28. Rhaim

28

RHAIM

W e drove back in total silence, and any time I looked over I saw Lia's fingers on her lower lip, helping her to gnaw on it.

"What're you thinking?" I asked her. I knew I'd dropped her in the deep end, and now was the wrong time to push her—but if she wasn't going to show up to work tomorrow, I wanted to know.

"Mostly? That I don't like how dark it is out here." She'd pulled her feet up onto the seat with her, and wrapped her arms around her knees.

"City girl," I muttered—but when we reached the highway, with its more regular streetlights on it, she visibly relaxed.

I could feel her thinking. I doubted she'd paid enough attention on the way out—or the way back—to know precisely where we'd been, and going into a police station and telling them that someone adjacent to the Ferreo family had killed someone fifteen years ago was likely to only elicit a "so what else is new?" from the very busy cops, many of whom we'd bribed over the years besides.

But I still braced when she looked over at me. I didn't think she was the kind of girl I could nurture back to health slowly, and I didn't have the time to, with the pressure of Nero thinking I'd let him give her away coming up, but there was still a chance it'd been too much.

Even though her making herself come in my lap twice earlier in the day apparently hadn't been...

I heard her inhale, pause, then blurt out, "Do you do that a lot?"

I had to stop myself from laughing. "How scared would you be, on a scale from one to ten, if I told you not as much as I'd like to?"

"Zero," she said brashly.

I swung my head over to look at her. "Liar."

That made her mad. "I'm sure I've met other murderers before."

Given that she was her father's daughter? "Probably," I granted.

"Have you ever taken anyone else out there?"

"What, you mean like on a date?" I said, in an incredulous tone, then laughed. "Fuck no."

She looked at me strangely.

"Not even your wife?" she asked, and I remembered the photographs I'd caught her looking at the other day. And perhaps even her miserable PI had managed to do a decent Google search on me.

My hands tightened around the Tacoma's steering wheel. "She was different. She was good. Like all the way good." I'd never had even the slightest clue what Isabelle had seen in me, but I'd fucking tried to give it to her. I'd wanted all of her white-picket-fence dreams to come true—and look what that had gotten her.

"And...I'm not?" Lia said softly, bringing me back to the present.

I groaned. "You're age inappropriate. You're my boss and best friend's daughter. Don't pretend that you don't know these things." I looked over at her. She was still frowning, and so I made a growl. "If I wanted something innocent and cute in my life, I'd date one of your father's hand-me-downs or go buy myself a puppy."

"So this was a date," she said, with slightly more gusto, and when I glanced over again her lips were puckish.

"A business date, with Business Lia," I tried to redirect her. "We have to coordinate this ridiculous IPO in just months because your father's not content to just sit on a pile of money, no, he wants to build a fucking empire. And I cannot impress upon you enough that the people we'll be dealing with from here on out, they're just like I am, Lia. There might not be literal blood on their hands, but what they do is worse—they kill people with paper, so they don't even see them bleed. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," she said, but there was still hesitation in her voice as I swung my truck into its final turn.

"You're allowed to let your guard down around me, little girl—but get it all out when you do. Because from here on out, around anyone but me? I need you to assume that they're lethal."

I parked in front of her apartment building as she turned toward me. "And what will they think about me?"

That was a good question. I narrowed my eyes at her. "Whatever the fuck I tell them to—you just follow my lead. Always." I pulled her phone out and handed it back over. "I'm in your contacts now."

She gave me a curt nod as she took it from me, put one hand on the door, and then paused. "And what about tomorrow, sir?" she asked, rubbing her thighs together expectantly.

I knew what she was asking. And I wasn't sure which was going to be more debilitating long term to my work ethic—the fact that I was never going to let her wear panties again at the office, or the fact that me doing so was going to lead to me jerking off three to four times a day.

"Off," I told her, and a subtle smile rode her lips before she got out of the truck entirely.

I drove to my place slowly, just a few blocks away, parked, and rode up the long elevator ride to my own apartment.

I'd put more effort into figuring out how to rig which analyst at the New York Stock Exchange Corvo was going to get assigned to than I had into figuring out why the fuck Lia wanted anything to do with me.

Probably because I didn't actually want to know.

But if today's activities hadn't scared her off—it was clear that nothing would.

I let myself into my place, took off my coat to hang it up, and walked over to the marble bar that divided my kitchen from my living space. My apartment had one of those open floorplans for people who were gracious hosts, which I wasn't. No one came up here but me. I'd had a brief window into a "normal" life with Isabelle, but then it'd closed and now...who the fuck knew what I was doing with Lia.

All I was sure of was how intense it'd felt knowing she'd done as I asked, and then me whittling away pieces of her compunction and shame until she was coming for me, like I'd told her to.

I'd kept a foot in racetrack dealings and horses for as long as I could. It was how I'd met Isabelle—and why I still owned Gracie. And part of the reason for that was because I'd never found another relationship that could be as absolutely in sync as the one between a horse and their rider.

I didn't actually want Lia to be a horse—but I did want her to be obedient to me.

And she wanted to be. Staring into her eyes, when she was working on her second orgasm—there was no room for doubt.

I didn't want to say she was incapable of deceit, I wasn't an idiot—but whatever she was when she was my little girl in my lap?

She wasn't lying to me.

She just was what she was...which in this day and age felt unbelievable.

Maybe that's why Nero had sent her away. He'd realized he'd needed to keep her safe from the world. A modern-day Rapunzel.

But he hadn't really been able to, had he? Sable had sent an entire dossier over of every place she'd been. While my skills were nothing like Sable's—technology had surpassed my limited abilities to code a long time ago, which was why I paid the right people good money to be smart for me—even I could hop through Lia's timeline of pain and misery.

I leaned against my bar and pulled out my phone, opening Instagram just like I knew I shouldn't—and saw a fresh post.

It was a zoomed in picture of three words, from another one of her romance novels, highlighted in pink.

Maybe.

Just maybe.

And even though it was dangerous and deadly...I wanted to think that they were about me.