Page 48 of Roommate Wars
I pretended to gag. “That’s disgusting.”
Soph thought she could trust Jack. Little did she know, he was the new man in my life.
ChapterTwenty-One
Jack
I wasn’tsure why I hated being in the office, but it was the thing I avoided the most in life. As a person who owned three companies (not including the ones I’d sold), that hadn’t always been easy.
Once Environ had grown large enough, I hired Thalia to be the one in the office instead of me. But today, I’d dragged my sorry ass out of the house and participated in two team meetings. The growth of our company should have kept my mind occupied, and it did. For a while. Now I had too much time to think about other things. So of course my mind wandered to Elise.
Never thought I’d find myself dating someone just to avoid an aggressive CEO. That was a first.
Who was I kidding? Sure, Thalia was more aggressive than other women, but that wasn’t the reason I’d wanted to date Elise. It was merely the excuse I used. I didn’t like the idea of Elise with someone else. It just about made my head explode.
I rubbed my temple and closed my eyes, leaning back in the leather chair of the office I used when I came into the building.
Was it such a terrible thing to date Sophia’s sister? Elise made me laugh. And she was loyal. Not something you often saw in the crowds Max and I ran in. She’d also been kind to my father—
My shoulders tensed. That there was the problem.
Most people weren’t all good or all bad, but I didn’t datesweetwomen. Dating women with a few ulterior motives made it easy to end things. But the ramifications of those past relationships had become too burdensome, so I’d stopped engaging. Then I’d grown lonely or possessive—was still trying to figure that one out—and here I was, dating another roommate, which I swore I wouldn’t do.
Two weeks wasn’t forever, and it would give me someone to take to work functions. So many fucking work functions. Somehow, the timeline made the whole thing palatable.
Thalia stopped at my office door and rapped lightly. “Am I interrupting?”
“Not at all.” I rested my elbows on my desk, hands crossed. “What can I do for you?”
She looked down, running her slender fingers along the edge of a yellow folder. She stepped inside the office and approached the floor-to-ceiling view of the Embarcadero instead of my desk. “I was just thinking about our engagement with the Napa investors.”
“Oh?” I stood and joined her, peering at the hustle and bustle below. The Environ offices had top-notch views of the bay, and traffic was picking up as people called it a day and got in their exercise along the waterfront. “You don’t think they’ll come through?”
Her expression remained bland, but I caught her eyes darting to the side for a split second. “I think they will…but they care about appearances.”
Where was she going with this? “Our company, along with the others I run, has a pristine reputation.”
“They do.” She looked over, meeting my eyes. “For now.”
I huffed out a breath of amusement. “You’re expecting that to change?”
Her gaze was back on the view. “Companies investing hundreds of millions in our technology won’t want anything to come between them and the bottom line. These days it can be something wrong with the technology…or a scandal.” She wiped an invisible smudge on the glass in front of her—likely causing a bigger smudge.
“Did you hear something?” I turned to her slightly. “Something I should know about?”
She sighed and looked at me. “It’s not about what I heard. It’s about what I saw. I wouldn’t want to pry into anything personal—”
I wasn’t so sure about that.
“—but your date at the dinner party the other night was unprofessional.”
The collar around my neck grew tight, and I unbuttoned the top. I wasn’t a fan of Thalia talking about Elise. “You meanmy girlfriend. And my girlfriend doesn’t need to be professional.”
Her gaze narrowed infinitesimally, but I caught it. She looked annoyed. And also perceptive.
Thalia was no joke. Only now, I could honestly say that Elise and I were dating.
When I thought back, my proposal hadn’t been romantic, and yet Elise said yes. She’d trusted me. Elise was honest and open, and it made me furious to hear Thalia disparaging her.
