Page 20 of Tempt Me

Just like that, I was fifteen again, and my brother, Cooper, and Jamila were telling me to go away because the grown-ups were talking business. I twisted my ring.

But I wasn’t fifteen anymore. I was twenty-six. Maybe I didn’t have a degree, but I’d spent all my life in the spotlight. As the youngest Jones, I’d observed plenty of my siblings’ mistakes. So I gathered my shredded pride and my last ounce of courage. “This isn’t going to be over next week. This is serious, Jamila. I bet Hope told you that you’ve already lost customers.”

She shrugged. “We don’t need customers who are afraid of a little cussing.”

“What about your financial services partner?” I asked. “What do they think of all this?”

Winslow whirled from the window. “You told her about the partnership with FA?”

“No, I didn’t. You just did,” she said wearily.

“Your financial partner is First Arbiter? But they’re so…stuffy.” They made Charles’s bank look libertine.

“Billie has a connection there,” Jamila said. “She and Winslow.”

“Not Kenneth Royal,” I said.

“Yes, in fact, I do know Kenneth,” Winslow sniffed. “We’re in the same golf club.”

I grimaced. FA’s CEO was the most rigid man I’d ever met. I couldn’t get him to crack a smile even with my party antics. He famously demanded all of his employees—men and women—wear the same gray suit and blue tie.

“He won’t be our partner for long,” he said. “Not if they invoke the morals clause of our agreement.”

“We’ll sweet-talk them the way we did when your divorce went public,” Jamila said.

His cheeks went blotchy red. “My divorce isn’t as public as this.”

“If this makes FA show their henhouse ways, we don’t need ’em.” The snap was back in Jamila’s voice. “We’ll find someone else.”

“But don’t you need them?” I asked. “You’ve come so far, and the launch is only…how far away?”

“Less than six weeks,” Jamila muttered.

We’d be lucky if we could clean up this mess by then. “I think you could save it if you helped them understand what happened. What did that guy say to you?”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle.” She jutted out her chin as if she were daring me to punch it.

Winslow sighed. “What do those guys always say? Something about being a Black woman in tech. It’s her trigger, and everyone knows it.”

“Fuck off.” Jamila waved her hand.

“Was that it?” I pressed.

“It?” Jamila raised her eyebrows. “Would you like it if someone questioned your credentials because of the color of your skin or because you don’t piss standing up?”

“No.” My face heated. “I didn’t mean, ‘Is that it,’ as in, ‘Is that all?’ I meant, is that what he said?”

“More or less.”

I wanted to dig deeper into what the reporter said to make her lash out like that, but it didn’t seem productive. Talking about it was making Jamila curl up like…like Quill.i.am.

I propped my hands on my hips. “You need a crisis communications team, and I’m here to head it up.”

Jamila rolled her eyes.

“Wait,” Winslow said, sizing me up. “Maybe this isn’t a terrible idea. Distract the media with PR Barbie.”

“Hey! I’m right here!” I interjected.

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