She frowned. “Fine, I suppose.” How did he expect them to get along? Cain was being blackmailed. He viewed her as one of the conspirators. He loathed her.
Even if he kisses like he filed the patent on it.
She mentally shook her head. As if lust had anything to do with affection or love. Donald had taught her that.
“Fine? You’ll have to do better than that.” He faced her, his drink in hand. “Do you think people haven’t noticed that you two seem distant toward one another? This is your engagement party and neither of you appear happy to be here. People talk. Then they’ll start to speculate.” He swirled the amber alcohol in his glass. “You need to try harder, Devon. After everything I’ve arranged on your behalf, you need to do better so all of my hard work doesn’t go to waste. This relationship might not have been his idea, but if you put in a little more effort, he may forget about that. I need Cain happy. And that is your responsibility.”
“Careful, Dad,” Devon drawled. “With talk like that, you’re edging close to prostitution. And you’re not pimping me out, are you?”
He uttered a sound somewhere between disgust and impatience. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is all for you, for the children you’ll one day have. So you will never have to endure what your mother and I did—poverty, powerlessness, invisibility. No one will look down on you, and I’m ensuring that. Is it pretty? No. But there’s nothing fair about this world we live in. Even Cain understands that.”
“I really think you believe that, Dad,” she murmured, sadness hollowing out her chest. “But Mom would’ve been happy living in a Plainfield, New Jersey, duplex surrounded by family. And maybe we didn’t live in a Back Bay townhome with money at our disposal, but we were happy. We had love, community and joy. We had each other. I don’t care if other people accept me. Money can’t buy that acceptance and it definitely can’t provide what we had back in Plainfield.”
“Spoken like a person who has never known what it is to work their fingers to the bone to provide for their family,” he sneered. “But that is in the past. Your mother isn’t here, and I’m going to provide for you in the way I see fit. Which brings me to another topic...” He lifted his glass and sipped from it, regarding her from over the rim. “It’s come to my attention that Farrell International has a real estate project in the works near TD Garden and North Station. It includes a concert venue, shops, an office tower, hotels, condominiums in a five-hundred-unit, sixty-floor residential tower, as well as transit upgrades to North Station. Farrell is apparently accepting only a handful of investors for the development. I intend to be one of those investors.”
She shook her head, shrugging. “I don’t know what that has to do with me.”
“Everything,” he countered. Placing his unfinished drink on the bar behind him, he strode across the room and halted in front of her. “Right now, Cain isn’t feeling very...charitable toward me.”
Devon snorted. Now wasn’tthatthe understatement of the millennium.
“That’s where you come in. I need you to convince him to invite me to be an investor on the project.”
The crack of laughter escaped her before she could contain it. “You’re not serious?” Another incredulous chuckle climbed the back of her throat but then she narrowed her gaze on her father’s darkening expression. “Youareserious,” she whispered, stunned. “Dad, that’s cra—”
“Thanks to me, you are now engaged to one of the most powerful men in Boston—”
“I didn’t ask you to do that for me. I want nothing to do with it,” she interrupted.
“Thanks to me, you are the envy of every woman in this house, in this city,” he continued, raising his voice and rolling over her protest. “The very least you can do is help me. A project this size would mean millions in profit for not just me but for all of my clients. To be in business with Farrell International would establish my company as one of the wealthiest and most successful boutique investment firms in the country. All you have to do is speak to Cain and use your influence to convince him to let me in on it.”
“Influence?” She scoffed, slicing a hand between them. “What influence? He hates me just a little bit less than he hates you. And even if I did have that kind of sway with him, I wouldn’t do it. I have no idea what you’re holding over him, but isn’t it enough that you’re forcing him into a marriage he wants no part of? Now you want to trick him into a business deal? No.” She shook her head, vehement. “You were just telling me how all of this is for me. This is about you, Dad. All you. And I won’t be a part of taking more from Cain.”
“Where’s your loyalty?” he snarled, crowding closer and jabbing a finger at her. “You are my daughter. Your first allegiance is to me, not to a man who wouldn’t even know you existed if not for my hand pulling the strings. You owe me.”
“I owe you?” she repeated on the tail end of a disbelieving chuckle. “And when do I stop paying, Dad? When is my bill wiped clean? When do I no longer need to whore myself out for your ambitions?”
Anger darkened his green eyes to nearly black pools and red mottled his skin. His mouth disappeared into a hard, angry line. He edged closer, looming over her. “Don’t you ever talk to me like that—”
“Get the hell away from her.”
Devon jolted. The seething fury in that voice had her jerking her head toward the library entrance. Her father stiffened, the corner of his mouth curling as he stepped back and turned to face Cain.
An avenging angel.
The words whispered through her head, and even though she acknowledged the sentiment as fanciful and silly, she couldn’t erase it. With his powerful body, starkly beautiful face and an aura of righteous wrath, the only things missing were wings. She shivered. In apprehension? In fear? In...excitement? She didn’t care to answer that question.
He stalked forward, and, oh God, part of her wanted to run to him, to burrow against that wide chest.
It was the need that kept her feet firmly rooted.
“This is family business, Cain,” her father growled. “Which means it’s none of yours.”
“You made it my business when you forced your way into my life. When you threatened my mother’s reputation. When you made your daughter collateral in a back-alley deal with my father. So no, Cole. Devon is my business.”
Devon is my business.
The statement seemed to echo in the sudden stillness of the room. It reverberated in her ears like a pulse. Pounded in her chest like an anvil. Throbbed low in her belly like an ache. To a person who’d spent the last sixteen years of her life never belonging to anything, anyone or anywhere, that announcement hit her like a drug. One she would be wise to resist.
