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“My dad.”
“Do you think he’d hurt him?”
“Not like that. But he’d want to be a part of his life. He’s all about legacy and stupid shit like that. He’d want a say in how I raise him and most likely, he’d treat him the way he treated me.And if Jax ever did anything he didn’t approve of, he might also do what he did with me and not want to have anything to do with him. And I can’t let that happen. It’s enough that I am raising him on my own. I don’t need people going in and out of his life.”
My voice is shaky as I say the words. Ethan’s hand clenches and I wonder if he is going to grab mine. But he doesn’t. Instead, he leans his knee against mine. It’s different than when he is pushing the limits beneath the coffee shop table though. It’s like he wants to hug me but won’t.
“I won’t tell him you have a son,” he says. “I will make sure he doesn’t find out.”
I nod, swallowing back the bile in my throat. “How are you going to do that?”
“I’ll do whatever it takes, Izzy. If you don’t feel safe, I’ll change that. I’ll make sure that you and Jax go to bed every night with peace of mind.”
“Why? Why would you do that for us?” My voice cracks.
Ethan turns to look at me. His face is close enough to kiss me. But he won’t. “Do I really need to answer that question, Izzy?”
There is a moment where we just look at each other and then Ethan turns to watch Jax again. “Speaking of safety. Do you know anything about the boy’s father?”
“What do you mean?” I ask quickly.
“Do you know who he is? Where he is? What kind of guy he is? I know he’s not in the picture but is it going to stay that way?”
I think carefully before answering and keep my voice as level as possible. “We don’t need to worry about him.”
Chapter 14
Ethan
“Asecretary,” Liam parrots the word right after I say it.
“Yep. At a dentist’s office.”
“Huh.” He isn’t convinced. And for a blip of a second I am starting to second guess my story too. I’m in Liam’s office for business. And the first thing on the docket is Izzy. I spent the better part of last night curating a story covering the who, what, when, where and why of Izzy’s life and I’ve rehearsed it enough times you’d think I was using a teleprompter.
“You know, I gotta say,” Liam shakes his head, reaching into the bottom drawer of his desk for a flask, “I’m surprised she would lower herself to that. But I guess that’s what happens when you fuck yourself over in our line of work, isn’t it? No room for error. Once you lose the good opinion of people, you lose everything thereafter.”
I literally have to keep myself from sniggering at that. The man is dumping dirt on his own coffin. For one, I can’t help him know what’s truly going on. And two, he needs to believe the story I am telling him so he doesn’t dig deeper.
“So she isn’t writing at all?” He asks, taking a dip from the flask before offering it to me. I wave it off. It’s 9am.
“Not from what I can find. She has no contracts, freelance or otherwise with any local papers or even online publications. Not under her name, which from what I have seen is still legally Isabelle Sloane.”
Liam nods, chewing on his lip and starting down at the grain of his oak desk. “So she’s a secretary, somewhere on the Western Slope. Unmarried. No kids. Just hiding in a hole in the wall basically?”
“From the sounds of it,” I breathe out.
Liam thinks about that for a second before taking another swig and tossing the flask back in the drawer. “I guess the Princess finally saw the crack in her crown and got humbled. Good. Now,” he claps his hands together. “Let’s talk business. Are you familiar with Good Eats?”
It takes me a second to catch up. I could wring his neck for the last comment but I remind myself that I need to be indifferent.”
“The…foodie magazine?”
“Emphasis onThe.Good Eats has more subscribers than any other food publication in the state. You know why, Savage?”
“Because their recipes and reviews are legit?” I take a wild but obvious guess. I don’t know what a food magazine has to do with us. But I do have a feeling I know where this is going.
“Because they steal their recipes from private yet publicly published food blogs.”