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He couldn’t wrap his head around what had happened.
Asher hadn’t slept in two nights since Heather had left him hanging, alone, at the lake house. Nor had he hadn’t heard from Heather since. He hadn’t reached out to her either, afraid that if he spoke to her all his frustration and anger over the situation would come to the surface. She was obviously dealing with some heavy mental turmoil, and something he’d done had set it off. He didn’t want to lose his temper like a loose cannon and make it worse.
He couldn’t stop going over all the scenarios of what went wrong, but he kept coming up empty with reasons or solutions.
Was she just embarrassed for leaving him stranded, and that’s why she hadn’t called or texted him? He’d gotten a ride back home from Raphael, so it hadn’t been that big of a deal in the end, but Asher had wished Heather had called him to at least give him a reason for bailing in the middle of their date.
He slipped on a worn denim jacket and pulled it around his body. The band was just wrapping up an interview and he hadn’t yet decided if he was going to head home, or what he was going to do. The restlessness inside him was off the chain and sitting alone in his penthouse wasn’t going to help that any.
The rest of the band was going to meet up at a local bar and have a few drinks. In his current sullen mood, he’d probably drink himself into oblivion.
“Do you want to join us?” Trevor asked, slapping Asher on the back as they exited the building where an SUV was waiting to scoop them up.
“No,” Asher shook his head. “I think I may just go home and call it an early night.”
Trevor frowned and studied Asher. “Early night? Dude, are you okay?”
Asher steeled his features. It was out of the ordinary for him to not want to take anyone up on their offer to have a few drinks and good food. He was definitely off his game tonight. This whole thing with Heather was sucking the life right out of him.
“I’m alright man, but thanks for being worried.” Asher gave his band mate a subtle smile.
Trevor pulled him back by the arm. “It’s not that chick with the weird ex-boyfriend is it? Because if it is, then you should just try to forget about her man. She sounds like drama with a side of unwanted hell.”
“It’s not like that.” Asher found himself getting defensive for Heather. “She’s a really sweet girl.”
“Who happens to come with a lot of baggage?” Trevor asked with a pitched eyebrow.
“That’s not her fault,” Asher protested.
“Nor is it your fault,” Trevor emphasized and tapped his index finger against the side of Asher’s temple. “You don’t need to involve yourself in that shit storm. If you’re not careful, you’re going to find yourself wrapped up in shit you don’t want.” He pointed to a few flashbulbs from paparazzi cameras that surrounded the cars for the band members. “In case you forgot, you are always in the spotlight.”
“That’s the life I chose for myself,” Asher argued. “I know how to handle my private life against those sharks.”
Trevor looked skeptical, but he let it go because he probably knew there was no point in arguing with Asher. Asher was the type of guy who became a brick wall once you tried to argue with him. Trevor climbed into a waiting car and Asher waited for Raphael in the next one.
“If you change your mind, you know where to find us,” Trevor called out after Asher and then closed the passenger side door as his car sped off down the street and away from the hoard of paparazzi’s flashing cameras.
Asher got in the car with Raphael and groaned. He sank into the seat and leaned his head against the back rest.
“What’s got you beat, boss?” Raphael peered over at Asher curiously.
“Nothing,” Asher huffed. His mood was souring by the second. He glanced out the window. Thankfully Raphael remained silent for the rest of the ride back to Asher’s apartment. He was going to give the man a raise just for knowing when to speak and when to keep his damn mouth shut.
Asher thanked Raphael for the ride and climbed out of the passenger side seat. He ran up to his apartment and avoided eye contact with everybody along the way. He couldn’t get his mind off of Heather.
He wanted an explanation like he needed his next breath. But he didn’t want to be angry at her. Something deep inside her drove her to react the way she had. He didn’t know the depth of her past struggles, of the demons buried inside her. Sure, he was angry. But more at the ghosts that haunted her than at the person she was.
He walked into his house and plucked a bottle of water from the fridge. He propped his elbows against his kitchen island and began to mindlessly scroll through his social media news feeds. It was always the same people, posting the same ole bullshit over and over again.
Asher was bored. He didn’t care about seeing pictures of people’s food. Did they honestly think they were professional foodie photographers or something? It was honestly ridiculous. He should have taken his band mates up on their offers to join in on the fun at the bar, but he wasn’t hungry. His stomach grumbled, but it was mainly from anxiety than anything else.
He wasn’t going to be able to get past his frustrations or concentrate on anything else until he talked to Heather. He wanted to get everything out in the open. Clear the air and decide the two of them, if they were going to move forward with this relationship or not. That’s it.
He was going to her house.
