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His derisive snort shattered her composure for a minute, but she forced the words out. “For a while there, I was forgetting my life and my choices are my own. And I’m ashamed to admit that part of my reasoning was to do with sex. I can so very easily let it blind me to the things that should be important to me. But I don’t want to be blind. You’re having a baby with another woman. I can’t handle that, Noah. I really can’t. I don’t want to suppress how I feel about that with sex. I’m sorry.”
“Leia!”
She hung up, turned the phone off and ejected the battery as an extra safety precaution in case Noah’s guy could track her.
Undressing, she slid into the cold, lonely hotel bed and pulled the covers over her head.
12
“What the fuck do you mean you lost her? What the hell am I paying you for?” Noah shouted into the phone less than thirty seconds after Leia hung up on him. “Yes, she just called me. No, I don’t know where the hell from or I wouldn’t be asking you!” Exasperated beyond belief and seriously fearing for his blood pressure, he pulled the phone away from his ear and rubbed at his throbbing temple.
A full minute later, he pulled in a breath and spoke to his PI. “When did you last have eyes on her?”
“My guy on the roof on the building opposite her office said she spent a couple of hours in a meeting. Then she went to her office at about three. That was when your other girl showed up.”
Noah’s temperature spiked. “My other girl?”
“Yeah, you know, Snow White’s stepmom?”
He stopped dead in the middle of his suite. “Ashley?”
His PI snorted. “That’s her.”
“I’ll call you back. You’d better have located Leia by the time I do.”
“If she’s deliberately covering her tracks?—”
“No excuses!” Noah hung up and dialed his condo. Ashley picked up on the third ring.
“What the fuck did you do?”
“I’m assuming we’re talking about your little pixie?” Noah could almost hear the shrug in her voice. “I paid her a little visit. Don’t tell me she’s upset? Seriously, I don’t know what you see in her if she runs to you with every?—”
“She didn’t run to me, you fucking bitch. She ran away.” He regretted the words the moment they were out of his mouth.
“Well then, that kind of proves my point, don’t you think?” Ashley crowed in triumph.
His vision blurred, and he worried if he would pass out just from the rage coursing through his veins. “For the sake of all things holy, I’m going to give you five seconds to tell me what you said to her. Starting now.”
“I thought she needed to be aware of the DNA test results and act accordingly, that’s all.”
“What did she say?”
A long-suffering sigh. “Noah, you won’t believe me if I told you so perhaps you should ask her.”
“Tell me what she said, dammit!”
“She said she didn’t care. About the baby… or about you. I think she found the whole subject boring, to be honest. She had the nerve to threaten to throw me out of her office.” She sniffed.
A ball of lead settled in his stomach. Even as he warned himself that he knew better than to believe a word Ashley said, he couldn’t shift the glaring truth. He may have remembered that Leia couldn’t have kids and imagined that it altered the facts enough for it to matter what happened between the two of them, but what if he’d been grasping at straws?
Was he trying to force an issue with Leia that he would be better off letting go? He was damn certain her dig about notwanting to be burdened with kids had been a protective mechanism. But had it held a grain of truth, a truth he was willfully turning a blind eye to?
“Noah, are you there? Aren’t you going to say something?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry she didn’t throw you out on your ass. Stay away from her, Ashley. Don’t make me tell you again.”
He shoved his phone in his pocket and rubbed a hand down his face. Encountering his stubble, he cursed.