Total pages in book: 224
Estimated words: 215705 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1079(@200wpm)___ 863(@250wpm)___ 719(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 215705 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1079(@200wpm)___ 863(@250wpm)___ 719(@300wpm)
Chapter nine
Carrie
Ispend the rest of my afternoon preparing a report on the two projects I’ve been chasing and why. I feel like Reid might need this for the stockholder meeting tomorrow. For the staff, I prepare a speech that Reid may throw right out the door, but I practice delivering it with a positive presentation. I’m actually pacing my office, memorizing it when my door suddenly opens and Reid appears.
“Did I hear a knock?” I ask, trying to cover up the way my damn heart races with his presence. He’s just so overwhelmingly male and so damn good looking.
“No,” he says, stalking toward me. “You did not.”
I resist the urge to take a step backward, standing my ground with Reid, knowing that I can’t allow myself to be his prey and survive this man. He stops in front of me, so close that anyone watching us would think we were intimate. We are intimate in ways I can’t escape and I’m not sure I want to when I should. He is not my friend. “You really want to hear what I think of you?” he asks, his voice a hard line that I cannot read.
“Professionally,” I clarify. “Yes. If I knew you would really tell me the truth. I don’t like hidden agendas. I don’t like back-stabbing. It’s not who I am.”
“And yet you want to be CEO of a company that thrives on back-stabbing and hidden agendas.” It’s not a question, but a statement.
“You don’t have to win that way. You just have to be smarter and faster, and I would have been.”
“When your father was not,” he supplies.
I force myself to be direct. “When my father was not,” I concede. “And for the record, you were right. I should have known about Japan. I should have followed my own decision to see where it led.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Does it matter?” I challenge.
“Yes,” he says, those blue eyes of his piercing. “It does.”
“It was a book I thought was closed,” I say offering him the most unemotional answer possible.
“It was painful,” he says his voice soft, but he doesn’t give me time to reject his assessment when I really can’t anyway. He sees the truth. “To be clear, I’ve told you what I think of you, but I get it. You don’t trust me.”
“How can I? You took over my family business and now you control my entire life.”
“You could walk away,” he points out.
“But I don’t want to, and you know that which means you can use me and when this is over, I have nothing.”
“I gave you a contract for a reason,” he counters. “So you don’t walk away with nothing.”
“I get nothing if I fail.”
“You won’t fail, but you want to feel my confidence in that statement. I’ll double your salary in back pay if this ends with you leaving, and yes, I’ll put that in writing. And as for trusting me. Use the instincts that made you see Japan for what it was. Wrong. Japan was a wrong move. I am not.”
“I didn’t trust my instincts about Japan, remember?”
“You should have. Your instincts were right, but if you need facts to back up why I’m the right move for you, you have them. The stockholder meeting is public record. You’ll know what I say in that meeting, and in the end, you’ll see that it comes down to one thing. In all things, we want the same thing.”
In all things, we want the same thing.
Those words land between us and hang in the thickening air, heat rushing over me that I don’t want to feel. “Do we?” I challenge, fighting this incredible urge to sway toward a man who is probably my enemy, a wolf who doesn’t bother with sheep’s clothing. “Because I want to trust you.”
“As I do you, Carrie, but you need to understand that I put my neck on the line for this deal. I cannot let you burn me. Don’t think about trying.”
I give a bitter laugh. “I tell you that I need to be able to trust you, and you react by threatening me again? You’re such an asshole and you do it so well that you must have been perfecting this skill your entire life. Congratulations. You are the ultimate superior ass.” I try to walk around him but he catches my arm, and heat rocks through me, over my shoulder to do a slow spread across my chest. I can’t breathe with the impact, with the realization that this wicked hot connection between me and this man defies the hate and distrust between us.
He pulls me in front of him, and he doesn’t let go of me, his long fingers wrapping around my arm, his gaze raking over my face. “If you burn me,” he says, his voice low, hard, “it burns you. I’m the best asset you have.”