Points’ property, was worth a cool hundred million, and I was, again technically, the CEO of it.
On paper?
I looked seamless.
The businessman who sported hundred thousand dollar watches and had a house in the Hamptons. No one save the Points and my CPA knew where the money came from. I liked that because, fuck, I had no intention of switching this pad for a lock-up in Riker’s Island.
Still, this project cut close to home, and the reasoning was fucking pathetic.
I’d never admit it to any of the O'Donnellys. The bastards were like family to me, and if I admitted to this, they’d never let me hear the end of it.
Extortion?
I usually doled that out to someone else’s to do list. Someone with a far lower paygrade than me, someone expendable. But the minute I’d heard of the troublesome tenant who was refusing to sell her lot to us? After not one, not two, not even three attempts with higher prices?
Five outright refusals?
The challenge to convince her otherwise had overtaken me.
See, I liked stubborn in women.
I liked fucking it out of them.
Throw in the fact the woman’s name was Aoife? It had been enough to get me sending someone out to follow her.
If she’d been fifty with as many chins as she had grandchildren, she’d have been safe from me.
But she wasn’t.
She was, as Aidan had correctly stated, my kryptonite. All milky flesh with gleaming auburn hair that I wanted to tie around my clenched fist. Her soft features with those delicate green eyes that sparkled when she smiled and were like wet grass when she was mad, acted like a punch to my gut.
Now?
My interest hadn’t just been piqued.
It had fucking imploded.
Yeah, I was thinking with my cock, but what man, at the end of the day, didn’t?
I’d just have to be careful. Just have to make sure I put pressure on the right places, make sure she’d bend and not break, and the old bastard in the pictures was my key to just that.
See, every third Tuesday of the month, Aoife Keegan had a habit of traipsing across Manhattan to the Upper East Side. There, at three PM on the dot, she’d enter a discreet little boutique hotel and wouldn’t leave until nine PM that night.
Five minutes after she arrived and left, the same man would leave, too.
At first, when Jimmy O’Leary had told me that Senator Alan Davidson was at the hotel, I hadn’t thought anything of it.
Why would I?
Senators trawled for donations in fancy hotels every fucking day of the week. It was the true luxury of politics. Sure, they made it look real good for the press. Posing in derelict neighborhoods and shaking hands with people who did the fucking work . . . all while they lived it up large with women half their age in two thousand dollar a night suites.
My mouth firmed at that.
Was Aoife selling herself to the Senator?
The thought pissed me off.
I couldn’t see why she’d do such a thing. Not when I’d looked into her finances, had seen just how secure she was. But maybe that was why. Maybe the Senator was funneling money to her.
The only problem was that the lot Aoife owned—did I mention it was owned outright? Yeah, that was enough to chafe my suspicions, too, considering she was only twenty-fucking-five years old—was a teashop in a small building in a questionable area of HK.
I mean, come on. I loved Hell’s Kitchen. It was home. But fuck. Where she was? What kind of Senator would put his fancy piece in that?
My jaw clenched as I studied the Senator’s and Aoife’s smiling faces as they left the hotel. Separately, of course. But whatever they’d been doing together, it sure put a Cheshire Cat grin on their chops–that was for fucking sure. Jimmy being a dumbass, hadn’t put the two together, had just remarked on the ‘coincidence,’ but I was no fool.
How did I know they were together in the hotel?
Jimmy had been trailing Aoife for four months—told you I was obsessive—and every third Tuesday, come rain or shine, this little routine had jumped out, and when Jimmy had picked up on the fact Davidson had been there each and every time, I’d gotten my hands dirty, bribed one of the hotel maids myself—and fuck, that had been hard. Turned out that place made even the maids sign NDA agreements, but everyone had a price—and I’d found out that my little obsession shared a suite with the old prick.