Page 19 of A Man of Power

“She’s a non-starter. I don’t fuck my staff and you know it.”

“Oh, right, just everyone else’s.” Fuck Conner, calling me on my own shit.

“Well, those women don’t report to me.”

“What women?”

Aiden asks as he walks through the side door.

“Bastian wants to fuck his new hire,” Conner says with a laugh.

Aiden smirks. “Shocking.”

These motherfuckers are starting to piss me off a little.

“Chillax,” Conner states, sensing my annoyance. “We’re just fucking with you. Fuck whoever you want. I mean, if you don’t want her, maybe I’ll ask her for a drink. She interned for my firm a while back, and I never forget a perfect rack. In fact—”

I scowl at him. “If you so much as a lay one of those meaty fingers on her, I will beat the ever-living shit out of you.”

Conner chuckles and sits up straighter, flexing his bicep that’s easily twice the size of mine. “I’d like to see that, Congressman.”

I glare at him as I feel my jaw clenching. I take another drink trying to calm myself. Conner’s fucking with me and I know it. He loves trying to get a rise out of me. He’s like a cat toying with a mouse because he can.

“What’s up, for real?” Aiden asks. He’s always more sensitive than Conner and me. He can be a righteous, pompous ass, but he’s not without his own baggage from his past.

“I just need to stop thinking about her. She’s a distraction I don’t need right now.”

“Or maybe, she’s the exact distraction you need,” Conner states.

“What’s going to happen when it ends? She’s an amazing employee and she’ll leave,” I say dryly, knowing full well she’ll likely leave once she gets her law degree. Alexis had an expiration date on her from the moment I offered her the job.

“So, she’ll leave. Staffers aren’t exactly hard to find,” Aiden points out.

“Good ones are,” I retort. As if she can sense we are talking about her, my phone pings with an incoming text.

Alexis: Just emailed you Confervo files.

I reply that I’ll look at them. Conner asks Aiden a question and it takes me a half a second to realize what he asked.

I look up from my phone. “The missing girl?” I repeat the end of his question.

“Did you see the article inThe Tribune?” he asks again.

I nod.

Aiden swallows. “It’s not like a girl hasn’t turned up in the woods before. That park isn’t exactly safe after dark.”

“It’s just interesting. The description of what happened…was eerily familiar,” Conner mutters before finishing his drink and reaching for the bottle to pour himself more. “But also written by that bitch of a woman.”

I smirk. Conner hates this reporter named Vivienne Westerly. I’ve never had an issue with her. Her grandfather was president when we were small children. Her parents own a horse farm in Kentucky. She was born with a silver spoon up her ass but chose to pursue journalism and leave the family business. None of that bothers Conner. What bothers Conner is an exposé she did on his family’s company. She did not write kindly about his mother. While his mother was a piece of work, she did have her charitable points. In any case, Conner loathes Vivienne. She may be the only sexy woman our age in the entire city that he hasn’t tried to fuck.

As I half listen to Aiden and Conner start comparing crimes, I pull up the email from Alexis, surveying the research she has compiled. It’s extensive. I’ll need to take a few hours and go through it all.

“What do you know about Confervo?” I interrupt, looking over at Aiden.

Aiden pauses mid-sentence. “Uh, why?”

Sighing, I lean back against the marble countertop behind me.

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