Monitored (The White Coat Series Book 3) (16 page)

“Gosh, I feel so much pressure now,” I said, smiling down into my coffee mug, messy strands of hair falling forward. Alexander reached out a hand and pushed them aside, his thumb tracing a delicate line along the side of my face. It was electric.

“No need for pressure, just your image alone inspires me. You can stand there for a year without speaking and I’ll still be inspired. Now… stand there for a year and sing to me in that beautiful voice for a year, and, well,” he smiled, “then I’ll be inspired a hundred times over.”

He finally got a giggle out of me. Just a chuckle that boiled up and erupted from a lack of anything else to say. It felt as if Alexander could just sit there and smile at me with those gorgeous blue eyes and everything would be alright and it would be funny and it would all be lovely and hot and steamy and passionate.

It would be all I ever needed.

“Well, I don’t think I can sing except if it’s in front of a karaoke mic and the Spice Girls are backing me up,” he laughed, “but I’ll read you a really long story.”

“You’re perfect. You know that?”

“I didn’t know all I had to offer you was a book reading for you to realize that.”

His smirk pulled me in. “You can offer me a bag of rocks and I would still take it.”

“Rocks are too heavy, but I can see what else I can muster.” We both laughed, nature's strongest aphrodisiac. It felt so great to just be sitting there and laughing. Feeling the stomach clenching, rib hurting, light-headedness of it all.

When the laughter died down, I decided to fill the silence with another awkward fact. “This is better than the time my family had won a free breakfast at IHOP for a week.”

Alexander laughed again, his head falling back. “I’m glad I can prove to be more entertaining than some extremely fluffy pancakes.”

“It’s a tough role to fill.”
 

We finished up breakfast and continued talking about the vast differences between an IHOP breakfast and a Denny’s breakfast. When that topic of conversation was over, we quickly moved to discussing why bacon had to be, by far, the most superior of all breakfast items. Alexander going so far as to say it was the best of all food items in general.

This ridiculousness lasted for the better part of the morning, until it was finally time for me to head out and do what I had been set to do. As I was switching out of my borrowed clothes inside the guest bathroom, I could hear Alexander answer a call from the living room. It was hurried and hushed and I could barely make out anything he had said, but I did pick up one word.

Or name rather: Blake.

I didn’t bring it up though. I knew that he still worked for him and I also knew how that was going to change, so I chalked it up to a work call and let it die.

We stood by his front door, an antique wooden table underneath a round, pristinely clean, mirror which held our reflections.“Let me know how laundry goes.” He wrapped a hand around my lower back and pulled me in for a goodbye kiss, his hands getting a little greedy and falling down, cupping my ass.
 

“And you let me know when you need your muse again,” I said as we broke from our kiss. Without the threat of my brother’s past coming and kidnapping me anymore, I had no real excuse to sleep over Alexander’s, and the last thing I wanted to do was seem clingy. So I wanted to play it cool for now.

“I have a feeling it will be real soon.”

We kissed one more time before I turned and left.

I shouldn’t have left.

I KNOCKED ON THE DOOR to his office, knowing he was inside and knowing that he was alone. I made sure to have the nurse double-check for me. The last thing I needed was for this to become some big scene like Alexander had predicted. I needed this to go as smoothly as possible, my own psychological health couldn’t handle much more.

“Come in,” I heard his welcoming voice call from under the door. The nurse had told him that I was waiting to come inside, so he expected me. I wasn’t sure what his reaction would be, but I figured he must be scared. It showed when I walked into his pristine office, the way his eyes darted behind me, double-checking to see if I had brought someone with me.

I pulled out a chair and sat down, placing my black purse on my lap. I tangled the strap around my hand. “Hi.”

“Hey,” he said. “How are you?”

“I miscarried, Blake.”

The words were like sharp icicles stabbing through the room, stealing both of our breaths in a simple second. I didn’t know how else to say it, how else to even approach it. He hadn’t done anything to deserve my respect and so I had no other idea on how to tell him.
 

