Page 67 of Our Chaotic Love Affair

I stared at her reflection. “I beg your pardon.”

“One-on-one time before you leave Rome. A genuine conversation.” She kept moving the wipe over her face. I was mesmerized by the transformation. “She’s clearly miserable with him. She wanted access to someone who seemed like an alternative. I gave her reason to believe she might get that access if she talked.”

“You offered me up,” I said. “To the wife of a business associate. As what, exactly?”

“A listening ear.”

“Cleo.”

“I said what I needed to say to get the information. That’s how negotiation works.”

“I can’t be seen meeting privately with Rossi’s wife. Do you understand how that looks? Whatever he’s planning, if I’m photographed with her, if there’s any suggestion that I am having some illicit affair with her, that could destroy us faster than any scandal he’s cooking up.”

“You don’t have to do it.” She turned from the mirror to face me directly. “I made a promise I had no intention of keeping. She gave me the information. We left. She gets nothing.”

“So now I’m associated with a lie.”

“You’re associated with getting out of a very bad situation before it got worse. You have information that protects your family’s business.” She tilted her head. “I’d call that a net positive.”

“And the commitment made in my name to a woman whose husband is planning to frame Bancroft Holdings is what?”

“It was never real.” She turned back to the mirror. “Nobody’s holding you to it. What’s she going to do? Tell her husband she betrayed him so she could get five minutes with you? That’s not going to go over well. She walked into the situation. I told a little white lie. Have you ever watched any true crime documentaries?”

“What?”

Once again, she was drifting into another topic.

“Interrogators often tell little white lies like the other guy is talking or the murdered man isn’t actually dead and he’s talking. It’s a tactic. An effective one.”

“I’m holding myself to the promise you made.” I heard the edge in my own voice and didn’t move to soften it. “I don’t lie. I don’t make commitments I don’t intend to honor. That’s not how I operate.”

She glanced at me in the mirror. “Cash, that’s ridiculous. It’s not like we shook on it.”

“I brought you here because I thought you understood the stakes.” The words were laced with my barely contained frustration. “This isn’t a game. This isn’t content for your social media strategy. This is my family’s name. We’ve always handled these situations with careful consideration.”

“Careful?” She turned fully now. “You’re calling tonight careful? You walked into that meeting without knowing what Rossi was actually planning. You were about to have a visible argument with him in a room full of people who would have had photographs up before the dessert course. You needed me to pull you out of that, and I did, and somehow I’m the problem?”

“You made a promise in my name without asking me.”

“And you flew me to Rome to be your fake fiancée without asking me.” The words were direct hits. “You decided what role I was playing and told me after the fact. So we’re both working with imperfect information about what the other person signed up for.”

I gritted my teeth.

“From everything I’ve seen of Bancrofts and what I’ve observed this weekend, the family has a rich history of image management and creative truth-telling when it serves their purpose. So don’t stand there and tell me you’re too principled for a little white lie that had no teeth. Quit being so damn self-righteous. It’s not a good look on you.”

“I am not my family’s history.” My voice was calm in the way it got when I was furious. “I have spent a lifetime building a reputation that is specifically not that. I am not my father. I am not my brothers or cousins. I’m not a fucking tabloid headline.”

Cleo looked at me. “No one said you were. You dragged my ass halfway around the world to help you. I did that, so back off.”

“You behaved like a child playing under the table while the adults handled the actual business,” I said. “Like this was all interesting material to collect and turn into a story. Do you understand what’s actually at stake here? Or is everything just content to you?”

The silence that followed crackled with electricity. Cleo looked at me and I knew immediately I was staring at the calm before the storm. She was about to unleash holy terror on me.

I probably deserved it but shit. It was going to get bad.

“A spoiled brat,” she said. Her voice was quiet too. “That’s what you think you’re dealing with.”

“I think you’re talented and impulsive and you made a decision tonight that could complicate an already complicated situation.”