Page 78 of Take Her

I made a face at him. “I remain convinced we could’ve negotiated with Georgie if you hadn’t slept with his wife.”

“Well, she wasn’t supposed to tell him now, was she?” Nero said with a laugh. “I could’ve died there, or during that escapade underneath the Hell Gate bridge, or—you remember when my house burned down?”

“Is the fact that you’re a cat with nine lives the point here?”

“It is. And that you should know by now I don’t die until I say I do. I’ll make it,” he said, sounding absolutely sure of himself.

I wish I shared even half of his certainty about anything in my life—other than his daughter. “Does Lia know?”

Nero closed his eyes and he shook his head. “I don’t think she’d handle the news well.”

“You’re her dad. You owe her the truth. At least about some of this?—”

“No,” he said, reopening his eyes to piece me with them. “But I need you to swear something for me.”

I already knew I was going to regret it—and that I couldn’t refuse him, regardless. “What?”

“That if for some reason I’m not well enough to see this through, both the IPO and seeing Lia safe,” he said, which was the closest he’d ever come to admitting his mortality in front of me, “promise me that you will.”

“Nero.”

“Say it, Rhaim. You may be a beast, but you’re also the only person I trust.”

I glanced over my shoulder at his omnipresent man. “Don’t say that where Rio can hear.”

Nero laughed. “There’s money”—he jerked his chin at the bodyguard—“and then there’s blood,” he said, referring to everyone else in his fucked-up family. “And then there’s friendship.”

He offered his hand out to me.

I stared at it for a moment, wondering what he’d make of me if he knew even half of what Lia and I had done, everything I still intended to do to her, and how I was planning to keep her.

But—like the monster I was—I still put my hand out anyhow to shake his.

“See, if you were just placating me you wouldn’t have hesitated,” Nero said, filling in my pause with what he wanted to be true.

“To the Ferreo-St Clairs,” I said when I released him, and he toasted me with the last of the coffee in his mug.

33

LIA

“This isn’t how I want things to be, Berry. I had such big plans.”

“I know.” I’d been there when he was making most of them. My fingers were laced with his, it felt like I was holding the roots of a cold tree.

“I’m going to tell you something horrible now.”

I propped myself up on one arm beside him. “If you tell me you wanted to bone Jenny McHutchinson in senior year, I’m going to punch you. I don’t care if you have cancer.”

He laughed. It was a hoarse sound, such a far cry from the satisfied bellows I’d gotten used to for the past ten years of my life, but I would take any joy from him I that I could get.

“It’s that Caleb has a crush on you.”

I managed not to panic, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I had, Mason’s eyes were only for the ceiling.

Is it a crush, if it’s wildly reciprocated?

“Why is that horrible?”