Discomfort tightened Flynn’s expression, and Brody immediately regretted his temper tantrum. Losing the woman you loved sucked ass, a fact Flynn knew better than anyone.
“I think the Crown Point development is a bust,” he muttered. “Nigel just likes being wined and dined on the company dime.”
The boys didn’t disagree.
S-O would be seated in Brody’s office in fifteen minutes, playing his usual mind games. Well, Brody was done with games. If that limey ass*ole
was still around when Brody showed up thirty—no, sixty—minutes late for their meeting, then they could talk.
“Let’s play ball.”
The slump in the ass-dented sofa happened to be right at the small of Emma’s back and to compound the discomfort, there was a broken spring. She turned over, but slid farther into the seat cushions. Rather than take this as an opportunity to search for loose change to buoy her life plans, she leaned over to the coffee table and checked the time on her phone.
Two thirty-seven a.m. On cue, the front door opened with an uncharacteristically cheery, “Honey, I am home.”
Emma smiled despite herself. That one never got old.
Katerina closed the door of her apartment—and Emma’s crash pad for the last two weeks—and went straight to the cozy kitchenette. She fished a couple of shot glasses out of a cupboard and brought them into the living room with a bottle of raspberry vodka as shotgun.
“It’s two thirty in the morning,” Emma murmured, feigning just-woke-up energy levels.
“What do you care? You have no job, no home, no prospects.”
That never got old, either. Sighing, Emma swung her legs off the sofa and sat up straight to get drunk off her ass. “Pour away.”
They knocked them back together and flipped them over on the coffee table, already riddled with dried rings commemorating their late-night girl talks over the last two weeks.
“Good night?”
Kat patted her purse. “The clients were extra drunk.”
Emma did not miss that in the slightest.
“No handsome billionaires to whisk me to paradise,” Kat added wistfully.
That was Kat’s way of saying Brody hadn’t stopped by the club to find Emma. Which was just fine. She didn’t need a handsome billionaire to rescue her. She’d been rescuing herself since the age of eight.
Daisy had completed her ninety days and was staying with a friend in Philly. Getting organized was Emma’s number one priority before she could bring her sister back to Chicago—find a place for them both to live, a job to support them, the girl she used to be.
Except she wasn’t sure that girl existed anymore. Brody had torn her apart in his effort to figure her out. All the puzzle pieces that made up her whole were lying in a broken mess, because he needed to see the inner workings.
Emma Strickland sat on a wall. Emma Strickland had a great fall…
She worried that he might be the only person who could put her back together again.
“Kat, do you ever think that maybe you wouldn’t want to always be a stripper?”
She considered this with her customary gravity. “I know this body will not always be beautiful. But I have Roth IRA that will help with retirement.”
“You have your life all worked out.”
Her friend shrugged in that oh-so-Romanian way. “I have few wants. I learned a long time ago that you can only rely on yourself. That pleasure cannot last. This body cannot last. But…” She looked off into the middle distance. “I understand that there are people who work better with someone else. This man, he wanted to take care of you, make you his woman.”
“While he refuses to trust me. While he wants to run the show behind my back.”
“You are annoyed because he did something nice for you.”
“Because it came with strings and my requirement to bow down and kiss his ring.”
Kat frowned. “There are always the strings. This is how it goes with relationships. With love. His instinct is to care for you with the tools he has. Money, influence. Yours is to go into the situation expecting it to fail.”
f*ck
ing Eastern Europeans and their searing wisdom. “I didn’t. I didn’t have any expectations at all.”
“You did. You have”—she waved a hand—“the anti-expectations. You thought because he was your boss, it would never work. Then you thought because he had money, and was willing to pay your debt, it would never work. Then you thought because he has no trust for women, it will never work. These are, what you say, first world problems. Accept that this man loves you in his own way, imperfect as it is right now, and teach him how to love you the way you need.”