King took the seat he’d pulled out, and once he was settled, he rested his arms on the table, clasping his hands in front of himself.
“You don’t like me very much, do you?” King asked as he stared at me, and I narrowed my eyes on his smug face, wondering what his angle was, because surely the answer to that question was obvious.
“I don’t know you to form an opinion either way.”
“Well, at least that wasn’t a yes.”
“It wasn’t a no, either,” I said, and when he chuckled again, my skin crawled.
“You’re not like I thought you would be, Jesse Clark,” he said, and my name falling from his tongue made me want to find him a bar of soap and demand he wash it off. But then his words began to compute, and I frowned.
“What do you mean? We’ve only seen each other once before, and that was hardly long enough for you to form any more of an opinion of me than I did of you.”
King shifted in his seat, leaning forward over the table closer to me, and it took everything in me not to push my chair back.
“That’s where you’re wrong. I’ve seen you, Jesse.”
I racked my brain, trying to work out how, or even where, and then I remembered that night at the Wolfe’s Den after Tor had me kicked out and I’d walked home.
I’d felt someone watching me that night. Someone following me the entire way home. Then several days after that on my way home from work…then at the market.
Oh my God, had King been following me?
I opened my mouth, about to demand an answer from him, but he said, “The night of the gala, here at the museum, I saw you. With Wolfe.”
My mouth clamped shut at that, and when he smirked, I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. He was seriously starting to freak me out. He’d been watching me? Had seen me? And with Tor? Who knew what he’d seen that night, and I wasn’t about to ask if he meant he saw us drinking champagne or that he’d seen us when Tor had given me the hottest handjob of my life.
“You’re awfully quiet all of a sudden.”
“I have nothing to say to you.” And honestly, I was hoping the lady would call my number soon, or I was going to just get up and leave without eating, because starving suddenly seemed like a better alternative than sitting there with him.
“Really? And here I thought I’d be right up your alley. That night at the den, I thought you were this shy little thing I needed to approach carefully. But then,” King said, shaking his finger at me, “then, when you showed up here with the Wolfe, and I found out you’d be working with my sister’s husband, who happens to be the director of this museum, I knew I was in luck. Because then I had an in, a way to track you down again, because clearly the problem that first night wasn’t lack of interest, but that I wasn’t forceful…enough.”
“You’re delusional,” I said, and shot to my feet, not willing to sit there with him anymore, and certainly not willing to listen to his sick imaginings. “I don’t know who you think you are or what angle you’re playing, but I’m not interested.”
“Is that part of the thrill for you, Jesse? Playing hard to get?” King said as he got to his feet, and I backed up. “Because I can chase you, if that’s what you want.”
I shook my head, determined to stand my ground. This was my workplace and, from what he’d said, not his. “You need to leave, or I’m going to report you.”
“To your boss? Or to Wolfe? I wonder, are you this mouthy with him, because from what I’ve heard, he doesn’t particularly like his playthings to talk back, if you get my drift.”
I wasn’t naive enough to believe Tor hadn’t been with others, but hearing it from King’s mouth made me want to scratch the guy’s eyes out. So this was how my first day was going to go. My feet were killing me. My fellow employees now hated me. My boss’s brother-in-law was a stalker. And now I was going to starve for the rest of the day. Great. This was just fucking great.
“Stay away from me,” I said with as much force as I could, and then I turned on my heel and booked it out of the dining room, away from the man who apparently had been watching, and was still watching, my every move.
19
“Look! Over there. Do you see it?” Jesse said from the wooden platform at the top of Lookout Point, where locals and tourists came and watched the whales during migration season. He had a pair of binoculars in his hand, the ones I’d given him this morning, and a bright smile on his face even as a light mist fell from the sky.