Despite having met several times at my nieces’ christenings, I held out my hand. “Stan, please.”
He studied my hand for so long, I wasn’t sure he’d take it, but after plopping one of the cats down onto a dresser, he grasped and shook it before correcting himself. “Stan.”
Impatiently, Jen tapped her toe. “Can you two play nice while I visit Savannah and Star?”
Conor arched a brow, but I answered, “I come in peace, Jen.”
“You’d better.” To Conor, she ordered, “If you have to shoot him, aim for a foot.”
His lips curved. “Sure thing,cuz.”
Scoffing, she hit the button for the apartment below the penthouse, where her friend lived. “Don’t let him leave without me.”
“God, she treats me like one of her kids,” I complained once the doors were shut.
“I heard that!” she called through the elevator.
Conor might have chuckled, but he still turned to me with a bemused frown. “Well?”
“I need your help.”
“And that necessitates subterfuge?”
“I didn’t think you’d meet with me if Jen didn’t act as my go-between.”
“Perhaps. I heard about your stay at the hospital… so maybe I would have.”
“Goddamn grapevine.”
“You didn’t mean to overdose?”
“You heard correctly. Now, I think I’m talking to a man who’d go to the ends of the earth for his woman, no?”
“My air miles back me up.”
“Then you’ll understand. I made a vow and I have to fulfill it.”
“And that involved you overdosing?”
“In a sense. I was trialing a drug.”
“Red?”
I might have created Red, but it remained the source of my greatest shame.
Red was my golden goose. Not only incredibly lucrative but also highly addictive. A drug that helped men fuck all night long.
The side effects, however, were brutal.
Men and women had died because of it.
People who weren’t worth less than Evangeline.
My moronic younger self had failed to calculate how often myfuckwit clients would take the drug and trigger monstrous adverse reactions.
Even so, I couldn’t lie to myself.
I’d needed an income to develop the medication that could have saved Evangeline’s lifeanda product to get my siblings off my back. Red had provided me with both solutions.
