His eyes began to burn, and he squeezed them shut. He would not cry. Not in a hundred… Tears crept beneath his lashes, onto his cheek.
Fuck.
Swiping the back of his wrist across his eyes, Brad sniffed hard and pushed to unsteady legs. He’d try her again. Maybe she’d pick up. Please, God, let her answer. She had to; he needed to make this right.
Damn—how could he screw up something so badly?
He forced himself to return to his bedroom and the phone. With shaking hands, he dialed Cassie’s number again. Once more, the call routed directly to her voice mail. He swore beneath his breath, blinked through the wetness that blurred his vision, and terminated the connection. At a complete loss, he sank onto the edge of his bed. Where did he go, when everything he wanted, didn’t want him?
Up. He went up from the bottom of the heap. Somehow, he would go up.
But first, there were three bottles of scotch calling his name from the living room. When he had made sweet love to all three of them, he would find a ladder and begin the long, lonely, climb.
Chapter Thirty
Brad’s head throbbed on Monday morning. Each step he took down the hall to the elevators made the Advil he’d choked down as effective as breath mints. He knew he looked like hell—he’d spilled his coffee in his lap, the red rings around his eyes refused to disappear no matter how much Visine he’d dumped in, and he was pretty damn certain his boxers were on crooked.
But he’d managed to pull himself out of a scotch-induced coma to get to work on time. Whether or not he’d achieved sobriety, remained to be discovered. He was here and functional. Presently that was all he cared about.
He jammed his thumb on the button for the partners’ topmost floor and shifted his weight from heel to heel to try and untwist his shorts leg. The comfortable Macallan 18 had balmed the pain, and he’d nursed it well into yesterday morning. With heartbreak under relative control, he swigged his way through the smoky Highland Park and managed to replay the conversation with Cassie without collapsing all over again. But it had taken half a bottle of the high end, twenty-eight-year-old Glenrothes to hear what she’d said.
She loved him. More importantly, she felt like she was losing herself.
Caught up in his simple need to have her close at hand, he’d barreled down a thoughtless track like an out of control freight train and scared the shit out of her. Course that little jewel of wisdom hadn’t hit until he was on his second to last glass. The final glass kicked him back into mindless oblivion.
Brad entered the elevator, leaned against the wall, and willed the pounding in his head to subside. An arm shot through the opening as the doors began to close. “Hold that!” Lurching forward, Brad grimaced as he groped for the button. Must remember not to move so fast.
He wanted to crawl in a corner when Joseph Heagle twisted into the car. Joseph took one look at Brad and blinked. “Whoa. You look like hell.”
“Thanks,” Brad grumbled. Good to know his voice still worked.
Very pointedly, Joseph lifted his nose and sniffed twice. “Well, at least you don’t reek of it. Nice work with the breath mints.”
“Listerine,” he mumbled as he pressed his fingertips to his temples. “My head’s going to fucking explode.”
Soft chuckling blended with the closing of the doors. The car jumped skyward, and Brad grabbed at the railing to keep from topping forward.
“Next time you tie one on, let me know. I want to be at that party.”
Brad shot him an unappreciative sideways glare. “No, you don’t. Trust me.”
“Way to make an impression.” Gesturing at his state of disarray, Joseph smirked. “Is this why you didn’t call yesterday?”
Sidelined by another gunshot blasting through his mind, Brad barely managed to nod.
“Well, you’re in luck. I’ve got a motion for custody the judge is going to toss, and that case isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. I have a hole.”
As the elevator coasted to a stop, Brad’s frown deepened. The case no longer mattered. He’d lost Cassie.
The pain began to burn away at him again, and he bit back an oath. He couldn’t discuss this right now. It was too new, too raw. He shouldered through the opening doors and headed for the ominous door at the end of the hall. Ten steps from now, if he managed to hold himself together, he’d reach his career goals. Only…he no longer wanted them if Cassie wasn’t in the picture.