Page 48 of Take Her

Rhaim was completely unfazed. “You should ask your uncle why he calls me that before you use that name again.”

For a mad moment I thought Junior might do something foolish, like spit at Rhaim or throw a punch, but apparently he decided to survive the morning and turned heel, walking out of the office before slamming the door, so then it was just Rhaim and I standing there—Rhaim, clearly deciding whether or not to go commit violence, and me, rather helpless at his side.

I looked over at the large stack of papers and folders he’d brought with him on my desk, wondering if they were truly mine—or just props, before I had another day of message managing—and then he turned to look at me.

“Integral?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t pop the rising bubble of my pride.

“Not yet,” he admitted, then gave me a slight nod. “But perhaps eventually.” He jerked his chin at the small tower of paperwork he’d given me. “That’s everything for the distillery your father just bought, plus the drive I gave you access to on your computer. Go through it all and give me three reasons why your father bought it, and your recommendations based on them by the end of day tomorrow.”

Given me access to it...when? Not just now, when he’d gone into his office to pick things up.

He must’ve done it last night.

And the thought of that made my heart race almost as much as my two sips of Burmese iced coffee had.

Because it meant this wasn’t a pathetic task to orient me on, created during an emergency, as an act of fluff to occupy a silly girl—it might be a real, useful thing.

“Yes, sir,” I said giving him a wholesome smile.

He didn’t say anything to that, just considered me a second longer before going into his separate office.

21

RHAIM

Ialready didn’t like Freddie Junior.

He embodied the three things I couldn’t stand in a man: he was stupid, he was lazy, and he thought he was better than me. The last could be tolerated, as I knew it wasn’t true—I was well aware that my pride was the least useful tool in my arsenal. Pride made you spend good money after bad, pride made you greedy, and pride would inevitably lead you to the proverbial fall—I’d seen it happen often enough.

But even worse than that, he reminded me of his goddamned father, and I was done with Freddie Senior’s shit. Corvo had spent enough money bailing him out solely because he was Nero’s brother. Until he’d been banished to Corvo’s Asian branch, the man swanned about town like he’d had some hand in making Corvo what it was, living both off of Corvo’s reputation and its dime. He was a few years younger than Nero and he’d lived his entire life like the last man on a canoe, content to do fuck all and coast on everyone else’s furious paddling, knowing no one had time to turn around and catch him pretending to use an oar.

When I came in and saw Junior standing so close to Lia and her looking both wounded and surprised—with the shoulder of her sweater frayed like she’d been mauled? If I hadn’t realized it was an aesthetic choice in time, Junior would’ve been about twenty seconds away from learning the hard way if he could fly.

And then him laughing at her?

Because of something I had made her do?

I was still considering tearing him limb from limb as I paced in savage lines across my office, behind the safety of my closed door.

Of course Nero hadn’t managed to keep his mouth shut about my punishment of her. I was sure he’d been complaining about me at the time, not mocking Lia, but he should have been smart enough to know that he’d been loading up whomever was listening to him with ammo against his little girl.

Would Nero mind if anyone else hurt her? He was ready to hand her off—hell, he’d practically already given her to me.

I just wasn’t allowed to keep her.

And knowing that was why I’d had to have a long heart-to-heart—and heart-to-dick—with myself after last night’s round of ill-advised flirting once I was certain she’d left the building.

When I’d taken Lia’s wrist to see her tattoo, I’d just wanted an excuse to touch her. What I hadn’t expected was to find her pulse racing beneath it, going a mile a minute.

Scared that I was going to tell her father?

I didn’t think so.

But considering other reasons why her pulse might race around me were too ludicrous for me, a forty-five-year-old man and confidant to her father, to bear.

So I’d decided that this morning when I came in I would tell her everything, in excruciating and hopefully humiliating detail—that I knew about her past, her private investigator, and her silly books, and that she needed to cut it the fuck out and grow up already. I needed to step on her interest in me like it was a dropped cigarette, snuffing it out entirely.

She would crumple, maybe cry, and I would feel like an asshole, but that was something I was used to. She might deny it to try to save face, but that was fine too, at least then things I’d said would be out in the open—and I knew I was right.