Page 58 of The Mogul: Leonard

“I’m sure she’ll be a great one.”

“Considering how much she argues her case to avoid being grounded, she’s had a lot of practice,” he chuckles, and we laugh with him.

“Well, I’d better be going. You don’t pay me to stay here and chat.” He stands up slowly. I’m a bit worried about his health, considering how slowly he moves.

“Good night, Jack.”

“Good night, Mr. Leonard. Goodnight, Miss.”

“Goodnight,” Roxanne replies.

He walks out the door, closing it behind himself. Roxanne turns toward me with a smile.

“What?”

“There isn’t a ‘last-minute scholarship’, is there?” she asks.

A small smile crosses my face as I shake my head. I should have known she’d be smart enough to see through this.

“You paid for her scholarship.” She says out loud what she clearly already figured out.

“It’s difficult to get a scholarship, especially to Ivy League colleges, so I just made it happen,” I confess.

She shakes her head and looks at me like I’m some sort of hero. And I don’t deserve it. I did nothing special.

“Why don’t you tell everyone what you do? Why hide it?”

I shrug. “Jack wouldn’t have accepted the money.”

She shakes her head. “Not just this, everything you do. The debt you paid for the bakery, the homeless meals. Nobody knows about it.”

“So what? It’s nothing special. I have loads of money; it’s the bare minimum I can do to give back.”

“Because people think you are a heartless asshole, but you’re not,” she says softly, and my heart clenches in my chest. She makes me feel seen and vulnerable, and it’s scary as hell.

“I don’t give a crap about what people think, and you’re the one that says I’m an asshole.” I raise an eyebrow in challenge.

She scoffs. “Yes, because you made me feel like an idiot.”

“When? I came to you begging for your help!”

The outraged look on her face tells me that’s the wrong thing to say. She is almost scary. Almost.

“At my sister’s wedding. I kissed you, and you rejected me. It was humiliating!” she burst out.

Oh, that. “You were a kid! What should I have done? Let you go even further?”

She rolls her eyes. “I was twenty-one, far from being a kid, and you had a hard-on in your pants. I could feel it!”

Yes, I clearly remember how I was feeling that day. I completely lost my mind as soon as I saw her in that dress that left her back naked. I would have licked every single inch of that glorious skin.

“Because you were sexy as hell, and you talked to me about all your projects. I get hard when you talk nerdy to me,” I confess.

Her expression is priceless. She’s so surprised her mouth is hanging open. I could almost laugh if I didn’t realize what I just admitted out loud to her.

“Really?”

It’s useless to backtrack now. “Really. I’m a sucker for smart women. And that dress was killer.”

---