“What do you meanour? You’re going too?”
Her lips pursed with annoyance. “Matt and I go every year. How do you not know these things?”
“I don’t know, Jordan. Maybe I’m too busy growing this business to worry about stupid IFRS updates.”
He was angry now. First, he had to deal with Matthew and his annoying comments. Then she walks in here and teases him with her seductive lips and sultry voice. After that he had to endure a full-on apocalypse in his mouth and now he just found out that he would be spending the next three days with her…alone. It didn’t matter that there would probably be over a hundred people at the conference. He hadn’t kissed any of them. He hadn’t spent all weekend fantasizing about any of them.
What made it worse was that he’d been conned into going to this stupid thing. Matt had manipulated him by offering him a solution to his Trisha problem then got him to go on a second not-a-date with Jordan, which was afail. All in all, he was about to endure three days of torture and he had received no benefit whatsoever.
This was an inconvenience he didn’t need. Nameless, faceless people in suits, that’s what he needed to get over this unexplained attraction towards Jordan Shepard. The plan was to stay as far away from her as possible and now that body was going to be in touching distance for the next three days.
“You’re a little tetchy this morning, Mister Evans. I’m going to blame it on the pastry. I promise tomorrow will be apricot-free. A driver is going to pick you up at five a.m. It’s a three-hourdrive to the hotel we’ll be staying at. The conference is on the ground floor of the hotel. Ask reception for directions if you’re not sure. I will meet you outside at eight-thirty and the mind-blowing seminar will begin at nine. It ends at twelve-thirty on Friday afternoon, so we should be back home by four the latest. You’re good with that?”
He only nodded, too peeved to give any more of a response. She smiled and left his office. He inhaled a deep breath, trying to brace himself for the next day. At some point today, he needed to find a way to stop obsessing over Jordan’s kissable lips, Jordan’s grabbable ass. It was going to be difficult because her words kept playing on his mind. She’d said that she thought it was amazing, that she hadn’t stopped thinking about it. Did she mean that, or was she just saying it to bend him to her will?
Her reasoning shouldn’t matter, but it did. He wanted to feel like he wasn’t the only one losing his mind over that onestupidkiss.
How did he ever get caught up in this mess? Now she was going to pretend the kiss never happened and he was going to pretend he didn’t want it to happen again. She was going to pretend they still had a professional relationship and he was going to pretend as though his feelings hadn’t escalated to something completely unprofessional. And in between all this pretending, he would need to think of another way to get Trisha back because he couldn’t pretend to date Jordan anymore.
Tyler groaned his aggravation. He was twenty-nine years old, too old to be playing these stupid childish games.
*****
Nothing like a consistent monotone harping on and on about the amendments to IFRS7 to get the juices flowing. The presenter, Jack Ford, really knew how to hold a crowd. Three people at theback of the room were nodding off and Tyler was a few seconds away from banging his head on the table repeatedly and begging someone to gouge his eye out with a plastic fork. That actually seemed like the less painful alternative at the moment.
He wasn’t even sure if Jack was still talking about said statement. He spoke slowly, one word flowing seamlessly into another without any pause or variation in pitch, thus making it impossible to pick up when he moved on to a different topic. Tyler had stopped listening hours ago, doodling different stick figures of himself dying in more creative ways. Boredom was not the way he wanted to go, so instead he drew stick-figure Tyler being hit by a bazooka, stick-figure Tyler jumping off the Empire State building and falling face-first to his death, and lastly stick-figure Tyler being eaten alive by the tiny dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. He was quite proud of the artwork of the last one, where he had actually swapped over to a red pen to outline the blood oozing from his stick-figure body.
Jordan seemed mildly interested, jotting down notes every now and then when Jack said something that caught her attention. She had more stamina than most. She glanced down at his notepad and shook her head. Leaning over, she scribbled something on the bottom right corner of the page.
Tyler chuckled, but didn’t turn to look at her. Actually, he was trying to avoid looking at her as much as possible. He’d been breathing her in for the last six hours and the only coping mechanism he could come up with was to just not look at her. He didn’t want to see those lips. He didn’t want to see those eyes. He was trying to forget about the kiss so the most logical solution was to avoid all reminders. There was a part of him that was grateful for Jack because at least the suicide drawings had been some kind of distraction.
“Thank you, everyone,” Jack said, wrapping up. People were so relieved they started packing up while he was still talking. “Tomorrow we will looking at the complexities of IFRS13 and all the disclosure requirements for fair value adjustments of non-financial assets. Due to the technicalities, I will be taking it at a little slower than today’s session.”
Tyler groaned and made a mental note to bring along a plastic fork the next day. If he ever got out of this conference alive, the first thing he was going to do when he got back home was kill Matthew!
*****
Jordan sat down at a table in the dining hall of the hotel and sighed as she looked at her plate. The food didn’t look appetizing at all. It seemed to be getting worse as the years progressed. She’d decided to go with smaller portions and less variety tonight. Hunger was gnawing at her stomach, but she had a feeling this meal was not going to be easy to put down, so all she had in front of her was a small helping of rice and two slices of roast beef. She took a bite, then immediately gulped down water to wash it down.
She sprinkled a significant amount of salt onto it just to give it…any kind of flavor. After her second bite, she realized the less she chewed, the better it tasted.
She looked up and saw Tyler in the buffet line. He had no idea what he was in for and she had no intention of telling him. Why suffer alone?
He was back to being awkward and distant. Clearly the deal wasn’t working. He had barely spoken to her today and when he did, it was out of necessity. He wouldn’t even look at her. It will pass eventually, she told herself. They worked together so this type of behavior was bound to fade over time.
She saw Tyler approaching and dropped her head because she didn’t want to make this any more awkward than it needed to be. If he thought she hadn’t seen him, he could just walk on by and continue avoiding her like he’d done all day.
She expected to hear passing footsteps and instead she heard the chair on the other side of her table being dragged out.
“May I sit down?” he asked.
Although completely confused, she nodded and he took a seat. He looked different…in a good way. So good it was bad. Tyler always dressed in formal wear, but tonight he wore a light blue Polo golf shirt and slacks. His broad torso filled outthat shirt perfectly and she could see the lines of every sculpted muscle beneath the fabric. Sinfully delectable. And she was definitely having some very sinful thoughts. Why? Why did he have to get hotter every time she saw him? Ugh! Barf!
“I see you got the wood shavings,” he said, pointing to the rice on her plate. “I decided to try the salmonella strips.”
She giggled, taking note of the contents of his plate. He was obviously feeling braver than she was because he’d chosen the chicken stir-fry with a few calamari rings on the side. Seafood seemed to be a preference of his, but he might just change his mind after tonight. “Off the chain again?” she asked.
“You know me. I live on the edge…a total bad-ass.”
