Page 44 of Between the Lines

“This is humiliating enough as it is,” she continues, and I can see the quick expansion of her ribs beneath my fingers. She really is angry. “We’ve only danced around the topics that actually matter. I’m starting to think you don’t want this memoir written at all. You give menothing!”

My fingers brush over her skin on their way to the base of the zipper, and damn it, she’s just as soft as I recall.

“Of course I don’t want this fucking memoir written,” I grind out. The pull tab is tiny and the lighting isn’t great, and she’s so distractingly close and warm.

“What?”She turns her head to glare at me.

I focus on the zipper and try to get it closed. “Would you want an entire book dedicated to the worst fucking time of your life? Revisiting the things you’ve spentyearstrying to bury?”

A faint sound escapes her. It sounds almost like shock, and a bit sympathetic, and I don’t want that. Never that.

But then she shakes her head sharply, and the light-brown waves brush along her shoulders. “Then why did you agree to it? Why sign the contract, and why hire me? Why am I here, Aiden?”

To drive me mad,I think. The zipper catches, and I pull it closed and snug up the side of her dress. But for every inch it draws together, it comes undone again below the slider.

“The zipper is broken,” I say. “The teeth won’t stay shut.”

She twists in an effort to see, and her dress gapes open even more. I catch the solid swell of her breast and look away, toward a gray peacoat hanging right next to my face.

“No way. It can’t be,” she hisses. “This is my only formal gown.”

I look back at her. “I offered to buy you a dress.”

“Which would have been completely unprofessional. But thanks,” she adds, so clearly as a polite afterthought she doesn’t truly mean, it makes me smile.

She narrows her eyes at my expression. “Why did you agree to this, then? The whole memoir if you’re determined to sabotage it?”

“I’m not determined to sabotage it. I’m determined to make it bland and boring,” I say.

She looks like she wants to throw her hands up, but doing that would make her dress fall. She glares at me instead. “That’s the same thing as sabotage! I have a career riding on writing good, well-received, bestselling memoirs. We have to tear up the contract.”

“No,” I say immediately. “We can’t do that.”

Her eyes are so angry they burn. “Oh my god, and whynot? Why are you putting both of us through this if you don’t even want a memoir? Why drag me into this?”

“You are an unfortunate casualty,” I say.

“You did not just say that.”

I blow out a breath. This isn’t what I wanted to talk about tonight, not what I wanted to admit. “The memoir is a trade with the Board. They want a good PR opportunity and a new narrative for the company.”

“And you don’t?” she asks, her eyebrows furrowed. She’s even pretty when she’s fuming.

“No. But in return for my agreement, the Board will greenlight a new acquisition and the project they’ve been dragging their feet on for years.”

“This is a calculated move on your part,” she says. Her arms are still wrapped around her chest.

“Yes, of course it is,” I say gruffly. What else would it be? I’m running a company that employs thousands of people, and it needs to recapture stability. It needs profits, and it needs to get back on track moving forward.

“Well, you’re going to have to find another memoirist.” She looks left and right, and then shakes her head. “Damn it. I should get out of here.”

A hum of voices reaches us from the lobby. The speeches must have wrapped up.

I wrapped up my own as soon as I saw Charlotte leaving her seat.

Not planned. But I saw her hurry through the space with quick steps like she was fleeing, and the remaining platitudes slipped out of my mind. The only thing that mattered was her.

No one’s ever gotten under my skin like she has.

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