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I HUNG UP THE PHONE and sighed. When the hell was I going to get to talk to her again?
I had no clue how long Nadia was going to make me wait before she spoke to me once more, but I was starting to feel like I was losing my damn mind, being this far from her. Did she realize how worried I was about her? How much I wanted to talk to her? How insane I was going, going from having these intimate nights with her, to having her not even able to answer my calls? It wasn’t fair.
But at least I knew she was safe now. As soon as I had caught wind of the fact that she was getting out of the city, I had sent a couple of my guys to trail her – I wasn’t having her followed, just making sure that she was safe. I had eyes on her whenever I needed them, and from the sound of it, she was enjoying her new life in Miami. She was working hard – as if she’d ever do anything else – and I hoped she was taking some time for herself, too. Some time to relax. It was what she deserved, after everything she’d been through.
And if she would just answer my calls, I would be able to secure that for her. But she was still skipping out on me, and I knew that I couldn’t let my life revolve around her anymore, not really. Especially with everything that was going on here with the Serbians.
It had started with their attack on the club, nearly six weeks ago now. I still couldn’t believe they had come swinging for me that hard, just because I refused to meet with them, but it shouldn’t have shocked me. These people were never the types to do anything by half-measures.
I was just lucky that nobody had gotten seriously hurt. They had at least waited until most of the people who worked there were out of that place, and the worst we’d had to deal with was some smoke inhalation and low-level burns.
But that didn’t mean I was going to sit back and just let them get away with it. I had to strike back. And so, I had.
It was only a week later that I went after Yersel Bank, the company that helped launder most of their cash – it was an open secret that they worked with that bank, it wasn’t exactly like I was exposing them or anything, but it was a statement. A statement to remind them that I wasn’t going to sit back and let them do this, just because I had been trying to shift my father’s business to something a little more legitimate.
Nobody had been hurt there either, but now we were at a stalemate – and whoever made the next move, I doubted we were going to get away without any bloodshed. It was just a matter of who was going to start it. Because once it began, it was going to be nigh-on impossible to get it to stop.
And yet, my mind was still on her. On Nadia. I wanted her back here. I knew I would have felt better if she was waiting for me back at my place right now, if I knew that I could just walk back through that door and see her again. But she wasn’t. She was all the way down in Miami, and I needed to forget about her.
How the hell was I meant to pull that off? I had been calling her every day, and she still hadn’t so much as picked up the phone for me. I wasn’t used to not getting what I wanted, especially when it came to women, and it was so much worse now I’d had a taste and she had ripped it away. Didn’t she want more, too? What was she hiding from? I knew that a lot had happened since we had met, but that didn’t mean that she had to hide from me.
Shit. I needed to get her out of my mind, but she was driving me crazy. Did she have any idea what this was doing to me? Any idea how hard it was to contain myself when I knew she was so close, but so far at the same time? She must have known how hard it was for me to stay focused on anything other than her, her, her, the way she made me feel, the way that I wanted her back, the way that I would have done anything to ensure that happened. I missed her like crazy and I felt like I was going to lose it unless I found some way to fit her into my life again, but I had no clue how to go about that, not really, not when she wouldn’t so much as answer my calls.
I needed to forget about her for the time being, and soon, because Mauro and I had a meeting later today that would make or break the chaos going on between us and the Serbs. I had no clue where to start. But we were hoping that a conversation with some cooler heads would let something sensible prevail, instead of the chaos that had been going down lately.
Mauro was meeting with me at the office to discuss everything we were going to need to touch on to make this work, and I had to be ready for it. I knew that he would see straight through me if I was still hung up on Nadia. I just hoped that he would be willing to overlook it and pretend that he didn’t see it for now. I could do without the hardcore speech on why I needed to forget about her – I already got, I just wanted to linger on the thoughts of what we’d done together a little longer.
When Mauro arrived, I swear it looked as though he had aged twenty years. I knew that all of this must have taken its toll on him, but that didn’t mean it came as any less of a shock to see him looking so... exhausted. I hoped that he wouldn’t be harmed by this. I knew he was getting older now, and the last thing I wanted was for him to end up struggling because of everything that he was going through. Everything that we were going through.
“You okay?” I asked him, and he nodded at once, not leaving any room for discussion.
“We need to go over our plan for the meeting this afternoon,” he explained. I nodded – I knew that we were going to need to approach this thing with the Serbs as clearly as we could, but I was still wary about what I expected from them, when it came down to it. I got the feeling they would be all too willing to twist whatever agreement we came to in order to fit their own desires, and I just hoped that they would be smart enough to see that they would have done better keeping on our good side.
“Of course,” I replied, and he sank down into the seat opposite me and pulled out a handful of scrawled notes he had put together in preparation for this. I eyed them nervously. I hadn’t put that much thought into this, and I was starting to wonder if that had been a mistake. I needed to be on my game right now, ready to fight, but I was still stuck in the headspace that revolved around Nadia and not much else.
“I want to call a ceasefire right away,” he explained. “Lay down the law, make sure that they’re not going to damage any more of our property.”
“And we’ll agree not to go anywhere near theirs in return?” I asked. He nodded.
“That’s the idea...”
He kept talking, and I did my best to listen – honestly, I was trying to take this all seriously, and I knew that the future of my father’s business relied on me being able to take this all in and really put in the effort to hear him out, but I was running over everything that had happened with Nadia instead. Trying to work out if I had misread something, if I had thought that there was more between us than there was.
Eventually, Mauro noticed that I was distracted, and he raised his eyebrows at me pointedly.
“You thinking about her?” he demanded bluntly. I nodded. I knew that there was no point in hell of trying to deflect his guesses about me, he had known me for long enough now that he could always guess what was going on inside my head.
“Yeah.”
“You need to forget about that girl,” he told me. His voice was edged with annoyance, and I couldn’t blame him, honestly. We had bigger things to think about right now than some random girl I’d hooked up with a couple of times. Just because she had suddenly dropped out of my life didn’t mean that I had to put everything on hold until I could get her back, especially not with all the shit that was going down with the Serbians right now.
“I’m trying,” I muttered. He had no idea, of course, that I had sent some of my guys down there to keep an eye on her, and I was certain that he would have flipped shit on me if he had. I knew the way he was when it came to anything outside of work. He had been so close with my father, and he didn’t want that man’s legacy to end up in the gutter because I couldn’t keep it in my pants.
“Try harder,” he told me firmly. “She’s gone. And there’s a good reason for that, remember?”
“I know, I know.”
“You need to remember that,” he told me. I hated it when he got like this, but he felt like he didn’t have a choice right now – he knew I was distracted, and distracted at about the worst time in my career that I could have been. We were locked in the middle of this crazy bullshit with the Serbs, and I was thinking about a girl. Yeah, that about tracked for my focus on work.
“I do—”
“She’s a Serb,” he reminded me, leaning forward. “She might not be working with them, but you never know – they could call in a favor and pull her to their side, and then you’ll be involved with someone working against you. We can’t risk that. You understand?”
“I understand,” I muttered. He was right, of course he was, but I hated to admit it. I had spent so long trying to preserve my father’s legacy, even improve on it, but it seemed like all I could manage was walking it back and getting distracted by this random woman.
No. She wasn’t some random woman. I knew there was something special about Nadia – I just couldn’t do much about it now that she was in Miami. In another life, maybe, we could have worked something out, but here, now, I had to accept that we had missed our chance, and that I needed to get over it.
No matter how much it hurt. No matter how much I wished I could escape this chaos in my head. And no matter how much I wished I could find some way to bring her back into my life, and keep her there.
