Page 11 of Take Her

And if he already thought I wanted to blackmail him, the answer to that wasn’t going to help me.

I paid someone their kid’s first year of college tuition to help me stalk you.

When answers weren’t forthcoming, he shook his head and growled, “No—you know what? Fuck you.” He stood and started pacing off.

“Rhaim—wait,” I said, jumping up to chase him down, running around in front of him quickly, leaving the pieces of my dismantled phone behind.

He didn’t stop until I was standing right in front of him, physically blocking his path, and even then I didn’t know if he was just going to sweep me aside.

“I really do want to learn. And Friday night was just an accident!”

“Keep your voice down,” he snarled.

“Why? Because I’m embarrassing?” I said, pitching my voice even louder.

His obvious disgust, that drew his dramatic features into a sneer, grew deeper. “No. Because I’m embarrassed by me. That I fell for any of your fucking bullshit.” He took a long moment to stare at me, breathing hard, and while it was frightening, I felt myself flourishing beneath his gaze, like a flower that’d been too long denied the sun.

“Can we just start over?” I pleaded.

His nostrils flared. “I’m going to ask you just one question—and you only get to give me just one answer, Lia: what is your fucking game?”

I inhaled deeply, longing to tell him the truth—that I’d been playing the same “game” almost half my life, just to get the two of us in the same room.

But I knew if I said anything foolish now, he’d methodically tear me to shreds, the same way he’d pieced out my phone.

“Just what my father told you—I’m here to learn how to run Corvo.”

It was obvious from the way his eyes narrowed that he didn’t believe me.

“I have fifteen percent of the shares!” I protested. I’d inherited them from my mother, when she’d passed. “And when—god forbid—my father dies, all of his are going to come to me.” Faced with the icy wall of his disbelief, I kept talking. “I was going to tell you at that club the other night—that’s the whole reason I was there, so this wouldn’t be a surprise—and I was trying to get up the guts to talk to you that whole time.” It wasn’t quite a lie. I would’ve told him everything at the bar, if I could’ve—he just wouldn’t give me half a chance. “But then you didn’t recognize me?—”

“Recognize you?” His voice rose again. “Jesus Christ, Lia, I haven’t seen you since—” he shouted, then paused, giving me a pocket to put all of my wishes in, before he finished with, “—since your father sent you off to boarding school.”

I rose up on my toes, trying to make myself taller. And why do you think he sent me away? I wanted to shout back at him.

The answer was right there.

Rhaim should’ve been able to read it on my face.

But he didn’t.

And I couldn’t tell him.

I rocked back, utterly defeated, and put a hand up to my chest to where my heart was breaking. He looked at me strangely. “What happened to your father’s Lamborghini? I remembered he shipped that stupid fucking thing over to Europe?—”

“Yeah. To me. I drove it around the Alps a lot. It’s being shipped back now,” I said very quietly, then glanced back at my abandoned phone and coffee, returning to it, and to my surprise he followed me, remaining standing while I tried to reassemble my phone without crying.

Then he sat on his heels beside me, like he was speaking to a child. “Your father doesn’t want to actually run his own company—why the fuck should you? And what makes you think that you’re in any way qualified?”

My cheeks pinked beneath his clear condescension. “I got good grades.”

“So did everyone on the third floor of our whole building. Corvo Enterprises is full of assholes who look good on paper,” he said with a dismissive snort. “But what do you even mean when you say you want to take over his ‘business’?” Rhaim said, while making air quotes around the word. I frowned, wondering if he was implying the sordid things my father did that I wasn’t allowed to know about—the causes of all the fights my dad had had at the dinner table with my dearly departed mother.

“Do you mean his casinos?” he went on. “His hotels? Or the distillery he bought just so he’d have something to talk about at the Hamptons next summer?”

I frowned. “Somehow you manage to do all of that,” I said with spite.

“Yes, but you are not me,” he said, and started shaking his head ruefully. “I wouldn’t even trust you to oversee janitorial at any of his facilities, and you know why? Because those people actually do important jobs, and you’re unqualified.”