I don’t know if it was his tone—exactly the same clipped, taciturn tone he’d been holding since the moment I first met him—or the actual information, but something about the answer thawed me a little. Sure, he was a little annoying and yes, he’d been trying to buy my family’s company, but he was a man about to get his wedding date tattooed on himself. A man I’d seen with both his wife and his family. Arguably, if not annoyingly, a pretty good dude. Which made it a lot harder to keep being mean to him.
I sighed, thawing a little. “Alright then. What are you waiting for? Sit back.”
Pushing a look over his shoulder, he glared, but I could tell through the scowl that this one was different. He was hesitating. “Will it… hurt?”
I felt a small smile tug on the side of my mouth. “Where do you want it?”
Turning further toward me, he patted the top of his chest, his eyes falling to the needles of my devices once more. Everyone focuses on the needles at first.
I shook my head to ease his worry. “Not too bad. But we have a bear you can hold for moral support if you want it.”
“Don’t push it, Harper,” he snapped as he settled back into the chair and I started running through the motions of prepping his skin for tattooing.
“Don’t call me Harper.”
“Why?”
I’m sure the look I gave him was as flat as a pancake. “Your sister calls me Harper.”
And that’s all I would say about that.
The image of her shot through my mind like a star, mocking me and asking me what the hell I was doing here with her brother of all people when I’d promised her things that night in her parents basement. Promised us things. I shook my head out of it. The sooner I got this done, the sooner I could get to her.
Speaking of soon. This guy needed to breathe soon, if he was going to make it through this tattoo.
“Here,” I grumbled as I sat Roger, the emotional support bear, in his lap. “Squeeze that and breathe. It’ll feel like faint scratching as I do the outline and rougher scratching when I fill it in. It’s a fast tattoo, but I have to stencil the image first, so you have about ten minutes to wrap your head around the idea. Shape up. I am not peeling your ass off the floor because you fainted on a numbers tattoo.”
He winced. “Would that be pathetic?”
I gave him one of his own looks. “Yes.”
Letting out a long breath, he took the bear up in his hands and fixed his eyes above the room, focusing on the ceiling as he settled into the chair. As promised, I let him settle for a few minutes. The stencil actually only took that long, but if he was nervous, maybe he’d appreciate a little extra time before going under the needle.
“Well?” I asked. “Are you going to tell me why you’re here? Iknow you didn’t just buy out the place to have an evening alone with me.”
“Do you know the details of the deal I was negotiating with your parents?” he asked. This guy really didn’t like to mince words.
I wouldn’t either, especially not for this conversation. “No.”
“Your parents were willing to sell me your proprietary designs for three different machinery components including the one you share with your sister for a bargain price with the contingency that we take the whole SHarper Designs division as our own,” he said.
“Yeah, so?” I asked, not understanding.
“So,” he paused as he watched my hands move above his body, holding up the stencil for his inspection and approval. When he nodded, I got to work laying it on. “So, it’s worth at least ten times more than that when it works in conjunction with the software your sister produced. The one that shestill owns.”
“Okay?”
“While you handed over your ownership rights years ago, her ownership has never been acquired by SHarper. It still belongs to her, and your product is only half as valuable as that,” he said.
He was just telling me things I already knew, and if this was really the reason he was holding me up from my real destination today, I was going to take a rain check. I’d refund him his money from my own pocket if I had to.
“Look man, I don’t know you well, but if you’re just here to practice your pitch on me, then?—”
“To acquire the other portion of ownership, your parents were going to have to presume your sister as dead… Officially,” he said, cutting me off matter-of-factly.
My fingers stalled, my chest constricting in a knot so painful, so out of nowhere, I had to cough to clear it out.
Like a bull, he charged forward. “It’s been enough years, and they were willing to sell us everything for a fraction of its worth just to have some closure on the situation.”
