The Other Side of Greed by Lily Zante

Chapter Twenty-Eight

KYRA

What’s up with that man? It’s almost as if he has a split personality. One minute he’s fine, and the next he’s closed off. I can’t work him out.

I keep my head down, and I ask Fredrich to get Brad to work with him. Maybe it’s a good thing that he declined the invite to Elias’s event. It would be awkward trying to make conversation with him there.

Simona, Fredrich and I are going together, but because Elias supports our organization, we were given a few extra invitations. We held a raffle to make it fair so that everyone from the company had a chance to go. Entry is by ticket only, and I’m supposed to meet Simona and Fredrich there

On the evening of the event, everyone leaves early.

I’ve been racking my brains on what to wear. A dress? Nice jeans? Dressy slacks? It’s going to be a fancy affair, but I’m not sure how fancy.

I finally settle on a pair of dark jeans which don’t look like jeans, but they are, and I dress them up with a spaghetti strap top. It shows off more of my tattoos, but I’ll have my nice blazer on most of the evening.

I get ready quickly, but Simona calls as I’m about to leave my place. She’s forgotten our invitations in her desk drawer. Thank goodness we gave the raffle winners theirs. I pass by work on the way to city hall, and I quickly rush out of my car and head into the factory. I’m surprised to see that the light in our office is on. Dayna, the factory manager, is still here. She whistles when she sees me. “My, girrrrrl. You’re lookin’ mighty fine.”

“Thank you!” I blow her a kiss as I rush up the stairs in my high heels.

* * *

BRANDON

The Redhill office is empty and there’s only me up here and a couple of the workers on the factory floor. I have nowhere else to go, so I stay on at work a little longer and wonder what’s going on at city hall. With Jessica and Kyra at the same place, it seems like I’ve made the right decision to stay out of it.

Jessica will have plenty to brag about, but I’m not eager to see her anytime soon. Fredrich and Simona will have plenty to say about it. I wonder what Kyra will think, and whether she will drone on about Elias the way Jessica has.

I drum my fingers on the table, wondering what to do with myself. I’m not going to pass by the hospital today. Emma’s sisters are over, and they’re going to find it odd that I keep visiting. They’ll get the wrong idea.

I fucked up. If I hadn’t asked her to pick up the paperwork for me, she wouldn’t have been in that accident.

I hold my head in my hands, elbows propped on the desk, wanting to clamber out of my pity party. No amount of me feeling bad will transform Emma back to exactly who she was.

That’s something I will have to live with.

Like my guilt over Kane.

I stand up and walk around, hoping to shift these gloomy thoughts. I should go home, get something to eat, or head back to my own office to deal with the mounting deluge of emails. I’ve had a dozen messages from the new PA. She is completely useless. Maybe I should check in at my office and see what a mess she’s made of today.

But something else draws my attention. With the office is empty, here’s my chance to see if I can find anything of interest on Kyra.

Like the dirt I was so sure I’d find.

The dirt I could expose her with.

Back in the days when I was so sure that no one could be as well-meaning as Kyra.

How wrong I was.

But still, I walk over to Kyra’s desk and sit in her chair, gingerly staring up at the ceiling to make sure nothing is about to fall on my head and kill me.

A moment of madness hits me and I snoop through her drawers, rummaging around, looking for something, anything. A clue to her. I want to know more about her. I take a peek but I find nothing significant. Some hand cream, lip balm. A copy of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. A hairbrush and a whole heap of unopened pastel-colored Post-it notes and other stationery.

I tap my fingers on Kyra’s desk. It’s not super neat, but it’s not a chaotic mess either. I see some letters lying around under a paperweight. One of them has Greenways Committee letterhead.

I shuffle through the pile. I’m about to tug the Greenways Committee letter out from under the paperweight when the door opens.

“Damn!” Kyra stands there, her knee bent as she glances over her shoulder examining the sole of what looks like a high-heeled boot. She looks amazing. “Damn heels,” I think she mumbles.

