Page 20 of After-Hours Heir

Of course. He was too smart for something as basic as a drug or other substance to get its claws into him. He was too aware.

It was this woman. This text relationship. It came from a place he hadn’t anticipated. From a place he hadn’t planned.

What a fool he had been.

He supposed he should be grateful that he had been foolish at a time in his life when he could afford it.

Foolishness back when he had been a boy would have ended in his death.

No more. He was aware now. There was a vulnerability inside of him that he hadn’t realized was there before. He had let her slip beneath it.

It would never happen again.

Never.

He drank down the rest of the whiskey and hoped that it would do something to get rid of the impression her hands had left on his body.

It didn’t matter whether it served its purpose or not. He would never indulge himself with her again. Not ever.

He was set on his next conquest. All that mattered was that he completed the acquisition of Jones & Abbott.

It was all there was.

He put the woman out of his mind.

He would not think of her again.

CHAPTER SIX

SHETEXTEDHIM. Just one time. Two days after they met.

He didn’t text her back.

Her brain spun scenarios about why this was happening.

That something happened to him on the way home from the hotel? Had he been hit by a taxi?

She was embarrassed to admit she had done a combination of Google searches trying to find out if a man had been killed in that area. Or been in some kind of horrible accident. Because the alternatives weren’t…worseper se, but they were painful in a different way.

What if all he had wanted was to lure her into a sexual encounter?

Well. That didn’t make sense. They had been texting for nearly six months. She was the one who had suggested they meet. If he had only wanted sex there was no reason for them to text that long, and he would’ve suggested a meetup long before.

She reminded herself that she had been in the driver’s seat, and it did something to quell the heartbroken feeling that she was grappling with.

She had sensed that there was something off with him emotionally. And she felt like maybe he was imbalanced after their encounter. But because of that she thought that he might break and eventually text, but he didn’t.

She had never felt this kind of heartbreak. She had experienced it in other ways. Her mother broke her heart routinely.

Her father’s death had been heartbreaking.

The initial stutter and stumble of the publishing house had been heartbreaking.

This was different. This felt like constantly breathing with a jagged piece of glass embedded in her chest.

It was ridiculous. But she missed him. She had no one to talk to. And as the acquisition of the company ramped up, that became more and more difficult.

She stared at her phone so often, wishing that she was brave enough to make an overture. She just wasn’t.