Seeing that Naomi was now twisting her hands together, I gave her a genuine smile. This had been harder for her than I realized, and I owed it to her to show my gratitude by being as honest as I could be.
“I appreciate you coming here, Naomi, and I know it wasn’t easy for you to do. I hate to say the cliched line of ‘no one knows what the future holds,’ but it’s true, so I can’t say it’ll definitely work out between us. What I can say is that I want it to.” Her eyes widened at the raw honesty in my voice. “It’s not lost on me that me and my brothers have a reputation as being party animals and not taking life seriously, but that’s people only seeing what they want to see in us.”
“I don’t think you’re party animals. I think you’re men who’ve worked their asses off to get where you are today.”
Yeah, she’d see that because she’d done exactly the same thing herself. So had Carter.
“We have,” I agreed. “I like Heidi, and I think that little girl of hers is the absolute shit. I wouldn’t ever hurt Heidi, but I’d also hate myself for the rest of my life if I ever did it to Nemi.”
One side of her mouth tipped up in a smile, the parental side of her appreciating this along with the best friend side. “I’m the exception to Heidi’s rule, but she’s also the exception to mine.
“I swore my attention would be solely focused on making Kleins a success because it’s mine and Canon’s baby, plus we have all of our finances and our livelihoods tied up in the business. Distraction could lead to it failing, and then we’d have nothing, and I’d have let my brother down.”
“That’s my motivation for giving Shanti the best life I can, too, and why I moved here when Heidi suggested it.”
Yeah, if anyone understood that, it’d be her. Naomi had been given custody of her niece after her brother and his girlfriend or wife had died in a car accident shortly after Shanti was born.
From what I knew, Naomi’s parents were drug addicts, and I was sure I’d heard that they’d tried to sell the kid when she was a baby to a couple who wanted a child. It was one big fucked up mess, but she’d come through it, and the little girl was a spitfire who had a personality everyone loved.
“And you’re doing that a billion times more than most people ever could.” My words made her blush, and I made a mental note to check in with Carter to see where he was at with this woman. We were good friends, and I wanted the best for him and Naomi, and I figured that would be with them being together. They’d be good for each other. “I didn’t go into this blindly, Naomi.
“I knew from the second I found out about Nemi that she’d have to come first in everything, and I’ve spent time working on making sure things were solid between Heidi and me first. I care about both of them, and I wouldn’t want to hurt either of them—mentally or emotionally—in any way. I promise I’ll treat them both with care.”
Sucking in a deep breath, Naomi exhaled and then nodded at me. “Okay. I’m glad we had this talk.”
“Me, too.”
She’d just turned to walk away when she stopped and looked back over her shoulder at me. “Just so you know, if you hurt either of them, I’ll buy a box of pubic hair online and put it in a pan of sauce in the restaurant one night. You won’t know when, but you’ll know when it happens and people find them in their food.”
The woman had transformed from vulnerable to vindictive quickly, and it took a moment for her words to sink in.
“You can buy boxes of pubic hair online?”
“You can buy anything online, Bond.”
She had a point.
“That’s pretty gross.”
“Let it be an incentive for you not to hurt them, then.”
“I didn’t need an incentive. Heidi and Nemi hurting is the worst thing I can imagine.”
Lifting her chin, Naomi began walking out toward the elevator again, but I couldn’t help asking a question as she pressed the button to call it.
“Yo. What if Heidi hurts me? Does she get a box of pubic hairs, too?”
Naomi tilted her head to the side while she thought about it quickly. “I could do that to her, I guess. But I think that daughter of hers would torture her worse than the pubic hairs would if she hurt you.”
I wouldn’t doubt that at all. Nemi may be small, but she was definitely fierce. And I liked that she cared enough about me to do that.
I could have taken Heidi out for a meal or driven us to one of the neighboring towns for some privacy and eaten at an expensive, swanky place, but I’d wanted her undivided attention for our first date. It’d taken me a long minute to decide how to appease that want until I’d decided on a picnic at the lake.