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Cormac dropped back onto the bed, breathing hard. Liam collapsed beside me. He snuggled up against my side and ran his hands over my hip and the backs of my thighs, murmuring sweet praise as I slowly returned to earth.
“Glad to see everyone’s awake.” Rian’s dry voice skittered up my spine. I tried to push myself to standing, but found my arms too weak and jelly-like to support my weight. Fuck, these guys destroyed me every damn time.
Warm arms wrapped around my stomach and my shoulders, gently drawing me upward until I could stand on my own. I sank into Rian’s warmth as I got my bearings and recovered from the intensity of my early morning orgasm.
“Good morning,” I said, my voice still raspy and rough with sleep. Soft light filtered in through Cormac’s curtains, smoothing the hard edges of the men I’d tied myself to. I wasn’t so foolish to think that fantastic sex conquered all, but it sure was helping to ease the pain of closing the door on the life I’d built before.
His hands settled on my naked hips. “I’m having lunch with Benedict Ford today. I’d like you to join me.”
Cormac narrowed his eyes from where he sprawled on the bed, tangling his limbs with Liam’s. “Benedict’s based out of DC. What’s he doing up here?”
“We went to school together,” Rian answered.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Cormac snapped.
Rian traced shapes on my stomach with his fingers. “Now that we’ve bought back the Russian’s initial investment, I’m looking for a new investor to infuse cash into the business. He wants to take over the construction from Ginevra’s father.”
I froze. “What does that mean, take over the construction?”
“In exchange for a bigger piece of the pie, he’s going to become the prime contractor,” Rian explained.
Liam ran a freckled hand through his hair. “Benedict’s a scary motherfucker. You should say yes.”
I tried to capture Rian’s eye over my shoulder. “Am I the decision maker here?”
He kissed the top of my head. “Yup. Get dressed, princess.”
Rian and Istared at the skeleton that would one day be a skyscraper. All construction stopped three months ago, and since then, local graffiti artists had left their mark on the frame. Fences and padlocks meant very little to kids looking for trouble, and all I could think about was the lawsuit waiting to happen when someone got hurt.
He handed me a hardhat, and we strolled through the gate. Liam had sent men ahead to secure the area, but given that we’d already signed the contracts mingling our finances, we were less worried about an attack than earlier in the week.
Rian stared up at the building. “A contractor tried to blame ghosts for the fact that his cement deliveries were always ten percent short. Another one couldn’t seem to lift a pane of glass without shattering it. The cost overruns on this building have been enormous.”
I sighed, eyeing the debris that littered the lot. “Millions of dollars down the drain,” I said, my voice hard with frustration and anger. Luis sent me the file to review, and the waste appalled me. No surprise, the signature on delivery after invoice after mistake was Alexi’s. That man was fucking my father over, and now that the immediate and physical threat to my family was taken care of, I was going to get to the bottom of it.
“Easy, princess.” Rian wrapped an arm around me, saving me from face planting when I tripped over a pile of cinder blocks barely covered with plastic sheeting. Instead of letting me go, his hand migrated to the small of my back, guiding me through the site as we meandered. I tried not to let his care with my physical person convince me he cared about me in any other way, but it was so damn hard to keep the walls around my heart with all three of them.
We picked our way through the shell of the building, Rian’s sharp eyes calculating potential. I didn’t know anything about construction, but the numbers I ran on the materials Luis sent me revealed a dire financial situation. It would be years before we’d break even on rents, let alone turn a profit.
Once back in his sports car, Rian whipped off his dusty T-shirt. My eyes caught on the hard muscles of his chest as he slid his arms into a black button-down shirt. He grinned at me, his dark hair falling across his bright blue eyes as he buttoned his cuffs. No man had the right to be that handsome.
“Don’t give him an inch when you negotiate with him,” Rian cautioned as I applied make-up at a stoplight. “Wait to hear everything he has to say before making your decision.”
I chuckled. Rian so easily forgot that I cut my teeth in corporate boardrooms negotiating with venture capitalists. Benedict Ford didn’t have a thing on the last generation of San Francisco tech bros, puffed up on their own importance, appalled that a woman had a brain in her head, much less a profitable app.
“I’ve already made up my mind,” I told him, curious to see his reaction.
He furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”
“Obviously it’s going to depend on the terms, but he’s more likely to finish the construction than anyone else.” I held up the screen of my phone to him. “Luis assembled a dossier for me this morning. Ford is impressive.”
“Nobody rises to that level of success in DC without being corrupt as shit.”
I laughed and elbowed him over the console of the car. “Oh, yeah, like you’re one to talk.”
He cut his eyes to me as he parked. “Exactly, princess.”
Ford sat at a table in the corner of the deceptively casual restaurant. It was a hole in the wall place that had popped up a few months ago—French cuisine, didn’t take reservations, full of trust fund hipsters. I couldn’t believe they’d seated him by himself while he waited for us. On the other hand, that was the type of power I wielded as a Russo in my own neighborhood, so maybe it wasn’t quite so odd.
