by Score, Lucy
“Absolutely, Ms. Stanton. Your haircut is killer.”
I’d styled it myself in a rush this morning and had to admit it still looked pretty fantastic.
“Thank you,” I called over my shoulder.
It was the first of many haircut compliments volleyed my way as I headed for my office. It was just hair, people. Get a grip.
“I see you played with scissors this weekend.”
Maxim lounged in the salon’s doorway in a purple shirt that appeared to be missing a few buttons and a leather hip holster for his styling tools. His mustache twitched.
“Do you approve?” I asked, fluffing the short layers.
He gave me a long follicular perusal. “I do,” he said finally. “Who is this hair maestro? Tell me their name so I can add them to my mortal enemies list. Miami isn’t big enough for the two of us.”
“I think your reputation is intact,” I said with an eye roll. “Derek isn’t in the hair game professionally.”
“Well, well, well,” Maxim mused. “Mr. Fixer appears to be excellent with his hands.”
Jane snorted, and I elbowed her, earning a wheeze and then her silence.
“Good morning, Ms. Stanton,” my assistants chorused.
“Great hair,” Valerie grinned.
“Love it,” Easton said, not to be one-upped.
“Thanks,” I said dryly, picking up my messages.
Jane and I stepped inside, and I leaned against the door.
“The amount of time and energy people spend on my hair is ridiculous,” I complained to her. “Why are they interested in my hair? Why would they buy a shirt just because I wore it?”
“Because they want to be like you,” Jane said, cracking her gum.
I ditched my bag in its usual place and headed straight for my desk. “Then go to college and study biochemistry and spend every waking minute building a company.”
Jane snorted. “That’s idealistic.”
“Idealistic is thinking that a new shirt or an expensive pair of shoes will make you famous,” I scoffed. “Why can’t everyone just be themselves?”
She flopped down on the couch. “You of all people are asking that question?”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“I’m pointing out that you of all people should understand why, boss. You put on your obedient daughter mask or your terrifying boss mask. They’re putting on their Emily Stanton makeup or doing their Emily Stanton workout in hopes that they can capture part of your essence.”
I blinked at her. “You’ve been hanging around Derek too much.”
“I think you’re right. He’s rubbing off on me. I need to take him to a shooting range or a dirty hook-up bar and Jane him up a little,” she mused.
“You two have gotten pretty close,” I observed.
Jane lolled her head to the side on the back of the couch. “You’re the one having toe-curling sex with Tea and Crumpets.”
“Do you like him, though? I mean, what do you think of him?” I asked.
She propped her boot-clad feet on the coffee table. “You really like him, don’t you?”
I took a breath, let it out. “I do. A lot. And it scares me. I feel like I’m missing some gigantic warning sign.”
“Not everyone is out to get you or to use you,” she said.
“Is that your read on him?”
She gave me a baleful look. “If you’re asking me as a skeptical security hood, the guy manipulates peoples’ feelings and opinions for a living. He picks pockets and paints phony pictures.”
“And if I’m asking you as my friend,” I pressed.
“My read is his feelings for you are real, and they are scaring the shit out of him.”
I sank back in my chair, relief softening the rigidity of my shoulders. As long as we were both scared shitless. As long as we were both in this. As long as this was real and not some challenge or conquest or spin.
Jane’s opinion mattered. I trusted her, and she was telling me I could trust Derek.
“Dammit, now I’m wasting a Derek-free morning analyzing my relationship with him instead of getting actual work done,” I complained
“You’re banging a sex god, and your hair is perfection. I feel zero sympathy for you,” she said.
A moment later, Valerie entered with the espressos and, sensing my impatience, hurried right back out.
“Finally,” I muttered to myself. I sipped my coffee and opened up the slew of files for the product development team meeting this afternoon. I had the new designs from the e-commerce department waiting for my approval and the god-awful IT report on recommended upgrades to our infrastructure. There was a very long Urgent column.
I also needed to touch base with the sales managers. A conference call would do it. But those tended to run very, very long. People in sales loved to talk. And talk. And talk.
There was also my never-ending updates from legal. As of last night, the SEC hadn’t asked for any additional documentation, and I was taking it as a hopeful sign that all of our I’s were dotted and T’s crossed. Given the upswing in public perception, this IPO might just happen after all.
I thought about Esther in the lab, bopping to the Grateful Dead while she waded through the data coming in from the cohort labs. My sigh was mighty.
“You blowing up balloons over there, boss?” Jane mused over her coffee and self-defense magazine.
“Nope. Just loving my job,” I said, skimming the last quarter’s sales on our Nouveau Face cream. It was selling like crack-laced hotcakes in the European market. We were outselling our direct competitor’s product—La Sophia’s Skin Riche—by a two-to-one margin. That was satisfying. La Sophia was a company with a seventy-year history, and Flawless was beating them at their own game. At least internationally. They still edged us out domestically, but their days were numbered. When Flawless’s scar treatment made it to the market, I planned to leverage the attention for brand-wide recognition.
