Total pages in book: 56
Estimated words: 53725 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 269(@200wpm)___ 215(@250wpm)___ 179(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 53725 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 269(@200wpm)___ 215(@250wpm)___ 179(@300wpm)
“Apparently, I’m using you to close a hundred-million-dollar deal.” He turns for the door.
My heart jumps in my chest. “Damion,” I say, still angry and confused, but I don’t want him to leave. “Wait.”
He rotates back to me. “I’m going to pay off your debt and get my family out of your family’s life for good this time. And you need to know that I think my father called the press to make it look like I was fucking you and distracted and incapable of doing my job. He’ll probably leak information about your father. You should also tell your own father to go fuck himself.”
“Your father did this? Are you sure?”
“No, but I’d bet my entire bank account on it.”
“I thought—”
“I know what you thought, which pisses off. I came back for you, Alana.”
“You came back to be king,” I say, my real feelings coming out now.
“Really, Alana? That’s what you think?”
“What am I supposed to think? All you said you wanted from me was a business favor that helps you reach that goal and for me to take my clothes off. Never once did you say anything was more than that.”
“Of course, it was more than that. We’re us, Alana. And we both know what that means.”
“I just told you, I don’t know what that means. I have never known what that means. I don’t know if I even know you anymore.”
His jaw tics. “It’s better that way. It’s always been better that way. You’re right. If my father wouldn’t have come at you, I would never have come back because it’s better for you that way.” There is something dark and tormented in his eyes, something I’ve sensed and felt in him only a few times.
Whatever he feels right now radiates through me and rips me into pieces. My anger dissolves. I don’t want to fight with him anymore. I don’t want him to feel whatever he feels right now. “Damion, I—” But it’s too late.
He opens the door and leaves.
I rush to catch him, but as I open the door and glance around, I watch him disappear behind a trailer.
He’s gone.
Chapter Forty
Damion
It’s six o’clock, one hour before the dinner with Mary Morrison, and I’m still at the office, dealing with a financier gone south, I lined up for a client in the UK. My plan for dinner is to tell Mary as close to the truth as I can. Alana and I had a fight. I probably lost her. It’s for the best for Alana, because Mary’s right. I’m too damn much like my father to be good for Alana. Honesty matters to people and I’m going to have to be honest with Mary, brutally so, because I need this to close and close now. Every day it does not, my father has one more minute to screw it up, and one minute is often all he needs.
Bottom line for Mary: this merger is all she has, or she will lose everything. We both know it. I’m saving her. She doesn’t have time to think, either. My father will come for her if she gives him a chance. I will send her home crying, but she will still have her company. It will just be a part of a bigger company.
After dinner, I will go home, get fucked up on the most expensive whiskey I can buy on my way to dinner, and then crash in bed alone and miserable without Alana once again, and this time for good. This isn’t about what I want. It’s about what’s best for Alana.
There are things I have done that I don’t want her to know. Things she might eventually find out, one way or the other, and I won’t let that happen.
Every time I get close to her, every time I smell her sweet perfume and see her beautiful smile, I forget these things. I forget that she’s a beautiful butterfly who would be basking in the sunshine of life, if not for me. I’m the reason my father is even in her life. And the truth is, I’m no saint myself. He made sure of that. I’m not the right guy for Alana, no matter how much I want to be.
I’ve just hung up with offering my UK client a solution when my father shows up in the doorway again. It’s an interesting development, considering it’s rare he enters my office at all. He makes me go to him. For him to do the opposite not once but two times in one day cries suspicious. He wants something he didn’t get the first time he was here.
“You fix that financing problem?” he asks, just inside my doorway.
That is not why he’s here, but I’ll play this game, whatever it is. “Of course, I fixed it. Why?”
“What, exactly, is happening with Mary Morrison and Alana? The board will want this done now, not later. We need to walk into that meeting prepared to give them now.”