CRUEL TRUTH (Cruel #4)

2. Lark

2

Lark

Sam’s eyes swept down my own black suit as he took me in from head to toe. I felt exposed in that look. As if he saw so much more than the rumpled suit to the vulnerable girl I’d been once upon a time.

He reached a hand forward as if he was trying to make sure that I was actually there. Then he quickly withdrew like if he got too close, I’d burn him.

“What are you doing here?” Sam finally managed to get out.

“What am I doing here?” I said in disbelief. “What are you doing here? I’m from New York. I thought you were still in North Carolina.”

“Oh, right.” He rubbed the back of his head. “You’re from New York. I just…I thought you were working for your parents.”

“Oh.”

Because of course he did. That had been the plan after all. One year on the presidential campaign in Madison, Wisconsin. One perfect year with Sam. And then I would come home to New York and take over St. Vincent’s Enterprise. Except everything had changed when I got home. I’d never been the same after that fateful November five years earlier.

“I decided to join Leslie’s campaign instead,” I told him. “I mean, Mayor Kensington’s campaign.”

“Really?” he asked, shock registering on his face. “But…I thought it was just a year.”

“Yeah…it was.”

We were.

I swallowed back the bile at the thought of what had happened with us five years ago. A year of bliss that had gone down in a fiery pit of destruction.

We stood together then like ghosts of our former selves. An echo of what we’d once been. Hurt, betrayal, and still that aching want burning at the edges. That had always been there with Sam. An inevitable force that blew us together, only to slam us into a wall, screeching tires, locked brakes, and cracked windshield, leaving us both a mess.

And still, despite all the walls I’d built up around myself since Sam, seeing him made it feel like my still-bleeding heart was exposed all over again.

“Hey, Lark!” Kelly interrupted, popping into the break room at that exact moment. “Glad you met Sam. He’s going to be a big part of the team from now on.”

I swallowed back bile. Oh no. Oh god. I’d known when Kelly sent me in here that Sam was the new attorney she had just hired. But I hadn’t put two and two together that I was going to be seeing him every single day from now until November.

“That’s great,” I said. “Welcome…to the team.”

“Thanks,” he said softly.

Brown eyes met green in the space between us. There was so much more that needed to be said. So much that had been left unsaid when I returned home all those years ago. I’d never thought that I’d see him again. And now that I was, I had no f*****g clue what to do.

“Well, come on, Sam. Lark is late to her banquet meeting, and the mayor just got in,” Kelly said in her default chipper tone. She strode out of the break room and called over her shoulder, “You’ll get your first intro on day one!”

“Ugh, my meeting,” I groaned, turning in place to follow Kelly.

“Wait,” Sam said.

He reached out and this time gripped my elbow. I turned back to face him with wide, shocked eyes. He towered over me. I’d forgotten until that moment how huge he was. All tall, wide-shouldered Southern boy who actually knew manual labor with calluses on his fingers and biceps for days. A man who liked to use his hands…in all the best ways.

“What?” I whispered. I was conscious of Kelly mere feet away and the meeting I was currently supposed to be in.

“We need to talk. Later.”

A dormant, broken butterfly wing beat for the first time in ages. I hated my heart for responding that way. But f**k, despite all the s**t we’d gone through and how we’d both f****d up so royally, it was Sam.

“Okay.”

He released me slowly, almost reluctantly. Something uncurled further in my chest…or perhaps lower, much lower, at the way his fingers withdrew from my skin. Oh f**k, I was screwed.

I scurried away from him. My heart raced, and my hands were clammy. I couldn’t seem to get my head on straight.

Sam Rutherford was in New York City. Something I’d never thought he would do. He certainly hadn’t considered it for me. And now, what the hell was I going to do? After what had happened, could I disentangle the anger and pain from the love and lust? Could I find a way to move on from what had happened and work next to him?

It felt impossible.

Honestly impossible.

And by the time my meeting was over, I hadn’t come to any better conclusion. In fact, I’d sat through the whole thing with my head in the clouds. Which was something I absolutely could not afford. I had too much to do to sacrifice even one meeting.

Somehow, just seeing Sam for a few minutes had left me feeling like the inexperienced twenty-four-year-old girl who had never been on a campaign before. Rather than the deputy campaign manager to the mayor of New York City.

I needed to shake it off. Get him out of my head. I’d worked hard to help Leslie get elected as the first female mayor. I absolutely deserved to be one of the highest-ranking people on this team. Many people had come and gone since we started, but I’d stuck with her, forgoing other campaigns to work with a candidate that I believed in. Which was the whole reason I’d moved to Madison six years ago for the presidential campaign in the first place.

Before the campaign, my parents had controlled every aspect of my life. I was their perfect little Upper East Side princess. Read: monster. I had all the right friends and boyfriends and high school accolades. I attended Brown, of course, because I was a legacy and got a business degree with the goal of taking over the company. Even when I decided to get a law degree, it didn’t ever feel like a choice. I went to Columbia Law so that I could work with my parents and be close to home.

But then something happened. Something changed. Governor Woodhouse held a rally at Columbia. English had heard he was an awesome speaker and dragged me and Whitley to the event. Then I heard him speak. Heard the eloquent speech he delivered to the packed, entranced audience, and something shifted in me. This was a man I could get behind. A race I could believe in.

I applied for a position the next day in every swing state.

