She shook it off. She couldn’t go on a real date with Gage Branson. It was ludicrous. The man was a heartbreaker of the highest order.
Instead, she should be thinking of how a date fell in line with her strategy. A little after-hours party, just the two of them. Some drinks and a few seductive comments and, oh, look. Gage slips and says something incriminating, like the name of the person he’d planted at her company. The one who was feeding him information he could use to his advantage.
And she would pretend she wasn’t sad it had to be this way.
Coy was the way to go here. But she had to tread very carefully with the devil incarnate. No point in raising his suspicions by agreeing to his deal right out of the gate. “What if I already have plans for dinner tonight?”
She did have plans. If working until everyone else left and then going home to her empty eight-thousand-square-foot house on White Rock Lake, where she’d open a bottle of wine and eat frozen pizza, counted as plans.
“Cancel them,” he ordered. “You’re too busy worrying about the leak to have fun, anyway. Have dinner with someone who gets that. Where you can unload and unwind without fear.”
“What makes you think I need to unwind?” she purred to cover the sudden catch in her throat. Had she tipped him off somehow that she was tense and frantic 24/7?
His slow smile irritated her. How dare he get to her?
“Oh, I’m practicing my mindreading skills,” he told her blithely. “I see that things are rough around here. You can’t be happy that word got out about your unreleased formula. You’re at a unique place in your career where you have millions of dollars and a large number of people’s jobs at stake. You want to keep it all together and convince everyone that you have things under control. With me, you don’t have to. I get it.”
Something inside crumbled under his assessment. Guess that shield she’d thought she’d developed wasn’t so effective after all. How was he still so good at reading her?
Now would be a good time for that distance she should have put between them long ago. She unglued herself from the desk and rounded it, an ineffective barrier against the open wounds in her chest but better than nothing. Let him make what he chose out of her move.
“You can’t come in here and throw around pop psychology,” she told him, pleased how calmly she delivered it. “You don’t know anything about me, Gage. Not anymore.”
Arms crossed, he watched her from behind her own desk, still wearing a faint trace of that smile. “Yet you didn’t say I was wrong.”
She shut her eyes for a beat. Dinner was going to be far more difficult than she’d anticipated.
If Gage was involved in corporate espionage, catching him in the act was the only way to prove to the others she could lead Fyra through these difficult circumstances. Plus it got rid of him, once and for all. His hundred-million-dollar offer wouldn’t be a factor and the leak would be stopped.
He’d get exactly what he deserved.
Then she could get started on getting over him—for real, this time. She could stop hating him. And stop being affected by him. And stop turning down every man who asked her out. The chaos inside with Gage’s name written all over it had driven her for so long. Wasn’t it time to move on? That was what she deserved.
“I’m not what you’d call a fun date,” she said. “I have a very boring life outside of these walls. Dinner is a chance to discuss the leak. Strictly business.”
A token protest. She knew good and well it was anything but.
“Is that really what you want, Cass?” he asked softly, as if he already knew the answer. “Because it sounds to me as if you need a friend.”
Of all the things she’d thought he come back with, that was not one of them. The laugh escaped her clamped lips before she could catch it. “What, like you’re volunteering? I have lots of friends, thanks.”
But did she really? This time last week, she would have said Trinity would take a bullet for her. They’d been friends for almost fifteen years. It still stung that no one had stood up for Cass in the board meeting, but Trinity’s silence had hurt the worst.
Alex’s defection was almost as bad.
Cass and Alex had met in a freshman-level algebra class. It had taken Cass four months to convince Alex she had what it took to be the CFO of a multimillion-dollar corporation and Cass had been right. Alex’s lack of confidence and all the talk of selling hurt.
Cass was afraid the cracks in Fyra’s foundation were really cracks in her foundation. The last person she could stomach finding out about the division in Fyra was Gage Branson, and it would be just like him to sniff out her weaknesses.
So she wouldn’t show him any.
“There’s always room for one more friend,” Gage countered softly. “In fact, I changed my mind. Let me take you to dinner and you can relax for a while. Wear a dress and we’ll leave our titles at the door.”
There he went again, working his magic because that sounded like the exact date she’d envisioned. He was the last man on earth she should be envisioning it with, though. “How do you know that’s what I need?”
“Cass. I know you. You can’t have changed too much over the years. At least I hope you haven’t.”
Before she could figure out how to respond to that, he rounded the desk and took her hand to hold it tight in his surprisingly smooth one. For a guy who’d always spent a lot of time outdoors, his skin should be rougher. It was a testament to GB Skin and the effectiveness of his products that it wasn’t.
She stared at his chiseled jaw, gorgeous hazel eyes and beautiful face framed by the longish brown hair he’d always favored and something unhitched in her chest.
Gage had broken her so thoroughly because she’d once given this man her soul.
That hadn’t been an accident. A mistake, surely, but not because she didn’t realize what she was doing. She’d fallen in love with Gage willingly. He’d filled her, completely. Because he understood her, believed in her. Taught her, pushed her, stimulated her.
All of it rushed back and she went a little dizzy with the memories of what had been holy and magnificent about their relationship.
“Say yes,” he prompted, squeezing her hand. “I promise not to mention how boring you are.”
Despite everything, she laughed, oddly grateful that he had figured out how to get her to.
“Yes,” she said. There’d really never been another choice. “But we split the check.”
He couldn’t be allowed to affect her. The good stuff about their relationship didn’t matter because at the end of the day, Gage didn’t do commitment and never would.
“That part’s nonnegotiable,” he said with a wicked smile. “I’m paying. After all, I bullied you into it.”
Mission accomplished. He had no clue he’d spent this entire conversation persuading her into exactly what she wanted
