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Chapter 22
Ethan
“Have I told you that you are brilliant?” I ask Izzy.
“No, I don’t think you have.”
I look up at her from across my dining room table. “You, Izzy Sloane, are fucking brilliant.”
She bites her lip with a blush that spreads to the swell of her breasts and I want to throw everything off the table and dive across it. I want to ravish her. But, we still have work to do.
Maybe later.
“Seriously, Izzy. This article is gold. I don’t know how you did it.”
“Well.” She stands up to stretch. We have been working all day, starting at the coffee shop, then a diner where we grabbed lunch, and now at my place. “I’ve been doing this for a long time, actually. After the Slay fiasco, blogging about assholes was kind of my quiet revenge on my dad. While he was busy fucking innocent people over, I found people like him to fuck over.”
Her friend Rosilyn offered to take Jax for the day, giving us time to finish the article. It’s also given us time together, something I have been aching for ever since the golf match from hell with Liam. I have to admit, zoos are not my thing. They smell, the cages are too small and they’re crawling with whinykids. But I would have put on a polo and a visor and played dad with the best of them if it meant not playing golf with Liam that day.
I smile at her sass. “And tell me, sweetheart. How does revenge taste?”
Her lips curve upward. “Sweet.”
I grin. “Good girl.”
Izzy sits back down and looks at her laptop. “Is there anything I should change?”
“Nope. Not one damn thing. I think we’ve done what we came to do,” I tell her, sifting through the copy she sent to my laptop.”
“So…it’s ready to print?” She asks and I can hear the nervousness in her voice.
“It’s ready to print,” I nod with an easy smile. But she isn’t smiling back and I frown.
“Baby girl, what’s wrong? Are you having second thoughts?”
Izzy shakes her head and I round the table, pulling her up into my arms. “No. I’m just worried. He’s going to lose his mind.”
“He is,” I agree, holding her against me.
“He’s scary when he loses his mind.”
“Oh trust me, I’m aware. But you know what? It’s nothing we can’t handle.”
Izzy snorts at that. “Easy for you to say. I haven’t had to deal with him for five years. And when I did, he was always this overbearing control freak, gaslighting me at every corner.”
I take her chin between my fingers and force her to look up at me. “But that’s not going to happen again. You know why? Because you have me now. I am on your side. He has no control, no leverage. Nothing. Once this article goes viral, sure. He will lose his damn mind. But the shit will be flying by that point and he will have bigger things to worry about. Like packing up histhings and getting the fuck out of the office.” I laugh but Izzy still looks worried. “Are you having second thoughts?”
“No.” She quickly shakes her head. “Honestly…I have been thinking about doing something like this for a long time. It’s low key why I started that blog. I think in my mind, if I wrote enough posts about corrupt people in power then maybe eventually I’d get the guts to expose him too. But it never happened.”
“Until now.”
“Until now.” She looks up at me. Her arms are wrapped tightly around me, like she’s holding on for dear life. There is something in those bright blue eyes of hers. They remind me of the sky just before clouds roll in. Just before an unexpected bolt of lightning cracks. Just before the storm.
“What’s going on in that gorgeous, brilliant head of yours?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she whispers. “Everything just feels so…absolute.”
“It is,” I agree. “But at the same time, this is just one big snowball barreling down a mountain. It’s already in motion. We just have to see it through.”