ARROGANT BRIT (A BRITISH BAD BOY ROMANCE) (65 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

“Wake
up
sleeping beauty. Dinner is served.”

I
opened my eyes. The TV screen was flickering in front of me and a soft, warm
glow was coming from elsewhere in the darkened room. I could smell the Chinese
food we’d ordered, the aromatic mix of soy and spices. It must have arrived
when I was sleeping.

But I never heard the driver…

As if
sensing my confusion, Nathan sat on the coffee table in front of me and smiled.
“You were sleeping so soundly that I didn’t want to wake you. I met him outside
and brought the food in myself.”

Then he
extended his hand to me. “Come on, before it gets cold.”

Groggily,
I reached out and put my hand in his. When his fingers closed around mine, I
felt my flesh sizzle. My nerves burned for him, and I realized that I never
wanted him to let me go. That’s how it always was with Nathan. It didn’t matter
how much I loathed him, or how little respect he showed me… He awakened a
desperate need inside me the first time I met him, and that fire had never
truly went out.

I
curbed those desires, instead letting him help me up and sitting down at the
little table he’d prepared for us. “Look, you can’t be taking any chances here.
You don’t go out that door without me,” I said firmly.

Nathan
just let out a little sigh. He’d managed to find a few plates in the cabinets,
and he used them to arrange our meals in a way that looked a hell of a lot more
appetizing than it would stuffed in those pagoda-style boxes. My orange chicken
popped against the lush green broccoli beside it and the sauce-stained rice
resting underneath. He’d even poured me a glass of green tea, probably the kind
you could get from the vending machine down the hall.

But the
best part was the candles. With the rest of the lights dimmed, they made the
room look cozy and quaint. I felt much more at home than I had when we’d first
walked in together.

I
smiled, looking up at Nathan as I tucked my hair behind my ears with my
fingernails. “This looks incredible… But where in the world did you find the
candles?”

He
picked up the remote and turned off the TV. “A man needs to have a few secrets.
Anyway, it’s the least I could do since I I’m the reason you’re stuck here.”

But that was the thing—I didn’t feel stuck.

“You’re
important,” I told him, picking up my fork as he sat down. I stabbed at a piece
of orange chicken, measuring my words, trying to ensure that what I said was
both enough and not too much. I needed to appeal to his ego. “This city needs
to see a man like you stand up for what’s right. Your testimony is going to
make sure Wallace never hurts another innocent person ever again. Can you
imagine what that means to the women and girls he’s devoted a decade to
enslaving?”

Nathan
didn’t answer. He only smiled weakly and skewered a bit of his broccoli beef
onto his fork.

“Oh,
come on,” I teased him. “You don’t have to be modest—not in here with me. You
can brag a little, if you want.”

He chewed,
then swallowed a gulp of his own green tea. “I thought you didn’t like
arrogant, self-centered Nathan?”

“I
don’t. But I have to give credit where credit is due. You’re putting your life
on the line for the greater good. That’s something not a lot of people would
do. It’s something you can be proud of.”

Nathan
went quiet for a time, watching me eat. When he spoke again, it was in a tone
I’d never heard from him before.

“Can I tell you something?”

I
looked up at him and frowned. He sounded soft, hesitant,
uncertain.
His
brows were furrowed and the corners of his eyes pinched. For the first time
since I’d known him, Nathan looked like a man shouldering an unseen burden, a
far cry from the man who would tie me to a bedpost and fuck my brains out
without even a hint of care.

I stopped eating and put my fork down. “Yeah. Of
course.”

Nathan
puts his elbows on the table, wringing his hands together as he looked away
from me and to the dancing candle flames instead. They lit up his eyes,
highlighting the gold rimming his pupils as he took in a deep, shaky breath
that nearly snuffed them out. When he spoke, his voice grated with the pain of
a man who’d made a terrible, perhaps unforgivable mistake.

“When my
father died,” he began, “I took over his company. You know that, obviously,
but… what you don’t know is that I’m nothing but a figurehead. I have no idea
how to run a business, let alone an international corporation. Dad tried to
groom me for the job as best he could, but I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t want to
do what he did for a living. Besides, Dad was young. Nothing was going to
happen to him for a long time. When he passed from a heart attack at forty-nine
and it all fell to me, I panicked. I decided to continue on with my original
plan and ignore its very existence.”

I
watched the shadows playing across his face. He suddenly looked older and
farther away, not the twenty-something playboy with a smart mouth and no
responsibilities. This was a facet I’d never seen before. It was like looking
up at the dark side of the moon.

“But… I
don’t know… When you broke things off with me things changed. I started to
spend more time at the office. I started to like it. People looked up to me, Sandra.
They wanted my advice. My ‘wisdom.’ I never wanted to be some big shot CEO, but
once I was in the chair, I didn’t want to give it up… In a way, you gave me
that,” Nathan trailed off, staring down at his fork. I kept silent, and he
continued.

“When
the head of our logistics division coordinated a meeting with Peter Wallace, I
agreed, knowing full well who he was. He was offering us an obscene amount of
money to transport those shipping containers. When he said it wasn’t anything
illegal, I believed him, not because I actually thought he was telling the
truth, but because I didn’t care if he was or not. I’d hired people to worry
about that kind of thing, and they were all in agreement that the contract was
on the level. Mr. Wallace has never been convicted of a crime—you know that.
And he does plenty of
legal
shipping. I didn’t even consider that my
advisors might be lying to me. I had no idea it’d be…”

He hesitated, lips parting as he struggled with the
word.

