PLAYED - A BRITISH BAD BOY ROMANCE (48 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

“Wake
up sleeping
beauty. Dinner is served.”

I opened my eyes. The TV screen was flickering in
front of me and a soft, warm glow was coming from elsewhere in the darkened
room. I could smell the Chinese food we’d ordered, the aromatic mix of soy and
spices. It must have arrived when I was sleeping.

But I never
heard the driver…

As if sensing my confusion, Nathan sat on the coffee
table in front of me and smiled. “You were sleeping so soundly that I didn’t
want to wake you. I met him outside and brought the food in myself.”

Then he extended his hand to me. “Come on, before it
gets cold.”

Groggily, I reached out and put my hand in his. When
his fingers closed around mine, I felt my flesh sizzle. My nerves burned for
him, and I realized that I never wanted him to let me go. That’s how it always
was with Nathan. It didn’t matter how much I loathed him, or how little respect
he showed me… He awakened a desperate need inside me the first time I met him,
and that fire had never truly went out.

I curbed those desires, instead letting him help me up
and sitting down at the little table he’d prepared for us. “Look, you can’t be
taking any chances here. You don’t go out that door without me,” I said firmly.

Nathan just let out a little sigh. He’d managed to
find a few plates in the cabinets, and he used them to arrange our meals in a
way that looked a hell of a lot more appetizing than it would stuffed in those
pagoda-style boxes. My orange chicken popped against the lush green broccoli
beside it and the sauce-stained rice resting underneath. He’d even poured me a
glass of green tea, probably the kind you could get from the vending machine
down the hall.

But the best part was the candles. With the rest of
the lights dimmed, they made the room look cozy and quaint. I felt much more at
home than I had when we’d first walked in together.

I smiled, looking up at Nathan as I tucked my hair
behind my ears with my fingernails. “This looks incredible… But where in the
world did you find the candles?”

He picked up the remote and turned off the TV. “A man
needs to have a few secrets. Anyway, it’s the least I could do since I I’m the
reason you’re stuck here.”

But that was
the thing—I didn’t feel stuck.

“You’re important,” I told him, picking up my fork as
he sat down. I stabbed at a piece of orange chicken, measuring my words, trying
to ensure that what I said was both enough and not too much. I needed to appeal
to his ego. “This city needs to see a man like you stand up for what’s right.
Your testimony is going to make sure Wallace never hurts another innocent
person ever again. Can you imagine what that means to the women and girls he’s
devoted a decade to enslaving?”

Nathan didn’t answer. He only smiled weakly and
skewered a bit of his broccoli beef onto his fork.

“Oh, come on,” I teased him. “You don’t have to be
modest—not in here with me. You can brag a little, if you want.”

He chewed, then swallowed a gulp of his own green tea.
“I thought you didn’t like arrogant, self-centered Nathan?”

“I don’t. But I have to give credit where credit is
due. You’re putting your life on the line for the greater good. That’s
something not a lot of people would do. It’s something you can be proud of.”

Nathan went quiet for a time, watching me eat. When he
spoke again, it was in a tone I’d never heard from him before.

“Can I tell you
something?”

I looked up at him and frowned. He sounded soft, hesitant,
uncertain.
His brows were furrowed and the corners of his eyes pinched.
For the first time since I’d known him, Nathan looked like a man shouldering an
unseen burden, a far cry from the man who would tie me to a bedpost and fuck my
brains out without even a hint of care.

I stopped
eating and put my fork down. “Yeah. Of course.”

Nathan puts his elbows on the table, wringing his
hands together as he looked away from me and to the dancing candle flames
instead. They lit up his eyes, highlighting the gold rimming his pupils as he
took in a deep, shaky breath that nearly snuffed them out. When he spoke, his
voice grated with the pain of a man who’d made a terrible, perhaps unforgivable
mistake.

“When my father died,” he began, “I took over his
company. You know that, obviously, but… what you don’t know is that I’m nothing
but a figurehead. I have no idea how to run a business, let alone an
international corporation. Dad tried to groom me for the job as best he could,
but I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t want to do what he did for a living. Besides,
Dad was young. Nothing was going to happen to him for a long time. When he
passed from a heart attack at forty-nine and it all fell to me, I panicked. I
decided to continue on with my original plan and ignore its very existence.”

I watched the shadows playing across his face. He
suddenly looked older and farther away, not the twenty-something playboy with a
smart mouth and no responsibilities. This was a facet I’d never seen before. It
was like looking up at the dark side of the moon.

“But… I don’t know… When you broke things off with me
things changed. I started to spend more time at the office. I started to like
it. People looked up to me, Sandra. They wanted my advice. My ‘wisdom.’ I never
wanted to be some big shot CEO, but once I was in the chair, I didn’t want to
give it up… In a way, you gave me that,” Nathan trailed off, staring down at
his fork. I kept silent, and he continued.

“When the head of our logistics division coordinated a
meeting with Peter Wallace, I agreed, knowing full well who he was. He was
offering us an obscene amount of money to transport those shipping containers.
When he said it wasn’t anything illegal, I believed him, not because I actually
thought he was telling the truth, but because I didn’t care if he was or not.
I’d hired people to worry about that kind of thing, and they were all in
agreement that the contract was on the level. Mr. Wallace has never been
convicted of a crime—you know that. And he does plenty of
legal
shipping. I didn’t even consider that my advisors might be lying to me. I had
no idea it’d be…”

He hesitated,
lips parting as he struggled with the word.

