“A lot of things,” I say, and avoiding the past we share, I hold out my hands. “You’ve done so much. You’re brilliant. They all know that. We need you.”
“We or Gigi?”
“We need you, but Gigi said to tell you she’s begging. This is her life’s work. She’s terrified of losing it.”
His brutal perfect mouth quirks. “I’d almost be willing to go there just to watch her beg like my mother did for help.”
His mother who killed herself. What was I thinking coming here? “This was a mistake. I should have just told her we’d find another way.” I try to turn away but he catches my elbow, heat radiating up my arm. My gaze rockets to his and that connection I’d felt to him six years ago is present and accounted for, thickening the air between us.
“If there’s another way,” he says, “why come to me?”
“People died, and you’re a genius, literally. You also have an understanding of the company, a connection, your family.”
“Family? Like being the stepbrother who gave you an orgasm?”
“Now you’re just being an asshole and you have a right. I get that, too, but I didn’t do any of the things they did to you. Like I said. This was a mistake. Forget I was here.” I jerk away from him and rush for the door, feeling as if my heart is going to explode in my chest on the way. I reach for the knob, escape only seconds away.
Eric is suddenly behind me, his hand on the door, his big body crowding mine, so close that I can almost feel his body heat. “Tell me why you’re really here.”
I rotate to face him and that’s a mistake. He?
??s overwhelmingly right here, in front of me. “Just let me leave.”
He studies me for several intense beats, those blue eyes so damn probing and intelligent. “You had to know that I wasn’t going to help.”
“I know that, but I had to try. People have died.”
“You came here because people have died.”
“I keep saying that.”
“But it’s not everything. It’s not the whole reason.”
“It’s the reason I was willing to come here and I know you might not believe me, but considering our past, this wasn’t easy for me.”
“Because I left or because you regret what happened between us?”
“Does it matter? I was one of them to you then and I’m one of them now.”
He considers me for a long few beats. “I know that you have a trust fund from your father. Take it and run. Get the hell out now because you’re right, even watching from a distance, and I am, there’s a problem at Kingston.”
I have a fleeting moment of fear that he knows because he’s somehow involved, but I shove that idea away. He’s not behind this. I know too much about what really is happening to believe he’s behind this. “What do you know that I don’t know?”
“To get out. I got out. You need to as well.”
“I don’t get my trust fund until I turn thirty-five and my mother loaned it to your father.”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“No. No, I’m not.”
“Then leave them and come here. I’ll give you a job. You can make your way just like I did. Unless you don’t trust your ability to make your own way?”
“I was planning to leave. I told your grandmother right before her heart attack.”
“And that made you feel guilty?”
“What part of people have died do you not understand? I can’t just walk away and your grandmother really has changed. She’s old. She can’t handle this alone.”