AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Prologue
I hated doing interviews.
Not for nothing, I was a busy man; I didn’t have time for this shit. The whole point of an HR Department was so that I didn’t have to waste my time with this crap, regardless of whether or not it was in my best interest to sit in this time around.
Last month, my personal/professional assistant had announced that she was quitting to be a stay-at-home-mom, and while I’d been happy for Lucy, it’d felt like she was dumping me like a high school senior dumped his girlfriend for all that college pussy that he was going to be swimming in next. Lucy had been with me for ten fucking years, taking the job when my father had finally decided to give me some real responsibility in the company. Twelve years later, I was already the CEO of Moore Industries, and my secret weapon was leaving me to go be happy.
It was bullshit.
So, for the past three weeks, we’d been conducting interviews for her replacement, and I’d hated every single moment of it. Not only was I too busy for this shit, but I trusted Lucy enough to have faith in whoever she thought was capable of following in her footsteps.
Still.
Here I was.
Here I was, not liking the seventh applicant, and at this point, I’d be better off hiring a robot. I didn’t do feelings, and I’d been lucky that Lucy had understood that enough to never take anything personally. If I walked in the office without telling her good morning, she didn’t curl up into a weeping ball, wondering what she’d done to upset me. She knew that I worked crazy hours, and she also understood the pressures of running a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate. I remembered her birthday, her work anniversary, and made sure to get her a Christmas gift every year; but that was the extent of it.
“Just one more for today.” I glanced across the conference room table, shooting Lucy a knowing look. “I promise.”
“If this applicant mentions anything about their ‘online presence’, then you’re doing the rest by yourself,” I told her. “I need someone that is dedicated to earning their paycheck more than they’re concerned about how many likes their latest post got.”
Lucy’s lips twitched. “You’re such an old man.”
I was thirty-two.
When the conference door opened, our receptionist escorting our latest applicant into the room, I almost swallowed my tongue at the stunning beauty that walked in, and that was saying something. I was one of the youngest billionaires in the world, so I was surrounded by beautiful women all the time. In a tale as old as time, women and money were always seen together; it just was.
I stood, saying nothing as Lucy greeted the woman. “Hello, I’m Lucy Averal. You must be Merritt Dale.”
“It’s good to meet you,” Merritt replied, and her voice had my dick twitching inappropriately.
Lucy gestured my way. “This is Cutter Moore,” she said, introducing us. “He’s Moore Industries’ CEO, and the man that you’ll be working for.”
Merritt looked my way, and her smile could end wars. “It’s nice to meet you.”
I didn’t make any effort to shake her hand, and I wanted them to hurry and sit down, so that I could do the same, hiding my growing dick. Admittedly, I had a past full of immoral escapades, but having a hard dick during an interview hadn’t never been on that list, and I wasn’t too crazy about it being on that list now. The size of my dick was the last thing that Lucy needed to know.
As soon as the ladies took their seats, I sat down, then waited patiently as Lucy gave Merritt the same rundown that she’d given all the other applicants before her. Lucy was very transparent about the job expectations, and she wasn’t sugarcoating anything. I needed someone that knew what they were getting into, and Lucy knew that.
When Lucy was done with the overview of the job, Merritt looked over at me, then asked, “So, basically, I’ll be keeping the same office hours that you do, and still be at your beck and call the rest of the time?”
With no sense in lying, I nodded. “Exactly.”
She nervously tucked a wild strand of hair behind her ear, and that’s when I saw it.
Merritt Dale was fucking married.
Chapter 1
Cutter – (Two Years Later)~
If I had one more senior vice president tell me that ‘they didn’t know’, I was going to take a fucking match to the entire building and just be done with it because nothing irritated me more than the words ‘I don’t know’. At this level in the corporate game, and with as much as we paid these sonsofbitches, that was an unacceptable answer to whatever questioned I asked. Luckily, it didn’t happen often, but when it did, no one was safe from my wrath, and I never felt bad about that. People should see what happened when they didn’t do their jobs at the level that was expected of them.
At the ripe old age of thirty-four, I was the CEO of Moore Industries, and though my father, Phineas Moore II, was only seventy-two and still very capable of running the company, he’d chosen to slow down considerably, being a better grandfather to my older brother’s kids than he’d been a father to any of us. Granted, after moving in with my older brother all those years ago, Phineas had gotten a lot better at being a father, and we were forgiving enough to give him credit for that.
My father had been a workaholic all my life, but that’d been because he’d been trying to forget the grief of losing his first wife, Rita. Of course, that wasn’t anything that we’d known until later in life, and because my mother had only been in it for the money, she hadn’t really cared that my father hadn’t been in love with her. Yeah, to say that our family was fucked-up was an understatement.
When my father had lost Rita, he’d found my mother a few months later, marrying her not even a year after the death of his first wife. He’d married my mother only because a man of his position was supposed to have a wife, and I wasn’t sure when they had stopped fucking around on each other, but their marriage had never been anything more than a business arrangement.
