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Most of my life, I had never felt like somebody worth looking up to. Half the time, I had been trying to survive one problem long enough to make it to the next one. I worked because I had to. I kept going because lying down and letting life beat my ass had never been an option.

I never considered that somebody might have been watching me and seeing strength where I only saw survival.

I was checking bottles against the numbers on my tablet when one of the bartenders called my name.

“Jru?”

I looked up from the screen. “What?”

She nodded toward the entrance, and I followed her gaze. A woman I had never seen before was walking across the club. And she was beautiful. Not cute. Not she cleans up nice. Beautiful.

Light skin, soft makeup, hair laid perfectly and an outfit that looked expensive without a designer logo screaming from every inch of it. Even the bag hanging from her arm looked like it cost more than the raggedy car I used to drive back in Rosemont. She moved through Vice like she had been there a hundred times before, heels clicking against the polished floor without the slightest hesitation about where she was going.

Her eyes swept across the room before landing on me behind the bar.

“Hey. Where’s E?” she asked, approaching the counter.

My finger stopped over the tablet. I looked at her for a second longer than necessary. E? So we calling this nigga E now?

Everybody else I had heard call him Ezra, except Malachi, and that was his best friend. Meanwhile, this woman had walked in looking expensive as hell and asking for E like she had every reason in the world to be familiar with him.

“I don’t know,” I said, turning my attention back to the tablet. “He was here earlier.”

“Of course his ass was.” She pulled her phone from her bag and tapped the screen with a manicured finger before bringing it to her ear.

Whoever she was, she clearly wasn’t intimidated by Ezra King. That shouldn’t have bothered me. It did.

She listened for a few seconds before lowering the phone with an irritated sigh. “I’ve been calling this man all day. Now all of a sudden he doesn’t know how to answer a phone.”

I glanced up despite myself. “Maybe he’s busy.”

Her eyes met mine, and instead of catching an attitude, she laughed softly. “He’s always busy. That’s his favorite excuse.”

Oh. So she knew his excuses too. Great.

I went back to my inventory before my face started telling this stranger things that weren’t any of her business.

She moved closer to the bar and rested her bag on top of it. “You know if he’s upstairs?”

“I haven’t been keeping track of him,” I answered, a little sharper than I intended.

Her brows lifted slightly, but she didn’t comment on it. “He better be somewhere in this building. I moved two meetings around for him today, and we have too much going on for him to be ignoring me.”

Meetings.

That should’ve made me feel better. It didn’t.

Because what kind of meetings? Who was she to him? An employee? Business partner? Girlfriend? Ex-girlfriend who still handled business with him? Did they mess around?

My eyes dropped back to the tablet. And why did I care?

I barely knew this man. Ezra had gotten in my space one time, touched my chin, remembered my perfume, and apparently that had been enough to make me lose some of the common sense God gave me.

Ashlynn’s voice immediately played in my head. Girl, you want him.

I pressed my lips together. She was getting on my nerves, and she wasn’t even here.

The woman tried Ezra again while I went back to counting bottles. I entered one number, looked down at the shelf, then realized I had counted the same bottle twice.