Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 108173 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108173 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
“No,” Lilah gasped, both horrified and amused. “He didn’t! Did he?”
“I was about twenty at the time, just an intern. And so damned eager to please my mentor.”
“Tell us you at least got to use that swanky company jet,” Kes said with a giggle.
“I did. The man had a craving, I needed to get his food to him fast.” He cast a sidelong glance at Lilah after that admission. “He swore me to secrecy afterwards, because he didn’t want you to find out about it, Lilah. He wanted to avoid a lecture on carbon emissions and being environmentally conscious.”
“He would have gotten one too,” Lilah said, her voice grim even though she couldn’t keep the laughter from her eyes. “It was ridiculously wasteful.”
“He anonymously donated a substantial amount of money to your favorite tree planting organization the very next day though,” Ben said, squeezing Lilah’s thigh reassuringly under cover of the blanket and she shared a smile with him. That was Gramps in a nutshell, he could be outlandishly exorbitant but also incredibly generous and conscientious.
The evening ended shortly after that, the ladies departed in a flurry of goodbyes, all lightly buzzed, and took a ride-sharing service home.
“Tired?” Ben asked after locking up behind Kes, who was the last one out.
“Yes. It was an exhausting day. But it’s a good tired. I had fun.”
“They’re a nice bunch,” he said, putting his hands into his back pockets and staring at her. She was sitting on the large sofa, fingers of one hand curled around the stem of a half-full glass of red wine. “I think I finally have a handle on who’s who now.”
Lilah snorted, “It only took you eight years.”
Ben sighed, poured the last bit of red wine into an empty glass and sat on the opposite end of the sofa. That left about two meters of space between them. He gazed out at the blackness beyond the terrace doors, one arm stretched out on the back of the sofa toward her. He took—what looked like—a fortifying drink of the glass that he held clutched in his other hand.
“I always thought they were a bad influence. Because of that night.”
“What happened wasn’t our fault.”
“No. It wasn’t. I knew that. I had Jackson”—one of the personal security team that worked for Gramps—“go back to that house and track down as many of those guys as he could. We didn’t have enough for an arrest… but he and a few of his colleagues put the fear of God in them. He let it be known that we would be watching them and if anything like that happened again, we would know and we would take action.”
“You did that?” she asked, touched, and surprised by the revelation. She’d always believed that the men involved in the incident had gotten off without any real consequences, as men too often tended to. Leaving five young women—girls really—too scared to trust boys for a long time after that. To now learn that Ben had taken such decisive action was heartwarming and—once she told them—would only cement his image as a hero to the others.
“I did. But that night shook me and I was irrational. And I allowed it to color everything to do with your friends—and you—for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Until very recently.”
“Until today, you mean?”
“Lilah.” Her name drifted toward her on a gentle sigh. “You nearly died. I didn’t… I couldn’t…”
He stumbled to a halt and she watched him, waiting patiently while he gathered himself.
“It scared me. And I don’t like being scared. Or feeling vulnerable. I don’t like not knowing what to do in a situation. And I resented you—and them—for putting me in that position.”
“For what it’s worth,” she said, “they always liked you. Saw you as some kind of knight in shining armor.”
He made a tortured sound that could possibly have been a laugh.
“How could they not? I’m a fucking prince, don’t you know?” The self-deprecation in his voice was a revelation.
“They certainly think you are,” she said, and he pinned her with his piercing gaze.
“What about you? Did you think I was some prince? Some mythical knight?”
“No. I never once thought that.”
“Not even when you were in love with me?”
“No, not even then.”
He was itching to ask her, she could see it, but in the end, he dropped his gaze to his glass, staring down into the ruby red depths of his wine as if he expected it to yield the answer to the question he’d chosen not to ask.
“Don’t you want to know what I did think?” she asked, keeping her eyes glued on that handsome averted profile.
He swallowed and his jaw clenched before he shook his head mutely.
“Why not?”
“Because no matter what you thought about me, it was bound to have been a lie designed to make yourself believe in this image of us that only existed in your mind.”