Page 95 of Love Her

But the news about Zane St. Clair’s overdose and subsequently becoming a murder suspect hadn’t made a dent either. It’d hit the gossip columns hard, but there were enough rich, sullen, ill-tempered children in New York to go around—if stock prices depended on people liking you, or your family, the bottom would fall out of everyone’s 401k’s.

What I was counting on was Nero’s sense of old-world propriety. He loved Lia. She was infamous enough as it was, merely by virtue of being his daughter.

He wouldn’t want to condemn her to any more infamy.

And then Nicholas Samson came in. He surveyed the scene, spotted me, and came straight over.

“What the hell are you drinking?” he asked, his large round face breaking into a smile as wide as a generous wedge of pie.

“Depends, are you buying?”

“Yes. Tonight? Yes,” he repeated.

“I take it you’re happy?”

“Impossibly.”

“Well that’s good,” I said, bowing my head. “Now we never talk about it again. Except for the part where you owe me a bottle of Macallan seventy-two year old Lalique.”

He clutched his chest like he’d been struck. “I should’ve known you’d have good taste.”

I tilted the bottom of my current cocktail his direction. “It’s why you fuckin’ hired me.” I was grinning back at Samson, when I saw Freddie Jr sneaking up.

“Hey, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think this was insider trading,” he said, on his way to the bar. Both Nick and I ignored him—but I realized if Junior was here, Senior was sure to follow.

I’d already had to deal with Freddie Sr. being smug earlier in the week, during the interminable board meeting we’d had, the day I’d found Lia in the stairwell. He’d asked questions just to hear himself talk—and that proved he hadn’t read a single goddamned IPO related email.

But he was feeling good about himself, clearly—because he knew his exile in Asia was nearly over. The second Nero died, all of Nero’s shares would go to Senior, and then my personal nightmare would begin.

“Excuse me,” I told Nick, and then went to the bar to talk to Jr. “Where’s your dad?” I asked, after he finished his order.

“Anything you want to say to him, you can say to me,” Jr said, giving me a shit-eating grin.

After his fiasco setting up Lia for him to “rescue” I wanted to curbstomp all his teeth in, so I made a show of looking over his shoulder some. “Where’s your shitbird friend?”

I knew for a fact that Bobby was still “hoping to walk” someday, with the on-going help of physical therapy.

“Which one?” Junior asked. “I have so many.”

If he’d managed to play it cool and leave it there, I might have had a fractional moment of grudging respect for him.

I might’ve believed he knew how the game was played.

But that slim chance evaporated, the second his idiot mouth went on. “You know how Nero’s sick, right?”

I said nothing. I moved nothing. I kept imagining punching in his teeth.

“You’d better keep an empty box under your desk, Rhaim. The second Nero dies, my dad’s in charge—and his first order of business is going to be to firing you.”

I stared Junior down. “No one sane switches chief financial officers right before an IPO.”

“Yes, but, after?” Junior pressed. “Everything’s going to change for you. No one’s going to hire you—you don’t have a degree, you’re just a lucky monster with a reputation.” He took a casual swig of his drink. “You’ve coasted long enough on my uncle’s soft, loyal heart—good luck when you hit reality.”

“Well, you know what they say about reality?” I asked him, then answered my own question. “Sometimes it hits back with a hammer.”

56

LIA

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