But May wasn’t afraid of his threats. “We sure are surly since coming home.”
He gave her a stern stare.
Still undaunted, May only leaned in closer. Women were like bloodhounds catching the scent of a fox when it came to acquiring knowledge they felt men were withholding from them. “So who was she?”
“Who?”
“You had some girl while you were in San Francisco.”
“I didn’t have anyone,” he replied, then decided to throw her a bone in the hopes that it would be enough to satisfy her curiosity. “She was just a fucktoy.”
A fucktoy he had called his pet for four, nearly five fucked-up days.
May sat back and eyed him carefully. “What was her name?”
The waitress came back with his drink, handing it to him instead of setting it down on the table so that their fingers would have to touch. Noticing, May rolled her eyes.
“You have a target on your back, brother,” May said. “The girls here probably all think you’re some prospective mitsugu kun... Are you?”
Her question surprised him. May knew that unless a woman was family, Ben didn’t tend to keep any woman around for long, and he certainly wasn’t anyone’s mitsugu kun, or sugar daddy.
“This fucktoy in California. What’s her name?”
“Why do you want to know?” he returned.
“Just curious.”
“Liar.” If he gave her a name, she would head straight to the internet to look up all that she could on Kimani Taylor.
She wrinkled her nose as he imbibed his kuusu, a distilled alcohol not unlike single-malt scotch.
“The fact that you won’t give up her name means she was more than just a fucktoy,” May shot back.
“I knew her all of four and a half days. She was just a fucktoy.”
An expensive fucktoy that had cost him two hundred thousand dollars. After the stunt Jake had pulled, he ought to have asked for his money back, but he didn’t want to have anything more to do with the wanker. And with the net worth of the Lee family at thirteen billion dollars, two hundred thousand was nothing to fret over.
Except Ben didn’t treat real money like play money. He opted for the finer things in life but had heard enough stories of how his grandparents could only afford to purchase meat for dinner once a week to understand that wealth was something to cherish, not squander on frivolous purchases.
Paying two hundred thousand dollars to have sex with a woman for a week was frivolous. But it hadn’t felt frivolous at the time. He’d told himself that it was partly because he hadn’t trusted Jake with her. He was being a bloody good Samaritan.
But that didn’t explain everything. If he had only been acting out of altruism, he could have also purchased Claire, the other woman Jake had bid on and won through the Scarlet Auction. But he had only wanted Kimani. And to seal the deal without any hesitation from Jake, he had offered an exorbitant amount of money.
“Just like Yuki,” he finished.
May, however, wasn’t finished. She returned his pointed stare. “Now who’s the liar?”
He downed the rest of the kuusu and considered calling it night, but May wasn’t done challenging him.
“Growing up, we told each other everything. You’ve never kept anything from me before.”
“I don’t tell you about every woman I choose to fuck, and you don’t tell me about every woman you choose to fuck.”
“True. But if you wanted to know the name of one, I’d tell you.”
He could see that she wasn’t going to let it go. He breathed out heavily through his noise. “She said her name was Montana.”
“Isn’t that the name of one of the states? Somewhere in the middle of America?”