Page 73 of The Billionaire's Beauty

19

Griffin

“What am I doing here?”I ask my brothers late one afternoon a week later, as soon as I walk into the library in the Hamptons estate, where they told me to meet them for reasons that remain unclear.

“Hello to you, too,” Damon says, brows shooting up as he turns away from the drink cart with a bourbon for Ryker and a dirty martini for himself. “Drink?”

“What?” I say, beginning to feel slippage in the reins holding back my temper as I watch him pass Ryker his drink. Admittedly, my mood hasn’t exactly been sweet for the last several days, but dropping everything at the office to race out to the Hamptons with no warning doesn’t help matters. “A drink? Why the hell would I want a drink? I want to know what’s going on. I get an urgent text saying you need me out here ASAP, then neither one of you answer your phones to tell me what’s going on. Someone’s dead, for all I know. Maybe the house slid off the bluff and floated out to sea. Now here I am, and I discover you two clowns sitting here having drinks like everything’s peachy? If I’d wanted a drink, I could’ve stayed in Manhattan and had a drink there. What gives?”

“I told you this was a bad idea,” Ryker says, then takes a sip.

“Yeah, I don’t give a fuck,” Damon says, setting his glass on the coffee table and returning to the drink cart. “I’m making you a gin and tonic, Griff. You’re either going to drink it or wear it. Your choice. Now sit your ass down.”

The reins slip another couple of inches. “I’m not—”

“Sit. Your. Ass. Down.”

Funny thing about Damon: as the oldest brother and the one who looks the most like our father, he occasionally taps into a voice of authority that demands attention. Not that Ryker and I are scared of him. I wouldn’t go that far, although he did beat my butt one memorable time when we were kids. Something to do with his broken model of the Starship Enterprise, if I recall correctly. No, we’re not scared of him. We just wouldn’t want to test him too hard when he gets like this.

So I sit down on a chair catty-corner to the sofa, shut up and check my watch. I don’t do any of it with anything approaching good humor. “You’ve got thirty seconds.”

“I’ll take as long as I want,” Damon says, splashing my drink together and handing it to me before sitting on the sofa with Ryker. Then he raises his glass. “To brotherly love.”

“Fuck you,” I mutter as we all clink. “What’s up?”

“Well, Griff, you’re causing a lot of problems at the office,” Damon says, crossing his legs and brushing lint off his pants. “We called this little meeting today to get to the bottom of it.”

“The fuck—?” I say, glancing at Ryker for confirmation.

He nods.

“First of all, no, I’m not,” I say. “Second, why couldn’t we have discussed these alleged problems back at the office?”

“We wanted neutral territory,” Ryker says. “Otherwise, we couldn’t guarantee your safety.”

“What?”

“There’s no good way to tell you this, Griff, but people want you dead,” Damon says. “They’re sick of your surly attitude and your rudeness. They’re sick of your lack of gratitude. They’re sick of your policy on khakis. No one wants to work with you. Everyone’s started calling you the MF’ing Beast. It’s bad.”

I feel a slight squirm around my guilty conscience, but not enough to care. Since Bellamy left, I can’t say I care about much of anything. And that includes eating, sleeping, working and behaving like a civilized human being. I’d hoped that my mood might lift in a few days or weeks, but that hasn’t been the case. If anything, my mood has gone from bad to worse. It’s the emotional equivalent of hot elephant shit, a rotting whale carcass and a ton of moldy Limburger cheese. Not that I care about pulling out of it or not inflicting myself on the public. Because, again, I don’t care about anything these days.

That’s not true. I care about this gin and tonic and getting to the bottom of the glass so I can move on to the next one.

“And this is my problem…why?” I ask.

“Because you’re going to wake up one morning soon with your head on a pike,” Ryker tells me.

I shrug tiredly, taking a healthy sip of my drink. The idea has some appeal. At least then I wouldn’t have to keep seeing Bellamy’s absent face every second of every interminable day.

“This can go one of three ways,” Damon says. “Option one: we let the staff take care of you for us. I’ll just tell security in the lobby not to stop them the next time they show up at the office with torches and pitchforks.”

I snort.

“Option two,” Damon continues. “We fire you to stop a human relations crisis from turning into a public relations crisis.”

“It could work, except you can’t fire me because I own a third of the company,” I tell Damon, propping my feet on the ottoman.

“That’s what I said,” Ryker says.

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