Page 55 of Bound By My Father's Best Friend

With a smirk!

“Head up, Heather,” Hector hummed from his door. “You shouldn’t be slouching, nor signing. I might need to teach you proper etiquette later this evening.” After tsking and shaking his head at me, Hector walked right to the elevator doors to greet that stupid piece-of-shit professor that shouldn’t be teaching in the first place. “Eric, I’m Hector. It’s nice to meet you.”

CHAPTERTWENTY-NINE

HECTOR

I shookEric’s hand and placed a hand on his shoulder, squeezing lightly, like I would to an old friend to make him feel comfortable, to get him to trust me, to like me before I cut him down and burned him in front of Heather.

“Eric, I’ve been so excited to chat with you,” I said.

Eric shook my hand stronger than I’d expected his scrawny ass to and smirked over at Heather, staring at her for much longer than I was comfortable with. He liked her. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he had been failing her purposefully to get closer to her.

To try to fuck her. Blackmail her.

“All thanks to Heather,” he said, his gaze dropping down her body for a moment.

A damn moment, but I had seen it.

“Come on into my office,” I said, extending my arm to show him the way.

He headed through the main office like he already worked here and walked into my personal office off the main floor and next to our executive conference room.

When I walked past Heather, I hummed, “You too.”

She frowned, trudged in behind us, and shut the door.

I pulled out a seat across from me for Heather, but that asshole sat down first. I clenched my teeth lightly and pulled out the chair beside him for her. When she sat, she shot me a glare because she didn’t know what I was planning.

“Well, Eric”—I sat across from him—“why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself?”

“I’ve been working at the university for three years now and have had the honor of having Heather as a student for two semesters. I’m looking to pursue more of a career with software engineers who actually know what they’re doing.”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “Teaching students must be hard.”

Especially when you purposefully fail them when they should be succeeding in your class …

“Like you wouldn’t believe.” He chuckled.

“Oh, I believe it.” I drew my tongue across my teeth and tried to keep my composure, but Heather’s face was red with fury, which pissed me off even more for her. “Must be distracting, too, with all those pretty girls who’d do anything to get a passing grade.”

Her anger would be worth it in the end.

“Some do …” His eyes flickered to Heather. “Others … not so much.”

“Your résumé looks very impressive,” I praised, glancing over at Heather, who sat with her arms crossed and a scowl on her face, not once peeking over at Eric. “And Heather has told me so many good things about you.”

Of course, it was a lie. But I wanted to build him up, to make him feel like he was on top of the world. Humiliation always hit harder that way. I had learned that from the years and years of abuse back at home, before getting adopted.

He smiled at her. “I’m glad to hear that.”

“Well …” I pulled my desk open and grabbed two laptops. “I thought we could start with you showing me some of your skills. This test is what we give to all our developers during an interview. I was thinking it’d be fun for Heather to do it alongside you so she could brush up on her skills and maybe …learnfrom you.”

Heather’s glare intensified as I set the laptop in front of her.

The test used a coding language that not many developers could read, but Eric had written on his résumé that he was familiar with it. And because I didn’t like the asshole, I’d had Steven create a pile of hot garbage code that wasn’t usable as it was.

You know … just to give it to Eric to fix.

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