Page 17 of Never To Be Mine

I smiled and walked back into the office. The temperature had dropped about twenty degrees. She shut the door behind me with enough force to shake the walls. She looked at me like she wanted to set me on fire with her mind alone.

She looked exhausted. Why was that so sexy?

I gave her my best disarming smile. Her jaw clenched so hard I worried she’d crack a molar.

Dan settled back into his chair and gestured for me to take the seat I’d vacated earlier. He looked at his daughter. She made a growling noise before flopping into the other chair in the room like a disgruntled teenager.

Dan smiled. “Hollis, why don’t you tell Juno why you came here today?”

I turned slightly in my chair to face her, keeping my expression open and sincere. “I never meant for things to snowball like they did. I posted that video because you called me out in public and I wanted to encourage people to judge my product for themselves.” I paused. “But it got out of hand. Way out of hand. The comments, the memes, all of it. That wasn’t what I wanted.”

She stared at me, unmoved.

“I want to bury the hatchet,” I continued. “Work together instead of against each other.”

“How?” The single question from her carried obvious skepticism.

I leaned forward slightly. “Look, despite your opinion on my green shakes, people like them. The demand is high. But I’m bottling them in a tiny workspace that can barely keep up with current orders, let alone the new ones flooding in since the video went viral. I need to scale up production to meet demand.”

“And that’s where we come in,” Dan said, picking up the thread smoothly. “We have multiple bottling plants for all of our health drinks. We can set one of them up for his drinks.” He paused. “On one condition.”

I nodded. “I have to prove the demand is high enough. I need to get my orders up to a million.”

Dan’s expression remained professional. “If you can do that, we’ll partner up with you to bottle and distribute your green shakes. And I want you,” he looked directly at Juno, “to work with Hollis. You’re my acquisitions superstar. I want you to vet him and see if he’ll be a good fit for the Young at Heart family.”

Juno shook her head immediately. “He’s a terrible fit. There. You have my opinion. I just saved us all a lot of time and hassle.”

I’d put up with a lot of shit, but at some point, she needed to accept responsibility for her role in the whole viral video. If she hadn’t done what she did, there wouldn’t have been a video. I got to my feet.

“If you’re not interested, I can go,” I said.

“No, no, no.” Dan held up a hand. “The whole reason we’re talking about this is so B Well and Young at Heart can show the world there’s no hard feelings and we both support one another. That stops our bad PR and it’ll tell people we don’t think his green shakes are made of rat piss.” He looked at Juno with that patient fatherly expression I had been on the receiving end of more than once. “And I’m firm in my position that I will do what it takes to stop the harassment online about my daughter.”

I respected that. Whatever else was happening here, Dan Young was protecting his kid. I could appreciate that kind of loyalty, even if said kid was currently glaring daggers at me like a spoiled only-child who wasn’t getting her way.

“I said they taste like rat piss,” Juno corrected sharply. “Not that they’re made from rat piss.”

I couldn’t help myself. “It’s mostly banana and kale, guys. Zero urine from any animal.”

“It was sour,” she shot back.

“So’s your attitude. Maybe that’s what you tasted.”

Her eyes flashed. I’d scored a hit.

Dan stood up, clearly done with our bickering. “I’m sure you two can work things out. We’ll schedule a follow-up meeting next week to go over the specifics.” He looked at me, then at Juno. “Good day.”

It was a dismissal. A polite one but a dismissal nonetheless.

I nodded and headed for the door. Juno followed me and I glanced over my shoulder to make sure she didn’t try to shank me.

The second we stepped out of Dan’s office, Juno’s hand clamped around my wrist like a vise. Before I could process what was happening, she dragged me into the nearest conference room and slammed the door hard enough to rattle the frame.

Clearly, that was her thing. All that righteous anger was hot.

“I don’t know what kind of sick game you’re playing,” she hissed, whirling to face me, “but I’m not interested.”

I leaned back against the conference table, crossing my arms and my ankles. “Game? You mean after what you did to me. If you don’t want to get recorded acting like an asshole, don’t act like an asshole.”