Money was taken from some piles and dropped into others. It was the nature of the business.
Bates helped himself to the decanter of scotch then relaxed in his leather chair around the conference table.
I shut the folder in front of me, partially thinking about the money I’d just made and partially thinking about the woman I’d fucked two days ago. Still hadn’t heard a word from her. She hadn’t come to the estate to continue decorating it.
She just disappeared.
“What’s on your mind?” Bates asked. “Money or pussy?”
“What if it’s neither?”
He chuckled before he took another drink. “It’s never neither. Which is it?”
I’d been thinking about pussy a lot more than money lately. “Siena.”
“And what’s new with her? Haven’t seen her around lately.”
“Neither have I.” I ignored my scotch because I wasn’t in the mood for booze. A cigar would be nice, but I didn’t have the energy to get up and fetch one. Giovanni was always two seconds away, but I was too proud to have the man wait on me hand and foot.
“Really?” he asked. “That’s interesting.”
I didn’t do much kissing and telling. Bates knew about my rendezvous because he usually witnessed them directly, but I rarely mentioned them out of context. I’d finally had Siena and assumed I would forget about her now that her name was carved into my bedpost. But I was even more confused than I had been before. “She stayed over the other night.”
Bates watched me, his hostility slowly filling the room. “How’d that go?”
I skipped the details. “I haven’t stopped thinking about her.”
“Then it went really well. You’re usually bored by the time you get into the shower.”
I definitely wasn’t bored this time. She was the only woman in my bed, and that seemed to be perfect for me. My fingers drummed against the table as I pictured the way she looked underneath me. With her ass in the air and her face pressed into the sheets, she was the sexiest thing in the world.
Bates studied me for a moment longer. “I was hoping this interest would burn out like all the others.”
I knew my brother was suspicious of her, but I believed she was harmless. If she really had negative intentions, she wouldn’t be so cold and distant. It seemed like she genuinely hated me, but her attraction to me kept her in place. She wasn’t like the others, the ones who threw themselves at me in the hope something would stick. “She’s harmless, man.”
Just like every other time he made a speech, he sighed before he spoke. “I did some digging. I didn’t like what I found.”
“How many parking tickets does she have?”
Bates didn’t laugh. “I’m serious, Cato. She’s Siena Russo.”
Was that name supposed to mean something to me? “Russo is a common surname, Bates.”
“She’s the daughter of Stefan Russo.”
Now that name did mean something to me. Stefan had a drug enterprise. He smuggled his goods in cigars. He’d asked me for money on many occasions, but I always turned him down because we could never agree on a mutually beneficial interest rate.
Bates held my gaze, knowing this information was important. “You don’t think it’s a strange coincidence that she follows you around and gets a job working where you sleep almost every night?”
I was the most paranoid man on the planet. I didn’t trust anyone—except my own brother. Even then, that was difficult to do sometimes. “You think this woman is here to take me down? What’s she going to do, Bates? She can’t get a gun past security, and she certainly couldn’t fight me off. Even if she did, how is she going to get me out of here? I admit it’s a weird coincidence, but that doesn’t mean she’s guilty of anything.”
Bates tensed visibly like a snake, as if he wanted to lunge at me with a knife raised. “I know you like pussy, but come on. How stupid are you?”
“I’m not stupid. I’m just not afraid of a woman who’s a little over five feet tall. She’s been working at that gallery for five years, so it’s not like this was all some setup. If it is, then she and her father have been plotting this for a long time.”
“Actually, she hasn’t spoken to her father in five years. When her mother passed away, they stopped speaking.”
I hardly knew this woman so I shouldn’t care about her feelings, but sympathy immediately tugged on my heart. Not only did she lose her mother, but she also lost her