“I don't expect you to read my mind, Gabe. I expect you to think. Have a little emotional intelligence, you know?"
He sat back from his plate of pork chops and wiped his mouth. "Saff, I don't want to fight with you. We get one dinner, once a fucking month that you'll allow me, and this is what we're doing?"
“You started this. I didn't start the fight, Gabe."
"Oh sure. Your maturity is astounding."
“You know what, Gabe?" I slapped my napkin down. I really didn't want to have this fight today. Or any day for that matter. But I did need to know why Lachlan King was so good. Too good. How much did Gabe know? Was Lock a plant? That would mean that whole night I hadn't been able to get out of my head for three months wasn't real. And I just needed to know. I deserved to know that much."Where did you get Lachlan from? Where did you recruit him from, anyway?"
He frowned then. "Why do you care?"
"Jesus Christ, Gabe, can we just have one conversation where we don't fight?"
He sighed. “I'm not trying to fight with you." He watched me warily. “Fine, he’s a classic recruit from a Rogues family. His brother, Charleston, was a Rogue. And their grandfather was a Rogue as well. But Charleston died when he was twenty.”
“So you replaced one brother with another?” The night we were together, Lock told me all about his brother, how much he loved him, how much he'd idolized him, how much he longed to be like him.
"Not exactly. The old man has connections in Oversight. He wants one of his grandsons as a Rogue. I agreed to train him. That's it."
"And what, you discovered him just like that?"
"No. Not that it matters, but we've had our eye on him for a while. Recently, he got in a spot of trouble. He and his father disagreed about a business partnership. Lachlan refused to do business with someone, a good friend of his father's. He broke the deal. To add insult to injury, he took the man’s daughter naked kite surfing."
My lips twitched.
“You seem to like this one. Like you want him to stay. Like you're willing him to be good."
“I'm not willing anything. He is good."
Excitedly, my brother leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “You've been training since you were a kid. He's good in hand-to-hand, you have to admit it. He almost got you in the woods."
"He did. I'm not saying he didn't."
"And he saw through your disguise in the last exercise. He has a sixth sense.”
“You and I both know that's not how it works."
"Right. Well, I'm just saying he's a natural. He's only been training three months, and he's already that good."
My stomach turned because I could hear Gabe's glee at another billionaire Rogue. "Let me guess, he's been cut off and given a certain amount of time to get his act together, right? And what makes you think he's going to want to stay a Rogue?"
“I can see it in him. His focus.”
“Did you lead his acquisition team?”
He shook his head. "No. The old man had a crew from Oversight do it. He wanted to make sure his grandson was unharmed, of course. Not that he doesn't trust us, but you know… He doesn't trust us."
I coughed. If Oversight's team had gotten him, it wasn't me they were watching. Fucking hell. So that meant Gabe didn't know. Which meant I should not be the one to tell him. "Well, he's not bad."
"Not bad? He's almost as good as you are. Which is high praise, right, sis?"
“If you say so."
“I say so. Why don't you like him?"
“It's not that I don't like him. It's just the way he does things, I guess."
"Oh, come on, I can tell you don't like him. You're tense and you're stiff. This isn't you."