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And I plan on keeping it that way, for oneveryspecific reason.
I hand Dahlia the plain white envelope. She looks at me curiously as she opens it.
“What’s this?”
She opens it, and her eyes drop to the page in her hands. Her irises flit over the words as she reads. I grin when her jaw eventually drops and her face goes white.
Her gaze snaps up to mine.
“What is this?” she breathes.
“I think it’s fairly well laid out right there in the—”
“Deimos, is this a joke?” she murmurs quietly.
I shake my head. “No joke.”
I don’t do off-the-cuff. And nothing I do is accidental.
Not even Laconia Logistics, and every move I’ve made with it since forming the company.
To the untrained eye, it would seem that I created that company for the sole purpose of blackmailing, overpaying, and lying my way into possession of as many of Adele and Dahlia’s assets as I could, once I discovered that they were under duress from “Gerard’s” legal threats.
And while, yes, that’sexactlywhat I did, the end goal wasn’t quite what you’d think. It certainly wasn’t what I know Dahlia thought, which was simply plundering her inheritance to fuck with her or to otherwise be an asshole.
I’ll admit it: at first, when I heard that Dahlia’s mother’s companies were under attack, I smelled blood in the water. I can’t help that, I’m a shark.
But that was before I bumped into her after all that time. Before I walked into Callie’s birthday party and laid eyes on the woman who’d twisted herself under my skin and into my heart and my soul six years before with the words she wrote.
With the way she understood me. And saw me, even when she didn’t ever lay eyes on me.
After that, my plans changed.
Radically.
“I…” she blinks, shaking her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, if you’d just read—”
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I canread, Deimos. Except it says here you’re making me the CEO and sole owner of Laconia Logistics.”
“Pending your graduation—with honors, if you’d refer to the fine print—from business school.” I shrug. “I’m not handing over control to some dropout.”
She grins quietly, shaking her head. “Why?”
“Because it’s yours.”
She trembles as I yank her close.
“Because it’salwaysbeen yours. Hell,” I say with a shrug, “you literally put the desks and chairs together.”
She grins and laughs, slapping my chest. “Such an asshole.”
I’ve said it before: nothing I do is accidental. Which is why I bought, cajoled, and stole as many of those companies as I could and lumped them under one umbrella corporation. It wasn’t just because I was trying to take them from Gerard—or Raph, as it turned out. It was because I’d looked into the financial statements of these companies, and seen the blatant grift going on.
Adele Roy is a wonderful woman. She’s a force to be reckoned with, she’s brave beyond comprehension, and she’s a fantastic mother who raised an incredible daughter…
But she’s a terrible businesswoman.
