Page 3 of Bossy Trouble

Damn it, why did he still have that effect on me?

Donovan’s voice was always his best feature, a baritone with a singular soothing quality. It was a dangerous asset—a voice that put his enemies at ease right before he ripped them apart.

And the voice sent my heart thumping in my chest as I took him in, the man in the well-tailored suit sitting at his desk and scribbling something on a sheet of paper.

It was my first live sighting of him in five years.

I drank it in like water.

Donovan was not a man who should have been handsome. Yes, he was tall with a leanly muscular frame, but his face was in no way the classic definition of that word. It was all too…much. His eyes were too sharp and aquiline, nose slightly hookish, lips a touch too wide, and jawline too angular. He was a man you could look at in a magazine for hours and debate if he was handsome or godawful ugly.

But the one thing no one could ever do was ignore him. He drew your eyes no matter what.

“What is it, Sasha?” he asked again without looking up.

I swallowed. “It’s not Sasha.”

He looked up then, but reluctantly, almost as if he didn’t want to drag his eyes away from the paper.

Then two things happened simultaneously.

One eyebrow lifted into his forehead as he leaned back in his chair and regarded me. And then, his lips twitched in an almost smile with a glint in his eyes that told me he smelled blood in the water.

Any illusion I held of getting out of this unscathed instantly vanished.

“Ah,” he said with the satisfaction of a hunter whose prey had come to him. “Georgia.”

2

DONOVAN

They often say the universe sometimes brings you exactly what you need.

I wasn’t naïve enough to believe in such bullshit, but it was serendipitous that Georgia, of all people, was here.

Before Georgia showed up, I’d already been thinking of a way to let off some steam. The stress of the week was starting to get to me. I could tell by the near-constant headaches I was getting. My father very inconveniently died just a few months ago, leaving me with only half of his meager fortune.

But all of his problems.

My father’s and my relationship became strained in the past few years, but nothing in particular happened. All we held in common was business interests, and once he took a back seat in Dresden Inc., our conversations naturally dwindled. Every once in a while, he would call in and find out how everything was going, and once I gave him a brief rundown, that was it.

Prior to the day of his accident, we hadn’t talked for nearly three months.

And even on his death bed, he hadn’t told me he left the company a ticking time bomb that could explode at any minute, taking us all down with it.

Finding a way to diffuse that bomb was quickly occupying my every waking thought. The fortune I’d built, all invested across diverse portfolios, would largely buttress me from bankruptcy if my company were to go under. Regardless, I wasn’t willing to lose it like that. Dresden Inc. was my fucking baby. While my father was the official CEO of the company, everything we achieved in the past few years was my doing. Saving us from ruin, tripling our fortune, and exploding our conglomerate—that was all me.

And with one wrong move, my father risked destroying it.

Over my dead body.I wasn’t going to let everything I worked so hard for, my legacy, be tarnished just like that.

That was simply not going to happen.

People could say a lot of things about me, but the prevailing theme was that, no matter what, I always came out on top. I was Donovan Dresden, and I didn’t lose. And it would stay that way for the foreseeable future.

So I needed to figure out a solution even if it killed me. And it just might. With the amount of pressure I was under, I was probably headed for a heart attack.

Of course, there were ways for me to release the tension, but I’d been so busy that sex was the last thing on my mind.

---