Page 115 of Taming the CEO

After we’d finished cleaning up, we went back to the living room. She sighed. "How am I going to be able to eat at this table again, knowing what you've done to me on it?"

"I know the solution to that problem."

She looked at me with narrowed eyes. "Buy another table?"

"No. I’ll make you come on it as many times as it takes for you to get used to it."

She threw her head back, laughing. It was a beautiful thing to watch. Then we sat down at the table, and she opened the contract on her laptop.

"It's thirty-five pages," I said.

She nodded. "Obviously, I don't think it makes sense for us to go through everything right now. Your lawyer will do that anyway. Dad already forwarded it to him.”

“Let’s look at the plan for the park.”

"You have it ready?" She looked at me with questioning eyes.

I nodded. “The architect drafted it up a while ago. He just finalized it this week.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Cami

Maddox scrolled toward Annex A and then cleared his throat. "Right. This is the current plan of the park."

I looked at it in fascination. "You've numbered every tree."

"Yeah, the way you have," he said. "We plan to have this path snake here, where your main trail is right now. In order to connect it to the hotel, we’d have to take down these two." He pointed to tree numbers 16 and 18. They were very old and the reason why we didn’t build any stations there—they were at-risk trees that could fall any second now due to the rot. It was only a matter of time before they had to be cut down anyway.

"That's fine by me. They had to go anyway."

"Then we'll take down the fence to your property here, and it’ll be a smooth transition to the distillery and the hotel."

I listened to him intently, but only part of my brain was following everything he said. My heart gave a mighty sigh. I hadn't seen many similar contracts, but I was 100 percent certain that the vendor was in no way obligated to include a plan. And yet Maddox had done it purely for my peace of mind.

"Cami, what are you thinking about?"

I turned to him, tilting my head sideways. He'd only put his pants back on, so his torso was completely uncovered. He was so damn tempting. "That you do deserve that second round of getting down and dirty after all."

"I was on probation?"

I gave him a seductive smile. "Not exactly." I traced his cheeks with my fingers, stopping at the dimples at the sides of his mouth. "Thank you for putting so much effort into this. I wasn't expecting it. And I know you didn't have to do it."

"It wasn't a big deal."

"If I talk to Gabe and the architect, will they say the same thing?"

Maddox started to laugh. "You're good. And I’d advise you not to do that. The architect might tell you that I'm the most exigent client he's ever had. Gabe informed me that he's going to sleep for the rest of the week. I kept him up by sending him various versions of the plan these past few days."

"Oh, so that's why you weren't replying to my messages as quickly as usual."

He shrugged. "What can I say? I had a goal, and I wanted to see it through."

"You could have just sent me the contract next week.”

He shook his head. "No. If we push the sale faster, it's going to benefit all of us. We can start the construction earlier, and you can begin working on your business. You don't have to worry about how the bad weather will impact the bookings or even bother setting up the ice rink.”

I loved this man. Yep, plain and simple, I just did. He didn't even know up until today that I’d planned to open a new business. He'd just wanted me to feel safe.

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