Page 52 of Wait for Him

I stare at him across the table.

Why the fuck is he being like this?

It's his mess. His bare ass currently playing on a loop across every local news channel in the city, his name trending beside phrases that should never appear anywhere near the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company, and he's sitting here treating the woman we're paying a fortune to dig him out of it like she's the one who stripped him down and tossed him into the fountain herself.

I cut him a glare sharp enough to get his attention.

Michael sees it.

Ignores it.

Interesting.

“Mr. Sullivan, there's a reason it's overdone,” Ms. Monroe says, completely unruffled. I have to give her that. Most people would've started packing a bag somewhere around the air quotes. “It's overdone because it works when it's executed properly. I am, however, entirely open to your suggestions.”

“My only suggestion is that you go back to Houston and find another corporate carcass to circle.”

Silence drops across the table.

I close my eyes.

Good fucking hell.

When I open my eyes again, Ms. Monroe hasn't moved. Her expression hasn't changed, and for half a second I think the insult rolled straight off her.

Then I see it.

A small flinch. Barely there, gone almost before it registers, but I catch it. Her fingers tighten around her pen and then release, her face settling right back into that perfectly composed mask.

That's the line that does it for me.

I have spent my entire adult life cleaning up after Michael Sullivan, and God knows he's given me plenty to work with, but I have never once watched him be deliberately cruel about it. Reckless, yes. Arrogant, absolutely. Occasionally so far up his own ass I've considered charging him rent.

But cruel?

No.

I open my mouth to say something I'll probably have to apologize for later, but Jackson gets there first. He rises from his chair with that maddening calm of his and crosses to the conference room door before the temperature can climb any higher.

“Could you excuse us for a moment, Ms. Monroe?”

She doesn't say a word. She simply gathers her notebook and walks toward the door, but when she passes me, I catch the slight tremble in her fingers.

She's good.

Very fucking good.

I'm positive she would rather cut the hand off than let any of us see it shaking.

And that makes me even angrier at my brother.

The door closes behind her and the room erupts.

Everyone starts talking at once, the entire board piling onto Michael at full volume. Frank is demanding to know what the hell he was thinking, someone else is reminding him how much we're paying her, another voice cuts across both of them about professionalism, and I'm somewhere in the middle demanding to know when exactly he lost his fucking mind.

Voices, power and money all crowd into the same airspace.

None of it lands.