Page 40 of Adonis: The Cost of a Billionaire's Heart
She was fighting for her son.
I paced the suite, unable to settle my thoughts. I’d prided myself on reading people correctly, on knowing their motivations before they spoke them aloud. Pursuing a real relationship with Simora meant pursuing one with Mason too. Seven days was one thing, but was I ready for fatherhood on a full-time basis?
My father was a real OG, not just in business meetings but in the streets where that shit really mattered. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. There was no trust fund or generational wealth for him to inherit—he carved it out of the mud, building a dual empire with legal and illegal connections while raising me as a single father after my mother died. I was five, just around Mason’s age. I hated to admit that I barely remembered her face, but what I’d never forget was how my father’s changed the day they put her in the ground.
He never remarried. Always kept her pictures up around the house and in his wallet. Never attempted to substitute her with a stepmother to pick up the slack. Holland Enterprises, his built-from-scratch business, became his soulmate. Raising me empowered him to keep grinding to show me what was possible in life.
It was the same determination I recognized in Sim. She’d said it in more ways than one; Mason was her purpose. Every move she made would always revolve around him, just as my father’s had revolved around me.
Underneath the business suits, good grammar, and wealth, my father was still a gangsta. He was good whether he walked through the hood or on Wall Street. Still, he wasn’t faultless. Between his gangsta mentality and the Caribbean blood that ran through his veins, I understood why he was introverted at times and authoritarian to the point of coldness. But underneath it all, I knew he’d burn the world down for me simply because I washis only seed. His love didn’t come in the form of bedtime stories every night or love notes in my lunchbox, but in the ways that made sure I knew everything it took to survive and dominate in both worlds.
Everything changed when he died.
Five years ago, a bullet to the chest ended his life. The shooter hadn’t turned out to be some disgruntled employee or mysterious criminal. It was Jadarius Washington. My childhood friend—the nigga who used to ride bikes with me and spend summers chilling in our pool. No matter how many times I analyzed that shit, I still couldn’t wrap my mind around it.
We met during my seventh-grade summer during one of my father’s many programs that gave back to the impoverished neighborhood where he grew up. Publicly, he was always trying to show young black men that there was more to life than dribbling a ball and hugging the block. Behind the scenes, he was recruiting them to distribute his work.
Ja and I were from opposite sides of the tracks in every way, and thick as thieves from thirteen years old until I went off to D.C. for college at eighteen. I tried to get him to apply for an internship at my father’s company, but that shit was no use. He didn’t want to do any work aboveboard. Jadarius wanted the street lifestyle and the fast money that came with it.
We lost contact throughout my time in D.C. It wasn’t until after I graduated and returned to New York to work for my father that I learned how deep the streets had their claws in Jadarius. After serving time for a possession charge and having two other misdemeanors on his record, he was close to striking out.
I tried lending a helping hand, but all he wanted was money, not to make permanent changes to his reckless lifestyle. We went out one night, and Ja started a fight and ended up getting us both arrested. That was when my father made me dead myfriendship with Jadarius altogether, citing that he was turning into a liability, and I couldn’t allow someone like him—a means to an end—to derail my future. Under my father’s guidance, I cut ties with him completely a year after I graduated from college.
Ja had always been the type of nigga to hold a grudge, and he carried the fact that I’d cut ties with him for years, just waiting for his chance to get his lick back. And he did. The botched armed robbery he’d planned with a few of his boys turned fatal, and suddenly, the man who’d raised me to lead empires was lying dead in the home he’d raised me in while I was out living it up on vacation.
I didn’t shed one tear at his funeral. Not because I didn’t feel pain or grief, but because I hadn’t felt the same since he’d been taken from me. Something inside me had permanently broken. Sim was the first person I’d met who didn’t make me feel like a fragment of my old self. But the reality of the situation was that we were both tethered to other important things. I’d always come second to her son, and she’d always come second to my business.
My internal thoughts paused when Sim returned from the bathroom looking as good as my intentions, maybe even better. Her hair was styled in loose curls that cascaded down her back, and she wore a fitted, designer navy blue cocktail dress that stopped just below her knees.Goddamn, she looks good enough to eat.I almost said fuck the meeting with Ellis. I was trying to lick her cat again until she cried out my name. The suggestion burned on my tongue. But that would mean admitting I cared more about her than the fifty-million-dollar deal on the table, and I wasn’t ready to take that kind of L.
Fifty million dollars wasn’t a small piece of change, even at my tier in the game. It was weight. Status. Another stone in the Holland family fortress I’d been constructing since I took over as CEO and started sleeping only four to five hours a night, withmy laptop on my chest and my phone in my hand. I couldn’t fuck it up. Not when I was so close. It was game day, and we both needed to keep our heads clear. So why did I lose my train of thought every time she looked at me a little too long?
Inside the chauffeured, sleek black truck, Simora and I sat in the back seat side by side, close enough to let our knees touch, and yet we didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t shy away, and neither did I. I should’ve been calculating Ellis’s moves in my head on the ride over, but instead, I found myself scrolling on my phone searching for the perfect gift for Mason. Not a bribe, not a replacement for what I was sure she provided him with, despite her limited means. Just a little something that said I saw him—that he mattered to me even if I never saw him again once his mother and I parted ways.
I selected a LEGO rocket kit—challenging enough to be impressive, simple enough for them to build together, and it wouldn’t take all night. Educational but fun. I had it shipped to her apartment, set to arrive once they were back there, addressing it simply from “Mr. H” as he liked to call me. I didn’t bother telling her. Like other things that had occurred between us in the past few hours, it wasn’t part of our arrangement.
Simora cleared her throat before tilting her head to the side and looking at me. “You never did tell me why we had to fly to Chicago at the last minute to seal this deal. I thought the whole point of our arrangement was to woo Mr. Garrick in New York.”
I shrugged. “Not only is Ellis a traditional man, but he’s a superstitious one too. At the last minute, he said he wanted tofinalize the deal in his office, where he’d signed all his other successful deals. He confessed that any deal he’d done outside of Chicago never turned him a profit. It’s fifty million dollars, so yeah, I gassed up the jet.”
She let out a soft, playful giggle. “You’d probably hop on one foot if it meant getting this deal done any faster, right?”
I chuckled. “Shit, I’m sure people have done far worse for this amount of money.”
“You’re right about that. Look what I’m doing for fifty thousand. That’s probably an amount you wouldn’t even bat an eye at, huh? Life changing for me, a drop in the bucket to you,” she chimed, though her voice was riddled with low self-esteem.
“I hope you don’t think that last night was expected of you. The terms were clear.”
“Nothing happened that I didn’t want to happen, Adonis.”
I dipped my chin. “Okay. Good. Me either.”
“But that doesn’t mean it has to happen again.”
My jaw ticked. Simora had given me her body, and I couldn’t lie. I wanted more. Her pussy was tighter than bark on a tree. No woman had ever made my toes curl before, let alone say her name during sex. She had a nigga going heart-eyed over her, but I had to respect her wishes. If she was done, I had to be too.
“If that’s what you want,” I answered, keeping my tone neutral.
“I think it’s best, don’t you?”
