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I dialed the number. I could just pretend I’d tried his cell phone and couldn’t get through.
“Coleton Central, this is Sasha. Can I help you?”
Sasha, I thought. I immediately pictured a vixen behind the desk with boobs so big and perky that she could run into a wall and bounce off without even scratching her nose.
“Yes,” I said, deepening my voice as much as I could. “I need to speak with Adrian White. Er, well, I need his secretary. I want to book an appointment. But I don’t want to bother Mr. White, so it’d be best if you just put me through to his secretary. Is that you? Are you his secretary? I mean.”
There was a brief pause, probably because I was ranting like a crazy woman. That, or it was the ridiculous deep voice I was using. “I can transfer you to his secretary. Please hold.”
I let out a sigh of relief. Unless I was about to get transferred to Giselle, who would sound even more vixen-like and make me imagine even bigger boobs.
“Hello?” A woman answered in a shaky grandma voice. “This is Polina, how can I help you?”
“Oh, sorry,” I said quickly. “Wrong number.”
I hung up the phone and laid down on the couch, chuckling at myself. I was an idiot. And Adrian was a much better man than I realized. I sighed and decided to behave myself while I waited for him to come back from work.
I spent most of my evening laying on the couch wondering if I was making the right choices. Adrian was almost exactly the sort of man I’d daydreamed about. Maybe my dream guy hadn’t started out as grumpy, but I was coming to see that side of Adrian wasn’t the real him. He was driven and he took care of me in a different way than my family always had.
They tried to shut me up with excess. If they threw enough shiny objects in my face, they thought I’d stop wanting more and be a good little Coleton girl. But Adrian valued me for me.
I wished I was still allowed to join him at the office, but I also understood why that was impossible. Even without Adrian’s goals, I would’ve been recognized too easily and dragged back home. My father did regularly show up at Coleton Central and dozens of men and women who knew me growing up worked there daily.
I turned over the possibility of my family’s company getting destroyed in my head for the hundredth time. Every time I thought about it, I expected to feel some sudden rush of wrongness—like I’d realize I was making a huge mistake by not warning my family. I did like my mother, even if she was far too complacent in the way my father tried to run things. But it wasn’t as if my family would go hungry if the business collapsed tomorrow.
They’d all have plenty of money and plenty of resources to get by. Destroying Coleton would just be taking away my father’s ability to keep ruining the lives of people like Adrian’s father. And that was what I always came back to. No matter how many ways I looked at it, this felt like the right thing. I knew people at Coleton would lose their jobs if Adrian succeeded, but how many would lose more than that if he didn’t? It felt like a necessary price to pay.
I turned on a show and hoped to distract myself for the next few hours while I waited for Adrian. But I only made it about ten minutes before I pulled out my phone and decided to text him some suggestive emojis.
I grinned, debating between a banana emoji or the purple eggplant.
Decisions, decisions…
31
Adrian
My phone had been driving me crazy. I considered shutting the thing off, but then I knew Jules wouldn’t be able to reach me quickly if she needed me. I was still nervous about her being all alone in the apartment while I was at work. I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen, exactly. The building I’d chosen had security and our place was on the forty-second floor. None of that stopped me from worrying, apparently.
I was sitting at a conference table with Noah, Travis, and my sister.
Noah squinted at me, pushing up his glasses. “You okay there, Adrian?”
I waved off his question. “I’m fine. My phone has just been narrating my texts to me all day. I haven’t had a chance to figure out how to get it to stop.”
As if happy to demonstrate, my phone chirped. After a brief delay, the text-to-speech voice kicked in. “Message, from, Davis. Cumberland. Please have it to me by tonight. Thanks. Talk Soon. End. Message.”
I gestured to my phone. “As you can see.”
Travis grinned. “I’d be fucked if that happened to my phone.”
