“Well in that case, I think you should probably go too. I’m sure you have a whole list of other people’s lives to ruin. And I’m going to need to get started finding a good therapist to guide me through this damn—”
“Abby?”
I looked up to see that he hadn’t moved an inch from where he’d started. Not only had my feeble attempts to kick him off gone completely unnoticed, but his every attention was now focused one hundred percent on me—freezing me in place again with that x-ray vision of his.
“I want to add on another condition to our arrangement.”
I stared back at him for a second, sure that I’d heard wrong. Then, in the first bout of relief I’d gotten all morning, I threw back my head with a giant laugh.
“You do, do you?” I managed, when I finally resurfaced. “After all the shit you’ve put me through, after this little stunt you pulled this morning...you want to add another condition?”
He didn’t even blink.
“I do.”
His lack of banter made me pause, as did that unflinching, undaunted look simmering in his eyes. Finally, when the silence could go on no longer, I had to ask.
“Okay...what is it?”
He smiled, but when he spoke, his voice was as steady and serious as I’d ever heard it.
“You don’t cheat on me either.”
Chapter 5
It was those last few words that stuck with me when he left shortly after. Haunting me as I got up to get dressed. Plaguing me as I brushed my teeth. Echoing back again and again as I slipped into my work clothes, and made my way to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee.
Let me start by saying, I had no intention of ‘cheating’ on Nick. None whatsoever. And not only because I currently had no social life to speak of (and thus, no one to cheat with), but because no matter the circumstance, I’d never been the cheating type.
That being said, I was fairly sure it wasn’t possible to ‘cheat’ on someone, when you weren’t technically in a ‘relationship.’
That being said, I didn’t know why Nick would really care either way.
True, I’d asked the same thing of him not long before—it had been one of the conditions I’d insisted on before we left Barcelona. But in my case, it made sense. The entire point of this little dalliance was to keep a positive spotlight on Mitchell Hunter’s son until his company’s grand awakening in three months. Every move Nick made would be scrutinized. The paparazzi fishbowl he already lived in would get even smaller—trapping him under a microscopic lens.
But the same rules didn’t apply to me.
I wasn’t a Hunter. I wasn’t the heir to anything. And even on my best of days, I was pretty damn sure the rest of the world didn’t think of me as an international celebrity.
I was, however, a world class talent at playing with the perceptions of the press. Even if I did happen to have a boyfriend on the side—it wouldn’t be a problem. If anyone knew how to keep a thing like that under wraps, it would be me.
Nick knew that. Of all the people in Manhattan, he knew it best of all.
And yet, he’d expressly forbidden it.
...why?
You don’t cheat on me either.
As if the words weren’t enough, then there was the look on his face. It was a look I had seen many, many times before. He might have been smiling, but there wasn’t an ounce of compromise anywhere in those twinkling blue yes.
It was not a request. It was a command. As simple as that.
I was still mulling it over a few minutes later, when there was a quiet knock on my door.
What the hell is goi
ng on today? Am I having an open house I don’t know about?