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“What?” I ask.
“Asking you to marry me. I know I sprung it on you, but I love you, Princess, and I couldn’t wait another minute.”
“No, no,” I rush to say. “I don’t regret it either. I love you, Hawthorn. You make me better. You make me worthy of your love. I don’t regret a single thing about us,” I blurt.
“You’ve always been worthy, you just didn’t know it,” he says, his earnest eyes daring me to believe him. “In a few weeks’ time, we’ll either have destroyed your parents or forgotten them. Either way, we’ll still be us, we’ll still be in love, and we’ll still have the brightest future ahead of us. No matter what happens, we’ve still won.”
“What did I do to deserve you?” I ask, suddenly really needing to know if it was luck, or fate, or just incredibly good timing that brought this man into my life when I needed him so badly.
“You asked.” He laughs. “You barged into my room uninvited, and you asked.”
“That simple?”
“That simple.”
* * *
One month later
“Forty percent,” Kip shouts, his hand held triumphantly above his head as he strolls across the cafeteria toward our table. “Forty percent. The only holdout is Ligada.”
“That’s Geoffrey ’s company.”
Kip nods. “Fucking Bancroft is refusing to even discuss selling, we can’t even get a chance to put an offer to him, and he holds the final nine percent. It’s not the end of the world if we don’t get them, we’re still the biggest majority shareholders except for whoever inherits your great-grandfather’s estate.”
“Should we meet with him and try to sway him in person?” I ask.
“That’d mean revealing that it’s us that wants to buy the shares,” Gulliver says, his voice low and thoughtful.
“We could be blatant and just lay it out for him.” I shrug.
“It could work, but considering he offered you and Izzy a threesome at the party, it stands a chance I might beat the shit out of him before he can agree to sell if he’s a douche again,” Gulliver growls as Hawthorn nods in violent agreement.
“I’ll go and meet with him,” Davis says, leaning back in his seat and lifting his bottle of water to his lips as he shrugs nonchalantly.
“Why?” Izzy asks the question that was already on my lips.
“I’ll flirt a bit, see if I can convince him to sell.”
“Flirt?” I squeak.
“I’m an equal opportunity kind of guy, Pen,” he says with an exaggerated wink.
“Wait, you’re bi?” Izzy asks, her eyes wide with shock while the guys snicker.
Davis shrugs. “I don’t like labels, but if I had to, I’d consider myself pansexual. Like I said, I’m equal opportunity.”
“The guy’s a pig,” I shriek. “You can’t have sex with him.”
“Whoa,” he says, lifting his hands in front of him. “Who said anything about me fucking him? I’ll go and flirt a little, admit it’s me who wants the shares, and see if that makes a difference. I’m not going to fuck that nasty dude.”
A burst of nervous laughter falls from my lips. “Oh, thank God, because we really don’t need those shares enough for you to do that.”
“The annual Rhodes Corp. board meeting is in two weeks’ time, if we can get Bancroft’s shares by then, we can attend the meeting and present our recommendations to the board. If it works, we could have your dad fired and humiliated by the end of the month,” Hawthorn says quietly, his steady gaze locked on me.
Since the party a month ago, I’ve been in a perpetual state of anxiety, waiting for my parents to attack and drop the next bomb, but it’s been unnervingly quiet. Hawthorn and I shared our engagement photos, we had his family join us for some shots, and then we took group pictures of the six of us, then ones with all the guys’ families. The fact that we excluded our parents couldn’t have been a bigger slap in the face, especially as the pictures ran in all the society pages. A New Dynasty is Born was the headline that ran alongside the pictures, with details of both mine and Izzy’s engagements.
Gulliver’s guy is keeping track of our parents, so we know they’re still in Green Acres, but the silence from them feels like the lull before the storm.
