Page 89 of Wait for Him

I open it as the elevator doors slide apart and start reading while I walk, heels clicking down the corridor. The article is slated for the Los Angeles Journal, and I make it halfway through before my feet stop moving.

I press the heel of my palm hard against one eye.

“Fuck.”

Not because it's all true.

That's almost worse.

It's the kind of piece built from enough truth to make every exaggeration around it feel credible, which means correcting the record won't matter once the headline does its job. Whoever put this together didn't stumble across Michael's mess by accident. They assembled it.

And we have less than an hour before it goes live.

I turn around and head straight for Frank's office.

Our most senior board member, the last man on earth I want to owe a favor to, and unfortunately exactly the bastard I need right now.

I walk in without knocking and shut the door behind me.

I can't take this to Michael first. He'll look at it, tell me it'll all work itself out and go back to whatever he's doing while the building burns down around him and the rest of us form an orderly bucket line.

God love him.

"You could knock, you know." He crosses his arms over his chest, and his eyes make a slow, appraising trip down my body.

I snap my fingers sharply next to my face. "I own the building, you know. Get your pervy fucking eyes off me and pay attention." I slide my phone across his desk. "We have a problem. An immediate, screaming problem."

I've never been one to cower to men like Frank. He's a dirty old bastard with a talent for making women feel like inventory, but he also has money, connections and a frightening ability to get things done before everyone else has finished deciding whether they're technically allowed to.

That combination is the only reason he still has a seat at this table.

I watch the reality of the article land on him. His face goes pale.

"Who?" he asks.

“No idea.” I fold my arms across my chest. “Jade got it to me before it goes live, but we don’t have a lot of time. We've got less than an hour.”

Within fifteen minutes, Jackson joins us in Frank's office. There's a tension between the two of them, thick and immediate, that I can't decipher and don't have the time to try. Frank barely acknowledges him, Jackson's jaw tightens the second he walks in, and whatever fresh circle of male bullshit they've opened between themselves gets filed under later with everything else.

“Where's Bennet now?” Jackson asks, both palms planted on the table, his head hanging low between his shoulders.

“He's with Ms. Monroe. Conference room B.”

“Then let's get this over with.”

The three of us move down the hall toward conference room B like a small storm front, tight and fast and mostly silent, the particular choreography of people who already know something unpleasant has to happen and aren't wasting time pretending a better option is going to materialize before we reach the door.

Somehow, I end up in front.

Why I'm first in line for the firing squad, I have no idea, but here we are.

I knock once before opening the conference room door, with Frank and Jackson filing in behind me.

“Sorry to interrupt.”

And immediately, more fucking tension.

Different tension.