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Nicholas slid the lazily-drawn contract back across the desk as he studied the man who was old enough to be his father. He wasn’t really seeinghim; it was Jay and her crying face floating before his eyes. He had come home from his run in a relatively good mood, only to find the relaxed and happy woman he’d left reduced to a shattered version of herself.
And then she’d held up the pictures.
“What the fuck is this,” he began, in a cold tone that came out sharp enough that the man across from him flinched. That was no good. He was too emotional, too distracted to really bargain properly, but for the moment at least, shock had given him the edge. “This is an insult.”
The man stammered some excuse. Nicholas barely listened. He’d heard them all before.
They marched in here as if they had come from an assembly line of white, balding executives in bespoke suits and Countess Mara ties and they fucked with him because they wanted tobehim, thinking his youth made him a fool, thinking that age made them smarter.
If it were Jay in here taking notes, she would have been staring at him with a hint of subtle reprimand. But instead he had Annica, who was still bristly from their “growth” conversation, who would only glance up occasionally to see if he had finished speaking before taking notes.
This man, as irritating as he was, was just a proxy for who he really wanted to destroy.
“One-point-five-percent, minimum,” Nicholas said at last. “I’m not going to bargain.”
Sweat was beading at the man’s temples. It was the sweat of a man who could already feel the heat of the grill and had braced himself to endure the flames.
He agreed so quickly that it was embarrassing for both of them. There were rings of dampness beneath the arms of his charcoal Armani suit and he left without shaking Nicholas’s hand, which was just as well because he couldn’t seem to relax his out of a fist.
Silently, he followed the other man out, holding the door open for his secretary as a courtesy she coldly ignored, preceding him out of the conference room with only the harshest of thanks before taking her seat next to Jay. He didn’t miss the dirty look she shot her, either.
Jay looked especially pretty today, with just a clip holding back her hair and all those curls tumbling down her shoulders in a glorious fall of umber shot through with silver. Normally, she kept it up and she was getting second glances from men passing by in the halls.
People said all kinds of things behind his back. He’d heard whispers at work, seen it in the papers, even had some of it said to his face. It came with the territory of owning a company that brokered international deals with the morally flexible and having a skirt-chaser as a father.
Jay had left before their family legacy had all gone up in flames. When she returned, only the ashes were smoldering; he had been there for the inferno, and seen all of his father’s so-called friends melt away while everyone else kept their distance, waiting to see how it played out.
Seeing the devastation on her face had made his chest tighten, reminding him of a time not so long ago when he had been the one to elicit that look.
He had savored it then. Now, it made it hard to breathe.
At least some of the photographs had been taken on his property. He hadn’t wanted to examine them too closely in front of her, but he recognized the view and perspective on the one taken of them in the pool. The photographer would have had to have been standing in the shadows of those cypress trees that his father had put in to capture that angle.
He had checked the security camera that looked out over the drive, and the side of the house, and after spending a few hours going through the footage, he’d caught a glimpse of a stealthy figure making its way up the walkway. They hesitated for only a moment before heading not towards the front door, but to the immediate left. Right for the pool.
Like they knew exactly where to go.
Jay, the poor little bird, thought this was going to ruin their lives. Thinking, no doubt, of the men like his father who would only be too happy to imagine her in flagrante delicto.
“It’s not like we’re actually brother and sister,” Nicholas had pointed out, which hadn’t been the comfort he thought it would be. She had just looked away and sobbed.
He had switched to a different, more familiar tack. “If whoever sent this really wanted to ruin our lives, these would be posted somewhere already. Which means that they probably plan on bargaining with them. I am very, very good at bargaining, Jay, and when I found out who did this, I will listen to their terms and then I will fuck them so hard, they’ll wish they’d never been born.”
She had laughed miserably but he’d gotten a small, wavering smile. “You sound so scary.”
“That’s because I am.”
His first thought was that it was Jay’s own mother, who had been ruthlessly pressing her for cash for weeks. When the calls stopped, he’d been suspicious rather than relieved, though he hadn’t voiced his suspicions to Jay. She also wasn’t very technologically inclined—he had a distinct memory of ignoring her when she’d shouted up to him to help her program the DVD player—and she had all the stealth of an airhorn. There was no way she had taken these photos herself.
But that didn’t mean she hadn’t outsourced the work to someone on Craigslist.
Then Jay, still in tears, had told him about her confrontation with Michael outside his wife’s bakery-slash-restaurant, and the subsequent slap—he would have paid good money to seethat.
Right after he ran the two-timing double-fuck over in a fatal hit-and-run.
Anyone who knew them could have done it, though. It wasn’t a secret where he lived, and plenty of people wanted to see them fall. As he’d told Jay once, perfection was really fucking annoying. So was success.
