Page 79 of Power

“How well do you know Jace?”

“You tell me. You seem to be the one with all the hypothetical answers to all the hypothetical questions.”

He smirked. “Well, let’s just say, if someone hurts someone Jace cares about, the man can be quite … unreasonable.”

Unreasonable. He said it like he was saying the wordbullet, but meantnuclear weapon.

“Then assume all his employees are people he cares about. Or here’s a thought: don’t sexually harass anyone, ever, because youknow … laws. Rules. Basic human decency. Stuff they usually teach in kindergarten right afterdon’t eat glue.”

“If you were to claim that what happened in your interview was harassment?—”

“It was.”

“To Jace, that would create significant problems.”

“I see. And you thought stalking me and harassing me would make me LESS likely to rat you out? Wow, college really failed you, didn’t it?”

His face tightened. “You will not tell HR,” Marcus declared, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. “And you will not tell Jace.”

“Is that so?” My eyebrow shot to my hairline. Now it was my turn to put my body language into full-on offensive mode.

See, here’s the problem with my control issues: Sometimes, when someone tries to back me into a corner, all the rational reasons I have for staying quiet evaporate. The only thing that matters becomes reclaiming my power.Because sometimes having a man tell me exactly what I was going to do? That made me want to do the exact opposite, consequences be damned.

“Well, seeing as how you’ve followed me home and peppered me with implied threats, I think maybe it’s time I do tell everyone what you did. I’m thinking company-wide email. Maybe an Instagram post. How photogenic are you? I hear fluorescent lighting in police stations is particularly unflattering.”

His movement was so fast, I barely registered it. I pulled away at the last second, but it was too late. My arm was in his grasp. A painfully biting, vise-like grip that would leave finger-shaped souvenirs by morning.

“You thinkI’msuch a bad guy? Well, Jace isn’t the clean-cut man you think he is.”

I jerked my body free. “Screw you. With a cactus. Sideways.”

Digging around in my purse, I pulled out my cell phone, unlocking the screen to call 911. But it exploded out of my hand with the force of hisfist.

It took a couple of seconds to register what had happened, to evaluate the shadows crossing the planes of his face, the dark turn this encounter had taken. And to register that Marcus wasn’t just a creep.

He was dangerous.

“If you need more incentive to keep your mouth shut, allow me to give it to you.” He stepped closer, towering over me, and it was everything I could do to not step back, to give him the satisfaction of showing him I was afraid.

But, holy hell, Iwasafraid. Too afraid to scream, too afraid he’d choke me to death or something before I could alert anyone for help.

“I’m protecting Jace’s darkest secret,” he continued. “One that no one knows about except for me. Not even his other so-called friends.”

“You expect me to believe you? What’s next? You’re going to tell me you’re actually a Nigerian prince who needs my bank account details?”

His eyes darkened into a predatory glare reminiscent of my father before his violent episodes.

“If you expose me, I’ll expose him, and he’ll lose everything. His career, his reputation. His freedom. Hell, his safety would be on the line. That secret could dig up enemies that would also endanger people he cares about too. People like his buddies that you seem to know so well.”

I didn’t know them well. I mean, I knew Blake reasonably well, but that wasn’t the point here. The point was, I had no idea what to make of Marcus’s claims. But I trusted my intuition about Jace being a good person. Marcus, on the other hand, had already proven himself to be human garbage.

“Sexual harassment is just a symptom of who you really are,” I said. “And if you’re capable of sexual harassment, you’re capable of lying. So, forgive me if I don’t take your word as gospel.”

He smirked. “Then call my bluff, Scarlett West. Butif you care about Jace at all, you’ll keep your mouth shut and watch your back.”

As he turned and walked away, I stood frozen, reeling from his words. The outright threats. The implied ones. The accusations about Jace and his supposed dark secrets.

I picked up my fallen phone, swiped it over, and hovered my thumb over the Emergency Call button.