Page 96 of This Bitter Sweet Temptation
Wine or not, Cleo Blackthorn looks more seductive eating by the nanosecond. I have to adjust my belt, stretching my legs under the table until it hurts.
Good.
Pain will make me sane.
Pain will kill this hard-on from hell and cool the molten lava in my blood.
I must be trying too hard, though. She stops and cocks her head. “Holden? You good?”
“Hmm?” I stroke my beard. “Yeah, sorry, I spaced. Something stuck in my teeth,” I lie. “What were you saying?”
She looks down at the last smear of potato and broccoli she’s chasing around her plate.
“I asked you about the offer,” she says quietly. “Do you think I should take it?”
Not this again.
I sit back in my chair, annoyed that we’ve come full circle. But besides being her bodyguard, I’m her point man too, her only partner in crime.
I shake my head. “Told you before, it’s not my decision.”
“Yes, but if it was…”
“I can’t make that call and you know it. I’m just here to get you and your treasure from point A to point B. That’s it, so take me out of the equation. I’m still being compensated fairly every week this lasts, just so you know. My ordinary pay. I can survive until we wrap it up and Miss Wilkes releases my severance package.”
Her mouth turns down sadly. “He really made us work for it, didn’t he?”
“Don’t know if Leonidas Blackthorn believed in death. He held out until his final day, didn’t want any family around. He wouldn’t let anyone throw him a funeral. There’s a lesson in that, I think.” Like I need to remind her. “I wondered about it, and the best thing I can come up with is, he didn’t want you to feel like it was the end. And maybe you wouldn’t if you had to put in a little more work for him, same as your cousins.”
Her smile widens, bittersweet.
“Stubborn old jerk.”
“He really was. All the advisors in the world, and he liked to do everything his own way. Even at the very end, he lived that old Sinatra song, ‘My Way.’”
For a wretched second, I’m back there in the library, the day I found Leonidas Blackthorn on the floor, barely conscious, barely moving.
I’d noticed him getting thinner the last three or four months, the doctors quietly slipping in and out of the house.
I called an ambulance immediately, wondering if he’d even recover with his pulse so weak.
While we waited, he had a second wind. A final wind, maybe.
He jerked up, grabbing my hand so roughly he nearly tore my skin.
“No more calls,” he whispered, his dark eyes so much stronger than his voice. “Holden, let me go.”
“Mr. Blackthorn, your family—”
“No.” His bony fingers clawed at my wrist desperately. “No sorry damn goodbyes. No point. Not one word until I’m gone,” he whispered.
I shook my head. “Mr. Blackthorn—”
A minute later, I let the medics in. A flurry of motion, checking his vitals and trading worried looks, loading him for transport.
He barely lasted two days.
Two days I had to fucking sit on the news, only confirming it with his lawyer.Not one word.
