Page 1 of Love Her

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RHAIM

"She'sbeautiful, isn't she," Nero Ferreo said, like I hadn’t been ignoring that fact about his daughter for the past two months.

We were at his spacious home doing yet another roadshow event for investors, this time a small gathering of the CEOs and CFOs of investment groups we were courting. Lia was across the room from us in a floor length green dress with a swooping neckline and a matching short coat with long sleeves, like covering her wrists could some how mitigate the devastating damage of her décolletage.

Yes, she was beautiful.

And she had never been less mine.

I’d given her a choice in her apartment, with the scent of her sex still on my hands—to either give herself to me and fully submit, or to choose to take the reins of her Daddy’s kingdom.

She’d chosen the latter—and it was the right choice.

It was the choice we’d both wanted her to make.

But ever since then, she’d been nothing more than cordial.

We’d worked together on Corvo Enterprise’s public offering like demons, getting in early, staying late, and in that entire time there hadn’t been one flirtatious glance or secret smile.

Nothing that let on that we’d ever been carnal with one another, and I was entirely, depressingly certain that she always had her underwear on.

“Rhaim?” Nero said, causing me to look up from the whiskey I’d been contemplating for far too many minutes.

“Sorry,” I apologized. “It’s been a long week.”

His lips puckered as one of his black eyebrows rose. “You’re working too hard.”

I snorted and knocked the brown liquid in my glass back before answering. “Don’t lie. You wouldn’t have it any other way.”

He chuckled wickedly. “Neither would you. Mostly.”

I tilted my faceted glass back and forth, with a lick of whiskey still inside, indicating my current uncertainty. With Nero beside me it was safe to let my eyes rest on Lia, because I could use my conversation with him as a reasonable distraction. She was cutting a swath through potential investors like a shark that could speak four languages and do complex economic math on the fly.

Fuck.

Me.

Then she looked up and over and caught my eye. She gave me a tight smile and an acknowledging chin lift, but they were gestures you might take with any colleague across the room who had your back in a business situation.

Nothing more.

Which meant that she—a slip of a girl, who I knew I could pick up with one arm and carry off—was somehow stronger than I was.

“Good thingsheknows how to mingle,” Nero said.

“I have other skills,” I muttered—one of which was murder. But there was no one here to kill, presently. I was still waiting for Nick to tell me who exactly he wanted dead in exchange for his money for the IPO and then his votes for Lia’s presence on the board. He was here, and damned if I wasn’t going to corner him for a name later, because if I didn’t blow off some steam shortly I would?—

Nero made a satisfied sound, watching the crowd. “This thing really is going to happen, isn’t it.”

I defused myself, both for his sake, and because I couldn’t deny it. And Lia’s deft ability to handle strangers, making men feel important and women feel comfortable, was a large factor why. “Against my will and better judgement.”

“I told you our books would stand up.”

I resisted glaring at him. “I told you I would bribe the right people,” I muttered. He chuckled, and I bit back a lopsided grin. It’d been a long time since I’d heard him laugh, and when he died, I was going to miss it. He had kidney cancer and he wasn’t interested in treating it anymore. He hadn’t told anyone but me and his security guard, Rio, who’d been driving him back and forth to chemo appointments, before he’d decided to stop.

It was one of the reasons why this entire IPO had been so rushed, that and the fact that Nero wanted to marry Lia off before he died.

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