Page 9 of A Billion Dollar Romance
“I won’t do it.”
“You won’t,” she said, and I shook my head.
“No, certainly not. I don’t have time for yourschemes, Lyle. Just–” I rubbed my hand over my face again. I was getting permanent frown lines between my brows, and I just had to hope they made me look distinguished, and not old. “Just… Start the search process, put out a call for submissions. And set up a team to find an in-house ghostwriter we can use as our author, just in case.”
They nodded, Bridget, at least, looking suitably chastised.
“There has to be someone down there–” I started, and then froze.Down there.
Edie’s intelligent eyes from the middle row of the classroom, those same eyes fluttering shut as I slid inside her.
“Sir?” Bridget prompted.
No, James. Not her.
“There has to be someone down there who can pull off a convincing romance…” I said, shuffling the papers on my desk. “But it sure as hell isn’t going to be me.”
CHAPTER6
Edie
“Per say.”Gotcha.I highlighted the phrase, typing “per se” over top so that my correction showed in green beside the original.
The draft I was proofing was clean, but that just made my job duller. I stifled my yawn, reaching for my cup of coffee.
“You want to get lunch soon?” said Margaret from the desk beside me. She tilted her chair back on two legs, craning her neck to look at my screen and grimacing. “Take a break? Peter and I are going to a deli around the corner, and if you eat at your desk again, I’m afraid I’ll find you face-down in your salad by the time we get back, the way you keep yawning.”
“Sorry,” I said, but she waved away my apology.
“We’ve all been there, believe me,” she said, and nodded at my coffee mug. “You just haven’t hit your perfect caffeine dosage yet. It takesyearsof experience–”
“You talking about your caffeine dependency again?” Peter bounced in from the break room, a freshly washed mug in one hand. “Don’t let her get to you, Edie. You don’t want to end up like her, spending all day in the break room, hooked up to a coffee IV drip just to make it through the afternoon.”
“Just because some of us are born with twice the normal human’s energy…” she started, launching in on what was obviously a well-trodden debate.
My first week in the office had been…fine. Boring, even.
Which was the best case scenario, really,I reminded myself,after a too-eventful first day.
I’d dreaded going in on Tuesday, had considered calling in sick–for what, the rest of my life? I’d put on my Back-Up Interview Outfit, a slim light-grey skirt and a navy sweater, pulled my hair back into a no-nonsense ponytail again, and trudged to the office, hoping I wouldn’t see him again.
If I had spent all morning checking and re-checking my inbox, looking for another email from his address, it was just because I was nervous.
Sure it was.
But there was no email that day, and nothing on Wednesday, either, or Thursday, and now I had reconciled myself to the idea that he had been telling the truth: that he had put our night together behind him, that he had moved on.
Of course he had. I’d seen the pictures of him in the tabloids, a different model on his arm every weekend.
It was only me that couldn’t forget that night. Who hadn’t gotten over the time we’d spent together–both in the classroom and between the sheets.
“Sure,” I said to Margaret, interrupting her coffee debate with Peter. “Just let me finish this chapter.”
* * *
The deli turned out to be just the kind of twenty-four-hour hole in the wall that I loved, the kind that served everything from bacon and eggs to spaghetti and meatballs, all of it made by a cantankerous old man and delivered to your table by a surly woman that justhadto be his wife.
I nibbled a fry from my near-empty plate, my club sandwich demolished, and leaned back against the well-worn vinyl of the booth seat.