“People. Women.
Children…
”

“But you knew?” I asked him, horror knotting in my
stomach. “You knew what he was bringing into the city was illegal, and you let
him do it?”

Nathan nodded slowly. “I suspected. Maybe… But
everyone on the board wanted to take the contract. A substantial part of my
inheritance is tied to maintaining my company. They could’ve voted me out if I
didn’t do something, and once I lost the reigns, there was nothing stopping
them from carving the whole damn company up for themselves. That would mean…”

“No more fancy title, no more office?” I finished for
him. “You would’ve had nothing except for your things, your fancy home, your
garage full of expensive cars, and the hundreds of millions of dollars you
probably have stashed away in the Cayman Islands. Wasn’t that enough? You’re
telling me you secured a job title on the backs of those young women and
girls.”

“I didn’t
know
,”
he insisted.

“Because you didn’t
want
to know!” I replied,
gripping the edge of the table so hard my knuckles turned white. I could feel
the smoke of anger swirling in my lungs, tightening my chest as it rose into my
throat and spilled out of my mouth. “You just wanted the money! You wanted the
power! If you’d bothered to look, you would’ve seen their faces. But you
couldn’t have that, could you? You couldn’t have that kind of guilt on your
head!”

Nathan sat back, folding his arms and looking away
from me. “You’re wrong. I never, not for one second, considered there might be
people in that container. Look, my family, my whole company has a history of
looking the other way. My father didn’t build a huge mansion in Miami on the
back of Chinese imports—he built the foundation of this company on cocaine
smuggling. Sure, he went ‘legit’ by the Nineties, but that was on paper,
Sandra. There were people putting pressure on me to keep quiet and maintain
business as usual. Maybe I wanted to make everything legal, but it was easier
to let other people deal with the dirty parts of the business. I chose to look
the other way and play stupid. That’s on me.”

“We’re talking about lives here, Nathan,” I whispered.
“Not drugs. Not guns.
People.
”

“If I had known… I would have done the right thing.
That’s why I came to the police. Because when I heard what he’d been doing…
When I heard about that container they shoved off into the ocean… I couldn’t
help but wonder if I’d had something to do with it. If I had, and I let that
asshole walk free, I couldn’t have lived with myself.”

I shook my head, and he blinked back tears. “Christ,
Sandra… Haven’t you ever made a mistake in your life? One that you could’ve
avoided if only you hadn’t looked the other way?”

The question hit me like a kick to the chest. My words
dried up in my throat and I looked away from him, staring at the dingy table
and my fingernails pressing into it. I closed my eyes, letting the whirlwind
inside me die down.

Haven’t you ever
made a mistake?

“Yeah,” I said finally, nearly choking on the word. “A
long time ago, before I knew better. Before I… became a cop. I didn’t see what
was happening around me because I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe in a
pretty little lie, and it cost my sister her life.” My stomach turned. “I guess
that makes me just as bad as you.”

Nathan’s
expression softened. “What happened?”

It wasn’t a story I told often—or ever, if I could
avoid it. But there was no backing out of this conversation now, not with the
tidal wave of my shame brimming in my eyes and on my lips. I had to tell him.

“I got emancipated when I was seventeen,” I said at
last, dropping my hands into my lap to keep from breaking my nails on the
wooden table. “I took custody of my sister, Jenny. Our mother was a junkie, in
and out of prison all the time, and after our aunt died… Well, it was just the
two of us. I thought I had my shit together. I thought that I was the best
thing for her. I thought that she’d see me working hard and playing by the
rules and she’d want that for herself, too. I refused to believe that the
fifteen years she’d spent watching our mom shoot up and smoke meth would tempt
her to do the same thing.
She’s a good girl,
I told myself.
She’d
never do that shit.
”

Nathan had put
his fork down, just listening intently.

“So when Jenny started going to parties and not coming
back for a few days, I told myself she was just troubled and going through some
hard times. When I saw track marks in her arm, I told myself that there had to
be some other kind of explanation, though I never even bothered to come up with
one. When she lost so much weight that she was sometimes too weak to walk, I
tried to ignore it all.”

“That’s not your fault,” Nathan offered, but I
continued despite his petty attempt to stem the flow of words.

“And when she ODed in her room while I was cooking
dinner? You’re trying to tell me that wasn’t my fault? That was when I couldn’t
lie to myself anymore. That was when I finally had to look at her and see what
she really was, what she had been for damn near a year. I finally had to see
her bruises, the punctures in her arm and between her toes, the way her body
had so obviously been used by the men supplying her with the shit that took her
life. But by then it was too late, wasn’t it? I’d already put her in the ground
with all the lies I told myself. I may as well have been holding the needle.”

I went quiet for a moment, the memories drifting
through my head, taking a little piece of myself with them. “Don’t tell me it
wasn’t my fault.”

A silence fell
between us, uncomfortable and heavy.

“So, yeah,” I whispered, my voice hoarse and
quavering. “Yeah, I get it. Sometimes we don’t want to see the truth, because
it would mean we’re the monsters. And that’s not an easy thing to look in the
mirror and accept.”

“But we can’t change the past,” Nathan said, his voice
warm and tender. “We can’t go back in time and undo the damage we caused with
our willful ignorance. The only thing we
can
do is…”