He rubbed his chin with his hand as he circled her. “Hmmm, I would say if I didn’t know better, he ravaged you and now you’re in love. I’ve never seen this side of you, the natural beauty.” He stopped before her and searched her eyes. “And by the sadness in your eyes, he broke your heart.”
She should have stayed home. She knew Rafe would see through her. A hot tear slid down her cheek followed by two or three more. She didn’t think she had any more left.
She’d been wrong.
“He’s a whore of a man and I’m just another notch on his bedpost.” Her breath caught on the last word and her lower lip trembled.
“He’s a bastard,” Rafe said, enveloping her in a hug. No easy feat when he stood five inches shorter than her.
She buried her face in his shoulder, fighting back a sob. “No, he’s just...I don’t know. Maybe he is, or maybe he’s damaged beyond repair.”
He smoothed her hair from her face and took her cheeks in his hands. “And it’s not your job to fix him. If it’s meant to be, it’ll happen. It always does. So, what else happened?” He took her hand and led her over to her chair.
“They found out about the lie.”
He handed her a cup of coffee and leaned against his art table. “Eeeeh, how did they take it?”
“Who knows? All they managed to do is ask what was going on a couple of times before Trevor hightailed us out of there with no explanation.”
“Ouch. So now what?”
She took a sip of coffee, appreciating the way the warmth soothed her tear-ravaged throat. “Now, I get to work. We have a company to expand. And I have to call Marla.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“This isn’t about me. It’s not about Trevor and that partnership. There are kids hanging in the balance and I can’t let them down.” She caught the dance dress she had left out from the corner of her eye and rounded her desk.
She circled it, the sounds of the city outside of the window fading to nothingness. She angled her head and narrowed her eyes. She eyed the line of the skirt and smiled.
She had it!
She grabbed the scissors and passed her coffee to Rafe without a word. Smoothing her hand over the front of the skirt, she shifted to where the middle of the left thigh would be and slit the outer skirt all the way up the waist. She did the same to the other side and flipped them up to the middle layer and slit that up the middle. She cut the base layer on each side to match the leg line again.
Giddy now, laughter bubbled up as she flipped the dress and did the same on the other side. When she picked it up, she held it to her and spun. “What do you think?”
Rafe pushed away from his table and ran his fingers horizontally across the skirt. The fabric caught for the briefest of seconds, then cascaded off his fingers. “My God, you figured it out. It practically dances on its own now.” He cupped her cheek, pushed up onto his tiptoes, and kissed her forehead. “It’s beautiful, Piper. Here, I’ll stitch the ends and get it on a mannequin for you.”
She smiled through the drying tears on her cheeks. “I can do that.”
He ran this thumb over her cheekbone. “You have a phone call to make.”
She wrapped her hand around the one on her cheek and nodded.
“I’ll be back,” he said and headed to the storage closet.
She grabbed the messages on her desk, went through them until she found Marla’s number, and dialed.
“Hello?”
“Marla, it’s Piper.”
“Oh. Well…what can I do for you?”
She couldn’t blame her lackluster response. What she and Trevor had done was dishonest and juvenile. With her feet firmly planted in her world, she saw that with crystal clarity. “Look, I know you must be upset, you have every right to be, but I’m calling about the dancewear. We want to work with you to get those kids outfitted for their dance season.”
“If this is your way of trying to get back into my good graces or help Trevor—” Marla began.
Piper’s hand squeezed the phone a bit tighter. “This is a decision I made before things came to light about Trevor and I.”
“How can I possibly know that?”
Marla loved her girls and to be as persistent as she’d been for the dance group, she loved them all, too. Piper planned to use that to their mutual benefit. “You don’t, but are you going to make the kids go without if I can’t prove it?”
“All right, let’s talk,” Marla said.
Piper breathed a sigh of relief and gave Rafe a thumbs up when he got back into the room.
She loved Trevor. She had since she had been thirteen. She imagined she always would, but he needed to look inside himself and fix what was broken there. She couldn’t do it for him, she had a few cracks of her own to patch. And she had a business to run.
She’d always have Trevor, in a way. In the same way she always had. She had no intention of pursuing more if he didn’t make himself worthy of it. Of her.
Drinking had been a fabulous plan.
Had it been water.
Trevor rolled his legs off the side of his bed and clutched his head with both hands, lest it roll away on him.
The fifth whiskey had been a bad idea. Hell, the way his head pounded, the fourth might have been a bad idea, too.
He pushed himself onto his unsteady legs and made his way to the kitchen for a glass of water and aspirin. Once he’d downed three, he headed for the shower. The tile and glass enclosure had room for a baseball team. A tile bench followed along two walls in an L. He had six shower heads.
He wanted to sit, but feared he’d never get back up so he leaned against the cool tile and let the spray work its magic on his muscles until he’d become partially human again.
The problem with feeling human? Piper jumped right back into his mind with startling force. He rubbed his chest, right over his heart with his closed fist, as if he could massage away the ache. Before he’d called her brother to enlist her help, he had her. He hadn’t seen her in years, but he could see her, and they’d be on good terms.
The words he hurled at her the day before came back to him with startling clarity.
They’d never be okay again.
He’d carry this ache forever.
Before he could lie to himself. He could tell himself that he could reach out to her anytime. Maybe one day they could see each other. At some point, maybe they’d have a chance at something.
It wasn’t much. When he stopped to think about it, it was really quite pathetic, but he held onto the thought in the back of his mind like a lifeline to that night with her. For how important the evening had become to him, one would think it had been his prom.
The water started to run cold so he left the shower in search of some much-needed caffeine. He checked his cell, but there had been nothing there from Piper.
Of course there wasn’t.
He’d been a dick, and if he had a sister and a man talked to her the way he had talked to Piper, Trevor would have kicked his ass.
He didn’t show a missed call, but the voicemail icon popped up in the corner of his phone. He smiled.
He hit the command for his voicemail and waited. Despite wanting to hear Piper’s voice, it was Neil Cartwright’s in the recording, returning Trevor’s call.