“Baker,” he said, sounding worried. “Are you okay?”
I gave Holt another small push, and his excited squeal filled the air around us. “Yeah, I’m fine. Holt’s fine. I have a favor to ask you.”
He waited without answering.
“I need a date to a wedding.”
Sixteen
I found you in this lifetime, I’ll find you in the next. Consider this your warning.
—Copper to Baker
COPPER
I was a nervous fucking wreck.
Why?
I had no clue.
I had no skin in this game. None of these people knew who I was, or how I wasn’t really Baker’s date.
Yet, just the idea of going with her on my arm had goddamn butterflies bursting to life inside of my belly.
I, a grown ass adult man that’d been to prison, was fretting about what to fucking wear to the rehearsal dinner.
I was still flabbergasted that she’d even asked me.
When she’d called, I hadn’t been able to stop myself from answering on the first ring.
I’d immediately agreed without finding out who this wedding was for, and when she told me not only was it formal, but also going to have the biggest “baddest” upper crust of society in attendance, my excitement had faded.
The bad thing was, I was one of those ‘biggest and baddest.’ Yet, I still didn’t want to go.
I hated those kinds of people.
I hated even more that I’d have to put on this fake smile and pretend like the business that my father had started was perfect.
It wasn’t perfect.
In the months that I’d had bury myself in work in hopes that it would stop me from thinking about a certain someone, I’d accomplished a lot.
In a matter of weeks, the business that my family and I had known for our entire lives would be no more.
I was going to piss off a bunch of people, mostly my board.
And I didn’t care.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’d slowly moved the staff that I cared about to a smaller company, one that had no shareholders, and no board to step on my toes.
It was under a name that wasn’t related to Castanon Enterprises at all and had solely been created to stop the corruption.
It had nothing to do with real estate, unless it was to help investigate those that were fucking others over in that field.
And, the best part, my father hadn’t had a hand in creating it.
I’d built it from the ground up with mostly Keely’s and Apollo’s help.
