AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Someone who pried her way inside you, only to fuck you over and pour gasoline on the fire she lit inside your chest?
I’m loath to say I hate her, because it feels like giving her a win to use words that strong with her. No, what I really hate is that ten years later, she’s still able to get under my skin and piss me the fuck off like this.
Ten years ago, I was weak. I was open to manipulation, especially the sort that came from pretty girls with big blue eyes and sharp, sassy tongues.
I’ve spent a decade changing all that. Burning out the weakness. Shoring up my defenses with iron and sheer will, almost as if some part of me was waiting for the day she’d try to storm her way back into my life and fuck my shit up all over again.
Good thing I did, too, because…well, here we are.
I stand staring through the glass of my corner office—not the window looking down on midtown Manhattan, with the sort of view my father only dreamed of in his career as an in-the-trenches lawyer.
No, I’m standing at the interior glass wall that looks down onto “the pit” below—the maze of cubicles on the first floor teeming with junior associates and legal aides.
Specifically, I’m looking at our newest hire, who’s currently sitting sulking in her—admittedly shitty—new cubicle.
I may have had a hand in picking that particular cubicle for her. Closest to the distractions of the bathrooms and the break room, sitting directly under one of the air vents—the one that persists in rattling every single time the air blasts out of it, no matter how often we get it fixed.
Oh, and it’s also situated so that the afternoon sun is goddamn blinding unless you’ve come to work with a welder’s mask.
Is this a childish, petty move on my part? Hell yes. Do I give a shit?
Hell no.
I’m fully aware that it’s not Eloise personally who bullied her way into working at Crown and Black with the promise of fifty million a year in billable hours. But as big a piece of shit as I think Massimo Carveli is, he and I don’t have a history that merits petty vengeance.
Eloise and I, however, do.
Currently, as promised, she’s buried under the mountain—more like mountains, plural—of case files I’ve had my underlings bring her. They’re not important cases, or even ones I have really anything to do with. And that’s not just because of my history with Eloise.
Well, okay, it’s maybe half because of my history with her.
It’s also because she’s wormed her way into a position normally reserved for someone who’s put literally thousands of hours of their life into this firm. Someone who’s given everything to get that coveted associate’s position.
Not a goddamn mafia princess who simply switched from one team to the other.
When I first heard that Eloise had married Massimo a little over a year ago, I was angry. But I was also confused. Eloise’s father, Andre LeBlanc, is the head of one of the biggest old-school mafia families in Paris. Or he was, before his illness—his number two, Luc, is apparently running things now. But the LeBlanc family is a French Mafia institution who, historically, gets along with the Italians about as well as Tom gets along with Jerry. As the Road Runner gets along with the Coyote, or Bugs Bunny with Elmer Fudd?—
You get the picture.
So, yes, color me twelve shades of surprised when Andre gets sick and it turns out his living will stipulates an arranged marriage between his youngest daughter and Massimo.
Almost as surprised as I was to discover that Eloise actually is a lawyer. Not one with any real experience, but at least, on paper, a good one.
I’ve checked.
She worked for one firm in Chicago—and one I can’t even shit on: they’ll be our biggest competitor if we do open a branch there—after graduating top of her class in law school, and did well there. But that all ended when she married Captain Fuckstick. Then they moved to California, and then here, and she actually passed the New York bar, which is impressive, much as I hate to admit it.
And now here she is. Right. Under. My. Nose. In my crosshairs.
Under my control.
Instantly, I regret thinking of it that way as my dick stirs and throbs in my slacks. My eyes narrow onto the pit, staring right at her.
Imagining vengeance.
Imagining stripping her.
Remembering the night when I had all of her.