He winced back for a second and then recovered. Much faster than I expected him to. His fingers came together, forming a fist on the center of his table.

“I’m so sorry.”

Something in the way he spoke told me he wasn’t, and that made me sick. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting in coming here, but I realized that relief was the farthest thing from it. And the way he sounded, the way his shoulder seemed suddenly relaxed, like he was now consulting a patient. It tore my heart in half. I literally felt the bile rise up from my gut.

“You’re pathetic.” My words spewed out like venom, uncontrolled. I was angry. Boiling.

“Sky, don’t do this. I understand how horrible this situati
--
”

I cut him off. “No. No you don’t.” My hands twined themselves further into my purse. I could see right through that jack-ass. His stupid Oprah act was cracking and I was the one to undo him, and I was not going to feel bad.
 

He was not going to make me feel bad.

“You’ve been putting pressure on me, on Alexander, on everyone else around you, I’m sure. All because you made a mistake and won’t own up to it. I went through the darkest times of my life and I had to do it by myself.” He tried to interject, but I cut him off with a glare. “And I came out stronger because of it. That’s why I’m telling you to fuck off. I want you to tell Sadie everything and if you don’t then she’ll just have to find out another way.”
 

This new side of me was surprising, even to myself, but I didn’t back down. Not even when the color in Blake’s face began to redden. Suddenly, a baby sounded much better than what he was facing now.

“Sky. You’re speaking with your emotions. I want you to step out of my office and come back when you’ve taken time to think about everything.”

“No, Blake. I have thought of everything. I thought of everything in the weeks I’ve been locked up inside my room, crying myself to sleep, missing my own classes, scared to go outside. I had a lot of time to think, probably more than I should have.” My knuckles were pale. “And the last thing I thought was having you approach this like you lost your reservations for a restaurant.”

He straightened in his chair. “That is not how I intended to come across”

“Really? How did you ‘intend’ to come across as, Blake? Hm? As a white knight coming to save me? As an adulterous king putting his whore to pasture? What was it, Blake?”

He didn’t answer me. His lips held tight. I could see his teeth grinding together through the way his jaw gyrated. I noticed he hadn’t been shaving, his five o’clock shadow now more of a two-day beard.

“This is ridiculous.” I snatched my purse up and pushed the chair back, the legs protesting loudly. “Tell her, Blake. Or I will.”

“You’ll regret this, Sky.”

I opened the door and walked right into another body, someone else about to come inside. I looked up and my knees felt suddenly weak, the blood rushing straight out of my body.
 

Alexander was looking down at me, confusion crossing over to understanding and flashing into something else.

Fear?

“Both of you should come inside.” Blake called. “
Now
.”

We had no idea as to what was about to happen.

ALEXANDER STOOD BEHIND ME, AN arm posted on the chair’s back. I was back in the seat, staring with a held breath and a look of apprehension. I could tell Alexander was tense behind me by just the way his breaths came swift. It was like that feeling right before an earthquake comes, the gentle rumblings that explode into world-shattering quakes.

“What is this about?” Alexander spoke first. He didn’t demand to know, but his tone was certainly not playful either.
 

“Alex, is that how you’re going to greet me? I totally forgot I had called you earlier to come in.” He paused, but Alexander didn’t speak. I noticed how he called him Alex, the name sounding so ill-fitting for the man that stood behind me. “Well, I’ll have you know that the emergency I called earlier about was that I needed to get a haircut scheduled for next week. But something else popped up.” He looked at me, something odd in his eyes. “And well, now that I have both of you here, I figure it’s best to talk about matters concerning the both of you.” Blake’s eyes darted from me to Alexander and back. A devilish grin was pushing away the worried expression.

“Sky is… well she’s holding something over my head that can destroy pretty much everything I’ve ever worked for.”

Wait, why was Blake being so open about this in front of Alexander? I knew that an assistant usually knew their bosses well, but not that well. Especially not Blake, who seemed like he needed to maintain control of every single detail that went into his public image.