There was a tap on my door, and then Easton poked his head in. “Excuse me, Ms. Stanton?” He stepped inside, closing the door behind him.
“Yes?” I said, without looking up.
“There’s a journalist from Building Fortunes here. She says she has an appointment.”
I dropped my highlighter. “Why does she have an appointment?”
Journalists didn’t get appointments with me. They got returned phone calls from my publicist who fed them benign, boring information. Building Fortunes was the biggest online business magazine in the country. It was run by a media heiress who had the foresight to shift her family’s print holdings to digital. While newspapers around the country folded or scaled back to skeleton crews, Building Fortunes aggressively snapped up readers and advertisers.
Easton looked wary. “Mr. Price made the appointment last week.”
Mr. Price was a dead man.
“Oh, good,” Jane muttered from the couch. “I remembered to charge my stun gun last night.”
“Why is she here?” I asked.
Easton shifted his weight on his feet. “She’s here to do a three-day, in-depth interview. The story will run on the front page of the website next week. All-access.”
In-depth. All-access. I hated all of the words echoing in my head.
There was a brisk knock, and the three of us watched in horror as the door swung open.
“Ms. Stanton, I have three days with you, and I’d like to make the most of my time. May I come in?” She was already in. The dreaded journalist looked less like the grungy paparazzi I expected and more like a disapproving boarding school mistress.
Her pantsuit was prim. Her high-necked blouse buttoned to the base of her throat. She had dark skin and cool, appraising eyes that appeared to have already made several unfavorable assessments about me.
I rose, gritting my teeth. I would rather face a mob of people openly hating me than be followed and judged by a professed-to-be neutral stranger. At least with the mob, I knew where I stood.
“Ms…”
“Geiser. Lona Geiser.” She crossed to my desk and held out her hand.
Geiser. Of course it was. Geiser like the spewing of the personal details of my life she was about to do. She’d made up her mind already, and I didn’t have the time to be shadowed.
We shook hands. My hair slipped over my eye, and I brushed it back. Badass hair. I had a badass haircut because I was a badass. The words flitted through my brain like a fork of lightning. I was a badass.
“Lona,” I said, choosing her first name. “I’m Emily, and I’m unprepared for your visit.”
“I don’t require preparation. Just full access to you,” she said blandly. “I’d appreciate it if I could have a copy of your schedule for the next three days. I’ve left my bags with your front desk. Mr. Price assured me that someone would take them to the guest suite he made available for me in Bluewater.”
She was staying in Bluewater? In the only place I was safe from the prying eyes of journalists and the public? A shot with Jane’s stun gun was too good for Derek. Yes. I was going to torture him before murdering him.
“Of course,” I said with a small, strained smile. “Easton. I need to take care of something. Will you show Lona the offices and make arrangements for her bags?” Keep her occupied. I telegraphed the message.
“I’d be happy to. Right this way, Ms. Geiser. How do you take your coffee?” Easton turned up the charm to nine million.
Lona raised a questioning eyebrow at me over her shoulder before Easton firmly shut the door. I snatched my purse from the console table. “Let’s go pay Mr. Price a visit,” I growled.
“Maybe we should just call him?” Jane suggested. She hated paying for dry cleaning to get blood stains out of her clothing.
“What I have to say is best said in person.”
“Oh, boy,” she muttered under her breath.
37
Emily
“VETO!” I stormed into Derek’s office, the watchful eyes of his entire team on me.
One of the pajama pants-wearing employees was so startled he fell out of his chair.
Derek eyed me from across his desk, the phone tucked between his ear and shoulder. “I’ll have to call you back. Something’s just come up.” He hung up the phone and smiled. “Can I help you, Emily?”
“Can you help me? You can stand up so I can kick you in the balls. A three-day, all-access pass interview? Without telling me? What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that this would be an excellent way to use the media to show how brilliant and competent you are. Of course, that was before you karate-chopped your way into my office.”
“Veto,” I said, enunciating each letter with venom.
“If I recall correctly, you are out of vetos.”
It was true. I’d used up my three vetoes in record time.
“Don’t you dare be smug with me. You went behind my back, again! I can’t believe I trusted you. After this weekend—” I dropped the sentence and the thought. Forget last weekend. He’d wormed his way into my trust, and now it was time to remove the pest.
“It’s in your calendar,” he said blandly. His tone made me want to punch him in the throat.
“I beg your pardon?” I said icily.
“I put the interview in your calendar. Your trust wasn’t misplaced, just your ability to read a calendar and my forgetfulness to mention it to you in person. Which is inexcusable.”
I dug my phone out of my bag and stabbed at the screen.
Son of a bitch.
“You just put this in here, didn’t you?”
“The magazine confirmed on Friday. I added it to your calendar then.”
“I’ve been busy since Friday. You didn’t think to mention it?” I’d been busy having sex with Derek and meeting his family. Wearing his boxers. Opening up to him. Dammit. The bastard was a sneaky, untrustworthy, colossal distraction.
He rose and came around his desk.
I held up a warning finger. “Keep your distance because I’m mad enough to violate your face,” I warned him.
