Page 74 of Power
I tilted my head, suspicion crawling up my back. The incredibly busy board of directors was inviting me to present, but had no specific goal for the meeting? Nothing suspicious about that at all.
Perhaps reading the skepticism on my face, the HR woman said, “They’re interested in learning more about some of the employees from the company they’ve acquired.”
Right. Okay … I wanted to say, but whyme specifically?
Instead, my frazzled brain replied with, “Sure. That sounds perfect.”Gold star for professionalism, Scarlett. Maybe next time, you can respond with finger guns and a wink.
“Great.” Her smile widened a fraction. “They’ll see you at one o’clock.”
She clicked away on her designer heels, leaving me standing there with my stomach performing a flag presentation. Specifically, waving red flags all over the place.
I didn’t know what was going on, but my internal alarm system was blaring like a five-alarm fire. Tapping my pen against my desk, my brain sprinted through scenarios of what this might mean.
Was this like one of those scenarios out of those movies where it was not a presentation at all, but a corporate execution squad waiting for you to justify your existence? The kind where if you didn’t come up with a good enough presentation or didn’t field the whole “what would you say you do here” questions, you’d walk out with your personal items in a cardboard box and security breathing down your neck?
Oh crap, what if there was no meeting at all? I’d learned through other fallen colleagues that when companies performed mass firings, they never put it on your calendar like:Hey, come to your termination meeting at one o’clock! Bring tissues!No, it always came disguised as something that would ensure you showed up.
Or maybe this was a good thing? An opportunity even? Jace’s doing perhaps? Trying to throw me a bone by giving me visibility to leadership after our argument? His way of making it up to me? What if it was the opposite though? What if Jace was so pissed I’d refused to give him Grabby Hands’s identity that he’d had enough and orchestrated a way to get me fired?
Or … or perhaps this was simply what that HR executive said it would be: an opportunity for new blood to learn what old blood did here.
Standing up, I paced in my office for two minutes before finally telling myself to stop obsessing over hidden agendas and get to work. No matter what this was, no matter how bad of a feeling I had about this, I had no choice but to show up prepared.
I could only hope that after this mysterious meeting, I’d still have a job.
Sitting at my desk, I cleared my calendar, created PowerPoint slides faster than an IT coding genius on a Red Bull bender, practiced my talking points until my mouth went dry, touched up my makeup and hair (because I read that looking good while getting ambushed was important), and finally, I walked upstairs, took one last steadying breath, and stepped inside the conference room.
And promptly forgot how to breathe.
Because there, commanding the room like he owned it (which, technically, he did), was another party I hadn’t expected to join this board presentation or whatever this was: Jace. He sat at the center of an oval glass conference table because, of course, it had to be glass, taunting me with memories of what we’d done on one, while his eyes laser-focused on me with an almost-predatory intensity. Predatory in the best way, to be clear, and dammit if that wasn’t infuriating. Also infuriating was how he somehowlooked even more gorgeous today than yesterday, when we’d had that argument over the NDA. The light streaming through oversize windows highlighted those eyes—the unusual shade of absinthe, equal parts danger and temptation—and his black suit with the white button-down was impeccable, complete with a blue tie.
Wait. That wasn’t just any blue tie. Was that …
Yep … that was the same tie I’d fastened around his eyes while he lay naked on another glass table entirely, the one where I’d straddled his face and he’d licked and sucked me into oblivion.
Did he wear it on purpose? To remind me that I could refuse him all I wanted, but we had an intimate relationship whether I liked it or not? Was it a message of some sort?
It took me a full three seconds to tear my gaze away from him and notice what should have been immediately obvious. The table was surrounded by over a dozen business people. All my bosses (minus the lone woman, suspiciously), a sprinkling of executives I worked with, plus a couple from the new organization, including Grabby Hands, who occupied one of the seats next to Jace.
All men. Every. Single. One.
Move, Scarlett. Play the part of the unaffected professional.
I forced my feet toward the only open chair, the pieces clicking together in my mind as I digested the scene before me with a horrible realization.
This wasn’t a presentation.
It was a trap.
38
JACE
Goddammit, she is beautiful.
That pencil skirt hugged her hips, ass, and legs that I wanted to spread wide open and feast on until she screamed my name. I wanted to bend her over this table and grab that blonde hair in my fist and pound into her, maybe give her ass a slap or two and tell her she’d been a bad girl, defying my orders yesterday. How was it possible that each time I saw her, she only grew more gorgeous? If anyone looked beneath the table, they’d see my pants struggling against my growing erection. Which was the absolute opposite of a professional response for someone who was actively staging a battlefield to uncover who had harassed Scarlett.
Someone in this room was a predator. Someone had laid hands on her. Someone had teased out Scarlett’s painful and deep-seated insecurities about men with power.
