Page 330 of Tormented Billionaire Romance Series

The skin on one side of Marly’s cheek sucks in as she bites it from the inside. She doesn’t say anything, but she nods.

“Can the rest of you give us the room for a minute?” I ask. “Thank you all for coming out. I appreciate it. We’re going to do everything we can to keep the company right where it is.”

I stand and shake everyone’s hand before they file out of the room. As soon as it’s just Marly left in the room with me, I resume my seat.

“Why didn’t you do it?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” she returns.

I say, “Don’t do that. When you left my office that night, you told me you were on your way to make your phone calls, and I know it wasn’t the board that held back the information. You never told them. I want to know why.”

“When I found out what they want to do—” she says.

“I’m serious, stop it,” I tell her. “You couldn’t have found out the board wanted to fire everyone and move the company overseas before you had a chance to make a few phone calls. Either you’ve got a relationship with the people on the board to a degree I don’t know about, or you never called them in the first place.”

Marly stands and adjusts the jacket of her pantsuit. “It didn’t feel right,” she says. “As pissed as I was—as angry as I still am you dropped this present in the board’s lap—I guess I realized that you can’t fix one wrong with another. Just get your head out of your ass and do what you need to do while you still can. If you can agree to that, you won’t hear another word about Grace from me.”

Now all I have to do is get Grace to speak to me for five seconds. The way it’s going so far, though, I have a better shot convincing Jacque to give up his life as a playboy.

* * *

“I’m not talking to you,”Grace says through the crack in her front door.

“I know I shouldn’t have gone off like Naomi like that, but something’s happened. I need to tell you a few things,” I say. “If you decide you’re done after you’ve heard what I have to say, that’s fine. There’s some stuff I need to get off my chest, and I don’t want to do it through the crack in your doorway.”

“What stuff?” she asks.

“I’ll tell you here if that’s what has to happen,” I tell her, “but I kind of had a whole thing planned out.”

“You’re kidding, right?” she asks.

“It’ll all make sense,” I tell her. “I have to leave for New York in the morning, and I might not come back as CEO. Before anything else happens, though, I need to do this.”

I can hear her sigh through the gap, the brass chain between the door and jamb pulled taut. “What did you have in mind?” she asks.

“We have the dinner we never had that first night I asked you out,” I tell her.

She waits for a beat before answering. “I’m not going anywhere with you until you apologize to Naomi,” she says.

I hope she can’t see me gritting my teeth when I say, “Of course. I think that’s only right.”

The door closes. After the sound of metal sliding on metal, it opens again, this time, all the way.

“She’s in her room,” Grace says. “She locked herself in there when she looked through the peephole and saw it was you standing there.”

I force a smile. “I’ll knock on her door,” I tell her.

In about twenty minutes, she’ll know why this is so hard for me.

I knock on the door across the hall from Grace’s.

“What do you want?” Naomi’s voice calls from inside the room.

“Naomi,” I say, “it’s Zach.”

“Go away!” she shouts, and I try to keep my eyes from rolling.

“I’m sorry for speaking to you the way I did,” I call through the door. “It was wrong of me, and I apologize.”

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