The Pretend Boyfriend (The Pretend Boyfriend #3)(19)
Author: Artemis Hunt

“I already did.”

He can tell that she’s softening her stance . . . a little. He takes a step forward, and she doesn’t move. “Please, Adie, I manipulated Sam into doing what she did. Just as . . . ”

It hurts him to say it.

“ . . . I manipulated you,” he finishes. “I figured of all people . . . you’d understand that.”

He can see the wheels in Adie’s head turning. God, he still can’t think of this woman before him as sweet, shy Adie – who wore her precious heart on her sleeve, just waiting for someone like him to tear it into a million pieces. They don’t even look alike, except for the height. And even that differed. Adie wore sensible shoes. This woman wears three-inch high pumps, and is every inch the confident barracuda.

I made her this way.

OK, maybe not totally, but I played a major part.

Somehow, conversely, he prefers the old Adie. The one who was shy and sweet and innocent, who looked up at him with loving eyes when he was f**king her. Not this beauteous, buxom, red-haired vixen who had seemed to step out, fully born, from Zeus’s head.

“Let’s talk,” he says again when she didn’t reply. “But not here. Let’s go someplace else.”

“You’re wearing a wire,” she accuses.

“No. I swear it.” He holds up his hands to emphasize the point.

She says calculatedly, “I want you to prove it.”

His heart skips a beat.

“Come with me.” She jerks her head towards the elevator. “Inside.”

It’s as though she were physically holding a gun to his head. In this case, it’s Sam’s freedom. He nods. Without another word, he walks into the open elevator car. She follows him.

The doors slide shut with an ominous clang.

15

They are in Adie’s apartment. The very apartment Sam broke into. Brian surveys it cautiously, resting his eyes on the closed door at the end of the corridor – the one that Sam claimed contained Adie’s spooky shrine to him. He wonders if Adie had taken down the photos now that Sam had divulged their existence.

Doesn’t prove you didn’t rape her.

Yeah, right. Well, it may not be proof for Officer Cutter, but it sure as hell proved something to him. I didn’t do it. This is what he’s here to plea-bargain with Adie.

But first things first.

He’s nervous as hell. He has never done anything like this before. He never had to. More worrying is Adie’s current mental state, the very state he helped create.

Adie closes the door and locks it behind her. He wonders if anyone saw them coming up here. They didn’t meet anyone in the elevator or the corridors outside, but he hopes there are surveillance cameras to capture the moment should he not be coming back. OK, stop being a drama queen. Still, the very atmosphere of oppression in this apartment does not quell his nerves.

He tries to breathe deeply and surely.

“So talk.” She turns to him, completely unafraid, and folds her arms.

He has rehearsed this a hundred times in his car while he was waiting for her. “I would like you to go to the police and drop all your charges against Sam.”

“And why would I want to do that in the midst of all the hard evidence?” Her eyes glint.

“Because I’ll do anything you want.” There, he said it, and the anchor dropped heavily from his chest. “I don’t have much money right now . . . you made sure of that . . . but the gym is doing well, and I’ll have more coming in.”

He’s aware that he’s offering himself up on a silver platter to be blackmailed.

He continues, licking his lower lip, “And there’s more. I have a new apartment right now, but I can sell that.”

She listens to all this, contemplating.

“In short,” she says, “you’re giving me everything you own.”

“Yes.”

“What if that’s not what I want?”

He swallows. “You want to see me humbled in court. You want to see me go to prison.”

It was a fact.

Adie says harshly, her face white in the glare of the overhead lamps, “So that you’d be a piece of meat to be f**ked repeatedly by all the hardcore prisoners? Fucked until you are nothing but a shell? You will be, you know, pretty boy.”

A knot tightens his stomach. “I know.”

So that is to be his punishment for doing what he did to her.

He says, “They’re already going to roll me over and f**k me. But you don’t have to bring Sam down in the process. You’re getting what you want. Now let her go. Please. Don’t do this for me. Do it because she’s young and innocent and . . . ” he can hazard this “ . . . in love with me, even though I have done nothing to deserve it.”

And maybe I’m in love with Sam too.

If he hopes that this will strike a chord with Adie’s previous plight, she shows no signs of it. His spirits sink. He had been gambling with emotional interplay again, something he’s not good at. Maybe Adie is already so hardened to hard-luck stories that she doesn’t give a damn about a fellow woman’s plight of being screwed over by the infamous Brian Morton.

Adie finally says, very slowly, “I will consider your request. But there is indeed something else that I want.”

Time stands still in the living room. His suspicion antennae are all up.

“What is it that you want?” His throat is dry. To see him humiliated even further? This is humiliating enough – having to stand before her like a serf, pleading for someone else’s life.

She says, “I want to use you . . . the way you use women. You say you’re not wearing a wiretap. Prove it.”

For a moment, he is speechless.

“Take off your clothes,” she orders. “All of them.”

So that’s what she wants? He warily begins to strip, aware of the undercurrents in the room. This is no ordinary request. That’s why he feels uncharacteristically shy. He peels off his jacket, and then his black sleeveless tee. She has seen it all before. Then why does he feel more naked than he ever has before?

You offered to do this. You offered to do anything she wants to get her off Sam’s back.

When he’s naked, he steps out of his shoes and crumpled jeans.

“Come here,” she says.

With trepidation, he goes to her. She doesn’t hold her arms out to him, and so he approaches her with the caution of a snake-baiter. He doesn’t quite know what ground he’s treading upon. What if she yells rape on him again? What if this is another one of her traps? Him in her apartment this time, naked before her – right before the date of the trial. He wants revenge on me, she would cite. He wants to snuff me out before we can go to court.