Page 54 of Addicted

Hugh’s head came to my chest and I held him tight to me.

We sat like this for a while, Hugh’s fingers moving across the skin at the hem of my dress, me tracing the skin of his neck beneath his shirt collar.

“Thank you,” he said, his lips moving against my skin.

He looked up at me, his eyes shining. I leaned down and brought my lips to his again, a chaste kiss that said more than words could at that moment.

“Now, I’m going to get up and we’re going to take a look at the financials for the eight organizations that I picked from that list. A few of them are abroad. We can go through theirs first and try to get questions out to them before morning. If we’re lucky, we’ll get some replies before we head home tonight.”

“Home?” He raised his eyebrows.

I hit his chest and started to stand. “You know what I mean. Don’t start.”

“And what if I want to start.” His hands gripped my ass through the fabric of my skirt, and I tutted at him.

“I think it would be a bad look to get HR called on us at seven thirty on a Monday morning,” I replied, taking a step back. “Plus, imagine telling your Grams we’re unemployed because you wanted to start. I definitely don’t want to get on that woman’s bad side.” I faked a shudder, but Hugh didn’t laugh.

I looked over at him and pulled tight on his beard.

“Open your email. We have shit to do,” I said, grabbing a chair and dragging it around the desk.

CHAPTER 33

HUGH

It was well past 8 p.m. as Denise and I sat, surrounded by piles of papers, at the big conference table in the office. We’d narrowed our list of eight down by two by comparing industry statistics and doing some digging online. The CFO one guy appointed had a recent felony. They were out. The numbers for a sustainable electronics company seemed bogus, so they were out too.

Falling into work was good, it was preferable. After the conversation we’d had this morning, I felt lighter than I’d felt in a long time.

Denise was the closest person to me, other than Grams. I had a few friends from college, but we talked once a year when they sent me their Christmas cards.

Knowing that Denise knew all the black edges of me and still sat here, laughing and joking over pasta, was hard to fathom. I’d never considered it. There was still thingsdancing between us and our relationship, but I had something I hadn’t allowed myself to feel: hope.

Hope that she’d see me through the inky black and that she really want a relationship with me.

I watched as she chewed on a meatball and tapped the paper in front of her.

“Automation is the direction to go in. We can get that guy that Xavier knows, I can’t remember his name, but he loves throwing money at anything that leverages AI. VacYay uses AI, real time weather updates, client satisfaction, ease of access, and satellite data to plan and adjust vacations. They even collaborate with locals to improve traveler safety. They’re based out of Africa. And…”

She shuffles through another stack, taking another bite of pasta while I tapped VacYay into a search engine.

“They are already seeing a four thousand percent return on their investment. It looks like they crowdfunded.”

I turned my laptop and showed her comments on their crowdfund page, lots of the investors went on discounted vacations and a cursory glance showed nothing negative.

“I feel comfortable considering them for the top three. But we’d need to fly out to see their operation,” I said.

Denise rolled her eyes. “A forced trip to Nairobi? Twist myarm...”

I shook my head as she set VacYay away from the rest and started looking at another stack.

“Lucian will need some convincing, but what do you think about health tech?” I said, flipping over the page on the pile I was looking at.

“I mean, Theranos is still super fresh. I don’t think he’d go for it.”

“Maybe he feels like enough time has passed,” I say, thinking out loud. “Would he have left them on the list if he wasn’t interested in seeing what was out there?”

“Or, he left them in to see if we’d be dumb enough to consider one after he’d spent years calling Elizabeth Holmes an actual psychopath.” Denise took a sip of her water and shrugged.

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