Billionaire Brothers 2 : Love Has A Name (42 page)

I could almost hear his teeth grinding from where I was. “Put some goddamn clothes on, Axia. You didn’t see how those guys were staring at your ass!”

Swiveling my chair back and forth, I depleted my Gatorade with an exaggerated ‘ah’ sound. “Again, Nelson, it’s a gym. Everyone stares at everyone’s ass.”

Lovello raked a hand through his hair, bristling with tension in the middle of my office and firing bullets at me with his eyes. He was casually dressed in dark jeans and a black hoodie, which made me wonder if he’d been to work at all. His hair had a damp look to it as if he’d recently showered. He was all irresistible-male-and-divine-scrumptiousness as usual. He was also extremely pissed. But I didn’t give a shit. What was he even doing here anyway? “You wanna tell me what wind blew you to this side of town, Nelson? Hurry. There’s a party downstairs that I’m missing out on.”

“Uh…” He eyed me uncertainly, as if vacillating whether he should say what he was about to say or not. “Nicole and I are going out for lunch … and I came to find out if you wanted to come, too.”

It would have been better if this asshole hadn’t shown up here at all, because where there had been shards of ice chilling my heart, now there were huge chunks of hail.

Was he serious? Was he purposely trying to hurt me? Who was I? The best friend third-wheeling the reunited couple? Not since age twenty-one when my father had given me my own gun had I thought about shooting someone. Yeah, I would shoot the fucker right there in the groin area that housed his oh-so-cocky cock.

Alas, I didn’t have my gun here, so I just played the insouciant card. “And where’s Nicole?”

“Out in the car.”

Could bet she was stretching out those long legs in the passenger side of his Bugatti with a smirk on her face. Where would he fit me? On the roof? “Well, that’s thoughtful of you. Thought I was hungry?”

“No, I —”

“I’m well fed, Nelson,” I sliced, then got up from my chair and brushed past him towards the door. “Enjoy your lunch.”
I hope you and the bitch choke to death.

Before I could make it through the door, Lovello grabbed me, reeling me into him and pressing me up against his hard body as if his life depended on it. His passive eyes bored helplessly into mine as he whispered, “I don’t know what to do, Axia.”

Cute, he was caught in a love triangle and didn’t know who to choose. Like the rolling dark clouds over the top of the mountains, I’d seen this coming. And that’s why I’d taken precaution in guarding my heart and getting him out of my system — well, not really, but still — before it got to this part.
Smart girl, Axia. Smart girl
.

“The situation is not as difficult as it seems, Nelson,” I soothed, slowly pulling from his embrace. “I’ve saved you the trouble and have already made the decision. You’re free. There’s no bondage. There never was. Because I was never yours. And you were never mine.”

Lovello frowned deeply, his brows knitting together. “What do you mean?”

“I
mean
, you can go on your lunch date with a clear conscience. The eenie meenie miney moe part doesn’t have to be played. I’ve already pulled myself out of the game.”

“What? Clear conscience?” he asked, rubbing hard on his forehead as if trying to wish away a headache.

“Okay, since you’re playing obtuse, let me be a bit more lucid,” I drew out slowly. “You no longer have to worry about what to do, wondering if anyone will be left heartbroken. Because you are no longer
here.
“ I placed my palm flat over my heart. “None of you is left here, Love. Everything has been decimated. Nothing. Zilch. Cipher. Nada.”

The idiot didn’t seem to realize that he’d made his choice just by coming here to ask me if I wanted to tag along with him and his ex. Had to say I was disillusioned. All this time I’d held this man in such high esteem as one of the wisest persons I’d ever come across. Turns out he wasn’t so wise after all. King Solomon was right, the wise man and the fool are not much different. They both suffer the same fate.

Lovello’s face paled, his eyes bleak and slightly widened, looking as if he’d just seen an apparition. His voice was barely audible when he spoke. “I knew it. You don’t love me … anymore.”

“No. I don’t,” I lied. It was wrong, but I had to protect myself.

He blinked once, twice, three times, and then his eyes wintered. “Is it that scum downstairs? Because I swear to you, Axia, I will
break
him. I’ll break his fucking neck!!”

I found his gaze and held it. “I know I’ve given you reasons not to trust me or my word, but this one thing is true: when I love, I love
hard
, so cheating is never in my cards. I’d rather leave someone before I cheat on them. I leave games like that to pros like you.”

With that, I walked away from him. Not daring to look back and not daring to cry.

Trudy was flabbergasted when I phoned her and suggested we go clubbing that Friday night. I wasn’t a party-goer and she knew it. Fitness and challenges were where I sought my entertainment. Clubbing and outing were a once-in–every-three-months thing for me. Of course, she leaped at the opportunity, because she knew that occasions like this with me were seldom.

She’d scowled at me, however, when I went to pick her up with Tish in the back of the jeep. On purpose, I’d excluded the tidbit that Tish would be clubbing with us, too. So, yeah, I was surreptitiously playing matchmaking in the process — or,
re
-matchmaking, to say.

Though Trudy didn’t want to admit it, she still loved Tish. She’d broken up with all her, ahem, women, and hadn’t been seeing anyone for over a month — a tad monastic for someone as nomadically lickerish as her. My eyes, also, were not purblind to the longing stares she stole at Tish when she thought no one was looking. But even so, she treated Tish as if she had some contagious disease that she didn’t want to catch.

The secretive small smile that tugged at her lips when she climbed into the jeep didn’t go unnoticed, though. Of course the reformed slut was glad to see Tish, yet she feigned otherwise and gave the silent treatment when Tish greeted her with a polite “Good evening, Trudy” from the back of the jeep.

