Since the company needs an interim CEO now…Brendan nominated you for the job.
The thing was, I wasn’t CEO material. True, I’d be lying if I said I’d never thought about it—our father’s habit of making all his children fight over the succession carrot had raised usallto want it. But I was the fixer, not the prince. The Black son who lived in the shadows, not in the sun.
But Brendan had named me instead of Owen or Shea. With the potential to make the job permanent.
If I could meet certain unspoken conditions.
Liza’s final gauntlet.
The board—your father included—expects the CEO to meet certain standards.
Family values. Stability.
They want someone who’s going to settle down, get married, have kids.
Now, I was hiding from the wife I didn’t know I had—the wife I wasn’t sure Iwanted—in the bathroom, trying to decide whether I wanted to jack off to the memory against this very wall or go back out and ask her the impossible question that had been quietly occurring to me since she held up her ring.
Would she be willing tostaymy wife?
No. Impossible. Not to mention reckless, asking a complete stranger to do the one thing that would help me get out of the box I’d been trapped in for most of my life.
She could be anyone.
A criminal.
A con artist.
A sociopath (and really, this marriage only had room for one, okay?).
But maybe just for a week. A month?
Forever?
“Stop it,” I muttered with a quick slap to my face.
I was mixing fantasy and reality. When had it become so hard to separate a critical calculation from a pipe dream?
I finished my shower with quick, methodical movements that included equally methodical masturbation (if only to think more clearly when I got out). By the time I’d located a pair of jeans, I knew what I was going to do.
When I reentered the living room, Laney was sitting on the couch, still swathed in the bedsheet, phone pressed to her ear. Her eyes deepened to the color of a soccer pitch when she caught sight of my abs just before I tugged a white T-shirt over them.
She really couldn’t hide a thing she was thinking.
I found I liked her all the more for it. Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to help me here.
“Megan, I have to go,” she said into the phone. “No, don’t come. I’ll meet you in the room before we have to leave.” She ended the call without waiting for a response. “Hey.”
She looked… different. Paler, somehow. Her hands shook slightly as she set the phone next to her on the sofa.
Shit. What had happened in the five minutes I’d been in the shower?
More importantly, why did I care?
“So, I was thinking, room service?” I affected my very best boy-next-door charm as I sauntered across the room. “The Minoan makes killer French toast, and I don’t know about you, but I could use a vat of coffee?—”
“You’re a billionaire,” she interrupted.
Well, fuck. So much for the boy-next-door strategy.