Darkly (Follow Me 4)

I take another sip. “I figured as much.”

“Skye told you?”

“Not in those words. She just said she was now unemployed. She’s getting some outside work, but Skye isn’t the type to leave a sure thing until she’s got another steady income.”

“Addie’s really pissed off about some cosmetics deal.”

I nod. “I know. Skye’s better off away from Addie and her toxicity.” Addie’s comments on Skye’s post race back into my mind. Just thinking about them gets anger rustling through me.

“I won’t argue with you there,” Ben says. “You ever going to level with her? About Addie?”

“Why should I? It’s in the past.”

“Yeah, but it’s got a lot to—”

“Stop right there,” I say, using my best big-brother voice. It still works sometimes, believe it or not. “I don’t talk about it. I don’t think about it. Some things are better left buried. We worked hard to make sure it would never surface.”

“We did.”

“So I don’t need you spouting off about honesty and trust and all that other bullshit. Skye and I aren’t in a relationship, so those things have no bearing. Case closed.”

The big-brother voice works.

Ben drops it.

But all I can think about during the rest of the flight are my own words.

Skye and I aren’t in a relationship.

They’re certainly true, as far as she knows. I made it clear we could date but there would be no relationship.

In my heart, though?

I want more than Skye’s control.

I want more than Skye’s submission.

I want more than Skye’s humor, brilliance, and beauty.

I want more than Skye’s energy.

I want her love.

…

I got all of an hour of shut-eye before the meeting with Foster McCain, a surly Irishman who actually came to us eight years ago offering to take our initial products into Europe. At that time we had better offers, so we declined, but McCain got a deal with three companies in China to manufacture knockoffs of our goggles, Black, Inc.’s flagship product. We sued—nearly depleting our coffers—and won, but at that point, McCain had made a shit ton of money in bitcoin and didn’t care anyway. Now he’s the Warren Buffet of the UK, and he’s started his own Berkshire Hathaway competitor, McCain Global.

In short, I don’t like him.

Neither does Ben.

Neither does Dimitri.

But we like his money. After we won our lawsuit, McCain took the high road and got out of the knockoff business. He used his bitcoin fortune for good instead of evil, and now McCain Global owns some prime property in the UK that we want to get our hands on. We’re willing to pay top dollar, but we need to get it yesterday.

Dimitri, Ben, and Dimitri’s right-hand woman, Lizzie McCullough—we hope Lizzie’s Irish surname will win us some points—sit in the smallest of our seven conference rooms.

My idea. McCain may come with an assistant, but we have four people at the table. Ben, Dimitri, and I are big guys, and Lizzie’s near six feet herself.