Because I hadn’t chosen an exact spot to party when I’d impetuously decided I wanted to go clubbing, I ended up being outvoted by Tish and Trudy to party at ‘Stilettos, Poles & Holes’, a posh gentlemen’s club.

“This is what I get for partying with lesbians. Damn strip clubs!” I joked with Trudy as we filed into a V.I.P. booth while Rhianna’s
Please Don’t Stop the Music
blasted through the speakers of the club.

A petite, bronze-skinned waitress came in to take our drink orders.

“What’s a good drink to have?” I asked Trudy before she made her order.

Trudy’s eyes bulged at me as if I’d grown a second head. She knew I didn’t drink. But I
needed
to swipe the plaguing thoughts of Lovello screwing Nicole’s brains out from my head, and I thought alcohol would do the trick. Trudy tried to speak in objection but I held up my hand. “Don’t even bother, Trudy. Just order me a damn good drink.”

Trudy turned to the waitress, resting her hand at the curve of the waitress’s shoulder and neck, and seducingly made languorous circles with her thumb on the base of her neck. The waitress didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she smiled brighter.

“Two Black Labels on the rocks,” Trudy ordered deep in the waitress’s ear, and, if my eyes weren’t lying, she bit her on her ear lobe. The waitress dazed back with an expression that proclaimed she had definitely been bought. Trudy winked at her, then glanced over her shoulder in Tish’s direction. An unpleasant frown clouded her face when she realized that Tish’s attention was directed at her phone screen. It was apparent then that the seducing scene she’d enacted with the waitress was an attempt to make Tish jealous. But unfortunately, Tish missed it — or was pretending not to notice. “And a Screw Driver. Hard on the vodka, easy on the orange juice,” Trudy spat out, leaving the poor waitress mystified.

Mystified was correct, because she couldn’t have known Trudy was just using her to make an oblivious Tish jealous.

Trudy peevishly slumped down on the glowing white banquet next to me. Tish, finally stowing away her cellphone, stood up and tugged on my arm, pulling me up to my feet and walking me to the thick black rope that parted off our booth. “Pick one,” she said, gesturing to the dancers on the floor. “You need a lap dance.”

“Oh no,” I began backing up. “This is all your shit, not mine. You want me to pick a dancer for
you
? Sure. You look like you could do with a lap dance. But none for me.”

“Well, I was gonna get one anyway. But you gotta get one, too,” Tish grinned.

“No stripper is coming in here to dance with
anyone
!” Trudy bellowed from behind us.

Stifling a laugh, I turned to look at her peeved expression. What the hell was her problem? It was all fun for her to ignore Tish, but she obviously couldn’t bear it when Tish ignored her, huh?

“You heard her,” I said, repressing a laugh. “
No
dance, for
no
one.”

Tish rolled her eyes, muttering something under her breath and remained by the rope, while I went back to sit next to Trudy.

A few minutes later, the waitress returned with our drinks. “Two Black Labels on the rocks and one Screw Driver,” she announced, setting the drinks down on the table.

The waitress tried to continue the flirt with Trudy, but with Tish’s back turned to us, Trudy wasn’t playing that game anymore. Nevertheless, the waitress pressed a piece of paper into Trudy’s hand and sashayed away with exaggerated sways of her hips. Trudy unfolded the paper to reveal a phone number scrawled under the name ‘Sherry’. She crumpled the paper in her palm and tossed it aside. This woman was about no one but Tish. From ‘a beast’ to a lovesick puppy. Talk about transformation.

“Don’t start, Axia,” she hissed, as she handed me one of the Black Label drinks and noticed that I was smothering a grin.

That only made me burst into laughter. “Well, someone’s awfully miserable tonight.”

“I
really
hate you,” she said on an eye roll, but I knew that her ‘I hate you’s’ were actually ‘I love you’s’.

She cut her eyes to where Tish stood at the front of the booth, rocking to the high-tempo music blaring in the club. Tish’s long brown hair dangled around her bare shoulders and her lean figure murdered a short and tight purple dress — was quite possibly murdering Trudy’s brain cells, too.

Trudy called for Tish all of three times to no avail. When she barked out her name the fourth time, Tish spun around and Trudy held up the glass of Screw Driver. “Your drink.”

Tish smirked and raised a brow. “Would you look at that, you remembered my drink.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, I remember
all
my girls’ drinks,” Trudy burned.

Tish wasn’t fazed. She blessed Trudy with a saccharine smile, took the drink from her hand, and sallied back to the rope to watch the topless dancers on-stage. Taking a sip of my own drink, my eyes squeezed shut as it went down my throat. Christ, this was strong. I haven’t had alcohol since I was eighteen, and even then, it had only ever been beer. I would just have this one glass, of course, because I had to drive.

“I don’t know how I feel about you drinking, Axia,” Trudy cautioned. “What’s going on with you? Is this about Nicole?”

“What about Nicole? Love’s fully hers now. I just needed a frickin’ drink. What’s so bad about that?”

Trudy’s eyes blew wide. “You broke up? When? He was really cheating on you with her?”

“He came to my gym today to ask me if I wanted to have lunch with him
and
Nicole,” I informed her, then took a larger gulp of my drink.

“What? Are you serious?”

“As a judge.”

“Shit, what on earth was the douche thinking? Was that his insensitive way of telling you he’s choosing her?” Trudy rhetorically asked, then took a gulp of her drink. “Well, she stops by his office like every other day, dressed to the ninth in killer heels and stylish clothes. I should’ve known the bitch was trying to sneak her way back into his life. But there was no way for me to be sure, seeing that I’ve ended things with Carla and there’s no other way for me to get valid inside gossip. She and Carla have become buddies now, though.”