He couldn’t take this not knowing any more. Without giving it a second thought, he went downstairs and pulled out of his private garage in his own blue Audi.
He peeled out into the street. He wasn’t going to give her a head’s up that he was on his way but would take his chances that she’d be home. And willing to talk to him.
A few minutes later, he found street parking right across from her building and took the elevator up to her floor. Glancing around for any sign of paparazzi, he was relieved to see he hadn’t been followed. Knocking on her door, he stood a few inches back and waited.
He held his breath. Let it out. Sucked in a hard breath. Let it out.
“Coming,” he heard an unfamiliar female voice call out from the other side of the door.
When it swung open a few seconds later, Asher stared into the face of another dark haired girl. Instead of silver, this woman had dark chocolate eyes.
“Can I help you?” She asked, sizing him up.
Either she didn’t know who he was already, or she didn’t care.
“Is Heather home?” He asked. He wasn’t rattled by this mysterious woman.
“Who are you?” She placed a demanding hand on her hip and kept her eyes locked on him. She was wearing a tight cream colored dress. For a tiny thing, she did a good job of taking up the doorway and blocking his path inside.
He cleared his throat. “Asher Quest.”
The woman’s features immediately fell with remorse and her cheeks blushed crimson with embarrassment. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. Yes, Heather is here.” She waved Asher in with a set of perfectly red manicured nails. “Please, come in,” she said.
Asher followed her into the hallway. She turned around to look at him. Her lips curved apologetically.
“Who was at the door—?”
Heather stopped dead in her tracks when she saw Asher standing beside the woman.
“You let him in?” The color drained from her face.
“That’s rude, Heather,” the woman lectured as if she was Heather’s reprimanding mother.
Heather met Asher’s gaze for the first time in days. It was as if he was hit with a stab of adrenaline. A lightning bolt of pleasure buzzed through his entire body with just one pure look from her pure eyes.
“Heather...” he trailed off; feeling like the breath had been stolen right from his lungs.
“Hi.” Her cheeks turned rosy again with color and definition. “Listen, Asher,” she began. “About the other night—”
“Don’t worry about it,” he interjected.
“Heather?” The brown eyed woman quizzed.
“Sorry,” Heather shook her head. “This is my sister Abigail.”
“Nice to meet you.” Asher gave the sister a polite smile.
“Introductions aren’t really what I’m after here,” Abigail said.
Heather sighed and began to walk away.
“Don’t leave,” Abigail raised her voice in a warning tone. “You need to come clean. You need to tell the truth before this goes any further.”
Asher frowned and looked at Abigail. His heart pounded. “Tell the truth about what?” He was almost afraid to ask.
“Why are you doing this to me?” Heather exclaimed as if her sister was torturing her.
“Why are you doing this to him,” Abigail inflected and pointed at Asher.
He was beyond confused. “Heather, can we talk in private?”
“I think that would be best,” Abigail said.
Heather threw her hands up in the air, clearly exasperated by the situation. Now Asher felt an infusion of guilt for showing up at her apartment without being invited there first.
“Will you please just stop trying to run my life?” Heather asked.
Abigail pursed her lips into a pencil thin line and crossed her arms defiantly over her chest. “Heather, you know the right thing to do here.”
Heather met Asher’s gaze. The weight of the world seemed to be swimming in her ardent
eyes.
“Okay,” she sighed and then glared at her sister. “Will you give us a few minutes alone?”
“I’ll give you all the time you need,” Abigail said and held her hands up defensively. “I won’t get in the way at all. I’ll just make myself busy in the back bedroom.”
“Follow me,” Heather said and pushed open the sliding glass door leading to the balcony.
Asher was hit with a wave of nostalgia about being out here with Heather once before in a slightly more magical and romantic setting.
“First of all,” Heather said and pushed her raven colored hair off her shoulders. “I’m sorry for my meddlesome sister. She just loves to interfere whenever possible.”
“It’s really okay,” Asher said. “Are you the youngest?”
Heather glanced up and locked eyes with him. “Yeah.”
“I know exactly how you feel,” Asher nodded in understanding. “I have two older brothers. I also have one younger one, so I can pound on him.”
His goal in making her smile worked. Her lips stretched out in a faint grin. “Well anyway,” she murmured with her eyes downcast. “I felt the need to give you a brief background on her overbearing personality.”
“It’s no problem,” Asher assured.
There was an uncomfortable silence between them. The city outside was eerily quiet. He didn’t know if that was a bad sign, but he felt like it might be.
“Overbearing or not though, my sister was right,” Heather said. “I do need to come clean about something.”
Asher gave him a few seconds to mentally prepare for whatever was coming next.
“Please, come clean.”
