Cole shook his head in dismay. “I want to say good, but at the same time—”
“I know. It’s complicated.”
“How are you rationalizing it?”
With a heavy sigh, I put my phone down on my desk. “I know doing this is protecting you from exposure. I also know you’ve made Slade well aware of it, so he can minimize the damage. Basically, it’s a means to an end.”
“Like your work in general, huh?” He gestured out the door at my designer living room in my luxurious penthouse apartment. “Dirty work for living the high life.”
I glared back at him for the out-of-the-blue shot at me. “You know it’s more complicated than that.” I strode over to him, eyeing him pointedly. “Just like your situation is.”
We’d both had to work hard in a down ‘n’ dirty world to survive and, eventually, thrive.
I’d grown up in a bad neighborhood that’d been drowning in drugs and violence, while being raised by a severely depressed mother, my father in the wind. I’d had to pick up the slack, working in retail, restaurants, anything I could, to support us. It’d ended up turning into a full-time situation as she’d reached a breaking point. It’d had me missing too much school to graduate. That’d ended up being the least of my problems when I’d come home after a double-shift and found her dead in the bathtub, her wrists torn open, her life drained away.
Just like Cole, I’d ended up alone in the world in my teenage years.
Fortunately, I had a gift for thinking outside of the box, a relentlessness to succeed about me that just wouldn’t quit in spite of all the obstacles that’d stood in my way at the time. And I was very resourceful.
It’d brought me this. A career. A place in the world. An infamous reputation.
My empire.
But Cole wasn’t wrong. It had come at a cost.
I’d become a loner, because trusting people was ill-advised in the world that I walked in. If I trusted the wrong person, it could actually kill me.
I operated in a dark and dirty world that often attracted extremely dangerous people. It was a balancing act to avoid creating enemies in any of them.
Even though I’d shut down the illegitimate side of my business, it wouldn’t take any of that away. At least, not for a while. A reputation lived a long time. It would take a lot of work and time to convert that into something altogether different.
I watched Cole’s gaze soften as he told me, “I’m sorry. This… all of this… it’s not right. I’m supposed to protect my club, not endanger it.”
“You are protecting it. If we hadn’t done this to appease Nik, you and Slade would be destroyed for what happened with Mikhail. Your lives would be over and how would the club fare then, with their President and their top enforcer locked away for evermore?”
“Yeah, all right,” he muttered resignedly. He scrubbed his hand over his face, struggling to hide his distress with it all. Then, in the next breath, he announced, “Come to the dining room. I made dinner.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “You did?”
“Yeah, well, you were on the phone sorting all this for almost an hour. I had to keep myself busy.”
I knew that well. Cole hated standing still. The guy barely had a thread of patience most of the time. I understood it completely. Living the way we both had for so long, it forced you into survival mode, where you felt like you had to keep moving and be on your toes at all times, that you had to be able to anticipate things. It also put up a lot of walls. It’d taken us a long time to work through that before we’d both been able to trust each other.
It was why it’d been all the more brutal when that incident had happened a few years back. We’d taken so long to open up to each other, then he’d turned his back on me and I’d broken his trust shortly thereafter.
But we were here again now, at that place.
There was such a deep connection between us. It kept bringing us back together.
I just hoped that it would finally stick this time, that we wouldn’t be forced apart again.
Cole held out his hand. I took it and let him lead me out of my office and into the dining room.
“Wow,” I gasped, as I took in the meal he’d prepared, all set in an aesthetically pleasing way on my mahogany dining room table.
Chicken Kiev, roasted garlic potatoes and what looked like chocolate mousse in my frosted glass designer dessert bowls.
I knew he could cook, but it’d been a long time since I’d been fortunate enough to experience it, given that we’d spent so long just hooking up then parting ways again. We hadn’t spent much quality time together.
This, right now, was really nice, and a great callback to how sweet and amazing things had been between us before.
“Here,” he said, as he pulled out a chair for me at the head of the table.
I smiled and took a seat and he even pushed it in. “Nice touch,” I said.
He grinned. “You know I can bring the romance, baby.”
“I do,” I told him as he took a seat adjacent to me.
He gestured to an open bottle of sparkling apple cider and then raised his glass.
“A toast with apple juice, huh?” I chuckled as I raised my glass to his.
“Well, you’re pregnant and I need to be stone-cold sober with everything going on right now.”
“I like it.”
“Yeah, you hate champagne anyway.”
“I do.”
“To us. Our future. Our family,” he said.
Emotion welled within me at his beautiful words and I choked
