OK, fine. That made some sense. In fact, it made a good deal of sense. Slowly, my nerves were calming down and I wasn’t feeling like I was on the verge of stabbing someone in the face.
But fuck…the very thought that he’d spoken to Callie, even if he “ran into her yesterday,” had my blood boiling. And I didn’t even want the girl near me.
Or at least, that’s what I kept on insisting to myself.
“What do you want with the apartment?”
“Just as a place to crash. Think of it as a good faith agreement. We know you won’t do anything if we have that place, and you know we won’t do anything since you could tell a lot to the King’s Men at any moment. It’s really common sense.”
Was it, though? Just giving it up to the Black Reapers like this?
This wasn’t deal-making so much as it was just deal-forcing. If I had any say in the matter, I never would have let Callie get near Sonny or any of the Black Reapers. For fuck’s sake, it was what I’d tried to do with her and the King’s Men for the first few years of our marriage.
But I had no choice.
“All right, fine,” I said. “But you better not so much as track the scent of oil into that place.”
Why did I care? Callie had already moved down to Phoenix. If anything, she would have rented out the place to the Black Reapers. It was a little late to be asking for rent checks, though.
“Relax, it’s a mutually beneficial situation,” Sonny said. “We’ll let you know when we need more.”
With that, Sonny hung up, leaving me to growl at my phone in disgust. I didn’t like being played; I’d never liked it when I was with the King’s Men, and just because I thought the Black Reapers were the lesser of the two evils didn’t mean I liked it any more now.
I needed to know why the hell this had happened. I needed…
Fuck, I needed to call Callie.
I dialed her number. It was the middle of the workday, but I didn’t care. Apparently, neither did Callie because she answered immediately.
“Ash?”
Her voice sounded hopeful but guarded.
“Did you speak to Sonny about our place?”
“Yes, I—”
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. I think she was trying to decode my intentions. There was nothing to decode—I wanted to know more about that meeting and what she wanted.
“Nothing.”
“Meet me at Corner Coffee Shop at six p.m.,” I said. “I want to know what you’re doing with that old place.”
I hung up before she said a word. I’d gotten what I wanted. She would show up.
But as I stared at my phone and the implications of what I’d just done began to hit me, I began to wonder if what I really wanted out of this meeting was what I was saying I wanted. And the answer was probably not.
And that might just have been for the better.
Callie
Iwould never let Ash know it, but I left work an hour early so I could get ready and pretty for our coffee visit.
It was just a coffee visit. I told myself that a thousand times over. Just a coffee visit to discuss the apartment in Vegas. I wasn’t sure what more there was to say; I only had about two more months on the lease. If he wanted to discuss the finances of it, somehow, there wasn’t much to say, and even if so, I would just make it easy on him.
But just telling myself it was only a coffee visit wasn’t doing much good. And if it was “just” a visit, it didn’t align with all the time I put into making my hair look nice, the makeup on my face look put together, and my clothes the right combination of classy and seductive. I picked out a green top that cut just beneath my cleavage, one of Ash’s favorite outfits; in fact, the last time I wore it, I believe Ash had said that he wanted to “jump me until the shirt tore under me.” So that was a good sign.
