Page 102 of Serving the CEO

And I’d gone about it the best way I knew how. I’d tried to broker a deal.

That was the point of my book, wasn’t it? A man had no need for any romantic entanglements when he could get everything he wanted through wise business decisions and money. ‘Love’ didn’t exist, and the only worthwhile relationships were those put down on paper so everything was in black and white.

Right?

I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. The thing I kept coming back to, the thing that had me wanting to drain that entire bottle of bourbon and then going to find more, was that if that wasn’t true, what did it say about my new book?

What did it say about me?

And what the fuck did it mean for my future?

FORTY-ONE

JESSICA

A dangerous coldsnap had practically shut the city down over Christmas, and I’d been grateful for it. I’d been working non-stop over the last couple months getting Bristol’s book ready for a release early next year, and the weather had been the perfect excuse to give myself a couple days to rest.

It’d also been a good reason for my parents to close the bookstore early on Christmas Eve and us to spend the time together as a family. After the year we’d had, it’d been nice to have a nice, quiet holiday…before the real world destroyed everything my parents had worked for.

Well, not the real world.

My vindictive fake ex who I hadn’t seen in three months.

I pushed thoughts of Derrick to the back of my mind and double-checked the inventory of children’s books that hadn’t sold before we’d closed the doors for the last time last night. Once I verified the title and number, I put them into the box with the other books and closed it up.

This sucked.

Every inch of this place held parts of my childhood.

I ran my fingers along the smooth wooden shelf, remembering how I’d helped my parents paint it an eye-catching shade of purple. And then I’d gotten into trouble for putting purple handprints on the walls. It’d been that incident that’d inspired my parents to make the children’s section more than just the shelves where the kids’ books were located. They’d made a huge day of it, had local children’s authors reading their books, provided snacks and discounts, and they’d invited the kids to put their handprints on the wall with mine.

My throat tightened as I reached the end of the shelves and saw the handprints. Every few years, my parents would host another children’s day and kids would put their hands on the walls, overlapping the ones that came before them until every inch in this corner was a riot of color.

Mine always went in the same spot and I put my hand there now. I could almost smell the paint, feel the wetness of it on my palm. The last time I’d done it, we’d had seven second-generation readers here to put their marks next to their parents’ prints.

And in just a few days, they would all be gone. Theirs. Mine. Everyone who’d left their mark on this place would be erased by some neutral office color picked by a focus group for its supposed ability to make everyone cheerful and productive.

This was what Derrick didn’t understand. Even if my parents had been able to afford a new place, there were things we couldn’t take with us.

“Heartless bastard,” I muttered as I wiped the tears from my cheeks.

I turned away from the wall and began to stack the little chairs into a single tower. I’d suggested that we sell even the furnishings during our ‘location closing’ sale this past week, but they’d insisted on keeping everything that they could possibly need to open a new store. It didn’t matter to them that they hadn’t found a new place or that they’d sunk so much of their savings into the store over the years that having the capital to re-open somewhere else was unlikely. They said they were too young to retire, as if that would be enough to prevent it from happening.

“Put those over by the door,” Dad said as he came up behind me. “They’re going in the moving van.”

He put his hands on his hips and sighed as he looked around. To an outside observer, he looked like someone surveying a job to determine if it’d been done to his satisfaction. I knew, however, that his thoughts were the same place mine were, grieving over everything we were losing.

“This is all my fault.” I finally spoke the words that had been eating at me for months.

“No.” Dad turned toward me, his expression fierce. “This is not on you.”

“But I could have saved the store.” Now that the silence had been breached, words poured out of me in a flood. “I could have fixed everything, and it’d just been one year of being married to him. Twelve months. And it wasn’t like marriage would’ve been such a hardship. I’d have lived in a huge penthouse and had a driver to take me to work. Gone to fabulous events wearing fashionable clothes and making important connections. He treated me well.”

“Until you didn’t give him what he wanted,” Dad reminded me gently. “Then he took back all of those promises without caring who he hurt.”

“He came to see me a couple months ago,” I confessed. “I didn’t tell you guys because I couldn’t bear the thought of you knowing that I’d had a second chance to help you guys keep the store and I’d turned him down.”

“What did he want in return?” Dad’s eyes were harder than I’d ever seen them. “Because that man has proven that he’d never give anyone anything without expecting something back.”

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