Dad:
Raf, have you lost your ever-loving mind? Of all the single women in the whole of New York, you choose the niece of a mafioso to break your dry spell? Have all my kids gone mad?
Not that it’s any of your business, but she stayed in the guest room.
Dad:
And why was she pictured leaving our offices this morning?
She’s a paying client.
Dad:
What in God’s name! You can’t sleep with clients.
As the paperwork will show, she was not a client at the time of that photograph.
Dad:
Semantics, and you know it. The optics are questionable at best.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Dad:
I hope you know what you’re doing, son. I have worked hard to build this firm into what it is, with a vision to pass it over to you.
Not everything is about you. I’ve got it handled. And for the record, I’ve worked damn hard too.
Dad:
That’s my point, son. I wouldn’t entrust it to anyone else. You’ve never given me reason to think you weren’t up for the job. This just feels very out of character.
I’ve got it handled.
And that’s when it hits me. I’ve been playing the role of the unaffected, serious, unfeeling lawyer for so long that even my own father couldn’t see past the character. And yet in the space of four weeks, she found the hairline fractures and exposed my protective and possessive side that very few get to see. The side of me I hadn’t entrusted to anyone since Victoria Williamson proved she had so little regard for the organ that only beat for her that she ripped it from my chest, stomped on it, then left me holding it, bloodied but still beating. I knew with certainty in that moment that I would no longer have any use for it. It became reclusive. Disfigured. A piece of shrapnel that remained inside me from the bomb she detonated. I was content to let it be decommissioned. Become defunct. Yet there is no mistaking the faint staccato stuttering through my entire body since Chiara’s arrival. Thump. Thump. Thump. A sure sign of life. Outside of my control. A state of being I despise, because control is the state of mind that gives me the professional prowess I’m revered for.Made me the man I am.But maybe I want to be revered for more. Maybe I want to be someone’s man.
Marco’s voice pulls me back to the present. All ridiculous notions of being anyone other than an unaffected asshole flit away as I make my way to our meeting spot.
“We’ve got about fifteen minutes tops until Avery arrives,” he says as he calls the elevator, then side eyes me. “I could have just set the record straight. I was the one who tasked you to take Chiara home. Though explaining the pics of her wearing your clothes and leaving your office this morning may have taken a bit more creative storytelling. Want to explain?”
I watch as Marco keys in the code followed by what I ascertain is the penthouse apartment given the very top floor lights up.
“I could ask you the same question,” I snap with more bite than intended.
“What the fuck? Is this is about keeping Sophia in the dark about what happened with your father?”
I take in the hard lines of his face and the dark, sunken circles under his tired eyes and am reminded his world shifted on its axis in a matter of minutes last night.
“We both know I’m sorry for how royally I fucked up. Believe me, I’m paying the price. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours and I feel like I’m bleeding out from the fucking hole in my heart.”
His eyes glaze over, and I see the anguish there. I almost—almost—let myself feel it. But I stomp on that pesky organ that’s the driving force of the foreign sensation of emotions bubbling beneath the surface.
“No. This is about the arrangement the Gigioliotti men have planned for Chiara.”
“What arrangement?” he snarls
The elevator comes to a stop, and the doors open, revealing AJ’s luxurious penthouse.
