Page 70 of My Brother's Billionaire Best Friends
I glance up. “Picked that up too?”
She stirs her lemonade with her straw. “I mean, what does it even mean? Never cry at work? Never need anything? Never fuck up?”
“Never want anything,” I say.
She lifts her eyes.
I lean forward, resting my arms on the table. “You want my definition?”
“Hit me.”
“Professionalism is the ability to pretend you’re not a human being. To look someone in the eye and pretend their judgment doesn’t hurt. To want something and swallow it anyway. To sit in a room where you’re not welcome and act like you earned your seat.”
She’s quiet. Then she smiles. “That’s bleak.”
“It’s honest.”
“You sound like someone who’s had a lot of practice.”
“I sound like someone who never had a safety net.”
She nods. And for once, she doesn’t try to make it lighter. She just holds the moment with me.
And that’s better than any fix.
The drive back is quieter.
She dozes off twenty minutes in, her head turned toward the window, one hand resting gently on the dress box in her lap like she’s guarding something precious.
I don’t turn on the radio. I just let the road hum beneath us, the traffic easing into background noise as we head toward her neighborhood. My hands stay on the wheel, but my mind is still at that table—still replaying the way she looked at me when I talked about professionalism like it was a punishment we all agreed to call a virtue.
She listened. Not like she was humoring me, not like she was waiting to correct me. She listened like someone who’s been living it too.
When we hit a red light, I glance over at her again.
She’s still out. Relaxed. Peaceful in a way I don’t see from her often. Her job has forced her into a thousand roles—executive, fixer, emotional shock absorber. But like this, in the fading afternoon light, she’s just Parker.
And I want her more now than I did when she was naked beneath me in a cabin shower. But I don’t reach for her. Not yet.
We pull into her parking lot a little after four.
She stirs as I kill the engine, blinking groggily, then straightening with a quiet yawn. “Sorry,” she mumbles. “Didn’t mean to pass out.”
“You needed it.”
She stretches, then collects her bag and the dress box. “Thanks for today.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I want to.”
She opens the passenger door and steps out. I follow her to the porch, watching the way the light dances across her hair, the way she tucks the dress closer to her body like it might blow away in the breeze. She turns at the top step, keys in hand. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“Carry everything and still look calm.”
I lean against the porch railing. “I’m not calm.”