Heather peered out over the city. He wished he could get inside her head and set up camp in there until he fully understood all the demons that apparently haunted her.
“I have been keeping a secret from you,” she breathed out. Her sentence fluttered over the balcony and plummeted down to crash on the pavement below, much like what his heart felt like at the moment.
“What is it?” He daringly asked.
“My controlling ex-boyfriend that I work for,” Heather began with a hard swallow. “He’s been blackmailing me to get information on you so that he can do a story for our news channel.”
“What?” Asher felt like he was tumbling down a black hole.
When Heather looked at him, her eyes were red-rimmed and beginning to swell. “I’m so sorry...” she trailed off as her voice cracked. A solitary translucent tear dribbled down the side of her cheek.
Asher shifted his weight and narrowed his eyes, focusing on Heather’s body language. “I don’t completely understand. Blackmailing you how? I thought you got a restraining order against him that night I was here with you?”
“I did,” she nodded to confirm. She drew her thumb up to her mouth and began to nervously nibble on the side of her nail, but then dropped her hand. “This all happened before that.”
“How did he say he would blackmail you?” Asher’s voice sounded stretched and thin.
Heather cringed. “He said he would sabotage my career if I didn’t help him.”
“And you believed him?” Asher said.
Heather shrugged and sniffed. “He is extremely convincing. I’m a nobody in this business. When a senior manager threatens to have you blackballed from the entire industry, you tend to listen to what he has to say. I didn’t know what to do.”
Asher’s fingers curled and relaxed curled and relaxed. “You report him.”
She threw her hands up. “To whom? Who is going to listen to a first-year employee working at the very bottom of the totem pole? Upper management would kick me to the curb and have me replaced before I could even catch a damn taxi.”
Asher’s mind was racing so fast; he couldn’t form and coherent sentence. He couldn’t decide if he was angry with her or brutally sorry for her for having to endure such so much shit from a creep like Kevin. She’d been on the edge of selling him out, of snooping into his private life for a story. For a job. The very idea took the breath out of him.
Heather took a long-winded sigh and propped her elbows against the top of the balcony railing.
“He said if I didn’t get a good enough scoop from you that had enough gossip to be splashed across some cheap tabloid that I’d be fired. Blackballed. He assured me I’d never work in this industry again, and make it very clear that I was his former piece of ass, the kind that slept around to work her way up.”
The deep seated anger inside him grew at the thought Kevin would use Heather like a sexual conquest.
“I feel so horrible about going along with his plan.” Heather flicked a sorrowful glance in Asher’s direction. “At the time, I was just blinded by the drive and ambition to succeed. I had nothing growing up, and this was my chance to make something of myself. Please, Asher. Forgive me. Won’t you say something?”
She studied him. Waiting with a shadow of hope in her eyes. But it was hope he wasn’t sure he could provide.
Asher shook his head. “The only reason you went out with me was to get a story on me?” He raked his fingers through his hair. “That story you asked me to do was for him, wasn’t it? It was for Kevin, never for me or the band.”
She dragged her gaze to him. He saw the truth in her eyes. “Damn it, Heather!”
He turned away from her to give himself space.
“At first, yes,” Heather confessed in a rush. “But once I got to know you, to really know you, I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I told Kevin I was starting to... to have feelings for you and that I wouldn’t dig around in your personal life. He twisted it back around on me. That’s why he showed up at my house that night. He knew you’d be there, and he was going to out me.”
Asher put his hands on the railing and leaned back on his arms, hanging his head low.
“You betrayed me.” He didn’t recognize the ripping anger in his own voice.
“Asher...” Heather pleaded. She tried to place her hand on his arm.
He jerked away. “Don’t.”
She sobbed, but when he looked at her, she held her head high and squared her shoulders. Guilt and pain were written all over her face. Damn it! He felt like his insides were dotted with raw, gaping wounds and just thinking of her betrayal was added salt to the broken flesh.
He needed to get the hell out of here. His friends had been right to warn him after all. Yet he hadn’t been careful or cautious. He’d thought with his dick and, damn it, with his heart. After so long of being alone, having her had been a sweet comfort. How wrong he’d been to think what they’d had might be real.
“Asher, can you ever forgive me?”
Her soft voice throbbed in his head. Ripping himself away from the balcony, he gave her one, hard look before pushing past her and into the house.
“Asher!”
He didn’t respond, just strode through the room with numbness threatening to claim every inch of his body. Slamming her apartment door behind him, Asher took the stairs two at a time until he’d reached the lobby and walked out into the crisp night.
Flipping his collar up around his ears, he started walking with no idea where he was going.
Just like this fake fucking relationship, everything the thought he knew suddenly felt like one big lie.