Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 81018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 405(@200wpm)___ 324(@250wpm)___ 270(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 405(@200wpm)___ 324(@250wpm)___ 270(@300wpm)
And that was the end of my rope. Corvin was a ballet dancer Ryder met in college. They were good friends and had been for a long time. There was just one problem—Corvin had a major crush on my boyfriend and did a shit job of hiding it. He openly flirted and treated me like gum stuck to the bottom of his thousand-dollar shoe. I hated that fucker, and knowing he’d had my date night was the last damn straw.
“No thanks,” I said, letting my disgust bleed into my voice.
Ryder tensed. “What? What do you mean? Why not?”
“I’ll need a few weeks before I agree to be stood up again. It was embarrassing enough tonight, so give me some time, but I’ll be sure to let you know when I’m ready to be humiliated again.”
His body went rigid, and not in the way that ended with us sweaty and tangled in the sheets. Fuck, when was the last time we’d even had sex? “Oh, shit. Alex…”
His voice held genuine remorse and sorrow, but I wasn’t ready to hear it.
“When you get a chance, let me know what cell provider Corvin has. Maybe I should switch since his texts seem to get through to your phone, but mind don’t.”
“Alex, I’m—”
I couldn’t have this conversation now. My emotions were too raw, too frayed.
“Not tonight, Ryder. I know people say you’re not supposed to go to bed mad and shit, but I’m… I just want to sleep. Okay?” I shrugged his arm off me and scooted closer to the edge of the bed, staring at the ceiling from my supine position.
He stayed silent. I could feel the weight of his regret and how his brain whirled, trying to think of a way to fix this. My words had hit their mark. They’d done their job, letting him know how upset I was.
“Okay.”
We lay side by side in thick, uncomfortable silence until my body’s fatigue won and finally forced my brain to go offline. I turned on my side, facing away from him. In the last second before I lost the ability to comprehend, I swore I heard a whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
He was the one at fault. He’d hurt me.
So why did I feel so shitty for what I’d said?
CHAPTER TWO
RYDER
I hurt Alex.
I hurt him.
Deeply, severely hurt him.
My stomach burned as though I’d consumed nothing but espresso for days, my chest ached each time my heart thumped behind my rib cage, and my head felt too heavy for my neck to bear.
I’d wounded him so critically that he couldn’t even speak to me. Alex was no pushover. He had no problem speaking his mind and telling someone—me—off when necessary. We spent years hating each other, and I’d lived on the wrong end of his caustic tongue that entire time. I much preferred my position on the side where he used that tongue for pleasure instead of cutting a man down. But I’d pushed him so far that he couldn’t even tell me to go fuck myself as I deserved.
I have no idea when I finally fell asleep. All I knew was I woke up alone in the bed and the penthouse with a rock in my stomach.
I sighed as I stared at the financial projections on my laptop screen. The numbers blurred together like they had for the past two hours. The mahogany desk where my computer rested, belonging to my grandfather and then my father, felt like a monument to expectations I’d never wanted to meet. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the corner office, Boston stretched wide beneath me. The view should have felt triumphant, but only reminded me how far I had to fall.
A soft knock interrupted my spiraling thoughts.
“Come in.”
Right on time for our ten o’clock meeting, Raquel Chen stepped through the door. Her usual confident stride was replaced by something more cautious. As my father’s head of research and development, she typically burst into meetings with the enthusiasm of someone who lived and breathed technological innovation. Her staff jokingly called her Tigger because of the way she bounced from lab to lab. Today, she clutched a tablet against her chest like armor, and her face was devoid of its usual smile.
“Good morning, Ryder. I have the results from the prototype trials.”
I gestured to the chair across from my desk, noting how she avoided my gaze as she slid into it. My stomach sank. In the five months I’d been sitting in this chair—five months that felt like five years—I’d learned to read the subtle signs of bad news from my department heads. The way Raquel perched on the edge of her seat with her spine straight, the careful placement of her tablet face down on the desk, and the slight downturn of her burgundy glossed lips didn’t instill confidence that this meeting would go the way I’d hoped.