Page 19 of Between the Lines

There are nine members on the Board, including two who were old friends of my dad. The only ones I haven’t been able to replace, yet. But they’re heading for retirement soon enough, even if I have to push them there by force.

The Board is younger now than it was when my father or my grandfather ran the company. Partly because of sheer necessity. When my dad’s fraudulent activity was exposed, the Board wasalmost as much to blame as my father. Corporate oversight is sort of their job, after all.

And there had been very little oversight.

Now, the new Board wants a new image for Titan Media.

I turn in my chair and look out at the city. I would rather be anywhere else than right here, right now. The rolling hills of Utah. Joshua Tree National Park. A stretch of beach at an exotic destination.

The memoir isn’t aboutme.Not truly. I know it, the Board knows it, and, soon enough, so will Charlotte. The story will be about my father—my relationship with him, his court case, and the time he’s currently serving. And it will conclude with a beautiful triumph about how I helmed the company and turned it around in the nick of time.

It’s a memoir aboutmy life,part of it anyway, but really it’s about Titan Media. It will be picked apart by tabloids and business media alike for nuggets they could splash across web pages, newspapers, or turn into a high-profile documentary in a few years.

The Board wants a bestseller that will cleanse us all with holy fire. Use the lemons my father left us with and make lemonade. Apply whatever metaphor you want, and the result is the same.

They want to control the narrative.

But it’s my family’s story that will be presented like a sacrificial lamb on a pretty little platter for the public to tear apart.

Well.

I had agreed to a first draft in two months. A hard deadline for the deliverable in exchange for the Board’s approval of my new investment. They’ll sign off on the finalized negotiations once that initial draft is in their inboxes.

But I never intended to make it easy for the memoirist.

They’d want my secrets? My personality, my demons, the scoop on my family? They’d have to drag it out of me. It was afuck youto the Board, with the poor memoir writer as a civilian casualty.

But yesterday the door opened and she walked in… Charlotte. I received the information about the ghostwriter before the meeting. The first name had been the same, sure. But what were the chances? There was no photograph. No other identifying traits.

The writer enjoys solo road trips across our country’s great national parks.

None of that.

But there she was.

Charlotte Gray.

Standing in my office in a pair of dark-blue jeans, a gray blouse, and with her long light-brown hair wavy around her elfin face. Bright-blue eyes and a plump mouth.

Staring at me like she just walked into a nightmare.

The odds of us meeting again were astronomical. So fucking slim that, had she been a lottery ticket, I would have won millions.

Millions.

There was a flash of panic in her eyes. I’d been ready to send Eric away, to let her know that if she wanted out of the contract, she could leave. But then she’d steeled herself. Rolled her shoulders back, met my gaze, and delivered her sentences with deliberate professionalism.

It was too damned intriguing. All of her is so damn interesting. Just like she’d been in Utah. Competence and vulnerability living side by side in her dazzling, intelligent gaze.

A complication.

Made worse by the fact that she had given me a goddamned fake phone number. She had brushed me off, and we both knew it.

But we still have to work together for two whole months.

My gaze lands on a helicopter in the distance. Sweeping over Los Angeles, a sprawling city that sometimes makes me feel like a king, and other times claustrophobic. It’s where I grew up, where I have my base.

My pride can take it.

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