I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“My sister does not need your fucking money.”
“What are you talking about?”
“LP Mayweather could buy and sell all of you dickheads five times over.”
“LP Mayweather?” I turned the name over in my mind. It was triggering some sort of memory, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Of course, Lucy Prudence Mayweather (Lucy hated the Prudence bit, but Hetty had insisted on naming her after a great aunt) was LP Mayweather, but there was something else – something I wasn’t getting. “Mike, I?—”
“Work it out for yourself,” he said dismissively. “I’ve got to say that given the man you’ve become, it’s not a big fucking surprise that you’ve taken very little interest in my sister beyond fucking and firing her. Moretti scum through and through. Blood will out, I suppose. Shame, though, I used to think you were a decent bloke and I never thought you’d turn into your old man.”
“Mike,” I said in a hollow voice. “I just need to see Lucy. Is she?—?”
“You stay away from my family,” he said, fury lacing histone. “Stick with your own kind, you entitled, upper-class prick.”
He spun around and stormed off then. When I followed him, he turned, planted one of his large hands in the middle of my chest and gave me a shove. I managed to hold my footing. Mike was forgetting all the times we’d kicked each other’s arses as kids. I wasn’t the soft London wanker he thought, but I wasn’t going to prove that now. I held my hands up, palms forward in surrender.
“Mike, I don’t want a fight,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. I needed to see Lucy, and Mike was clearly the route to doing that. Mike snorted.
“I bet you don’t.” He turned to leave again, and I grabbed his arm.
“Please,” I was begging now as he spun around with a furious expression, ready to punch me again. “Please, Mike. I just want to see if she’s okay. I swear I didn’t know anything about what happened. I’m going out of my mind here.”
Some of the angry tension left Mike’s body. I felt his muscles relax slightly under my grip and he lowered his clenched fist.
“Felix,” he said, his voice losing a little of its hard edge. I thought it was a good sign that he was using my first name. “She’s not going to talk to you now.”
“But—”
“Listen,” he said, turning fully towards me as I dropped my hand from his arm. “If the man I knew is still in there, then he’ll give her some goddamn space. She can’t handle you right now. If you really care about her, you won’t bulldoze your way into seeing her just to make yourself feel better. Even you can’t be that much of a selfish prick.”
I felt myself deflating. He was right. Rationally, I knew he was right. But the problem was that the memory of that footagewas making rationality hard to reach for. I kept replaying the image of Lucy’s small frame being thrown against the wall, Brent’s body caging her in, and how hard she was shaking after he let her go.
“Just please, please let me know how she is,” I say in a broken voice. “I can’t—” I broke off to take deep breath in and out. “I can’t stand not knowing. And tell her I’m sorry.”
Mikey jerked his chin up – it was as much acknowledgement as I was going to get from him, given how angry he was. Then he left, and I knew I had to let him go to her. I felt like shit.
Nobody said anything for a long time. The silence was broken by Vicky, and as usual, she was brutal in her directness.
“LP Mayweather’s books areNew York Timesbestsellers, multiple times over,” she said, her face fixed on her phone. “Her brother is right. She does not need to sell company information.” I moved to Vicky and reached for her phone. She had the Amazon website up. An LP Mayweather book was currently number one in epic fantasy books. As I looked at the cover, a memory stirred. There was a dagger pointed down in the forefront, with a vast foreign landscape behind. “Number one in epic fantasy, number twenty-two in the store overall. According to the online calculator, and including her backlist, she’s doing very well. Of course, she’s a hybrid author so some of that money will be going to her publisher. But her self-published works perform just as well. No wonder she was so helpful to Vanessa.”
“Vanessa?” I said, distracted as I scrolled through all of Lucy’s books. I counted twenty. She had two different series, set in different worlds. “What about Vanessa?”
“Lucy was helping with the advertising campaigns for the new estate.”
“She was helping Vanessa? Likereallyhelping?” But Lucy was useless at work, wasn’t she? Dead weight.
“Yes. She basically took over the social media paid ads. I estimate that she’s increased our revenue by twenty per cent in the last two months,” Vicky said then cocked her head to the side. “You didn’t know that? Don’t you know anything about her? I thought she was your girlfriend? I thought you grew up together?”
Tabitha snorted. “Men are self-absorbed arseholes.” I was still blinking at the phone screen. I didn’t really know what to say to that. I mean, TBea was not wrong.
Chapter 25
You wrote my story
Lucy
“Earth to Lucy,” Emily’s voice penetrated my daydream and I came back to myself with a start. “You alive in there, hun?”
