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She turned to look at him with annoyance written all over her face, shoving his hand off her. “Tell that to me after you get nearly drowned. You may be dad’s first choice when it comes to taking over operations, but it doesn’t make you his favorite.”
Not waiting around to see the look on his face, she jogged upstairs. Liam was left there with a scowl on his face that he had been cursed with a sister who didn’t know her place in the family. He picked up his empty glass and flung it at the wall of wine bottles causing it to break into a cluster of glass shards.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Still stuck on the equivalent of desk duty, Layne tried to take the time to enjoy life a little bit more. It wasn’t easy, as she often lost herself in her work.
After several shopping trips, mostly to supply Rebecca with some hot finds, she grew bored of those outings. How her father had ever expected her to take on the role of a true uptown girl was insane to Layne. She needed something with a little more purpose than running up credit card statements.
The meeting Liam and her dad held with the administrative coordinator for the specialist in the lead spot for the job had gone extraordinarily well from everything she had heard. She wasn’t given much in terms of details other than there was mutual interest on both sides of the transaction.
The last step was to meet the harbinger of doom himself to ensure an appropriate fit for the job at hand. If you were going to hire someone to take out a significant player in this game, you wanted to let your gut do the judging when meeting them in person.
Until then, she was stuck trying to live the life of any other twenty-five-year-old on a mandatory staycation. Her music was blaring throughout her living room, feet dancing her around the various pieces of furniture in an impromptu dance party. If only her clients could see her now, taking the time to let loose a little bit instead of being so uptight all the time.
Her hair wildly left down, the natural dark waves indicating she hadn’t taken a blow dryer to them after her shower this morning.
Her phone dinged with a new notification, causing her to pause. When she grabbed the phone off its charger, she unlocked the screen to see a message waiting in one of her dating apps. A girl had particular needs from time to time, and Layne was no exception to that.
The message was from a guy she had been speaking with back and forth over a few weeks. His name was Cole, he supposedly worked as a trader for one of the top banks in the Financial District, owned a Golden Retriever puppy, and lived out on eastern Long Island. He had invited her out to his place to take a trip out on his boat several times, but she hadn’t yet taken him up on anything.
Cole
Hey, beautiful. Want to save me from having dinner alone tonight?
Layne
Depends. What’s for dessert?
Cole
Lady’s choice.
She stared at the message for a few minutes while having an internal debate with herself. Layne desperately needed to get out of the house and find a distraction that wasn’t online shopping.
“Fuck it,” she whispered to herself as she sent a reply back in the chat.
Layne
Consider me your savior.
Cole was quick to send over the details of the time and place, leaving Layne wondering if her night out was going to be a major bomb or if things were going to be smooth sailing.
He had chosen a place called Annie & Cain’s for dinner. It was a swanky place that a lot of the banker types frequented to toss around their excess funds. The restaurant was a little too stuffy for her likes, but she wasn’t going to turn down her original plans this evening of Netflix surfing over it.
Checking the time, she had a little over two hours to get ready and head out to the Financial District where the restaurant was located. Turning her music down to a less deafening level, she poked her head into the kitchen where her guard of the week was sitting on a stool by the counter playing a color-matching game on his phone to pass the time. He had come inside to freeload some eats and never left to go back out to his car.
“I’m going out for dinner.”
He perked up, immediately straightening in his seat. “Where?”
“Annie & Cain’s in two hours, it’s in the Financial District off of Pearl Street.”
Her security guard seemed to think he had a say in this as he sat there thinking it over. “I guess that’s okay.”
“I wasn’t asking permission.” Layne may have been under watchful eyes these days, but she sure as hell wasn’t under any disillusion that her status in the O’Reilly family hierarchy had changed. The chain of command still operated as it had been, with her still only being outranked by a small handful of people. Those people were essentially family and she had no desire to try and challenge those ranks.
Her new security detail was evidently annoyed as he abruptly locked his phone and pocketed it. “Do you want me to get the car ready, or are you going to insist on making me follow you down to the subway?”
