Cecilia had expected the usual Carter Matthews treatment—dinner at fancy restaurants, drinks in jazz bars, impromptu trips to a B& B, but when Carter had told her he needed to spend his time making a stab at this CEO instead of stealing away with her for weekend rendezvous and late nights on the dance floor, she’d thrown a fit.
“According to Cecilia,” Daphne went on, “you’re a no-good jerk and she doesn’t want to see your face ever again, even if you were—” for this, she looked down at the card for the exact wording “—the last cockroach left on earth.”
“Ouch.”
“And this, I believe, is yours, not mine.” She pivoted, picked up a massive black wicker basket he hadn’t noticed earlier and thrust the thing into his arms. Skulls and crossbones decorated the outside, along with words like “never again” and “make hate, not love”.
Inside the basket were all kinds of goodies. A voodoo doll with spiky dark hair that he suspected was supposed to be him. Stuffed and tortured with pins and red X’s marking the mortal wounds. A half-dozen dead, shriveled black roses, a copy of Men Who Are Jerks and The Women Who Dump Them, a can of dog food with a spoon taped to the side, and a pint-size bottle of Lester Jester’s Eau de Skunk.
“Guess she wanted to get her message across,” he said.
“You must be one heck of a boyfriend.”
“I’m actually a very nice guy.”
She arched a brow at him. Apparently it was too late to make a good first impression.
Carter glanced again at the voodoo doll and noticed the hat pins sticking out of its eyeballs. Granted, that didn’t speak well for him. “I don’t get it. Tell me how my breakup ruined your life.”
“This—” she pointed at the basket “—was delivered to me.”
“I’ll be sure to complain to the delivery company.”
“Too late. I already ended a perfectly good relationship because of this thing.”
“Did it breed in your living room? Or were you totally overcome by the fumes of Lester’s skunk aroma?”
“I thought it was from my boyfriend.” She glared at him as if every glitch in the universe was Carter’s fault. A few he’d lay claim to, but not this one. “So I broke up with him.”
He smirked. “A preemptive strike?”
She colored. Clearly Daphne Williams didn’t like having the tables turned on her. “Yes.”
“Didn’t you read the card?”
“I didn’t open the box until…after.”
He tried to bite back his laughter but gave up the effort. “You broke up with your boyfriend, thinking he was breaking up with you, and you hadn’t even opened the box?”
She parked her fists on her trim little hips. “I have had a very bad day.”
“Well, so have I.” He grinned. “But you just made me laugh, so it’s starting to improve.”
She gave him a glare. “I don’t find this funny.”
He raised the can of liver-flavored dog food in her direction. “I can’t believe you ruined a relationship over this.”
“It’s your fault.”
“It is not.”
“If you hadn’t been such a horrible boyfriend, Cecilia wouldn’t have sent you this and I wouldn’t have thought it was meant for me and ended things with Jerry.” She threw up her hands. “You have no idea how this throws a wrench into all my plans. I needed Jerry, and not just for a little dim sum on Friday nights.”
He shook his head, needing a second to follow her long-winded logic. He hadn’t had any dinner and the lack of sustenance had his brain firing in the wrong directions. “First off, I wasn’t a horrible boyfriend.” He thought a second. “Well, I wasn’t exactly a horrible boyfriend. Second, you breaking up with Jerry was your choice, not mine. So I don’t see why I owe you anything at all.”
“I truly don’t care what you think, Mr. Matthews. The way I see it, you owe me a favor. Two, in fact, because I lugged this thing all the way up to the fourth floor to deliver it to the right recipient.”
“I disagree. I say Jerry was just waiting for an excuse to break up. My basket happened to be handy. So there’s no favor required here at all.” He started to shut his door.
She blocked him with a dark blue two-inch heel. “That’s not true. I was a wonderful girlfriend.”
He gave her a sardonic grin. “If you were so wonderful, then why did he let you get away so easily?”
Carter Matthews looked at Daphne Williams’s furious, silent face and thought he’d never seen anything so pretty as a woman who didn’t have a ready retort. She stepped back, sputtering and steaming, but not a single word came out.
“Have a good day, Miss Williams,” he said, and shut his door.
Then he realized winning the battle didn’t seem quite so victorious, considering he was left alone with a faux dead cat and a basket full of hate messages.
And a few truths about himself that weren’t so fun to face.
Daphne stomped her way back to her apartment, considering various methods of torturing and killing Carter Matthews. She rejected drawing and quartering as too kind.
The man had the gall to make an analysis of her life when he was the one being sent a pin-stuffed voodoo doll? She’d been a darn good girlfriend to Jerry, even putting up with his endless obsession with Mortal Kombat, figuring the man had a dream and she should support him as he supported her.
Well, he didn’t exactly support her. Or understand what she did. Or listen to eighty percent of what she said, because he called her work as a creativity coach “way above his mental ability level.”
That part might have been true.
In the beginning, Daphne had found him distracted, and endearing. Then, in the last few weeks, his inattentiveness had become annoying.
Hurtful.
But he had been behind her idea of building a creativity center for children. It was the one thing that drove Daphne, fueled her desire to create all that she had never had as a child. A center like that could be a place of mental freedom, allowing kids to open their imaginations to the world.
To have fun, to create. And maybe, to feel like their ideas, their creations, were welcomed.
Jerry, the indulged only child of wealthy parents, had pledged to give her the start-up funds, then continue his support through the family foundation. Groundbreaking was scheduled to happen in two weeks—
Or had been anyway.
She’d had her funding and a comfortable relationship that demanded nearly nothing of her, until she’d made that rash—
Preemptive strike.
Whatever. She refused to use Carter Matthews’s words, even if her mind might betray her.
Her doorbell rang and Daphne crossed to it, half hoping Jerry would be there, ball cap in hand, calling the whole thing a silly mix-up. And half hoping he wasn’t.
Maybe the Breakup Basket had been a sign—or an open door—to force Daphne to change her life. To do more than go to work and come home to an empty apartment and an empty heart.
She shook off the thought as she opened the door. All she needed was a minute to recoup and get her plans back on track.
“How was Reno?” Kim, her best friend from kindergarten on up, stood on the other side of the door, a steaming bag from Garden Palace Chinese in one hand and a bottle of Jose