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He continues to chatter. To attempt to convince me to dedicate my entire life to his boring self, but I pull the phone from my ear and kill our call, then drop my hand and phone to the seat and exhale.
“He enjoys your attention, Ms. Cannon.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and work through the travel sickness I have never conquered in my twenty-seven years of being driven around. “He should get a puppy,” I grumble. “Unconditional love. Always happy to see him come home.”
“That would imply he’s willing to take care of another being, instead of that being taking care of him.”
I snort. “It’s not hard. Feed it. Take it out to pee. Get it vaccinations once a year. Besides,” I open my eyes and meet his in the mirror, “what does he expect of me if we marry? That I’ll quit my job, don an apron, and become his little Suzy Homemaker?”
Edward sniggers at the thought. “No one should expect you to do that. I couldn’t even imagine it.”
“No! Because I like my job. I like my life.”
“I like being in your life,” he adds happily. “I like that you like your job.”
“I should never have gone to bed with him that one time.”
Edward’s smile drops away, and though he doesn’tliterallyturn green, I sense his disgust in the air.
“I gave him that glimmer of hope,” I groan. “That chance to think we would be something. And now he won’t go away.”
“It doesn’t help that he’s your boss.” Indicating a turn and making my car sickness a little worse, he brings us around the corner. “Your father made him editor-in-chief, Ms. Cannon. Like it or not, he controls your career.”
“He controls nothing.” I shut my eyes again—it helps—and focus on our words. Not the ebb and flow of traffic. The stop and start as cars line up to move forward a few feet. “He’s a seat-filler until I step up,” I clarify. “I’m not ready for that position yet, or willing to fake it till I make it. I have articles I want to write. Adventures I want to go on. I have interviews to conduct and stories to construct. I can’t do those things if I have his job.”
“You don’t want to manage people,” he correctly concludes. “You just want to run your own race.”
“Right. I’ll take the job eventually. But not yet. Not until I achieve the things I wish to.”
Point made, and with nausea swirling closer to the base of my throat, I clamp my lips shut and while away the minutes until we come to a stop outside my apartment.
“Wait for me.” I open my door before he can cut the engine andclimb out to do it for me. “I’ll be an hour at the most. Then I need a ride to the Eriksons’, and approximately ninety minutes after we arrive, I’ll need you to get me out. Fake a heart attack or something.”
Stunned, he looks across in question, but his expression turns to a smirk and an incline of his chin. “As you wish.”
4
FELIX
SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY — HOPEFULLY
Christabelle Cannon is twenty-seven years old, with a March birthday—same as me—and is the heiress to theCannon Dailyfamily fortune. We’re talking, like, thirty-sixbilliondollars coming her way the moment old man Cannon craps out.
Men line up to fuck her. Many more wish to marry her. All of them want a taste of the lifestyle being with her would provide. And here she is, writing stories aboutmyfamily and walking into a party in a rich, golden gown that’s so thin, I can count her ribs and see exactly where her hipbones jut forward.
She’s not emaciated by any means. Not underfed. But she’s trim, and the too-thin fabric she was duped into buying certainly wouldn’t justify the price tag that came with it.
If anyone else were wearing it, people would assume they’d bought the garment off the rack and couldn’t afford something less flimsy. But because it’s the glamorous Christabelle, it’s obvious the designer intended it to look this way.
“Whiskey, Mr. Malone?”
I turn at the bar and wink for the server setting a lowball glass by my elbow. Snatching it up and swinging back around, I remain in theshadows of a party I have no interest in, and watch the dazzling Christabelle accept her warm welcomes and ass kissings.
Not even the bride-to-be is the star of this evening’s festivities. No one gives a fuck that Janey Erikson, the hotel heiress with three hundred million sitting in her bank, is engaged…again. No one cares that she wears diamonds as big as her fist, or that her red-rocket lips drop into a pout wheneveryonewatches a different woman enter the room.
Because Christabelle Cannon is where it’s at.
Her long, almost-black hair shines under the lights, and her lips, thick and fuckable enough to make me hard even from fifty feet away, glisten. Her eyes are sharp like lasers, though they don’t see me here, and her brain is perhaps even sharper.
