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I stare up at her, our gazes transfixed.
Lowell will fucking kill me.
“Don’t be all grumpy again.” She smiles.
“I’m not grumpy.” She pushes her hand through my hair, and I lean into the touch, my eyes closing.
No, not grumpy. Just utterly fucked.
I fall back to the bed, taking her with me. She lies across my chest, her body wrapped around me as we settle into the quiet of the night. “Can I tell you a secret?” she whispers after a while, sounding not far from sleep.
“You can tell me anything.”
I feel her smile on my skin, and then she snuggles in closer. “This has been the best birthday I’ve ever had.”
I feel her drift off to sleep moments later, and I know that I won’t be getting any sleep for a while, not with the bedside light still on.
I don’t turn it off, worried she might wake up to darkness.
When I wake up the next morning, she’s gone.
“Do I want to know what’s crawled up your ass, Sullivan?”
I don’t reply to Charlie. I don’t need to. I just continue to stare at the elevator doors as we’re carried to the seventy-eight floor.
“If it’s Vanessa, then you’ve done the right thing. They don’t have a leg to stand on, and it’s not like you’ve played your worst card. They needed a good reality check.”
I turn to look at him standing in the back of the elevator, realising he hasn’t a clue what’s wrong with me. “I couldn’t give a fuck about my mum right now.”
His face narrows in, his chin lifting as he tries to figure it out. I don’t know anyone who can do what he does with such little effort. “Then it’s Scarlet,” he says as if it’s something he didn’t consider, but it doesn’t shock him.
He nods and rights himself, not asking me anything else.
I straighten my tie, squaring my shoulders. She’s not replied to the text I sent yesterday morning. “Do you know where she is?”
“She’ll be on the estate,” he says, ignoring my agitation with a steely expression of his own.
“Have you spoken to her since Wednesday night?” I ask.
“I haven’t.”
My frustration rises. “Has Mason?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Will you ask me something back and not be such an annoying prick for two minutes?”
His head shifts to me, a warning look in his eye. “No. Scarlet isn’t some girl you pick up on the weekend, Lance. She’s important to too many people who will come for your head—including me. I ask you questions and leave myself open to answers I don’t want to hear. It’s better for your pretty face this way.”
“You wouldn’t hit me.” I snigger, knowing he’s a changed man from the one he once was. “So because Scarlet’s Mason’s sister, I can’t talk about her?”
“Depends,” he mutters, striding out onto Mason and Elliot’s office floor where he turns. “Do you have that same faith in Mason’s fist as you do mine?”
No. Mason really would come for my head if he knew what I’d bought for his sister’s birthday. What she did to me on the bed. What her body felt like riding my lap.
Fucking hell.
“You want a question, Lance?” Charlie asks, looking around the reception area.