“It’s true,” Jane said from the door. “The boss has been itching to violate someone’s face for years. Be a shame if it was your pretty one.”
He held his hands up in a show of surrender. “It’s one of the biggest online media organizations in the world,” he said. “Their readership is huge, and the only way they would agree to do the article was if you gave them full-access.”
“She’s staying in Bluewater,” I snapped. “Following me to meetings. Is she going to shadow me to the bathroom, too?”
“What are you afraid of?” he asked.
“Oh, boy,” Jane muttered behind me. “That was stupid.”
“I’m not afraid,” I spat the words out.
“This is how I’m going to get you your IPO, Emily. I’m sorry I didn’t explicitly explain what was happening. That was my mistake. A colossal one. But I’m not screwing you over. I’m saving you. So tell me what you’re afraid of?”
Of losing the last shred of privacy I had. Of stripping myself of my dignity and begging for approval. Of opening myself up to the judgment of one person who could influence thousands. And what if I came up short? The thoughts tumbled through my head like sopping wet clothes in a dryer. I loathed that he could read me well enough to see that it was fear behind the anger.
“I’m afraid of putting public opinion on the shoulders of one woman who’s already decided she doesn’t like me,” I snapped.
“You’re an incredible woman, Emily, and it’s time the rest of the world saw beyond that curated facade. This is your chance to show who you are.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Derek?”
“I was a little distracted this weekend,” he said, sliding a hand around the back of his neck. “A lot distracted. And I forgot.”
Was that a line? A lie? Did he naturally spin everything? For all his talk of honesty and vulnerability, was he capable of practicing what he preached?
“And maybe I was a little terrified of how you’d react,” he admitted.
That at least rang true.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Truly. Deeply. I wanted to bring it up in the best way—”
“You wanted to manipulate me into saying yes,” I corrected him.
He paused and chose his words carefully. “I wanted to present the opportunity in the best light so you would see its merits.”
“And you forgot.”
It seemed almost involuntary how his eyes, blue and wary, skimmed over my body. Like a lover’s caress.
“I forgot. I allowed myself to be distracted by the gala and… everything else. I promise it won’t happen again.”
“D never forgets,” Rowena called helpfully from her workstation outside his door. “And since he did this time, we won’t let him again.”
People let me down. Always. Sooner or later, everyone would in some way or another. And I’d learned not to let them past my walls. Yet somehow, a man I’d known for only a few weeks, a man who had broken into my house to make a point, a man who’d stolen my father’s wallet, had scaled those walls. I was angry. But more at myself.
I knew better than this. I knew better than to put myself in vulnerable, uncontrollable situations. Had I learned nothing since I turned twenty-one?
“Tell me how to make this better,” Derek said earnestly. “Tell me how you want me to fix this, and I’ll do it.”
I wanted him to cancel the interview. To grovel. To leave me the hell alone.
“Give me space,” I said coolly. The words had frozen razor edges to them.
He winced. The ice queen claimed another victim. Finally.
“Stop,” he said when I turned to leave. He caught me by the arm and spun me around. “Jane, give us a moment and close the door.”
Jane waited for my nod before sauntering out of the office and shutting the door behind her.
“Emily,” Derek said.
I remained silent. The withdrawal of affection and attention was
often more powerful than a temper tantrum.
“Don’t you dare freeze me out,” he said, frustration lacing his tone. His grip tightened on me.
“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do. I gave you your chance. You disappointed me. Lesson learned.”
“You’re a stubborn idiot if you think that I’m going to let that be the end of this. Of us.” His voice was low, controlled.
No one in my entire life had ever called me an idiot. Stubborn, yes. Cold, of course. Difficult, “that bitch,” whore, holier-than-thou princess. But never an idiot. Never stupid.
Forgetting my favored offense, I let my temper win. I shoved him in the chest. “What did you call me?”
“There you are.” He had a gleam in his eye. That gleam.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I snapped. He didn’t have the right to look at me like that. Not anymore.
“I forgot. It was a stupid mistake. I don’t make stupid mistakes. Ever. But you—”
“Of course you’re going to blame me,” I scoffed.
“Emily, how in the hell am I supposed to keep anything in my head when all I can see is you under me, coming on my cock, calling my name?”
He wasn’t being flippant. Derek Price was being deadly serious.
“Speaking of mistakes,” I said blithely.
He looked like he was going to murder me. Those glacial eyes burned with an icy heat. “Don’t you dare use what we shared this weekend against me,” he warned.
I glared back at him.
“Emily, I wanted to tell you in the right way to minimize this. And then I forgot.”
“Oh, you forgot. How does it just fall out of your head that you signed me up for something you knew would piss me off? Three days, Derek. A stranger following my every move for three days!”
He had the good grace to look embarrassed. “This weekend was… eventful.”
“You don’t forget things.”
“There you were Friday night running around your house half-naked and needing me. And I forgot. It fell out of my head in a fog of lust and excitement and the egotistical boost of you letting me in. I’m only human, Emily. And the ‘you’ behind those monumental fucking walls is a goddamn miracle. You destroyed me.”