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I drag in a deep breath and let it out through my nose. “I don’t know how.”
“You have an IQ of one fifty-two,” he replies. “Figure. It. Out.”
“And what if I don’t want to?”
“It’s not about you,” Beckett snaps. “It’s about the five thousand employees who count on you for a paycheck and the thousands more who’ve invested their hard-earned money in you.”
“They’ve invested in my company, Beckett. Not me.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
I sigh. The crippling loss of energy is another side effect of starving my wolf of any human or shifter contact. I’m just so sick of caring what happens to my company’s stock, my employees, my pack.
Beckett must sense my unspoken defeat, because he crosses the room in four quick strides and hauls me off the rug by my armpits.
“The fuck —”
My head of security grunts as he heaves me over one beefy shoulder. Beckett’s an ex-Navy SEAL who has shifter strength on his side, but I’m a goddamned alpha.
I punch him squarely in the spine with enough force to cripple a linebacker. Beckett goes down, but then he gets me in a headlock and drags me out of the study.
I sucker punch him in the abs, but it’s like punching a brick wall. He hauls me up the stairs with relatively little effort, nearly taking my head off in the process.
Before I know what’s happening, he’s tossing me inside the glass-enclosed shower. My back hits the smooth tile wall, and he turns on the tap.
An angry howl tears out of me as cold water pummels my skin, which itches like hell from the pieces of glass still embedded beneath the surface.
“Take a shower. You reek,” Beckett snarls, glaring at me with a mixture of brotherly concern and violent satisfaction. “Get dressed, and get your ass downstairs in twenty. You have a press conference at ten.”
Chapter Two
Jules
My heart feels as though it might beat right out of my chest as I pull up in front of my nana’s house. It’s a tiny blue bungalow with a chain-link fence that wraps around a patchy brown lawn. I just drove my slightly used cargo van off the lot, which means this is finally happening.
Throwing the vehicle into park, I jump out and take a few steps back to admire the company logo painted on one side. “White Glove Maid Service” gleams in classy black letters, and my chest swells with pride.
Grinning like an idiot, I go around to the passenger side to grab the two bags of groceries I picked up on the way. Nana always insists that she doesn’t need anything, and yet her fridge is practically bare. Now when I come over, I try to stock the essentials — milk, bread, eggs, and fruit.
“Nana?” I call, raising my voice to make sure she can hear me as I nudge my way through the front door. The neighborhood is considerably rougher than it was when she and Gramps bought this place back in the seventies, and yet she never locks her front door no matter how much I nag.
“I’m still here,” comes a creaky voice from the back room, where I can hear The Young and the Restless blaring on the TV set.
The brown carpet in the living room is worn, and the floral curtains are faded, but Nana’s house is always immaculate. Her small white shoes are lined up neatly along one side of the entryway, and the old linoleum tile is squeaky clean.
Out of habit, I glance up at the glass pendant light over my head — a little trick of the pros that Nana and my mother taught me. You can always tell if a house is truly clean by looking in the hard-to-reach places. Light fixtures and ceiling fans are magnets for dust, and they’re the things people most often neglect to clean. Not Nana, though.
“I have something to show you,” I call in a singsong voice, going into the kitchen to put the groceries in the fridge.
“I hope it’s a new pair of knees.”
I hear a grunt and the painful-sounding crack of joints as Nana heaves herself out of her chair. “These old ones ain’t what they used to be.”
“Sorry, Nana,” I say, smiling despite the knot in my stomach.
Her refrigerator is bare except for a bottle of ketchup, half a packet of tuna, and a mostly empty carton of orange juice. I knew the bill from her most recent trip to the hospital hit her hard, but I hadn’t known things were this bad.
I hurriedly shovel the groceries I brought into the fridge and stick three hundred-dollar bills under the little ceramic cat figurine on the table. She’ll be angry when she finds the money, but I’ll be long gone by then.
