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“Then everything is fine…as long as you apologize to her.”
“Is she coming back?”
“Doubtful,” Lena said, sliding onto the chair next to her husband. “She’s down in the cellar, though.”
She shot me a meaningful look, and I took that as my cue to leave and seek out Amara.
“Cal,” Lena said as I moved to leave. “1-9-9-5.” My forehead scrunched in confusion, and she added, “The code to the cellar door.”
I’d never been down there before as it was a family only sanctuary. Lena must feel strongly about me patching things up with her daughter if she was handing the code over to an outsider.
With a nod, I bid Leon and Lena goodbye and stalked across the lobby, my mind whirring in a thousand directions. Quietly, I slipped through the cellar door and down the stairs. With each step closer, I felt like I was walking to my doom. This girl…she had the power to ruin me, in more ways than even she knew. But after that conversation with her father, and her mother’s comments, I had to make some changes to my behavior. Because one day, her idle threats of voting me out wouldn’t be idle any longer.
I found Amara where Lena said she’d be—curled up in one of the armchairs in the cellar. The contrast between the balmy late-spring air upstairs and the temperate, conditioned air down here rose goosebumps on my arms. For a moment, I leaned against the stone wall at the foot of the stairs, studying Amara before she acknowledged my presence and the serenity of her expression was wiped clean by her disdain of me.
I allowed myself to remember how it felt to have every curvy inch of that body pressed against mine. How her skin felt under my lips. The tiny sounds she made when I hit a particularly good spot, when my cock laid heavy between us…
“What the fuck do you want?” she asked suddenly, snapping me from my daydream.
Good thing too. The blood flow to my aforementioned cock was reaching dangerous levels.
“I came to apologize.”
“Save it,” she said. “I don’t give a fuck what you have to say.”
“Now, now, Amara,” I chastised, unable to stop myself from needling her. “That’s no way to speak to your partner.”
“You’re not my partner.”
“I am if you want to get anything done around here.”
“It’s my name on the door!” she burst out.
“And you’re going to have to get that temper in check if you want anyone to take you seriously. If you want to make a real difference around here.”
“Real difference? I’ve been working here for fourteen years, Cal. That’s half my life. I’ve already made a difference.”
“Not in any meaningful way. That’s why you’re trotting out your new little marketing program, isn’t it? And pushing so hard to get those RTDs to market? Because you want to leave your mark on this company.”
I laughed when she said, “It’s not little. And those RTDs are going to make us a fortune.”
“That’s what she said.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
“Gladly…as soon as you accept my apology.”
“Well, that will never happen. You have no idea the shit I’ve gone through to make myself useful around here. You think Ilikedspending the better part of five years separated from my family by an ocean? No, I didn’t.”
I couldn’t sympathize with the feeling, but I knew how close this family was, so I could imagine it hadn’t been easy.
Then again, she hadn’t really seemed to be hurting when she was getting drunk every weekend.
“I’m going to level with you: I don’t give a fuck what your parents think or say. I don’t think you’ve got what it takes to run this company successfully. An MBA from some state school and a European club tour isn’t job experience. It’s just…you fucking around and wasting your time and money on stupid shit.”
Amara blinked slowly at me, as though realizing something for the first time. “You really have no idea what I was doing over there, do you? You just looked at my credit card statements and receipts for reimbursement and assumed I was blowing money for no good reason other than to get drunk, screw my way through Europe, and live up to that ‘party princess’ nickname you’re so fond of.”
That rumor about her and an English earl slammed to the forefront of my mind, and my molars ground together at the thought of her screwing anyone but me.
