Page 4 of The Bargain
“Oh fuck you, Ethan. Fuck. You.” She pokes at my chest. “You think you are so superior. You aren’t.”
A woman tries to pass us to enter the coffee shop, and I’m forced to step back and give her space to pass between me and Anna. The minute I step closer to Anna again, she turns and walks away. Again, I pursue, but the damn bellman gets between me and her. By the time I reach her, she’s slid inside the back of a hired car. By the time I’m at the door, it’s pulling away.
I curse and scrub my jaw, before walking back inside the hotel, and making my way back to my table in the coffee shop. Anna’s a manipulator but she rarely blows smoke. If there is trouble brewing, I need to get ahead of it. I dial Harper. She answers on the first ring. “Ethan. What’s up?”
“I need to meet. Now. Where are you?”
“Actually, right by your hotel. I had a meeting this direction. You want me to come there?”
“The hotel coffee shop. How soon?”
“Three minutes. Get me a vanilla latte.”
Once I have a cup in hand for her, she’s at my table. “I’m here. Obviously. My clients are exhausting me today. Not you. Not Sofia. But others.”
She dumps her stuff at the table. “Let me go to the ladies’ room, and we’ll dig in.” She rushes away, and I curse under my breath over my tardy return to Sofia and pull my phone from my pocket, attempting to call her. A fast busy signal follows that has me cursing all over again. The service in this area is notoriously bad, and I try her two more times and the hotel once.
I’m about to step outside and try there when Harper returns and sits down in front of me. “All right. Tell me what happened from the time you and Sofia were at my office to now. And before you say anything, she’s a keeper. Don’t fuck this up.”
“She’s also waiting on me in a hotel room, which is why I’m trying to make this fast. Anna cornered me. She says Grant’s gotten into something dirty. Shady investors, she called them. The mob, more specifically, which I’d say is crazy, maybe anexaggeration, but the more I think about this, the more I’m reminded that Grant is good at finding trouble.”
“Oh shit,” she murmurs, sipping her coffee as if it were the alcoholic beverage I need right now. “And the family business is involved?” She holds up a hand. “Irrelevant. If Grant’s tangled up with the mob, they’ll drag everything and everyone close to him into the mix. Money borrowed must be repaid. Promises made must be kept. The law won’t help you, because there is no law to what they do. And before you ask how I know so much about this, I had a client get in bed with them. He’s dead now.”
That hits like a steel ball in the chest, and despite the logic in her words, I’m far from accepting. “If this is true—and I can’t know that it is, it’s Anna, after all, feeding me this information—there has to be a way to get him out without a bloody or broke outcome.”
“Pay up and pay fast before they claim huge interest, or ownership, of entities outside the original agreement. The mob has a weak definition of what is yours and a strong one of what is theirs. For instance, you share his last name and Grant’s bloodline. They can spin those things in scary ways. I’ve seen it happen.”
“I hope like hell this is just Anna spinning stories to manipulate me for reasons I have yet to discover but at the core are always self-serving.”
“I’d tell you to assume as much, play dumb, and just go to Paris, but the mob is far reaching, and your interests are linked to your brother’s. You need to get the truth out of Grant.”
“That’s not going to happen. There’s only one solution. I need to get to the truth all by myself.”
She narrows her eyes on me and motions with her finger. “I see your wheels in motion. What are you going to do?”
“Hire a PI firm to find out if this is real. Then I have something solid to go on with my father.”
“I know someone. Walker Security. They’re the best. Why don’t I hire them to offer you a buffer?”
“I don’t want you to place yourself in the line of fire.”
“I’ve used them before. I’m not going to get linked to you on this. Not like this. And they have offices right next door to me. I’ll walk in. No calls. No record of what I wanted. Let me have them dig around.”
“Do it. The sooner the better.”
“I’ll talk to them today. Any budget?”
“The ‘save my ass’ budget will do.”
“Got it. No budget but they’re honest. They won’t screw you around.”
I push to my feet. “I’ll get you a car.”
She’s already standing, sliding her briefcase onto her shoulder. “I’m good.” She motions to her Apple Watch. “I like my steps. Be careful.”
A complicated direction, but exactly why I’ve been thinking of walking away from the family business. If I’m smart, and I try to be, this new development should be the feather that breaks my back and pushes me away. I walk Harper outside and wait for her to disappear around a corner, before I finally head back inside the hotel and seek out the elevators, actually shocked at how much I want to see Sofia right now. Normally, in a situation like this one, I’d want to be alone. Instead, I want to be buried inside her, the floral scent of her drowning me in her sweetness. But as I open the door, I sense the emptiness. I know she’s gone, but I don’t feel the slice of the emotional blade until I spy a piece of paper where it sits in the center of the bed, a gnawing feeling in my belly. I cross and snatch it up, reading the words with the impact of that steel ball to the gut all over again.
Ethan, business and pleasure don’t mix. We both know it’s true. We both know this was a mistake. But thank you for everything.
