“Go check on the guys,” I instructed Eric, and gestured through to the kitchen where the security guards were dealing with their own battle wounds.
He hovered a long moment. “Just don’t do anything stupid, yeah? Please don’t do anything fucking stupid, Bran.”
I couldn’t give him an answer to that, just kept my stare firm until he gave up the ghost and trekked on through to the back.
Once he was gone I turned my attention where it should have been earlier, before Drake made any appearance in this space. I clicked onto his encrypted message stream, catching my breath at the prospect of what the prick had pinged through to me.
I should never have ignored it in the first place. My attention should never have been so concerned with the girl upstairs that I turned my back on the one fucking thing that could take her from me.
I scanned the messages with heavy brows.
Pick up the fucking phone, Grant, and call me before I find other ways of reaching you.
Client care is everything. The girl is nothing. Send out those schedule documents before I have to send them for you. They want to fucking see her.
What’s the matter with you? What the fuck is going on with this girl?
I’m done with this. Pick up the phone or I’ll turn up in person. Believe me, neither of us want that outcome.
And then one more.
I’m on my way. Be ready.
I should have known. Should have read them. Should have made the necessary plans to face Drake on even ground.
I typed out a response to his stream of pings.
We need to speak, Drake. I won’t let this go. I won’t let her go.
But no. I couldn’t put that. I couldn’t make my priorities obvious. I deleted the text and typed out an alternative.
We need to speak, Drake. Business needs attention. We both need to get our facts straight.
I hit send and lit up a cigarette at my desk, my throat tight from all the smoke I’d gulped down my neck already that evening.
And then I thought. I thought hard. I weighed up the avenues through which I could find my sweet girl in person and fight to get her back in my arms.
But there was no obvious avenue.
Drake had a bottomless pool of properties he could be holing my beautiful girl up in. He had manors dotted across the country, as well as several villas overseas. He had work buildings, and back alley retreats, and an ocean of business partner-clients whose locations he could cash in on.
My chances of rolling up at the right address and waltzing on in for a standoff were nothing better than finding a rat’s shit in a fucking giant haystack.
I rubbed my forehead, fighting back the shiver of guilt. Guilt at abandoning Paige without realising how vulnerable she was to Drake’s grasp. Guilt at dragging my brother into this carnage without even being forthcoming with my motivations in this sorry spectacle.
Guilt at the security team coming up against a much stronger force without so much as a hint the barrage was coming.
Guilt at being such a fucking idiot.
I finished up my cigarette before I clicked through to the scheduling screen, and then I saw it. My temples pounded worse than I imagined fucking Eric’s did as I scanned the listings.
Drake had fucking done it. He’d done it already.
He’d confirmed every client bid with a window of time for their appearance with their sixty-day acquisition. Paige was booked up, day by day in advance, slot after slot booked in with our vile filthy cunts of clients, their preferences mapped out in perfectly readable form.
Bondage. Whipping. Strangulation. Group action. Double penetration. Humiliation.
And worse.
So much fucking worse that I clicked right on back out of there.
I leaned back in my chair with my pulse racing strong, mouth dry, and I cursed myself for my own stupid part in this chaos.
If I really was the monster I’d been so keen to convince Miss Emmerson I was in this space, I’d have shrugged off my part in this mess and tried to rectify this shithole of a situation with Drake. I’d have written this off as a bad sixty-day project and put Paige’s sad outcome at having to fulfil her obligations with my prick of a business partner down to nothing more than fine print.
But I couldn’t.
I couldn’t because I was desperate to have the girl back in my grasp. I was desperate to have her at my side, her eyes locked on mine, her body mine to touch, to want, to command.
To protect.
That was the worst of the whole sorry shit storm. I wanted to protect her.
I knew it deep down. Knew it would have been the case regardless of the idiot hard lines I’d been maintaining through our developing closeness, that there was no way I’d be able to watch Paige take her punishment at another man’s hands. There was no way I’d have been able to stand aside and watch another man take his fill of that delicious body I’d come to crave so much with my own.