“This is stupid.” I tried to cut this off. I didn’t want to hear anymore. From my view, all I saw was Blake, dressed in his perfectly pressed dark blue button-up, no doubt from the top designer shipped from the fanciest of European countries, and his sleazy smile, the look he gave when he thought he was manipulating someone. It worked well, there was a reason why he was always on television.

But it wasn’t working on me.

“On the contrary. I think you want to hear this the most, Sky.”

“Stop.” Now Alexander was demanding. It took me by surprise, the sheer power of his word. It fell like a hammer onto the strong table that separated the three of us.

“What’s that now? You want me to keep quiet?” Blake leaned forward, smiling wider now that he knew he had the power. There was something that Blake knew, something that Alexander did not want him to say. I cocked my head, looking up at Alexander. He didn’t return my look, just stayed staring straight at Blake. His sapphire eyes cutting like knives across the room.

“What do you want?”

“I want Sky to keep her mouth shut. I also don’t want her blackmailing me.”

I looked at the both of them in shock. Was Alexander really bargaining on what to give Blake so that he would keep his secret? As if I would just stay quiet through the whole thing, a pawn just handed off to the one with the highest stakes in the game.

“What is he talking about?” I asked Alexander, standing up from the chair and looking him in the eyes. This was his chance to come clean, to wash his hands of whatever they were hiding.

Alexander didn’t speak though, scaring me more than a half-hacked excuse would have.

There was something big in this closet.

I turned to Blake. “Tell me.”

“Then I won’t tell Sadie.”

So now he was trying to bargain with me? This man was something else.

“Fine,” I bluffed.
 

“Your Brazilian boy toy, Alexander, well he’s been with you all this time because of me.” He sat back in his chair now, relishing in the moment of the reveal. The moment that it dawned on me, that everything clicked in my head. Suddenly it all made sense. The phone calls, the secrecy, the circumstances.

“So this was all just to keep an eye on me? So I wouldn’t talk?” I turned on Alexander now, a feeling of betrayal washing over me. Like the rug underneath me was just swept out and thrown over the edge of a cliff, me close behind.

Alexander stayed quiet for a moment, his mouth forming words like “sorry” and “forgive” but unable to actually say them. Finally, “I fell for you, Sky. Harder than I have for anyone else.”

“Don’t give me that,” I said, trying my damned hardest to hold back tears.

“You were a spy. You were just keeping watch.” I looked at Blake in disgust. “And you, you’re not even man enough to do it yourself. You have to take someone that works for you and put them up for it. Instead of just talking to me.” An uncontrolled tear rolled down the side of my nose. “You would have known that I didn’t want any attention just as much as you did.”

“I’m sorry,” Alexander finally managed to say from behind me. I straightened my shoulders and nodded, quick and curt, acknowledging it for now but nothing further than that. This was going to take much more than a singular apology to fix.

Then a chill crept down my spine as I realized, “So you were the one that knocked on my door?” I turned to Alexander. Why would he knock and run away when he heard someone else inside?

Alexander shook his head, his dark black hair tousled even further. “No, Sky. And I have nothing to hide from you anymore.” His eyebrows raised, almost like a puppy begging for forgiveness, except this puppy just bit me with the force of a pit bull.

I noticed Alexander look behind me, something attracting his attention. I turned but didn’t see anything except Blake, now sitting pretty rigid.

This was making me reach my boiling point, logical thought being pushed aside for something more basic. I was just angry.

“This is fucking ridiculous.”

I pushed past Alexander and stormed out of the door, the white coat that hung loose on a hook behind the door falling to the floor. A nurse glanced up from her files, looking me over with a worried expression. I tried to muster a reassuring smile but could only manage a pained grimace as I kept walked past her and into an elevator, still open from letting go of it’s old cargo.

I couldn’t click the ground floor button fast enough.

I couldn’t get into my car fast enough.

I couldn’t slam my fists against the wheel and sob soon enough.

“I’VE NEVER FELT SO BETRAYED, Con.” I stared down at the floor, noticing a light stain marking the spot where Kester had left me a hairball. His way of thanking me for feeding and sheltering him.