Page 24 of Tempting Him

His perfect white teeth flash between his lips as he smiles before jogging toward his vehicle and pulling something from the back. When he gets to my car, he tosses a backpack in the back.

“Wishful thinking.”

I shake my head. “Don’t be smug.”

“Never.”

* * *

“So,”Jay muses, dropping his bag on the couch before he sits next to it. “Aleksander Drakos. CEO and CMO of MGD Advertising. You’ve been in charge for a few years now. Sorry to hear about your parents.”

I pour some liquor into a couple of highball glasses before pulling a Coke out of the fridge to add to Jay’s. “I see you’ve done some research.”

“Just a little.”

“Hmm. What would I find if I Googled you?” I ask, handing him a drink.

“Jayden Brooks, best wide receiver to ever grace South River University’s football team, and the winner of a couple national wrestling championships. That’s probably it.”

“Best ever, huh?”

He grins. “I like to think so.” After a pause, he says, “I may have found out your age.”

“Yeah? And you’re still here?” I question, sitting on the couch opposite him.

“Forty-one isn’t that old.”

“How old are you?”

He chuckles. “I’ll be twenty-three soon.”

“Makes me feel ancient,” I say with a grin before taking a sip.

“Younger than my parents,” he offers in an attempt to make me feel better.

“Bringing your parents up doesn’t help.”

Jay laughs again. “Sorry. So, did you always want to do this, or did it fall into your lap?”

“I guess you could say it was expected of me. I didn’t really have a chance to find anything else that brought me interest. I got into some trouble as a kid. Typical teenage shit. I was rebellious, got in some fights, and hated authority. My dad got sick of having to bail me out of trouble and really put his foot down. We moved and he started bringing me to work and teaching me everything I needed to know. Just so happened that I fell in love with it.” I take another sip of the bourbon before continuing. “Their deaths happened a lot sooner than expected, so being in charge came quicker than I thought it would, but I was prepared nonetheless.”

He nods, probably unsure where to go with the conversation after I mentioned their deaths. Death makes people uncomfortable. They don’t know how to treat you when they know you’ve been affected by it. They assume you’ll turn into an emotional mess.

“I don’t struggle with the fact that they died,” I tell him. “It was an accident, plain and simple. It could’ve happened to anybody and there was nothing that would've been able to prevent it. Bad weather created conditions where people couldn’t see and the roads were slippery. They weren’t the only ones who died that day.”

Jay watches me with a strange look, and I can tell he wants to question me about something. He opens his mouth, closes it, then takes a drink before asking something else. “You don’t have any siblings?”

“No.”

“So, who will you pass the company to when you no longer want to run it? If your parents created it, I imagine they wanted it to stay a family business.”

I shift, gulping down the rest of the drink before standing up to refill it. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? They’ll never know who runs it.”

He spins around, his eyes full of shock as he studies me. I stare back at him as I pour the liquor, and he must see something in my gaze that tells him not to question it any further. And he’d be right. I’m never in the mood to have the discussion me and my parents had way too many times.

Jay stands up and walks over to me, taking my glass and swallowing down two shots’ worth of bourbon. “Let’s get drunk and fuck.”

I pour more into the glass and drink it down. “I like that plan.”

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