“People. Women.
Children…
”

“But
you knew?” I asked him, horror knotting in my stomach. “You knew what he was
bringing into the city was illegal, and you let him do it?”

Nathan
nodded slowly. “I suspected. Maybe… But everyone on the board wanted to take
the contract. A substantial part of my inheritance is tied to maintaining my
company. They could’ve voted me out if I didn’t do something, and once I lost
the reigns, there was nothing stopping them from carving the whole damn company
up for themselves. That would mean…”

“No
more fancy title, no more office?” I finished for him. “You would’ve had
nothing except for your things, your fancy home, your garage full of expensive
cars, and the hundreds of millions of dollars you probably have stashed away in
the Cayman Islands. Wasn’t that enough? You’re telling me you secured a job
title on the backs of those young women and girls.”

“I didn’t
know
,” he insisted.

“Because
you didn’t
want
to know!” I replied, gripping the edge of the table so
hard my knuckles turned white. I could feel the smoke of anger swirling in my
lungs, tightening my chest as it rose into my throat and spilled out of my
mouth. “You just wanted the money! You wanted the power! If you’d bothered to
look, you would’ve seen their faces. But you couldn’t have that, could you? You
couldn’t have that kind of guilt on your head!”

Nathan
sat back, folding his arms and looking away from me. “You’re wrong. I never,
not for one second, considered there might be people in that container. Look,
my family, my whole company has a history of looking the other way. My father
didn’t build a huge mansion in Miami on the back of Chinese imports—he built
the foundation of this company on cocaine smuggling. Sure, he went ‘legit’ by
the Nineties, but that was on paper, Sandra. There were people putting pressure
on me to keep quiet and maintain business as usual. Maybe I wanted to make
everything legal, but it was easier to let other people deal with the dirty
parts of the business. I chose to look the other way and play stupid. That’s on
me.”

“We’re
talking about lives here, Nathan,” I whispered. “Not drugs. Not guns.
People.
”

“If I
had known… I would have done the right thing. That’s why I came to the police.
Because when I heard what he’d been doing… When I heard about that container
they shoved off into the ocean… I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d had something
to do with it. If I had, and I let that asshole walk free, I couldn’t have
lived with myself.”

I shook
my head, and he blinked back tears. “Christ, Sandra… Haven’t you ever made a
mistake in your life? One that you could’ve avoided if only you hadn’t looked
the other way?”

The
question hit me like a kick to the chest. My words dried up in my throat and I
looked away from him, staring at the dingy table and my fingernails pressing
into it. I closed my eyes, letting the whirlwind inside me die down.

Haven’t you ever made a mistake?

“Yeah,”
I said finally, nearly choking on the word. “A long time ago, before I knew
better. Before I… became a cop. I didn’t see what was happening around me
because I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe in a pretty little lie, and it
cost my sister her life.” My stomach turned. “I guess that makes me just as bad
as you.”

Nathan’s expression softened. “What happened?”

It
wasn’t a story I told often—or ever, if I could avoid it. But there was no
backing out of this conversation now, not with the tidal wave of my shame
brimming in my eyes and on my lips. I had to tell him.

“I got
emancipated when I was seventeen,” I said at last, dropping my hands into my
lap to keep from breaking my nails on the wooden table. “I took custody of my
sister, Jenny. Our mother was a junkie, in and out of prison all the time, and
after our aunt died… Well, it was just the two of us. I thought I had my shit
together. I thought that I was the best thing for her. I thought that she’d see
me working hard and playing by the rules and she’d want that for herself, too.
I refused to believe that the fifteen years she’d spent watching our mom shoot
up and smoke meth would tempt her to do the same thing.
She’s a good girl,
I told myself.
She’d never do that shit.
”

Nathan had put his fork down, just listening intently.

“So
when Jenny started going to parties and not coming back for a few days, I told
myself she was just troubled and going through some hard times. When I saw
track marks in her arm, I told myself that there had to be some other kind of
explanation, though I never even bothered to come up with one. When she lost so
much weight that she was sometimes too weak to walk, I tried to ignore it all.”

“That’s
not your fault,” Nathan offered, but I continued despite his petty attempt to
stem the flow of words.

“And
when she ODed in her room while I was cooking dinner? You’re trying to tell me
that wasn’t my fault? That was when I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. That was
when I finally had to look at her and see what she really was, what she had
been for damn near a year. I finally had to see her bruises, the punctures in
her arm and between her toes, the way her body had so obviously been used by
the men supplying her with the shit that took her life. But by then it was too
late, wasn’t it? I’d already put her in the ground with all the lies I told
myself. I may as well have been holding the needle.”

I went
quiet for a moment, the memories drifting through my head, taking a little
piece of myself with them. “Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault.”

A silence fell between us, uncomfortable and heavy.

“So,
yeah,” I whispered, my voice hoarse and quavering. “Yeah, I get it. Sometimes
we don’t want to see the truth, because it would mean we’re the monsters. And
that’s not an easy thing to look in the mirror and accept.”

“But we
can’t change the past,” Nathan said, his voice warm and tender. “We can’t go
back in time and undo the damage we caused with our willful ignorance. The only
thing we
can
do is…”