Page 154 of The Grand Duel

“You lied to me.”

He nods, blue eyes desperately searching my face as I wait. “When you showed up that first day in the office I was in shock. I had no idea it was you who Edna employed, and I had no part in the process. At first, I didn’t know if you’d recognise my voice or if someone at the club would have told you who I was, but then when you just stood there…” He shakes his head. “You were so much more beautiful than I remembered, and yet I hadn’t stopped thinking about you for days.”

I close my eyes in a bid to clear my thoughts. To push aside the parts that just made my heart soar and focus on the way he might have been feeling in the moment. “I get why it might have been awkward to tell me there and then.”

“I thought about firing you there and then,” he admits. “I knew it would be inappropriate to bring it up at work. I spent days contemplating if telling you was the right thing to do, and when I finally decided that I had to, you bailed on me mid meeting.”

My eyes lift to his. “You were going to tell me…that was what you needed to tell me?” I think back to the day I left early. “I thought you were going to fire me.”

“I probably should have with the way you left that meeting. But I knew I had ignored you for days and made you feel like crap. I just didn’t know how to tell you, and I knew it couldn’t be at work.”

I sit and think over what he’s said. “What about after that? You still could have told me after.”

“True. I wanted to tell you again in Macca’s that first time.” He pauses, flicking his eyes around my face before he looks down at Daisy, stroking his pinkie up and down her snout as his jaw goes rigid. “But then you told me I wasn’t your type, and I figured telling you was only going to make you feel awkward about it. We were finally working out a semi-professional relationship and something in my gut told me to leave it behind us.”

I shake my head, hating that I made him feel like he wouldn’t be my type. “Behindyou,” I correct him. “I didn’t get a choice.”

He rolls his lips, nodding. “I’m not sorry for any of that if I’m honest. I was trying then. I wanted you to know,” he says, meaning his every word. “What I’m sorry for and what I know is wrong and makes me hate myself is everything after. Especially whilst we were in Italy. You deserved my honesty and because I wasn’t challenged to give it, I didn’t.”

My heart throbs, the ache in my throat unwelcome. “There are so many things I look back on that make me feel so stupid. Like you letting me speak about that night, knowing and not saying anything.”

“We would have been on the clock?—”

“I don’t care!” I talk over him. “We were having a conversation about me fucking another man. Literally fuckingyou.Do you not think we were already well past the professional line?”

His brow dips as he contemplates it.

“You sent me to The Montwell for that meeting. They both knew, didn’t they?”

Regret tightens his features. “I’m sorry, Lissie.”

“It’s bullshit, Charles.”

“I know.”

“You paid Bronwyn to keep me out of the rooms,” I force out.

His nostrils flare, jaw locked tight.

“You could barely speak to me at work, left me thinking the man I was with that night didn’t want me and listened to me stress that, and then paid six hundred and fifty thousand pounds to keep me out of the rooms.”

“If I thought even for a second you would’ve wanted me, I’d have told you. I had no idea we’d grow closer. I thought you were better off not knowing it was me.”

My stomach twists at his words.

“You gave your name. That night in The Nightingale, you gave me your real name. Why don’t you use a fake one?”

“I do.”

“You didn’t.”

He levels me with a stare I can’t break out of. “You were blindfolded, Lissie. It was your first time in the rooms, and you seemed nervous. You had no idea who I was. I just wanted to give you something.”

“There are other women at the club that you sleep with.”

He nods, jaw clenching.

“You told me you let your friends call you Charlie, and yet there are people at the club, women, who know you by that name. Women who have been with you.” I can’t help the way my face screws up, the idea of it making me want to be sick when I’ve never had a problem with the club before now.