“I used you to get to your brother.”
Stunned, I blanch, but recover quickly. “I knew that the minute you met him,” I say, concern filling me. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“You knew already?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you let me?”
“Because my brother might be a bastard, but he’s my brother, and this is my family. If you wanted to be close to my brother, you would have found a way. This way I knew what you were doing and why. I was protecting him.”
“Did you tell your brother?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d already decided you were an asshole I cared about by the time I knew.”
“I’m not using you now.”
“I know that too.”
“You matter to me, Teresa. I hate that you matter to me, but you do.”
“I’m not sure how to take that.”
“I’m not sure what do with that.”
I study him a moment, looking for an answer I don’t find but need. “There’s still more, isn’t there?”
“My father gave my brother control of the company while he’s in treatment,” he announces, which I know is devastating news for him. “That man,” he continues, “has used his death to taunt Shane and me into a war over a company that should be mine. Every wrong move I made was really my father’s, but I took the fall for him. I took the fall. I deserve the company. I earned that badge, and I can’t let him or Shane take it. So do I want him to die? No. But that hate I feel for him runs deep.”
“Can you change his mind?”
“I know him,” he says. “It’s done.”
“Why would he do that to you?”
“Shane convinced him your brother will take it from us, when my father all but shoved me at you and your brother.”
“At me,” I say, my throat thickening, that admission more than a little bit cutting.
He cups my face. “I regret using you, but had I not, we wouldn’t be here tonight.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I need you. Is that what you want to hear?”
“For me or for my connections?”
“For you, baby. I need you, or I would not be here tonight, talking to you like this. I don’t—”
“I know. I know you care about me, or I promise you I’d be out of this corner and you’d be hunched over.”
His hands settle on my shoulders. “Then I need to tell you something else.”
“And here it comes. The real reason you’re telling me this tonight.”
“One of the reasons,” he amends. “Shane recorded me telling him you were just a fuck. I was talking out my ass. I was—”
“And you said you fucked me to get to my brother.”
“Yes. And I said it like you were a conquest.”
“You’re such an ass. I don’t even know why I’m here with you.” I try to get past him.
His legs lock around mine. “You said you knew.”
“I wanted to be wrong, but suddenly it feels really shitty, like my judgment in men.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Did I mention that you’re an asshole?”
“An asshole who wants you.”
“You mean, who needs me to get to my brother.”
“You know that’s no longer true.”
I don’t know, and I don’t think I’m going to be rational about it when he’s standing in front of me naked, so I don’t try. “If Adrian wants your company, it’s already his.”
“He couldn’t take it, and even if he tried, it would be insanity to connect a drug cartel to a pharmaceutical company.”
“If he wants it, he has a plan, and maybe it’s not even the pharmaceutical branch he really wants. You don’t understand my brother or my family. I love Adrian, but he’s like my father; he’s brutal and greedy, something my younger brother didn’t learn and now he’s dead.”
“Your father killed your brother.”
“After Adrian set him up.”
His brow dips. “If you believe that, why are you here with him?”
“He’s my brother, and beyond that my answer is as complicated as yours is about your father and it’s not what’s important right now. You better hope your brother doesn’t play that tape for my brother.”
“Shane isn’t that brutal.”
“I hope you’re not underestimating him, and you had better not underestimate Adrian. The only way to get Adrian out of your business is to make him think he makes the choice on his own. You have no idea what Adrian is capable of, but I do. He’d kill for me, but everyone else he kills, and there have been many, he kills for himself.”
CHAPTER NINE
EMILY
Teresa Martina.
I tell myself to think of her, and her story that I have yet to figure out, not the fact that Shane isn’t home yet and isn’t taking my calls. That works at midnight. It works at two in the morning. By three though, it’s no longer my ticket to sanity, and yet somehow at five I wake up on the couch, still in the office, and incredibly, I’ve dozed off. I check my phone to find nothing from Shane. I stand up and pace, my hand ripping through my dark hair that I wish right now was its natural blond. In the absence of the familiar with Shane, I crave something I know, something that feels like me.
I don’t understand why he’s not communicating with me. He was just supposed to be checking on the security breach, but I’m still alone. And I could deal with that if he’d just talk to me. I sink down on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, where I’ve spent hours tonight, and I key my computer back to life, but another story about the brutality of the Martina family isn’t helping my waning sanity. And that’s how I keep focusing on Teresa. There’s nothing violent in her past. There’s nothing much at all to her past that’s documented. She’s twenty-two, in school, and seems to be low profile. But aren’t the silent ones often the most dangerous? She’s too squeaky clean to make sense. I mean, she’s here, working at her brother’s restaurant.