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If the language insults her, her expression doesn’t reveal it. Instead, she sits at the nearest table and faces me from the other end. “Okay, Mr. Bellamy. What do we have to discuss?”
“Nothing too serious,” I assure her. “I merely have one simple question to ask.”
Her eyebrow arches once again. “Oh?”
“What will it take for you to stay away from Adrian Riley?”
She frowns, and I clear my throat.
“Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough, Evelyn. How much damn money do I have to shove into your bank account for you to stay the hell away from him? Name a price, and it’s yours.”
CHAPTER16
evie
My dad was a big proponent of the mantra “Never say die.” No matter the stakes. No matter how high the odds might have been stacked against you… as far as he was concerned, you always went in with your head held high or not at all.
However, Graeme Bellamy might have tried even his patience. For someone so successful, he is too damn stubborn. Wasn’t there some joke about the flexibility of business? The only thing flexible about Bellamy at the moment seems to be how many different ways he can frown and yet somehownotseem as petulant and childish as his words reveal him to be.
“Round figures,” he prompts me when I gape at him, speechless. “Let’s make this quick.”
“Yes,” I force myself to croak when the shock of his request wears off. “Lightning quick. I’ll give you a round figure—zero. Just one,” I add to clarify. Then I stand, keeping the bulk of my bag between us as if it can serve as a sufficient shield against the searing look he shoots my way. “Thank you for meeting with me, Mr. Bellamy. Sorry, to have kept you from your next appointment—”
“Sit down.” He nods to the empty chair when I don’t comply, his voice taking on that hard, guttural tone I loathe. Vibrations jolt down my spine, awakening every nerve before I can help it. “Please.”
The dangerous hint of politeness makes me swallow my pride and join him at the table again. My heart flutters in my chest. I feel like I’m navigating a minefield blindfolded with no clue of which direction to head in. I was used to handling Bellamy’s temper alone, but rarely did it spark to life in the first place because of me.
“Alright,” I say softly. “What do you want?”
“A solid number.” He reaches for the pen he always keeps in his breast pocket and snatches up a napkin from the center of the table.
Being that this is an expensive bistro that probably serves imported coffee from wherever coffee is born, the napkins aren’t average napkins. They’re crisp white, thick, with the bistro’s logo embossed on the front. To make a good enough impression with the ink, Bellamy has to force the nib of the pen down—hard.
“Big enough to fit on the line of a check,” he adds impatiently.
How typical. If there was ever a problem that Graeme Bellamy couldn’t solve with his name or ruthless personality, he threw money at it. Alotof money. Like when he dumped his last girlfriend a week before her birthday and sent her to Acapulco with the tennis instructor she’d been cheating on him with, just to keep the mess out of the tabloids.
That kind of money. This was the same man who sent his mother a check on her birthday so he wouldn’t have to be bothered to meet her for lunch if he didn’t feel like humoring her. To him, placating an employee he’d fired after three dutiful years could easily be accomplished with a few zeros and a well-placed decimal point.
“I don’t want your money,” I insist, stressing every word. “So, if that’s all you have to discuss, then we really are done here.”
I make no move to stand, however. I watch him instead. His eyes narrow and turn a dangerous hue of blue. That sizzling, electric shade. I’ve only seen that color a handful of times. Once when he kicked a man out of his office after the bastard tried to grope me. Once again, when his mother mentioned any “family” gatherings. Oh, and again last night. When I pretty much called him selfish in the sack, and he…
I blink back the memory, but my body is slow to catch up. Heat prickles in my belly and travels lower. My clothes feel tighter. It’s too hot in this damn place.
“I’m not playing coy, either,” I add when Bellamy doesn’t speak. In fact, he’s too quiet—sitting there patiently like a wolf about to strike the moment its prey lets its guard down. “Maybe before this mess, I would have accepted a raise, but I don’t need your money—”
“Then what?” he demands. “Property? A high-rise apartment in LA? Name it. It’s yours.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I say.
“Then what?”
He seems more frustrated than he should be. As if, for all his worldly experience and success in trade, it’s like Graeme Bellamy really can’t fathom anything someone might want other than money or material things. Perhaps that cold, ruthless persona isn’t all an act?
The poor man really has no fucking clue. Though maybe it took someone who couldn’t risk forging an existence solely based on money or property to see that.
“I don’t want or need anything from you,” I try to reiterate.
