Offside

And when it came right down to it, despite all the shit they struggled with regarding bills, they were all pretty happy.

I looked up at Lucas and smiled.

“You are a shifty little bastard, aren’t you Lucas?” I kept smiling.

He chuckled softly, and I saw his posture relax. He thought he had me.

“When should all this go through?” I asked.

“By the end of the month.”

“Good.” I pushed my chair back away from his desk. “Once the transactions are all completed, you’re fired. I’ll give you the information on my new lawyer before then so you know where to send everything. Max is fired now—tell him not to contact me again. If I hear any more about this shit, I’ll turn you in. There’s plenty of evidence in Dad’s study to fuck your whole agency about six times over. I bet you’d do jail time.”

I had no idea if that was true or not, but I figured it was. I continued to smile as I watched Lucas go pale.

“I buried my father’s body two days ago,” I told him. “Today I bury the rest of his shit.”

He only stared at me with his palms flat against his desktop.

“Are we clear, Lucas?”

“I suppose we are,” he replied.

I left.

Shakespeare advised: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” But I was more intrigued by the idea of giving the shit away. I had the feeling a lot of people were going to resist it, but I also knew I could be pretty convincing. I’d win in the end.

I always did.

I wheeled myself out of the office and back to the car and my Rumple.

It was time to meet my real father.

“How did it go?” Nicole asked as she helped me back into the car. I shook my head.

“Can we save it for later?” I asked. “I’m kind of overwhelmed right now. If you want, though, you can warn Greg that I just won the fight over the bills.”

“What does that mean?”

“Forget it,” I said. “What time is it?”

“Almost noon.”

“Shit—will I be late?”

“I don’t think so.”

Nicole drove us over to the little restaurant where I was supposed to meet my biological father. I called him yesterday evening and set it all up. Nicole told me to take as much time as I wanted. She was going to the bookstore in the next block, and she could pretty much stay there all day without getting bored.

Nicole took me into the restaurant where we saw my newly-revealed father dancing from one foot to the other next to the hostess’s station. Nicole kissed my cheek and told me to call whenever I was ready to head home. I nodded and looked up into Thomas Gardner’s eyes.

Like a fucking mirror.

“Hey,” he said, and his hand went for his hair at the same time mine did. We both paused, smirked, and dropped our hands.

“This is kind of weird,” I said with a shrug.

“Yeah,” he agreed. His chest expanded with a deep breath, which he then let out through his nose. “Should we get a table?”