“Dinner date?” Grady parroted, sounding confused as his pale eyes settled on me.
I sputtered, nearly choking on my wine. I placed the glass back down before I threw it. “The business dinner,” I reminded Grady. “The reason I had to reschedule our date. Brock, my boss, and I brought the potential investors here.”
“Your boss,” Grady murmured, sitting back in his chair. The air of confusion faded as his lips thinned. “And childhood friend, right?”
“We did grow up together.” Brock chuckled as he planted a hand on the back of my booth. “Saying ‘childhood friend’ seems to belittle what we were to each other.”
What in the holy hell?
“That sounds perfectly correct.” I glared at Brock, but now he was busy eyeing Grady with that unnerving stare of his.
Brock ignored my comment. “Did she ever get around to telling you about the first time we met?”
“He doesn’t want to hear about that,” I cut in, forcing a dismissive laugh that came out a bit crazy-sounding.
“Actually,” Grady replied coolly. “I would love to hear about that.”
My mouth dropped open.
Before I knew it, Brock was settling into the booth beside me. Sitting so close that the entire length of his right side was pressed against my left. “So I was fourteen, I think, and you were eight.” He gently elbowed my side. “Right?”
“Right,” I murmured, eyeing the wine glass and thinking that my whole never getting drunk again thing sounded like a dumb idea right now.
“I’d been hanging around her father’s Academy for a while. Every kid growing up in that neighborhood knew who the Limas were. We’d all loiter outside just to catch a glimpse of her father or one of his brothers.”
“So your family is a bit famous?” Grady speculated, obviously forgetting Cam’s reaction to Brock and all of that.
“Something like that.” Fully aware of Brock’s body against mine, I eyed my wine glass with fervor.
“She’s just being modest. That’s how Jillian is,” Brock said in an infinitely familiar way, and I swallowed a groan. “Anyway, let’s just say I was a bit of a punk back then.”
“Was?” I muttered under my breath.
Brock grinned, obviously hearing me, and I hated that grin. It wasn’t cute or sexy or charming at all. Nope. “I tried to rob Andrew, her father, one night.”
“What?” Interest filled Grady’s gaze as his hand halted, the wine glass several inches from his mouth.
“Yep. I’d left home. Was starving and it was cold. Needed money, and I was a fucking idiot,” he explained, and Grady flinched at the curse word. “Tried to rob a man who could end my life in about six hundred different ways.” Laughing softly, Brock shook his head. “But Andrew didn’t kill me or beat the crap out of me like he easily could. Didn’t call the police. He’d noticed me hanging around the Academy, knew that I was fighting in some of the underground circuits—”
“At fourteen?” Grady sounded stunned. The poor country boy had no idea.
“You’d be surprised by what goes on in the cities that no one ever knows about,” Brock replied, leaning back in the booth.
I stiffened.
He draped his arm along the back, right behind me, and I tilted my head to the side, somewhere stuck between wanting to laugh at the outrageousness of him right now and wanting to throat punch him. “Andrew brought me to his house that night, offered me a hot meal and a place to stay.”
“Wow.” Grady’s smile was faint when he looked at me. “Your father is a saint.”
“My father saw raw talent and that’s what he went for,” I said, even though I knew that wasn’t exactly the only reason. My dad had grown up on the streets of Natal, Brazil. Brock had a hard childhood, but it paled in comparison to my father and uncles. My dad saw a kindred soul in Brock . . . and a son he never had.
“It was pretty late when her dad brought me to the house and he left me in the living room very briefly. I’d never . . . never been in a house like that before.” A distant look glazed over his eyes. “It was just outside the city, huge and yet still somehow warm. No cockroaches crawling on walls or rats scurrying in the dark corners. It was the kind of house I’d never dreamed of entering.”
Grady was riveted as he slowly lowered his glass to the table, and I swallowed hard, thinking of the deep well of dark memories Brock had of his life before my father opened up our home to him.
“I was about to follow him into the kitchen when I looked over at the stairwell. You see, they have this half-enclosed stairway that empties into the front room and atrium. It was dark, but there was a little shadow plastered to the wall, peeking around it.” A slow grin appeared on Brock’s face. “All I saw was this hair—dark brown hair—and big eyes.”
Scooting forward, I placed my elbow on the table and rested my cheek in my hand.
“It was little Jillybean.” Brock laughed while I rolled my eyes. “She was eavesdropping on us and her father had no idea she was up. We made eye contact and I half-suspected her to run up the stairs, because I had just . . . well, I’d just gotten into a fight before running into her father. I was looking pretty rough.”
I sat there and wondered in a daze what in the hell had happened. Brock had successfully commandeered what was left of my date, beguiling Grady with tales of our childhood.
I was going to seriously kill him.
“You didn’t run?” Grady asked me.