I let go of the letter I was about to pull out and fall back into her chair. The sound of it creaking makes her look up at me.

“Brad …” It’s a breathless whisper, shot through with surprise. “You’re here late.” Furrows form on her brow. I can’t talk, because I’m fixated on her bare arms. The small sun tattoo—the one I’ve seen many times before—almost winks at me.

“I’m ... I was ...”

“You said you were busy tonight?”

“I was about to leave. Check in on Emma …”

“That’s why you’re not coming with us tonight?” she asks. It’s a lame excuse and I don’t know how to reply because one white lie leads to another and before I know it I’ll be caught up in a fishing net of deceit, feeling like a hapless little fish. I stand up, because I’ve been caught red-handed—not that she seemed to notice—and because she looks so breath-taking.

Stunning, is the word that shoots to my mind. Something else, white hot desire, shoots directly to my cock.

I’ve never seen her dressed up. She’s not red carpet dressed up, but she looks different. Dark jeans hug her hips. High heels, pencil thin, make her legs look longer. A blouse with thin straps caresses her skin. She’s the epitome of rock star glam. Rock chick glam. My interest in her just hiked up fifty notches.

The transformation is a complete makeover but not a drastic fix-the-teeth-get-Botox type of makeover. I could have sworn she only went home less than an hour ago so she hasn’t had long to get ready but she already takes my breath away.

She sashays into the room, keys in one hand, handbag in the other, and goes straight over to Simona’s desk where she fumbles around in her drawers.

Fuck.

She has another tattoo in between her shoulder blades. It looks like a compass, and it has me thinking. Why that, and why there? Where she can’t see it but I can? A hot-blooded man like me who now has no choice but to gawk at it because I sure as hell can’t seem to turn away.

My eyes are riveted, and it’s like I’m seeing a new side to Kyra for the first time. She is sexy as hell. There was something about her before, which I begrudgingly noticed, but this... this is her sexiness on steroids.

I have to work hard not to let my eyes rake down the length of her as she walks towards me.

“The invitations,” she says, holding them up. “Simona forgot them, and now I’m running extra late and—”

“You look like a model.”

She laughs, confusion making her brows slant before she looks away. We don’t exchange words like this.

“You do,” I insist.

As if a blindfold has been untied from around my eyes, I see Kyra in a whole new way. In a possessive way. In an I’ve-got-to-have-her way.

She ignores my compliment and comes over to my side. When she bends over and pulls open her drawer, my attention falls to her back and her compass tattoo again. I’ve never been with a woman who has ink on her body. I’ve never been with a woman like Kyra, and now I want her even more than before.

She has a beauty on the outside that matches what’s inside, and she has the biggest heart of anyone I know.

Jessica couldn’t hold a candle to her.

My cock twitches. As Kyra rummages around, the throbbing between my legs intensifies. This is awkward.

“What are you looking for?” Not that I should be asking her. She should be asking me what the hell I’m doing sitting in her chair.

She pulls out what look like a couple of lipsticks. “I’m so late,” she wails, oblivious to the effect she’s having on me. My heart lurches as she opens and swivels the lipsticks one by one, presumably to check the color, but with her back to me, I can see clearly the tattoo on her back, between her shoulder blades. I reach out and touch it, not caring that I’ve invaded her space. She flinches, as if the shock is electric, then bends over and rummages through her drawer again.

“Your tattoo. It’s a … compass.” I try to compose myself. “Why’s that, Lewis? Are you lost?” I venture a casual laugh that I don’t feel. The moment is hot, sparky and weighted with the boulder of desire which is suddenly too big for me to ignore.

She turns to look at me, her smoldering eyes burning into me, causing a chain reaction that threatens to explode. I’m going to turn into a jabbering wreck, unable to string together a coherent sentence if she stays here any longer.

As if she can sniff out my weakness, she tilts her head, observing my reaction. “Not anymore.”

