“Nope. Like I said to him, I don’t give a shit who he is.”
“Nash, James has family high up in politics and can make your life hell with the connections he has. He really isn’t someone you want on your wrong side.”
“Babe, do I strike you as a man who is scared of anyone?”
She took a moment to think about it and then blessed me with a beautiful smile. “No, you don’t.”
I nodded. “Exactly. And I certainly don’t let motherfuckers like him scare me. I don’t want you worrying about him anymore; you let me do the worrying.”
Her shoulders sagged, and she took a long breath. Then she hit me with a piercing look; one that I knew meant something important was coming. “Nash, what’s with the turn around in attitude towards me. Until two days ago, you didn’t want anything to do with me, and now you’re offering to take on my problems.”
Moment of truth. “Madison sorted me out.”
“What does that mean?”
Fuck, I hated talking about this shit. But she wasn’t the kind of woman to let it go. “I talked to Madison about you; about us, and how badly I treated you. She told me to get my shit together and apologise to you. Seems to be something I’m doing a lot of lately.”
“You told Madison we slept together?”
“Yes, and that I fucked it all up by being a bastard to you when I couldn’t work out what the hell to do with our friendship after it.”
She fell silent so I continued. “Velvet, I don’t have a lot of friends like you. It was uncomplicated before we had sex and then it just felt all screwed up. Do you know where I’m coming from with this?”
“Yeah, I felt it too, Nash. But I was happy to forget the sex and just stay friends.”
I blew out a long breath and went with complete honesty. “I don’t know how to do that when all I can think about now is fucking you again.”
Her eyes widened. “Yeah, but you think the same thing about all women. You want to have sex with every woman you meet.”
“Not like this; this is something new for me, and I don’t know what to do with it.” My skin itched with irritation at every word I was uttering; laying yourself out like this was hard to do.
She ran her fingers through her hair and bit her lip. She seemed confused with the whole thing and I didn’t blame her; I’d been giving her mixed signals for weeks now. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this so I don’t really know what to say.”
“What do you want between us, Velvet?”
“I want what we had before we slept together.”
Maybe I’d left it too long to apologise, but I figured friends was a good place to start from again. “I want that too.”
“Good.” She smiled but it was forced and I wondered what she was hiding behind it.
“Now that we’ve got that sorted, tell me what the hell is going on with your ex.”
“James is going into politics and wants to pay me to keep my mouth shut if journalists ever come digging for dirt on him. I’ll never talk to them but I don’t need to be paid to do that. He doesn’t believe me and is trying to force me into taking the money.”
“You never fail to surprise me, Velvet.”
“Why’s that?”
“There’s so much good inside you but you don’t show it often. If people took the time, they’d see it but most people don’t fuckin’ bother to take the time. They skim the surface of a person and judge the outside layer. I see it in you but every now and then you surprise me with more.”
It wasn’t often I saw Velvet speechless but she was now. I let her take that in, and then continued, “So he wants you to agree to this within the next week?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll fuckin’ see about that. Don’t contact him, okay? Leave it with me.”
“Okay, but I’m not sure what you can do about it.”