And yet, when I allowed my mind to drift, when I allowed myself to pretend that I could date whoever I wanted, regardless of ethics or whatever, no one came close to Adrian.No one.No one had his powerful smile, his colorful yet tactful dress, or his charisma.
Which made him all the more dangerous, as Sarah had pointed out on a personal level and Eric had accidentally shown on a professional level. All the Vales were charming and dark,but you could never forget both sides of the coin regardless of the situation.
I just couldn’t decide, sitting at my work desk, reading the auto-transcription of my interview with him, if the words spoken signified the charming side of Adrian or the dark side.
And I couldn’t figure out what the consequences might be of either.
CHAPTER 5
Adrian
Three days passed without my saying a word to Delilah.
It wasn’t because I believed in some juvenile nonsense about the three-day rule to contact someone attractive. If I got what I wanted, it was the “no-day rule,” as in, there’d be no day I’d contact them. If I hadn’t gotten what I wanted, there were no rules, I just called them when I wanted and made things happen.
It was because I had a fucking casino empire to run, and no woman was more valuable than that.
It was an axiom that Cassius seemed to have forgotten now that he was with Sarah. Oh, credit where credit was due, I suppose. The man did continue to work as CEO. He did attend all the meetings requested, and he worked late hours some nights.
But guess what?
We didn’t get to where we were by simply doing enough for the credit. We didn’t become billionaires by doing only what was expected of us. And if we really wanted to reach the pinnacle of where we wanted to go, we had to work even harder.
I’d even said as much to Cassius at one point at his penthouse the other day. His response?
“Don’t be envious. It’s unbecoming of a Vale.”
Envious.
Fuckingenvious?
What was there to envy about Cassius’ situation?
I suppose there was something to be said about never having to put in effort to get ass. The game did get tiresome on occasion, and I would never pretend it was all sunshine and rainbows. But seriously, envious?
Well, in any case, I put the thought to the side and threw myself at work. An email about the Morrils trying to poach our ground-level talent had been enough to remind me that they needed to be destroyed, and it brought me to the evening of the third day.
A Sunday, yes, but the nice thing about Delilah was I knew she was like me in one respect. Days of the week didn’t mean anything for us; if the business needed a task done or if a source needed a phone call, and it could only happen on a Sunday, guess when it was happening?
I was sitting in my office, an admittedly ostentatious tribute to the journey we’d taken to get this far. Technically, Cassius had a larger office one door down from me, but he spent most of his time in the penthouse anyway. I had diamonds on display that I’d purchased when I made my first million dollars, my first one hundred million dollars, and my first one billion dollars; they were impossible to miss to anyone walking in, square at the front of my desk, each one propped up just slightly higher than the other. There were the other things, of course; the ten-thousand-dollar desk, the five-thousand-dollar executive chair, the windows overlooking the Las Vegas Strip, photos of me with major celebrities and politicians. What could I say? The King of Diamonds loved the high life.
But I had also set it up this way on purpose to me, a reminder of what I had to lose if I fucked this business up.
I called Delilah and got annoyed when it went to the third ring without an answer. Motherfucker, did she know who I was? Did she?—
“This is Delilah from theLas Vegas Times.”
Much better. And, somehow, her voice sounded just as sexy on the phone as it did in person.
“Miss Delilah Reyes,” I said in the smoothest voice I could, “do you know who this is?”
“Only one person would call me like that and have the arrogance to introduce themselves like that. Yes, Adrian, I know it’s you.”
I got a laugh out of that. Oh, the fearless kind! I hadn’t been called arrogant to my face by someone not in my immediate family in… I didn’t know, years for sure.
“You know it’s me,” I said. “Yes, I suppose it might be a little arrogant. But can you forgive me?”
“I can forgive you,” Delilah said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t call it like I see it. You won’t intimidate me.”
