Page 30 of Because I Need You
“He already does dangerous shit, G,” Nadia said, keeping her voice low.
“How are you okay with this?” I met her gaze.
“I know what we signed up for.” She shrugged a shoulder. “And the seat is important.”
Ah, it was about the seat, which I couldn’t quite grasp. It wasn’t like Tony could take it. The sitting four would never allow that and he’d need someone big to vouch for him, and since my dad wasn’t here, that was out of the question. That seat meant automatic control of the import-export and cargo. Lorenzo’s operation may have been his, but the way things were set up, to ensure that no one would stab each other in the back, meant he wasn’t allowed to act on his own. Charles held control of where everything was stored. And the stabbing in the back? It would happen over this. We all knew it. It wouldn’t be me, or Lorenzo, or Dean, but Silvio and my father were wildcards. It was the reason I hadn’t formally announced I was going after it.
“Fine. You can interchange with Nico,” I said to Tony. “I’m going to have Joey Z stick with Isabel in the meantime, but if shit goes sideways…”
“It won’t.” He was so sure of himself, and I wanted to believe him, but shit had gone sideways one too many times in the past.
“You have guys who keep their ear to the ground, right?” I said, “Maybe you can ask around. If it was a hired job, it’ll be easy to track.”
“I’m on it.” He took his phone out and started typing as he sat between his daughters on the couch.
“What did she say?” Nadia asked, nodding her head toward the ceiling. “Anything we can use?”
“She didn’t talk.”
“What do you mean?” She frowned. “She came here though.”
I went around the desk and sat in my father’s chair. It still smelled like him, this entire office smelled like him, which I tried to ignore since the smell only brought beratement with it.
“You didn’t ask questions?” Nadia asked, taking a seat across from me.
“Of course, I asked questions.”
“And? What did she say?”
“She went out to get pizza at one in the morning,” I said, trying not to grit my teeth as I thought about it. When it came to doing stupid shit, men had women beat by a landslide, but when women went and did stupid shit, they really went all out with their recklessness.
“That was ballsy,” Nadia quipped. “And when she got back the house had been broken into?”
I set my elbows on the desk and shut my eyes as I massaged my temples. “I guess.”
“You guess?” Nadia’s voice rose. “You didn’t think to ask?”
“She started fucking crying and tried to leave.”
“So, what’d you do?”
“I carried her up to my room and locked her in there.” I let my hands fall on the desk and looked up to see Tony trying to bite back a laugh from the couch and Nadia’s jaw on the floor.
“You are such a fucking asshole.” She shook her head. “You didn’t even try to comfort her?”
“Comfort her?” I was sure the look on my face was bewildered. “Have you met me? What the fuck would I even say?”
“I don’t know. You seem to know how to charm the shit out of women when you want to fuck them, I figured you’d know how to handle this situation.”
“You want me to fuck it out of her?” I asked, even though I didn’t need the answer. Nadia’s shrug was answer enough.
I bit my tongue and looked away, my eyes landing on the portrait of my parents. It looked like an eighteenth-century portrait and not one done in the nineties. My father was the reason that everyone expected me to whip out my dick and turn up my charm as a way to “deal with women”. It was something I could never complain about without sounded like a pussy, but fuck, in times like these, it bothered me. Nadia wasn’t wrong, though. Did I want to fuck her? Absolutely, but the alarm bells my head told me to stay the fuck away. I’d never had alarm bells ring over a woman before, and this time, they were blaring and impossible to ignore. Under any other circumstance, I would have charmed the information out of her. I would’ve coaxed her until she was sucking my dick and begging to fuck me before I left her there, sleeping in my bed, in sheets that smelled of sex. She’d replay the scene over and over and ask for more. I’d be an idiot to turn it down. From the moment she walked into the office at my nightclub with her smart-ass mouth and her perfect body and beautiful face I’d been thinking about bending her over my desk and fucking her. But I wouldn’t. This would be the woman I’d leave alone, because Mike was right. She was good, and I knew there was something else underneath all of that armor she hid behind. There was a sadness in her eyes, even when she was angry, even when she was smiling. That was the kind of shit that got men like me into more trouble than I was willing to deal with right now.
