Page 10 of One Night Billionaire

Anna processed that. It meant that things had already gone south before on this project, and she was glad she requested the clause to opt out after learning about it. It might have been completely unrealistic to complete now.

“Let me have it then,” Anna said.

“That will come from Brian as well. He should be free in the next ten minutes, so we can make our way down to his office.” Pete went back to the door and gestured for her to follow him.

She followed him out, closing her door before matching his lazy pace. Anna had only met him a handful of times throughout her very quick onboarding last week, but he seemed relaxed about everything and didn’t seem to be interested in rushing.

He was far different from Brian, whom she’d only spoken to on the phone. She’d almost turned down the job based on his name. It made her think of the man that she’d met on vacation and her long list of regrets when it came to him.

That was a lie. It wasn’t a long list. It was short. Leaving, that was her regret. Even if that was what she was supposed to do for a fling, she wished she had stuck around and spent the night in his arms.

She wished that she didn’t have any regrets. Maybe, if she had stayed, it would have been that he asked her to leave, but now she would never know if it could have been a second day of great sex.

And the sex had been damn great, like the kind that blew your mind and still had you begging for more at the same time you wanted it to stop. It was the best she’d ever had.

Lucy had told her part of that was probably the mystery of it all that had heightened everything. That and the fact that she knew it wasn’t a relationship, so there was no pressure. Anna wasn’t so sure.

“You can have a seat over there. I’ll see if he’s out of his meeting,” Pete told her.

She sat in one of the three chairs in the outer office to wait for him. The whole walk over here, she had been distracted by thoughts of Brian, and now she had to hope that Pete was going to take her back to her office because she had no idea how to get there.

Starting the job distracted wasn’t going to help her at all. Pushing those thoughts down, she reminded herself to focus. This was likely going to be the biggest test of her skills and determine whether she stayed at the company or not. She needed to put her head back on work.

Pete poked his head out of the office. “Anna. Come meet Brian, and we can get started.”

She took a steadying breath as she stood. It was time to find out if she truly had a job or not. One thing she wasn’t prepared to do was risk her reputation on a project with unattainable goals. It wouldn’t be good for her or the company.

Walking into the office, she froze. “No way,” she muttered under her breath.

“Anna, meet Brian. Brian, this is Anna.” Pete did the introductions.

Brian didn’t look up to meet her right away, typing away on his computer. “Thank you. Have a seat and give me just a moment,” he said distractedly.

It gave her a moment to recover her senses. She closed her eyes and steeled her spine before taking another step forward.

Before she could take a seat, Brian looked up. She watched the recognition flash followed by anger before settling into the mask of a business professional.

“Nice to meet you,” he said.

“Same,” Anna said, her voice barely above a whisper.

He stared at her until Pete cleared his throat, pulling Brian out of it. “Sorry,” he cleared his throat.

“Brian has the details on the project and it’s more his baby than mine. I have the details of where it was left by the previous project manager to answer your questions. As we discussed before, you’ll be working closely with Brian on updates, daily preferably,” Pete explained.

“Understood,” Anna said. She was impressed her voice sounded relatively normal.

“This project is due in three weeks, but sooner if we can. I cannot move the deadline again. It will challenge both your leadership and technical skills to get done,” Brian told her.

“I am confident that if it’s doable, I can do it,” Anna hedged.

“We are creating a program. One that will organize files automatically based on templates and content. This was supposed to be done more than a month ago but we had a lot of setbacks. I recently took a vacation,” Brian pinned her with a look, “and while I was away, the old project manager seemed to make a bunch of changes.”

“He undid some of the work that had been done already and deleted the backups. I don’t know why. He quit before we could catch this,” Pete added.

“Before that, there were several delays and I am now wondering about their validity. That part is not your problem and something we will investigate from our end. What it does mean for you is that your team is frustrated and it will take a lot of… work to get them back on track.”

Anna nodded. “And aside from delayed, how far behind are we on milestones?” she asked.

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