I hold my breath, wanting her to elaborate, wanting to ask her but my tongue seems to have stopped working and my mouth has dried up. It’s only my eyes that function, raking down the length of her. My gaze naturally drifts to her sun tattoo, then to her spaghetti straps, then my brain starts to wonder if her bra is strapless or something else. All this in the space of a few seconds. I wish I was going with her.

“Not anymore?” I manage to ask. She’s wearing a touch of makeup. Her lashes are thick and long, her lips moist and pouty. Her skin is velvety. I wish I hadn’t turned down the invitation tonight. I suddenly don’t like the idea of Kyra being at city hall, around Elias Cardoza. I don’t see how anyone can resist her looking the way she does, and the chances of Cardoza talking to Kyra this evening are a dead cert.

She turns to leave and it sends my hormones into a tailspin, seeing her back, the silken skin, and those pipe-thin straps.

“I never had you pegged for being into tattoos.” This is my pathetic attempt to catch her attention, to need an answer that makes her face me once more.

She stops, turns and tilts her head, as if she’s considering whether to tell me or not. My breath hitches in my throat. It feels like a secret, and now I want to be her best friend so that I can hear it.

“I wasn’t. My ex was. He had them all over. I was curious, so I got this first.” She touches the sun on her shoulder. Involuntarily, I lick my lower lip. “Then he convinced me to get a rosebud tattoo.” She rolls her eyes as if she regrets it. The whole time she’s talking, I picture tasting those lips.

I fold my arms, as if this will help stem the flow of blood from rushing south. “Convinced you? I didn’t think anyone could convince you. You’re a woman who knows her own mind.”

“Love,” she says, with a shrug, as if it was a huge mistake which now means nothing. Her face turns serious. “We were together for four years, and he cheated on me for three of them. I dumped him the day I found out. Three years of my life with a cheat. It knocked me for six. Left me lost and broken, but Redhill gave me direction. This ...” She hooks a thumb over her shoulder, “is to remind me that I’m on a journey, an adventure, even, and that I’m not stuck.”

I want to say something to comfort her, but I’m scared of saying the wrong thing because I’m glad that shithead is out of her life. Crazy fucker, cheating on her. He doesn’t deserve her. “You’re better off without him.”

She nods, then stares down at the invitations. I hope she doesn’t have her eye on Cardoza.

“He was great at the beginning, when I was starting Redhill, and he helped me a lot. I mistakenly thought we shared the same ideals. What I didn’t know was that he shared our bed with someone else.”

“His loss.” I leave the words floating around in the heavy haze of desire which permeates the air. It surprises me that she is opening up so much. Longing and lust topsy-turvy in my stomach, and I want to suck her lower lip, to elicit a moan from that pretty little mouth of hers. “Where’s the rosebud?” I ask, in a voice so hoarse that I barely recognize it.

“Further down, where no one can see.”

Further down?

How much further down?

“Yeah?” My voice sounds disgustingly high-pitched. An indecent thought rockets north from the base of my groin. In the push and pull that has been the sum total of our strained relationship, I’ve tried to hold back from thinking such things. Now it’s impossible.

My gaze rakes in her back, sauntering slowly from her spaghetti straps, to the compass tattoo, all the way down to her fuck-me heels.

She throws me a look over her almost-bare shoulder. “You’re blushing, Brad. Are you okay?”

She knows exactly what she’s doing. I don’t answer, for fear of giving my teenage horniness away. I grimace, and hope it resembles something like a passing grin.

Her lingering gaze sets flames licking all over my skin. This is a new side to her. A vampish and unexpected side that I never would have thought someone like her possessed.

I want her.

Watching her stride away, I’m overcome with the thought of grabbing her and pushing her up against the door. I want to claim her mouth and rain kisses down her bare arms and shoulders. I want to make her mine.

“Don’t forget to lock up,” she tells me, completely oblivious to the tsunami of emotions she’s sent sweeping all over my body.

She’s so naive, so trusting, she hasn’t even asked me what I was doing sitting in her chair.