I’ve cared for you. I’ve always cared for you, I just didn’t know it.
“You also offered me new housing. I didn’t take it?—”
“You complained about your apartment all the time, but you didn’t want to let it go because that’s where you lived with your mom and leaving it would feel like losing her all over again.”
I marvel that he figured that out. I didn’t realize that about myself until now. “So you made me work late nights because you couldn’t bear the idea of me being home alone. Right?”
He swallows and nods. It’s one thing to confess all this in the moonlight but another to shout it from a mountainside.
“I think you were taking care of me this whole time. In your own emotionally closed-off way.” I wag my finger at him.
He has that lost expression on his face again. “It hasn’t all been noble.” His gaze falls to his brogues. “I also didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to be with you, Wellesley, and if that meant forcing you to stay by my side, dragging you to every godforsaken work event I could…”
“Trapping me in a mansion with you, making sure I couldn’t run…”
“I’m sorry?—”
“It’s okay. I know why you did it.” This is the man who found out my mother always took me to Rockefeller Center and made sure to take me there for our work anniversary to make new memories. “By the way, I want my watch back.”
His head comes up, his golden eyes alight with hope. “Does that mean… are you?—”
“Oh no, I still quit. I’m never ever working for you again. At least, not under you.”
His eyes narrow.
“Not in the business sort of way.” My face heats. “I would be willing to be under you again, in other ways. I’m ready to make a deal.”
“Are you now?”
“Yes. If the terms are good. I learned to negotiate from the best.”Attagirl,I can hear Marty say.
“Then tell me, Wellesley.” He starts slowly walking down the stairs. “What will it take for you to make that deal? Or at least stop this madness and come inside?” The way he’s looking at me promises retribution of the sexy kind. My butthole tingles.
“Hmmm,” I let my fingers dance against my lips, pondering my demands.
“I’ll sell my company,” he says before I can think of anything. “Everything. All of Lords. You don’t have to quit. I’ll make you CEO.”
“What?”
“I’ll sell it to you right now for a dollar.”
“You’d give away all your money for me?”
“Not all my money. I’d still have the trust. The family holdings in London and Mumbai. The ancestral pile,” he shudders.
“But everything you’ve built, you’d give to me?” He worked so hard to make his own pile. To prove himself to his father.
“You’re worth it.”
Oh, Piers.“I don’t want your company.”
“Then what do you want?”
You.I could say it. I could shout it. But I don’t want to make it too easy for him.
“Come down here,” I say. “There’s something I want to show you.”
I start to back up into the fir trees.
