LITMIR.BIZ

       One

      Liam Christopher tipped his head up and tracked the winking light of a jet above him. That could, for all he knew, be Brooks Abbingdon’s jet carrying Teresa away from him. The image of Teresa curled up in Brooks’s lap, him comforting her as she cried—because, hell, if anyone deserved to cry it was Teresa St. Claire—flashed on his retina and his grip tightened on the crystal tumbler in his hand. He heard a sharp crack and a second later, expensive liquor ran over his palm and under the wristband of his watch.

      Liam opened his hand and looked at the cracked glass and its sharp shards. Surprisingly, there was no blood. Transferring the broken glass from his hand to the coffee table on the balcony, he shook the droplets of his Manhattan cocktail off his hand before reaching for his pocket square and wiping the liquid away.

      Well, that was a waste of good booze. Liam looked back into the luxurious Presidential Suite of the Goblet Hotel and saw his friend Matt Richmond pacing the area between the designer sofas and the dining table. Matt was pissed and he had a right to be. His gala evening was ruined and would be long remembered for all the wrong reasons.

      And it was all Teresa’s fault. Well, not her fault exactly—she hadn’t known that her brother would show up and ruin months of work—but as the event planner, the buck stopped with her.

      Would her company recover from this? He doubted it. Would she? Teresa was tough but she’d had a couple of hard knocks lately. When Matt asked her to leave the retreat immediately, taking her brother with her, Teresa knew that her reputation was about to take another beating, and Liam understood why she felt the need to run. Why would she want to stay and witness the pitying looks, the cruel smirks, hear the caustic comments?

      She also wanted to run from him. And that, he understood most of all.

      Seeing movement in the room behind him, Liam turned his head to watch Nadia approach Matt, her eyes on her man. Matt was still on the phone but he held out his hand and Nadia tucked herself into his side, her arms encircling his waist. Matt dropped a kiss on her head before continuing his conversation. Liam’s stomach cramped with what he thought might be jealousy. He’d never believed in true love—hadn’t been exposed to it growing up—but maybe it did exist; maybe it was just as rare as hell. Matt had found his Holy Grail in Nadia but Liam wasn’t naive enough to believe that everybody, most especially him, would be that lucky.

      Love, he was convinced, wasn’t for him.

      Matt threw his phone onto the sofa behind him and pulled his wife into his body, burying his face in the crook of her neck. Although Nadia was a foot shorter than Matt, Liam knew that he was sucking strength from her, that Matt was leaning on her. They were a unit, taking turns to lead and to follow, to give and receive strength. They were two trees growing together, sharing soil and water, their branches and roots intermingling.

      It struck him that he and Teresa were two separate pine trees planted in a regimented row. They both stood tall, took the wind, never bent. They’d been planted too far apart—and too much had happened between them and to them—to bridge the gap to be able to even start to explore anything deeper than flash point sex.

      Liam turned away and walked to the edge of the balcony, gripping the balustrade with tight fingers. Maybe Teresa’s leaving, her breaking it off for good, was—as she’d said—what was best for her, him, Christopher Corporation. For everybody involved.

      And if that was true then why did he feel like week-old crap?

      Hearing Matt’s footsteps he turned his head and saw Matt approaching him, a bottle of bourbon in his hand. Matt raised his eyebrows at the broken glass and, without words, handed Liam the bottle. Liam took a hefty sip before dropping the bottle to his side, holding it in a loose grip. By the time dawn broke, he was going to be best buds with this bottle.

      “Where’s Nadia?”

      Matt leaned his butt against the railing and rolled his head from side to side to release the knots in his neck. Liam didn’t bother; his knots were now permanent residents. “She went to bed,” Matt replied. He glanced at his watch. “It is almost three in the morning.”

      “It was a hell of a night.” Liam took another hit from the bottle, ignoring his still-sticky hand. He glanced up, saw another jet and forced himself to meet Matt’s eyes. “I feel like I should apologize.”

      “For what?” Matt asked, his eyes and tone weary. “You didn’t cause Teresa’s brother to ruin my gala evening.”

      “Neither did Teresa,” Liam responded, needing to defend her.

      “Tell me about her brother,” Matt said, moving to the sofa and dropping down. He immediately tucked a pillow under his head and propped his feet up onto the coffee table.

      Ordinarily, Liam would never consider divulging someone else’s secrets but this was Matt, his best friend, and he trusted him implicitly. He also needed Matt’s sharp brain to help him make sense of what was, at this crazy hour, the senseless.

      “It’s a tangled mess but I’m going to tell you what I do know, gathered from what Teresa has told me, along with what my investigator dug up.

      “So years ago, Joshua, her brother, liked drugs and alcohol a little too much and got himself in debt with some unsavory characters. They offered him a job to pay off the money. He became a chauffeur—”

      “And he, knowingly or unknowingly, ferried drugs,” Matt finished for him.

      Matt was, by far, the sharpest tool in the shed. “Yep. He was busted and was jailed. Via Mariella Santiago-Marshall, Teresa employed the talents of The Fixer—”

      Matt whistled his astonishment. “I’ve heard of him. He’s—”

      Liam raised an eyebrow. “Effective?”

      “I was going to say ruthless but that works, too.”

      “Anyway,” Liam continued, “he got Joshua’s charges dropped, him out of jail and across the country. The kid didn’t learn and has raked up another huge gambling debt. A mafia-type organization has bought that debt from the original crew and it’s rocketed to an impossible sum.”

      “How much?”

      “Seven million dollars,” Liam replied. “Several weeks back Teresa was told that he’d been kidnapped but that turned out to be BS. Teresa’s been informed that she needs to repay his loan, but she doesn’t have that kind of cash, and they’ve never called her back, as far as I know.”

      “Pay it for her, offset it against the cost of the shares you are going to buy from her when she’s completed her yearlong mandatory stint on the board of Christopher Corporation,” Matt suggested. “As per the terms of your father’s will.”

      “Teresa is hoping that she can delay repaying them until she’s sold her shares. She wants to keep me out of the equation. Hell, maybe she’s shopping around for a better deal for the shares.” The thought of Teresa selling those shares to anyone else made his stomach whirl. If she did that, he would no longer have the thin sliver of control over Christopher Corporation he did now.

      “Nobody has given Teresa, or Joshua, a firm deadline for the repayment of the debt.”

      “Weird,” Matt agreed. “So it should be imperative that he keep his head down, even stay out of sight. Then why would Joshua crash a highly visible, live-streamed event?

      “What does Teresa think?” Matt asked, after a moment’s silence.

      “I don’t know

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