Page 23 of After-Hours Heir

Kid: I’m not available for the next hour either. We can meet at Rosie’s, on Sixth.

Baby: Fine. I’m near there.

That made her frown.

Kid: Okay.

Just then, the elevator doors opened, and Christos stepped out, dressed all in black.

Her anxiety wrapped its hands around her throat and forced her stomach to plummet.

She hated that he was tied up in all this. She hated him. She might hate everybody. The company was against her, her mother was against her, the one man that she had trusted seemed to be against her now, and then there was this idiot.

This fool that she had to deal with because he had decided that he was going to target Jones & Abbott. And there was nonegotiating with him. The best-case scenario was that he kept her on in her position to continue the day-to-day operations uninterrupted. But that was literally all she was working for. It was no longer going to be what it had been.

It was no longer going to matter in the way that it had. It was going to be his.

Did she even want to fight to keep her job? She was going to have a baby.

She was going to potentially be a totally single mother doing this all on her own.

Well. She might not have a good example in the form of a mother, but her father had been an excellent single father. Who had done his very best to clean up whatever disarray her mother had left her in routinely when they had spent time together—times few and far between.

She knew that a parent doing it on their own could make an immense amount of difference.

So she went. And she wasn’t in the mood to be nice.

Because she wasn’t fighting for this job anymore.

She was fighting for herself. She was fighting for her baby.

They walked into the boardroom.

There he was. The dark and foreboding angel of hell himself. Satan’s very own. Lucifer in a custom suit. The absolute worst man on earth who didn’t have access to the nuclear option.

She was stalling on coming up with new titles for him so that she didn’t catalog his physical features. His perfect, far too appealing physical features.

“I assume you have all the paperwork?” she asked.

“Of course,” Christos said, leaning back in his chair as if this meeting were a relaxing holiday. “This is merely a formality. All the terms have been agreed to.”

“That’s a stretch. I have pushed some of the terms as far as they can go. And I accept that.”

“Good. I’m glad to hear that you’ve reached a place of acceptance,” he said.

“That’s me. I’m the picture of perfect sanguine acceptance.”

The other members of the board, her legal counsel and his walked in.

They all took their seats around the table and began the meeting, going over everything that was in the contract she had already read. The timings of different phases of the acquisition process, and the plan to keep her on in her position for guaranteed length of time, so long as she continued her work in a manner that kept the company meeting certain metrics.

It was extremely poor consolation, but it was the only consolation she was going to get. And it gave her time. Which she desperately needed. Time to figure out what she was going to do. Time to figure out what was important to her.

Because everything had changed this morning.

Whatever she had thought might happen, something different was happening now.

“I understand that this is not an ideal situation from the perspective of everyone in this room,” Christos said. Totally detached as ever. His dark eyes met hers, and there was something there, but she couldn’t read it. It was like staring into a well. Bottomless. Fathomless. Maybe there was something at the bottom, maybe it was dry. Who would ever know?