Chapter 38: Scumbag’s Guide to Diplomacy [3]

But then he had added the catch, and that was the part that actually landed. If Cane, the scumbag, the degenerate, was volunteering to hand over a strategic advantage and attaching a condition to it besides, that condition was probably the entire point, and a woman who’d spent her whole life reading the fine print on lesser men than him wasn’t about to ignore it now. He had told her plainly that he had already worked his way into Marcus’s circle enough to know exactly which of them would be easy to peel off. His actual position, if she wanted the five students, was that he supported her whole platform—lazing around, doing the bare functional minimum, letting the other brackets fight over the actual win while this team quietly coasted through with minimal risk and minimal effort. Yelena had accused him outright of angling to win. He had waved that off entirely, told her he had zero interest in actually winning, that victory sounded like a great deal of effort for a reward he didn’t particularly care about. All he wanted, once he delivered the five, was to be left alone, no labor requirements beyond a token showing now and then, just enough to keep the rest of the team from turning on him out of spite. She had agreed, reluctantly, on the condition that the two of them never spoke of the arrangement again. Which was exactly the agreement Cane was currently honouring, technically, by standing here and pretending this entire conversation was not a direct consequence of a deal he personally engineered.

Yelena’s blonde hair swayed with the sharp, frustrated shake of her head. She stepped in close, dropping her voice to something meant only for him. "The rest of the team is watching. They’ve noticed you getting away with doing nothing, and now they think that if you can do it, so can they. Your little exemption has turned into a contagion I now have to manage."

Cane shrugged, entirely unbothered by the scope of the crisis he had apparently caused. "That sounds like a leadership problem, which, last I checked, isn’t my job."

Yelena gritted her teeth. "Can you get them to go back to work?"

"Why would you assume that’s within my power?"

"You’re the one who brought them over to my side in the first place," she said, her voice clipped. "That means you’ve got some degree of pull over them whether you want to admit it or not."

Cane did not confirm that. He also, notably, did not deny it.

Yelena finally asked, flat and clipped, "What do you want? There’s always a price attached. I’d rather hear the number now than keep circling it."

Cane’s mouth curved into something slow. He reached out, unhurried, and settled both hands on her hips, using the grip to pull her a full step closer, close enough that she had to rise onto the balls of her feet just to keep her balance. She was several inches shorter than him, short enough that the motion pressed her soft, small breasts directly against the flat, hard plane of his stomach. He held her there, steady.

"What I want," he said, plain and unhurried, "is you."

Yelena stammered, actual words failing her for a second. She shoved both palms flat against his chest to put distance back between them. "I have a boyfriend!"

"I know. Antonia’s brother, isn’t it? Ehhh, what’s his name? Neero? Neevo?"

Her expression shifted from flustered straight into something closer to feral. "Nero! His name is Nero! And why would you even bother proposing something like that if you already know I’m taken?!"

Cane’s smile turned devious, slow and entirely without shame. "You already know exactly why. The reputation’s accurate. I’m a scumbag. Always have been. No false advertising anywhere on the label."

She was practically shaking with fury, cheeks flushed dark. Whether she noticed herself doing it or not, her thighs pressed together, tight, a small, involuntary give beneath all that outrage.

"What exactly would this entail?" Her voice was lower now, tighter.

Cane shrugged, casual as if he were suggesting she fetch him a second coconut. "I want you to suck me off."

Her face became a tomato.

"No!"

Cane just shrugged again, entirely unbothered by the refusal. "That’s fine. Genuinely fine. No hard feelings. This isn’t blackmail. I’m not holding anything over you, there’s no threat buried in the offer. It’s a transaction, plain and simple. If you don’t want to follow through, nothing changes. I don’t punish you for it. I just go back to my sunbathing and let you handle your mutinous little coconut cult on your own. But if you do decide to take the deal, I become something genuinely useful to you instead of a liability. An actual asset. Mutual benefit, clean as anything."

Yelena’s blush deepened, spreading down past her collarbone. After a long, visibly conflicted pause, she asked, her voice quiet, "Can I think about it?"

She glanced back over her shoulder at the six lazing shirtless bodies scattered along the tree line, at the rest of her team watching this whole exchange with open, curious interest, clearly clocking exactly how little authority their leader currently seemed to have over any of it. A few of them had stopped pretending not to watch entirely, arms crossed, waiting to see how this particular standoff resolved itself, and Cane had no doubt that whatever conclusion Yelena reached in the next few minutes was going to become camp gossip within the hour regardless of what either of them actually wanted.

Cane shrugged, easy, entirely content to let the silence stretch as long as it needed to. He wasn’t in any particular hurry. He had, after all, a coconut to replace, a considerable amount of dignity to pretend he still possessed, and absolutely nowhere better to be.

"Take all the time you want."

But there may be interest.

As Cane thought this he looked over to Fira and winked. She blushed, winked back, and looked away. He’d noticed her sneaking glances at him. She was a commoner girl, so Cane’s reputation didn’t deter her as much as it should have.

Didn’t she have a boyfriend too? Nice guy he was.

Too bad his girlfriend had a bubble butt. He’d apologize later.