Complete Me(130)

Damien is studying my face, and he’s obviously seeing my temper rising. “It’s done,” he says. “It’s over.”

“How is it done?”

“I explained to her that my lawyers were more than capable of dragging out multiple actions for defamation and invasion of privacy. She’s a businesswoman at heart, so she understands that I can keep a litigation going forever, but she’s going to have trouble finding a lawyer whose hourly rate doesn’t break her. We came to terms.”

“What kind of terms?”

“She turned over all right, title, and interest in her galleries to me. She’s relocating to Florida. And good f*cking riddance.”

I press my palm against the glass, as if the coolness will ease the bite of my temper. “You don’t have to fight my battles, Damien.”

“I love you, Nikki. I will always fight for you.”

His words are heavy with meaning and ripe with passion. They knock me backward and steal my breath. “You love me,” I say stupidly.

The corner of his mouth curves up. “Desperately.”

I swallow back the knot of tears that has formed in my throat. “You haven’t said it,” I say. “Not for weeks now.”

He closes his eyes as if my words have hurt him, but when he opens them again, it’s not pain that I see, but love. He reaches for me and pulls me close. I lean against him, breathing in the scent of soap mixed with sex. It’s heady, and I want to get lost in it. Lost in this moment.

“I love you, Nikki,” he repeats. “I say it with every touch, with every look, with every breath that I take. I love you. I love you so much it hurts.”

“Me, too.” I brush a kiss across his lips, then meet his smile. “But you can’t protect me from everything, Damien. And you sure as hell can’t protect me by keeping things from me. You should have told me about Giselle. Hell, who knows what else is out there you’re keeping from me. So just stop it, okay? It doesn’t protect me, it just pisses me off.”

“All right,” he says evenly. I think that’s the end of it, but then he continues. “Sofia sent the photos.”

I have to rewind his words in my head, because what he is saying makes no sense whatsoever. “The photos in Germany. Sofia is the one who sent them to the court? I don’t understand. Why? How do you know? Did you talk to her?”

He moves away from the glass wall to the center of the room. He paces, not like a man trying to solve a problem, but like a man who already knows the answer and doesn’t much like it.

“I discovered a discrepancy in one of my father’s accounts. Small amounts siphoned off to an account that I don’t have access to. In excess of a hundred thousand dollars, and yesterday I learned that money was filtered to Sofia.”

I don’t ask him how he knows all of this if he doesn’t have access to the account. I do not doubt that Damien Stark has access to pretty much any information that he’s willing to pay for. “Why would your father send Sofia that much money?”

“Payment for her testimony,” he says. “He wanted her to testify about the abuse—same reason you wanted me to testify. But he didn’t know about the photos. She must have found them in Richter’s things. She took those, sent them to the court, waited around just long enough to make sure it worked, and then used the money to skip out of Europe.”

“How do you know all of this?”




“After I learned about the skimmed money, I had another talk with dear old dad. He told me.”