Two weeks later, I’d gotten the job in Madison.

It was the only real choice I’d ever made in my entire life. And it was the start of everything. The start of getting out from under my parents’ thumb and finding my own life.

And then there was Sam.

I shook my head. He was all jumbled with that choice. Inherently connected to it in a way that I had never been able to pull apart. How the f**k was I going to do it now?

My phone buzzed just as I stepped back into my office, prepared to lock myself away all afternoon and obsess endlessly about this issue. As one did.

Just got to Coffee Grounds and managed to snag a table. I’ll grab our drinks. See you soon!

“Oh, right. Fuck.” I’d forgotten about my coffee meeting with English. I jumped out of my seat and grabbed my purse on the way. “I’m out for a meeting. I’ll be back in thirty.”

“Roger that,” Aspen said. She gave me a little salute as I passed.

I was out the door and jogging the few blocks to my favorite coffee shop in the East Village. Somehow, I managed to only be ten minutes late. It might be a record.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said, plopping into the seat across from my friend.

English removed her enormous sunglasses and brushed her long Hollywood blonde hair off of her shoulders. “You’re always late.”

“Well, yeah, but this time, I have a reason.”

“You were in a meeting for the campaign and forgot?” She laughed as my eyes rounded and pushed my drink toward me. “I know you too well. Now, drink up before it gets cold.”

I took a fortifying drink of my coffee. This was going to suck.

“Sam is back,” I blurted out.

Her bright blue eyes rounded. “Sam? Like, the Sam?”

“Yeah. Yep. He’s here. In New York City. And I don’t know what to do,” I told her in a rush.

“Wait, what?” she spat. “Sam Rutherford, the guy who did you dirty on the last campaign, the guy who ran your heart over with his truck and then blamed you? That Sam? Please tell me you didn’t actually talk to him.”

“He just got a job in my f*****g office,”

“No way. What a douche!” she gasped out. “He had the nerve to get a job where you already work? What, did he use you as a reference to get an in?”

I shook my head. “No. As far as I know, he didn’t even know that I worked there. He thought I was still working for my parents.”

“Ew.”

“Tell me about it. But it was what he’d thought was the plan before our fallout. So, I think he probably didn’t know I worked for the mayor. It’s not like my picture is on the website.”

“Girl, we are going to need to get something stronger than coffee to deal with this conversation,” English said.

“You’re not wrong,” I said, gulping down the coffee. “What am I going to do? He’s in legal. It’s probably the department I deal with the least, but it’s not a big office. I’m going to have to see him every day from now until November.”

English reached into her bag and pulled out a planner that was stuffed to the brim with notes and tabs and stickers. She flipped until she found a blank page, immediately going into fixer mode. She might look like a movie star, but she chose to handle their publicity and generally clean up everyone’s messes instead of acting herself. Her work as a celebrity publicist was top notch. She was one of the best in the business back in LA. And she worked nearly as hard and as many hours as I did to prove it, and that was saying something.

“Let’s make a list of what we can do,” she said. “First things first. I’m not saying that I know someone who could plant blow on him so that he could get fired, but…I do work with rockstars.”

I burst into laughter. “I love you, but no. I can’t do that. Bad Lark might have considered that option, but that’s not who I want to be anymore.”

“You act like Bad Lark is a physically different entity than you,” English said, jotting the word blow down on the Maybe list.

“I hope she is,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t want to get him fired. I don’t want to jeopardize his career or anything. I just…don’t know what to do.”

English put her pen down. She sighed. “Because you still care about him.”

I bit my lip. “And I hate him.”

“And you’re wondering if this is your second chance.”

I immediately shook my head and then frowned and nodded slowly. “I don’t know. Can we get past what we did to each other? Five years is a long time. I’m a different person than I was. Maybe he’s different too.”

“I’m going to go on record and say this is a bad idea,” English said, adding second chance to the No list. “You just had to deal with all the Thomas s**t. That asshole still works as a senior executive for St. Vincent’s Enterprise. I mean, your parents actually sided with your ex-boyfriend over you in the fallout. I don’t think you’re ready to head straight into Sam-level territory. Can’t you just find a nice, normal guy?”

“Says the girl married to a movie star.”

English laughed. “I mean, we’re not all lucky enough to find a Josh Hutch. But I know there’s a guy out there for you. I just don’t know if it’s Sam Rutherford.”

“Jesus, I need to get it together. He’s just an ex, right?” I glanced up to find her nodding approvingly. “He’s just this guy I dated for a year, like, five years ago.”

“Exactly. I mean, you still hang out with your crew, and haven’t you slept with Penn, Lewis, and Rowe?”

I glared at her. “We do not bring up Bad Lark when we’re trying to get me to do the right thing here.”

English snorted. “Fair point.”

“I can put the past behind us. I’m a professional. I can deal with Sam being in the office for the next six months. It’ll be fine…right?”

“Well, if it’s not, we can always drink,” English offered. She scribbled wasted into the Yes column. “I was thinking we could go out tomorrow night with Whitley before I leave for LA. You could even invite Katherine.”

“Oh god, Katherine and Whitley in the same room. That sounds like a perfect way for me to forget that Sam is in town.”

“Exactly. You game?”

I nodded. Even though I knew that I’d pay for it the next day at work, I really needed a night out with my girls. Maybe I could get drunk enough to forget this disaster had even happened.