How could he let her go on believing the worst about herself?
His nape prickling, he watched in absolute shock as he recognized the man stepping out of her building. What was Carlos doing here? He was out of the car before he could blink and crossed the road. His heart beat an incessant tattoo, his mind running through so many different scenarios.
He came to a halt in front of Carlos. “Carlos, is she—”
“She’s fine. She had a little incident with the press and fell.”
Of course she did. Thinking you had everything in control when Olivia Stanton featured in your life was a very big mistake. Alexander circled his nape and pressed with his fingers, feeling an invisible knot tighten there. “Where the hell were you?”
Carlos and he’d known each other for fifteen years. Alex trusted him more than anyone else, which was why he’d asked him to keep an eye on Olivia.
His head of security eyed him with the same remote look he leveled at everyone. “I was bringing the car around to pick her up and asked her to wait,” he muttered, running a hand through his overlong hair. “Even though they see her as ‘Olivia’, working for you is drawing enough attention. I was gone for two minutes. By the time I was back, she walked into the mob and one of them shuffled her until she fell.”
Alexander kicked a pebble with all the force he could muster and let loose a string of expletives that felt very true to the neighborhood. He stepped toward the entrance, only to have Carlos’s muscular frame block him. He rubbed his temple with his fingers, feeling his nerves tautly stretched, every muscle in him itching for a fight. “Spit it out, Carlos.”
“This isn’t you, Alex.” Carlos looked as if he was struggling for the right words, which surprised Alex even more. “You have more integrity, more discipline than any man I’ve ever known. Don’t play with that girl knowing that you’ll only break her in the end.”
Alex stood there for a few minutes as Carlos left without a backward glance, the thick silence of the night cloaking him. In all the years he had worked for him, Carlos had never commented on his personal life. Yet a few days with Olivia, and he was already her champion.
* * *
Olivia pulled her T-shirt down, its length hitting her midthigh, and squeezed the water out of her hair. Her head throbbed. She looked on the counter for the painkillers she had been given and sighed. She had left them in Carlos’s car. She could go to the drugstore around the corner but she had no energy tonight to chat with either seventy-year-old Mrs. Robbins or the twenty-year-old self-proclaimed stud Pinto.
She ran a tentative hand over her forehead, and winced as her fingers grazed the gauze dressing. Just her luck that she had to fall on a scrap of metal wire that meant she had needed stitches. She took a sip from the bottle of wine that Nate had given her and scrunched her nose in distaste. Just great. Now her palette was too spoiled for cheap wine. But it didn’t mean it wouldn’t get her sloshed pretty good.
She had had a hell of a week and a half. She had worked fourteen-hour days, going over the contract details and budgeting with Daniel and Nate. It had been the hardest working week of her life. It was exactly the way she wanted it.
Stupidly, she had hoped that she might see Alexander again on her many trips to King Towers. Every time a tall man with broad shoulders had passed by her stomach had dived. Until she’d realized what small potatoes LifeStyle Inc. was in Alexander’s business empire. Of course there had been no sight of him. She finally had stopped looking when she’d heard someone mention that he was out of the country.
Which was for the best. It was easier to hate him, be angry with him at a distance, to assure herself that he had no power over her, that the time she had spent with him in Paris had left no mark on her.
Self-delusion—1, bitter reality—0.
The doorknob rattled from the outside. “Go away, Pinto,” she yelled. The fiddling didn’t stop. Her heart in her mouth, she turned around when the door was pushed through and Alexander walked in.
She sank onto her bed, her knees trembling. “You broke the lock!”
A look of pure rage crossed his features, tight lines fanning around his mouth. “You call that a lock?” He pushed the door shut behind him with a grunt, the thud shaking everything in sight. “I didn’t even have to put my weight on it. Do you know that there’s a weirdo outside in the corridor peeking at your door without blinking? And you’re walking around dressed in that,” he muttered through gritted teeth, “flimsy little thing.”