Hero(4)
Author: Samantha Young

Rachel grimaced. “You can’t say fucked in front of a kid, Lex.” Our drinks arrived and she pushed mine toward me.

“Now calm your shit so we can talk about me for a while.”

I smiled a real smile for the first time in a week. “Only if you tell me one more time I’m not going to get fired.”

“Lex, you’re not going to get fired.”

“Alexa, you’re fired!”

My stomach dropped at the irate beginning to the voice mail message Benito had left me.

“I don’t know what the fuck happened this morning, but you are done. And not just with me. Oh no! Do you know what you cost me today? You pissed Caine Carraway off so badly I lost Mogul and two other magazines from the same media company! My reputation is on the line here. After everything I’ve worked for! Well …” His voice lowered, which was even scarier than the shouting. “Consider yourself fucked, because I’m going to make sure you never work in this industry again.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and sucked in a shuddering, teary breath.

This was bad.

This was so, so bad.

CHAPTER 2

I stared stubbornly at my phone as I sipped a huge glass of red wine. “No.”

My grandfather sighed loudly, causing the speakerphone to crackle. “For once put your pride aside and let me help you. Or do you want to move out of that apartment you love so much?”

No, I did not. I’d worked my butt off to be able to afford to rent a place like my one-bedroom condo in Back Bay. It was beautiful with its high ceilings and tall windows that looked down onto the tree lined street. I loved the location. I was a twenty-minute walk from my favorite part of the city—the Public Garden, Newbury Street, Charles Street … Location was everything, but the fact that my apartment was cute and homey was icing on a very nice cake. It was the kind of place I’d always wanted, and I had hoped that someday I’d have saved enough for a deposit to buy the apartment or one in the same neighborhood.

Material goods didn’t mean a damn thing. I knew that. But I just really needed my pretty apartment right now. It was a comfort thing.

Did I need it enough to sell my principles?

Unfortunately no.

“I’m not taking your money, Grandpa.” I knew it wasn’t Edward Holland’s fault, but the diamond fortune he’d inherited from his family and gone on to expand with wise investments that diversified his business portfolio was the very thing that had polluted my father. I didn’t want anywhere near something so toxic.

“Then I’ll have a word with Benito.”

I thought about the fact that my grandfather had kept his relationship with me secret from the rest of his family. No one outside the family knew that Alexa Holland was a Holland—my dad had managed to keep the indiscretion with my mother that led to my birth from his family, excluding his father—and Grandpa certainly hadn’t confessed to them that he’d reached out to me when I was twenty-one and all alone in Boston.

I understood that it would have caused drama and irritation for him to reveal the truth, but I couldn’t say it didn’t hurt. Sometimes it felt like he was ashamed of me. Like it or not, though, he was all I had now and I loved him.

I bit down my resentment. “You can’t,” I said. “Benito has a big mouth. He’ll tell everyone who I am.”

“So, what, then? You find another job … Doing what?”

Any other job would come with a major pay cut. As an executive PA to a successful photographer, I made a nice income. More than twice that of standard PA positions. I sipped at my wine, looking around at all my pretty things in my pretty home.

“I didn’t even get to apologize,” I muttered.

“What?”

“I didn’t even get to apologize,” I repeated. “He blew up in my face and then ruined my life.” I groaned. “Don’t even say it. I recognize the irony in that. My family ruined his … tit for tat.”

Grandpa cleared his throat. “You didn’t ruin his life. But you did take him off guard.”

Guilt suffused me. “True.”

“And I already told you my attempts in the past have failed. It isn’t our place to apologize.”

“I know that.” I did know that. I wasn’t disappointed, because I couldn’t apologize for my father’s sins. I was disappointed because in that moment, when Caine realized who I was, I saw a pain in his eyes that was so familiar to me. Seeing the pain that was clearly still raw for him, I felt a sudden, overwhelming sense of kinship with him. We were both part of a tragic legacy. I’d never been able to talk about it with anyone because of the secrecy of it all. For years I’d been left to bear the burden of the truth all by myself. Then three months ago my mom died and all the ugly shit came crawling to the surface, and during a tirade on the phone to my grandpa he’d finally let slip the name of the child who had been wronged.

Caine Carraway. The only other person besides my parents and grandfather who knew the truth. The only other person who could possibly understand.

I couldn’t explain the connection I felt to him. I just knew that it was possible I was the only person who could understand his pain, and … I found I wanted to be there for him somehow. It didn’t make sense. I barely knew him. I knew that. But I couldn’t help feeling it all the same.

It was gut-wrenching then to have him look at me like I was part of the problem. Like … I was to blame. I hated the idea that he could think that of me, and I didn’t want that to be the last time we ever spoke. I didn’t want to be part of a bad memory. “I should go over there and apologize for ambushing him. While I’m there I could ask him to fix this. One call to Benito and he can make this go away.”

“Alexa, I don’t think that’s wise.”

Maybe not. But I was desperate for my job back and to change Caine’s opinion of me. “Ever since Mom … I just … I need him to hear me out, and I see no harm in asking him to call Benito while I’m there.”

“That sounds an awful lot like what you need and not what he needs.”

I shoved that truth aside and rationalized, “Have you met Caine Carraway? I don’t think that man knows what he needs.”

The receptionist was staring at me as if I was ridiculous.

“You want to see Mr. Carraway of Carraway Financial Holdings without an appointment?”

I knew it wouldn’t be easy to walk into the huge rose-granite-walled building on International Place and expect to be escorted directly to Caine’s office. Still, the receptionist was treating it as if I were asking to see the president. “Yes.” I curbed my natural instinct to return her question with sarcasm. She didn’t look like she’d respond well to that.