She nodded tentatively.
“Good. Think it’s time you tell me the whole story, Daze.”
“We don’t really need to talk—”
“You’re not getting out of this room until you tell me everything. And I mean every fucking thing.”
“But we’re not really togeth—”
I pinched her lips closed. “Uh-uh, Naomi. It doesn’t matter what the fucking label says, I care about you, and if you don’t start talkin’， I can’t do what I need to do to make sure it never happens again.”
She was still for a long beat.
“If I tell you, will you let me go back to work?” she asked through my fingers.
“Yes. I’ll let you go back to work.”
“If I tell you, will you promise not to hunt Warner down?”
I was not going to like this one bit and I knew it.
“Yes,” I lied.
“Fine.”
I took my hand away, and she ducked under my arm to stand in the middle of the room between my desk and the couch.
“It’s my fault,” she began.
“Bullshit.”
She whirled around and fixed me with a look. “I’m not telling you anything if you’re going to interject like one of those old man Muppets in the balcony. We’ll both just die of starvation in here, and eventually someone will smell our decaying bodies and break down the door.”
I leaned against the front of my desk and stretched my legs out. “Fine. Continue with your asinine assessment.”
“Excellent alliteration,” she said.
“Talk, Daze.”
She blew out a breath. “Fine. Okay. We were together for a while.”
“History. You’ve got it. You moved on, and he hasn’t.”
She nodded.
“We’d been together long enough that I had my eye on the next step.” She glanced at me. “I don’t know if you know this about me, but I really like checking things off my list.”
“No shit.”
“Anyway, on paper we were compatible. It made sense. We made sense. And it wasn’t like he was making plans for next year’s vacations. But he wasn’t moving as quickly as I thought he should.”
“You told him to shit or get off the pot,” I guessed.
“Much more eloquently, of course. I told him I saw a future for us. I was working for his family’s company, we’d been dating for three years. It just made sense. I told him if he didn’t want to be with me, he needed to cut me loose. When he slid a jeweler’s box over the table at his favorite Italian place a few weeks later, part of me was so relieved.”
“The other part?”
“I think I knew it was a mistake right there.”
I shook my head and crossed my arms. “Baby, you knew it was a mistake long before then.”
“Well, you know what they say about hindsight.”
“It makes you feel like an idiot?”
Her lips quirked. “Something like that. You don’t really want to hear all this.”
“Finish it,” I growled. “I spilled my guts to you the night Nash was shot. This’ll even us out.”
She sighed, and I knew I’d won.
“So we started planning the wedding. And by we, I mean his mother and me because he was busy with work and didn’t want to deal with the details. Things were happening with the company. He was under a lot of stress. He started drinking more. Snapping at me for little things. I tried to be better, do more, expect less.”
My hands itched to close around that fuckface’s throat.
“About a month before the wedding, we were out to dinner with another couple, and he had too much to drink. I was driving us home, and he accused me of flirting with the other guy. I laughed. It was so absurd. He didn’t think it was funny. He…”
She paused and winced.
“Say it,” I said gruffly.
“H-he grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head back. I was so surprised I swerved and almost hit a parked car.”
It took everything I had not to jump up from the desk and run into the parking lot to kick this fucking guy’s ass.
“He said he didn’t mean it,” she continued as if her words hadn’t just set off a ticking time bomb inside me. “He apologized profusely. He sent me flowers every day for a week. ‘It was the stress,’ he’d said. He was trying for a promotion to set us up for our future.”
I was choking on suppressed rage and wasn’t sure how long I could pretend to be calm.