a pain. It was one thing for him to have to deal with the photographers, quite another for his mother and father to have to do it. “Okay.” He grabbed his robe from the end of the bench and slipped it on.
“If you want to stay for dinner, we could invite your sister, too. Your father and I would love that.”
“That sounds great. Anna and I can work on Dad, see if we can talk to him some more about working Anna into the succession plan for LangTel. We both know she’ll do an incredible job.” He no longer talked to his parents about the fact that he didn’t want to run LangTel. It was always dismissed as ludicrous. Now his focus was getting his dad to give his sister, Anna, the chance she wanted and deserved.
“Your father would never dream of letting your sister run the company. He wants Anna shopping for a husband, not sitting in a boardroom.”
“Why can’t she do both?”
“I’m about to lose your father, and now you don’t want me to have any grandchildren? You won’t have any until you find the right woman, and Lord knows when that will happen.”
There she goes. “Look, Mom. I have to go. I have a houseguest and I need to shower.” He strode into the bathroom, across the slate tile floor.
“Houseguest?”
He reached into the shower, cranking the faucet handle. “Yes. Melanie Costello, the woman Dad hired to do this futile PR campaign.”
“It’s not futile. We need to preserve your father’s legacy. When he’s gone, you’ll be the head of this family. It’s important that you’re seen for your talents, not for the women you run around with.”
He sighed. He didn’t like that his mom saw him this way, but he also didn’t like feeling as if he couldn’t make his own damn decisions, bad or not. He’d be thirty-one soon, for God’s sake.
“So tell me. Is she pretty?” she asked.
He couldn’t help but laugh. “Mom, this isn’t a date. It’s work. Nothing else.” He couldn’t tell his mother that he wouldn’t mind if this was a date or that he and Melanie had a past. He certainly couldn’t tell her how much he loved being around Melanie, even when she got mad. It made her already vibrant blue eyes blaze, which was particularly intoxicating when packaged with gentle curves and those unforgettable lips.
The mirrors in the bathroom began to fog up. “I need to go, Mom. Tell Dad to call me if he has a chance. I’m worried about him.”
“I’m worried, too, darling.”
Adam said his goodbyes and slid his phone onto the marble vanity. He dropped the robe to the floor and stepped into the spray, willing the hot water to wash away his worry about his father, if only for a moment. His mother wasn’t doing well either. He could hear the stress in every word she said.
He lathered shampoo and rinsed it away. However heartbreaking his father’s illness, he could do nothing about it except to make his father’s final months happy ones. That was much of the reason Adam had agreed to the PR campaign. The final deciding factor he’d kept to himself—the instant he looked up the Costello Public Relations website and saw Melanie’s picture, he had to say yes. After a year of wondering who she was, he not only knew the identity of his Cinderella, he’d be working with her.
Adam shut off the water and toweled himself dry before heading back into his walk-in closet, bypassing the custom-made suit he’d worn on the corporate jet into Asheville. Those clothes were made for the city, and he relished a respite from Manhattan and the media microscope. He certainly preferred the uniform of his freer existence in North Carolina—jeans, plaid shirts and work boots. Choosing to dress in exactly that, he headed downstairs to find Melanie, curious how she planned to air his dirty laundry in public.
The inside of Melanie’s purse might have resembled a yard sale, but she never forgot where she put something.
“Have you seen my binders? The ones with the interview schedule?” she asked, peeking behind the cushions of the massive sectional in Adam’s living room. Nothing.
Adam was tending the fire, a welcome sight even though the rain had cleared up. “Not the binders again. Can’t you send that to me in an email? I’ll read it off my phone.” He stood and brushed the legs of his perfect-fitting jeans. She had a weakness for a man in an impeccably tailored suit, but a close second was a guy dressed exactly as Adam was. Each held its own appeal—in-command businessman and laid-back mountain guy. So of course Adam had to knock both looks out of the park.
“I like paper. I can rely on paper,” Melanie said as she headed into the kitchen and tapped the counter. “It’s so weird. Did I bring them up to my room?” She went for the stairs, but didn’t make it far. Her notebooks sat mangled behind one of the leather club chairs. She scooped them up. “Did you feed these to Jack?”
Adam was tapping away on his phone. “What? No. Did you actually leave those out where he could get them?”
“I assumed they’d be safe on the coffee table.”
“Um, no. He’s only three. As well trained as he is, he might as well be a puppy. He’ll chew on anything if you give him the chance.”
She flipped through the notebooks. One had massive teeth holes at the corners, and the binding of the other was twisted. “I hope he enjoyed his snack.”
Jack was sound asleep in front of the fire.
“I’d say he’s dead-tired after it.”
“We should probably concentrate on interview preparation anyway. You’re going to need coaching.”
“You can’t be serious. I’m unflappable.” He sat on the couch, running his hand through his touchable head of hair, giving off a waft of his cologne or shampoo or perhaps it was just plain old Adam. Regardless, it made Melanie’s head do figure eights.
“Okay then, Mr. Unflappable.” She took a seat opposite him. “We’ll do a mock interview and see how you do.”
“Fine. Good.”
Melanie clicked her pen furiously, well acquainted with the techniques writers might use to put Adam on edge. “Mr. Langford, tell me about that night in February with Portia Winfield.”
Adam smiled as if they were playing a game. “Okay. I went out, I ran into Portia. We’d met a few months ago at a party. We had a few too many drinks.”
“Don’t say how much you had to drink. It casts you in an unflattering light.”
“Why? It’s a free country.”
“Never, ever say that it’s a free country. It’s an excuse to do whatever you want, without regard for the consequences.” She ignored the scowl on his face. “Now try again. Tell me about that night in February.”
There was deep confusion in Adam’s expression. Hopefully that meant he was realizing what a narrow tightrope he had to walk to get past a scandal. “That question is
