“I don’t know. She’s not perfect?”
“Exactly. You should settle down. Marry her.”
“Coming from you, that’s a good joke.”
I grin at him and shrug. “You never know. Might be changing.”
“Doubt it.”
I give him a quick tour of the place. We look at the conference room, at the cubes, at the offices. He introduces himself to pretty much everyone we meet, since they’re just as much his employees as they are mine, even if the office is mostly my project. He shakes hands, easy and charming, like a fish in water.
We stop just at Val’s cube. I’m a little tense, but she doesn’t look surprised when she turns and shakes his hand. “Nice to meet you,” she says.
“You’re the one he keeps talking about,” Darin says and looks at me. “What is it about this one, huh?”
“She’s smart,” I say. “She’s going to make us all rich.”
Val grins at us. “I’ll make myself rich first, boys.”
We both laugh and I can tell Darin likes her. He eyes are like he wants to strip her down and I get a sudden, intense pang of anger that rings through me. I have to physically step back to make sure he doesn’t notice…
But Val does. She catches my eye and frowns slightly.
“Okay, well, nice to meet you,” Darin says and turns away. I lead him over to my office and we step inside. “Holy shit, dude. That girl is really hot.”
I tense. “Which one?”
“Uh, Val? The redhead? I wonder if the—”
“If you say anything about her carpet, I swear to god.”
He stares at me and laughs. “Are you in love with her or something?”
“No. It’s just a dumb joke.”
“All right then. Well, she’s really fucking sexy. Do you mind if I take a run at her? Who knows, maybe she’ll let me get a peek up that skirt in the break room.”
I turn away from him. I’m trembling with fury. He can’t know how I feel about Valerie, and if he did, I know he wouldn’t say any of this.
But hearing it doesn’t feel good.
“I’d stay away from her,” I say through clenched teeth.
“Yeah? Something wrong?”
“No. She’s just… she’s an employee. You can’t date employees.”
He snorts. “Yeah, good one.”
“I’m serious.” I turn back to him. “Leave that one alone.”
He looks at me and frowns for a second. “Yeah, okay, man, sure.”
I take a breath and slowly let it out. I force a smile on my face. “Anyway, she’s out of your league.”
He laughs but there’s no joy behind it. “Right. Too hot for me. I’ll stick to losers like Aimee.”
“Perfect.” I go and sit at my desk. He takes a seat in a chair in front of me.
“So listen,” he says, taking out his phone. He checks his messages while he talks. It’s a habit that drives me insane, but he manages to multitask without losing track of what he’s doing at least. “I was speaking to my associates.”
“Which ones?”
“Dee Morra and Carmine Caro.”
I cock my head. “The men I met with? I didn’t know you were associates.”
“Those are the ones.” He looks up. “I want to meet with them again.”
I lean back in my chair. I knew this was coming sooner or later, but I didn’t expect him to start out with it so hard again.
I can’t remember him ever pushing a client this hard before, but I also can’t remember ever turning someone down that he recommended. If he’s brought mobsters into our company in the past, I’m sure I never even noticed. His only mistake this time was getting me involved at all. Otherwise, I bet I still wouldn’t have noticed. And when Val came clean to me, I might’ve been a lot less willing to work with her.
“If you want to go, you can go,” I say. “No need to include me.”
“But you know they want you involved. They don’t want to sign with us if you’re going to be uncomfortable with it.”
I shift a little in my seat. “It’s not that I’m uncomfortable—”
He laughs at me and looks up from his phone. “Oh, shit, man. As soon as I mentioned them, you immediately looked like you wanted to jump out a window.”
“It’s not like that.” I frown at him. “I just want to follow the rules.”
“There are no rules against us keeping our clients confidential.”
“Confidential is one thing. Keeping no paperwork on their identity? How would we even do that? We need to report something to the IRS, for example.”
“I’ll take care of that,” he says, waving a hand. “We’ll have something on file for them, obviously.”
“But what, exactly?”
He sighs and throws up his hands. “I don’t know, man, fuck.”
“See, that’s my problem.”
“Look, just come meet with us again, okay? I promise they’re decent guys. Clearly that first meeting went poorly, but we’ll do better this time.”
“I don’t know.”
He puts his phone down and looks at me. “Listen, Jacob. Have I ever fucked you over?”