Page 14 of Grant’s Heat

“Mr. Twombley.” She shook her head. “You are one of the least selfish people around here.”

Inside my office, I hung my suit jacket on a hanger on the back of the door. After sitting down at my desk, I stared at the pile of papers in front of me. The damn stack looked like it had doubled in size since yesterday, and I had zero motivation to get to it.

Lately, my motivation had been waning for a lot of things.

Even a buzz on my cell—which had me looking at a happy text from Char, confirming my offer on the condo had been accepted—had me reacting with a hollow sigh and a matching cavern in my chest. Closing the deal on that property should’ve had me close to hard, but right now?

Nothing.

I paced restlessly to the window. Although I didn’t have the view Bas had from his office, I still had a decent vista to behold. But even that didn’t bring me the peace I needed at the moment. Nothing seemed to.

It was unsettling.

Something in my life was shifting. Something in me. The shitty thing was, it was happening faster than I could cope with. It wasn’t rational. Or, at this point, even identifiable.

When did this change take place? What caused the shift? Something that was a lifelong thrill didn’t stop overnight. The last time I bought a property, I’d been higher than a kite. I went to Lulu’s and fucked one of her regular girls until she cried from all the orgasms. But right now, even envisioning that did nothing for my dick—or the widening chasm in the center of my chest.

My interoffice phone line rang. I strode over to my desk in a few long steps, grabbing the receiver off the cradle. “Yes, Reina?”

“Ten-minute warning,” she said briefly, indicating it was already time to return to Bas’s office.

“Thank you. I’m on my way.” Grabbing my suit coat, I shut off my office lights—no sense wasting energy and all that happy green horseshit—and headed over to Bas’s office for our meeting with the architect for the Edge, Jacob Cole.

Chapter Three

Rio

“Kitty? Here kitty, kitty, kitty.” I bent down to peek under the rosebushes that lined my front patio. The little scamp usually hid under the shrubbery while the neighborhood kids played outside. At the moment, however, it was getting late, and the street was relatively quiet, so there was no reason for him to hide.

I made friends with the black-and-white stray two weeks ago when his crying caught my attention. On that first night, he was brave enough to trot right inside my front door when I opened up to see what was causing all the commotion. The tiny feline strutted across my welcome mat with his little tail flying high like the flag of his very own nation.

He owned me from that first moment, weaving in between my ankles, motor purring louder than should be possible from such a small body. Once I began putting food out for the little man, we were official. He was mine, and I was his.

“Robert?” I called before setting the little porcelain dish down on the patio. I went with the French pronunciation of the common name because my small friend had an air of sophistication about him that deserved a little flair. Sean still hadn’t met him, but he would love him when he finally did. At least I hoped he would. Already, I couldn’t bear the thought of having to say goodbye to the young fellow.

For the past two weeks, Sean had been working even longer hours than he had at his previous job. Now that he was hired on with the team at Sebastian Shark’s project, the Edge, he was trying to make a good first impression. Apparently that meant a real investment of hours. A lot of damn hours. When I complained that I never saw him, he reminded me about the incredible salary increase he was given and the premium health insurance we now had.

Put in those terms, the long hours didn’t seem so terrible. Plus, my husband assured me he was just staying after hours for the first month or so, trying to get acclimated to the new job site itself and get up to speed on the project.

Sean confided in me just after being hired that the Edge was more massive and high profile than he’d ever expected. For those reasons and a thousand more, the attention to detail was more serious than any other job he’d ever been assigned to. When he came home after his first day and told me he’d taken the position, he was so excited about what the opportunity meant for our future, and we dared to have hope again. We went to bed that night and had wild, passionate sex with all the faith in our hearts that we were putting the icing on our good-fortune cake and adding a baby to our precious family.

But now, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t lonely. Very lonely, as a matter of fact. Abbigail, my sister-in-law and business partner, had cut back her work hours at our catering kitchen by at least half. She was just beginning the twenty-fifth week of her pregnancy, and since she’d already had one scare from overworking, Sebastian insisted she scale back the time she spent on her feet. That was all a sensible—and necessary—plan, but my personal adjustment was tough. Not only did I miss the help around the kitchen, but I also longed for the daily girl time with Abbi.

Basically I was left with no other choice but to hire some outside help until Abbi returned from maternity leave.

Enter Hannah Farsey, a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu but utterly uninterested in landing a standard job with a five-star restaurant. So far, the visionary young woman was working out like a dream. She arrived first thing in the morning and left after I took off for the noontime deliveries. The timing on hiring her couldn’t have been more perfect. Since the big Greystone party, word about Abstract Catering had spread through the city’s social elite faster than a brush fire during a Santa Ana wind. As a result, the day-to-day operations at Abstract Catering had changed more than Abbigail or I could have ever predicted.

In addition to the regular lunch deliveries Monday through Friday, our private VIP clients had increased by almost thirty percent—at exactly the same time Abbi dramatically cut her kitchen hours. The only problem was that all the newly scheduled events were taking place before baby Shark was due. That meant I had to assemble my fresh team and hope like hell we functioned as well as the old one. Hannah’s arrival had been a huge help in that regard.

Scheduled events.

At that thought, tingles of excitement pricked me. The sensation was both thrilling and unwelcomed. It was a heady yet shameful combination of emotions from the way our business was finally taking off and…well…something else entirely.

There was a secret I had been hiding from everyone. A dark part of my psyche that I didn’t like to examine for too long. Something that was wrong with me. And by wrong, I meant disturbingly so. Not like having one toe that was longer than the others or eating pineapple on pizza. This was something worse. A terrible secret I’d kept hidden from everyone in my life, including my husband.

Especially my husband.

Until Grant Twombley barged into my world.