have time to waste.” Kingsley greeted Carter with a grin despite the seriousness of what they needed to discuss. After a few quick keystrokes, Kingsley stood up and hugged Carter, gave him the manly slap on the back.
“Trust me. I understand,” Carter said.
He was so focused on his brother that he didn’t notice the other figure in the large office until he caught movement from the corner of his eye.
Right. The head of the California-based PR firm. Damn, he must have been more tired than he thought.
Carter turned with his hand held out to shake. “Carter Diallo,” he said automatically, expecting a middle-aged white man. But he froze as a slender hand clasped his.
“We’ve already met,” the PR chief said in a particularly expressionless voice. The corners of a familiar pair of lips curved up in a humorless smile. “Jade Tremaine, in case you’ve forgotten.”
Carter Diallo was huge.
His shoulders easily filled the doorway of his brother’s office, and his presence was immense and intimidating. The impression of overwhelming strength was only made even more so by his expressionless face. He looked more like an enforcer than the CSO Jade knew he was. Thick muscles were apparent even under the sleek Tom Ford suit; his hair was perfectly and precisely cut—he was the very embodiment of class and power.
His face was still the same, though. At least his eyes were: that peculiar mix of hyperconfidence and authority that hadn’t seemed to match the slender boy Jade knew in college but now seemed perfect for the giant who just walked through Kingsley Diallo’s door.
No, this wasn’t the man she knew in college. His effect on her equilibrium was worse. She swallowed and barreled ahead on the course she’d chosen when she first found out they would be doing business together.
“Jade Tremaine, in case you’ve forgotten,” she said, carefully shielding her emotions from him.
His eyebrow, dark and perfectly sculpted, rose as he clasped her hand in a perfectly respectable handshake.
For such a muscled, hypermacho-looking man, he was incredibly well-groomed. His brows manicured, skin smooth and exfoliated. She couldn’t remember if that was all natural or if he took as much care with his looks as she did with hers.
Looking at him, her nerves jangled all over the place. Although she’d prepared herself for Carter Diallo, just seeing him in the flesh after ten years obliterated everything from her memory except the taste of his lips.
She’d seen Carter’s last name on everything, from the first email contact to the massive sign and logo on top of the building his family owned, even the transfer of her agency’s fee in their account. But somehow she’d thought—hoped!—it was all a coincidence.
Until Carter walked in the door, older and even more gorgeous than ever.
She hated herself for noticing.
Kingsley had a large glassed-in office. Anyone inside could see out but no one could see in. So she saw Carter coming in from the elevator, watched him exchange a few words with Kingsley’s assistant before striding with a confident, bow-legged stride toward the door. Though she’d been in the middle of a conversation with the older Diallo, Jade had turned away, flustered, to root around in her briefcase on some pretense or other. When Carter came in, he didn’t see her face right away. She made sure of it.
And now...
“Not at all,” he said in response to her ridiculous statement, and she immediately saw his brother take note, a shifting of the expression on his face.
But, ever the professional that Jade had known him to be in the few hours they’d known each other, Kingsley said nothing.
Carter unbuttoned his suit jacket and took a seat at the oval conference table at the far end of the spacious office like he was the one who’d called the meeting. In a way, he had, she supposed.
“Did Kingsley tell you what this is about?” He glanced briefly at his brother which was Kingsley’s cue to join him at the table, apparently.
Kingsley gestured toward a seat at the table and waited for Jade to sit down before sinking into one of the sinfully comfortable leather chairs.
“Yes, he gave me the details.” She put the folder she’d pulled from her briefcase on the table and tapped it with a long mocha-lacquered fingernail. “Your little brother hasn’t been acting in the best interests of the company lately. His behavior will negatively impact the IPO offering.” Jade pulled a few key sheets of paper from the folder and passed them to the two men. “Here’s all the information I put together on him.”
When Corrie, her assistant and the one handling the day-to-day workings of the firm while she was in Miami, called her and said Diallo Corporation was looking for a professional fixer, she’d been shocked. But jumped on it right away. Diallo was big business and it was only luck—bad or good, she wasn’t sure yet—that had her in Miami this week.
Her parents’ sudden deaths in a car accident yanked her from the safety and distance of her San Diego home back to Miami where she’d been mostly miserable. Or too ignorant to realize she’d been miserable. She hadn’t talked to her parents in years and although her first impulse was to hand everything over to a professional to deal with, Corrie had cornered her the afternoon after she found out about the accident and basically guilted her into jumping on a plane.
Jade arrived in Miami in time for the meticulously planned funeral—her parents had been so thorough with their own arrangements, she’d hardly had to do anything—and hadn’t been at all surprised by the service’s sparse attendance. The ten or so people gathered around the caskets seemed more intent on avoiding each other’s eyes than mourning Isaac and Abigail Tremaine.
Jade included.
Resentment was too strong a word for what she felt for her parents. It had mostly been apathy, especially after the way they’d treated her when she was in college. Even with Corrie bullying her, Jade didn’t want to deal with her parents’ funeral, their estate, the murky pool of unsorted emotion in her chest. She didn’t want to deal with any of it.
So, it had been a blessing, she thought, when she got the call about the Diallo Corporation’s interest. Sitting in front of the lawyer and painfully discussing her parents’ last wishes, she’d practically jumped for joy when her cell phone rang. Now she wasn’t so sure if any of this could be called a blessing.
With her escape from the lawyer’s office at the forefront of her mind, she’d done the quick research on the problem—boy genius Jaxon Diallo’s general tactlessness and extremely bad taste in women—printed the information she thought she would need for the quickly arranged meeting and just shown up.
Now she wasn’t sure what was worse. Dealing with the lawyer telling her that her parents had always wished for her to forgive them and return home, or facing the man who’d shattered her heart into a million pieces ten years ago.
A tough choice.
“Damn, I wish Jaxon would learn a little more discretion,” Kingsley said, dragging Jade’s mind back from
