“Grip, where’d you get that?”
“Oh, it came with my breakfast this morning.” He slides a slip of paper across the table to me. “Along with this.”
Your queen or mine?
Park
er’s scrawled words may as well be carved into my skin. That’s how much they hurt, how badly Grip reading them hurts. I must be bleeding subcutaneously. Just under my skin, I’m hemorrhaging pride and self-respect.
“I can explain.” I look from the damning note, the gilded evidence glimmering against the cheap wood. “Parker and I, we aren’t—”
“I know you aren’t cheating, so don’t even bother explaining that,” Grip says. “We’re so far beyond that. What does he want? Besides for me to know he’s using me to get to you?”
How much should I tell him? I have no idea.
“Don’t think about lying to me.” His glance peels my skin back, and any lie I would tell him crumbles under that stare.
I have to tell him everything. I wanted to do this on my own because I knew Grip and Rhyson would try to stop me. Of course, they would. It’s insanity to even consider what Parker has proposed. It’s demeaning and soul-destroying.
And I have every intention of doing it and whatever it takes to get Grip out of here and his name cleared.
“Parker was at my house when I got home last night.”
He flattens his hands on the table. His fingers twitch, but there’s no other indication that he hears. That my words might infuriate him.
“He . . . he admitted that he did this. That he has at least one high-ranking judge, probably more, in his pocket. This case isn’t going anywhere unless he says so.”
“Again I ask, what does he want?”
There’s no curiosity behind the question. He already knows and just wants to hear me say it.
“He wants what he’s always wanted.” I force myself to look at him. “He wants me.”
“He wants you to marry him?” Grip asks dispassionately.
“No, he says he’d never marry me now that I’ve ‘soiled myself publicly with you.’”
“Well, at least there’s that.” The tight line of Grip’s mouth loosens just a little. “So then what?”
“He wants to take me to the Amalfi Coast today.”
All pretense that he doesn’t care, that he knows everything, disappears. Urgency charges the stale air in the small visiting room.
“Today?” he demands. “What’s his plan?”
“We’ll have . . .” The word sits so foul, queued up and rotting on my tongue. I press my lips together against emotion and tears so I can go on. “Sex, we’ll have sex on the upper deck of his yacht.”
I push the words up my throat, as heavy as a boulder up a hill. “And the reporter who leaked the Vegas pictures will leak pictures of us . . . together.”
“Fuck!” He bangs the table, the sound echoing like a clanging cymbal. It rattles my teeth. “You won’t.”
I keep my head lowered. I figure it isn’t a good time to remind him he isn’t the boss of me. We have so little time before I have to go, and I don’t want to spend it arguing about something that, in my mind, is done. Is happening.
“Look at me, Bristol.”
I clutch my conviction and raise my eyes to his.
“You are not doing this. Not for me.” He does take my hand then, both of them between his, and squeezes. “We’ll find another way.”