Page 54 of Take Her

Nero pursed his lips. “But you’ve never let me down, have you? Not like Freddie and his wastrel son.”

“That’s hardly setting the bar high.” I’d worked for Nero long enough to know that this was happening, whether I wanted it to or not. That was the thing about Nero—he always got his way. “Have you told Lia?” I asked.

Nero started walking away from the window and over to his bar, to begin making himself a Boulevardier. “How are her lessons going?”

“She’s writing me a paper about the assorted uses for the distillery.”

“Perfect. Amazing. Keep her just like that.”

“I’m asking if you’ve told her.”

He shrugged, while stirring ice in a glass. “There’s nothing to tell—yet. Don’t worry about keeping your story straight, because there isn’t one. Just throw her a couple bones to gnaw. She gets obsessed with things rather easily. Toss her one and move on, let her overthink herself.”

“And Mr. St. Clair doesn’t care to meet her?” I wanted to know which senator’s son Nero was setting her up with.

I would hate to kill the wrong one.

“She’s young and gorgeous, and she’ll be taken care of,” Nero said, as though everything else should be self-evident. “Besides—that’s none of your concern. You and I just need to time everything right so that this builds during campaign season. Start getting documents together in order to list us, I’ll start whispering in the right ears, and we’ll figure out who to parcel shares to.”

“And the distillery?”

“That was my first plan to become a household name to secure this—I thought about being one of those assholes with their names up on billboards.”

Which meant Nero’d been thinking about spending his daughter like a dollar bill for months.

“And what if she says no?” I asked.

“She won’t,” he said simply. “I know what’s best for her.” He took a calm sip of his drink.

I didn’t like the sound of that—and I’d never heard that particular sentiment pass his lips before. Then again, he and his daughter hadn’t been in the same time zone—or even much on the same continent—for most of a decade.

I remembered when Lia was sent abroad, right after a fire claimed Nero’s gracious mansion outside the city. Nero had gotten burned pulling his brother from a burning bedroom.

At the time, I—like everyone else—had assumed it was an act of retaliation. The list of people we’d pissed off and hadn’t gotten around to murdering yet was very long, so I presumed he’d shipped her away for her own safekeeping.

But after seeing her records courtesy of Sable, I wasn’t sure he’d done her any favors.

There was nothing for it in the moment, though. “I’ll come up with a feasible timeline by the end of next week,” I said, and he nodded.

“Set something up with Eileen—she’ll know when I’m around.”

I’d gone straight from that into my meeting with Lia and I couldn’t even fucking look her in the eye.

It would be one thing if she’d come back from Europe all spoiled, then I wouldn’t have minded helping her father serve her on a platter. If she’d made a habit of coming in late, if she didn’t take things seriously, if she hadn’t tried to work hard—even demanding that I give her work to do.

But as it was . . . oh, moth.

There are too many spiders in the world for you.

I knew because I was one of them.

So I let her finish her little presentation even though none of it mattered, and all of her youth and beauty and intelligence was about to be wasted on some jackhole her own age who wouldn’t respect her.

I’d braced myself to do the bare minimum and then extract myself from her purview—I had ten different underlings I could foist her off on regardless of Nero’s opinion, all of whom would be immune to her charms.

But then she panicked and it was so beautiful it was almost breathtaking—the way her lips parted and her skin flushed and her pupils widened.

I wanted to give her more reasons to be scared.