The Mogul and the Muscle: A Bluewater Billionaires Romantic Comedy(29)

“I can laugh.”

“You should do it more often,” she said.

“If it makes you feel any better, the last woman I dated long-term tried to kill me.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

I tried not to wince. Damn it, I shouldn’t have said that. Normal people didn’t have ex-girlfriends who’d held a knife to their throat. But I had said it, so… “Yeah. She did.”

“Wow. How’d you stop her?”

“Talked her out of it.”

“I’m impressed,” she said.

“Thanks. It was a long time ago.”

We’d arrived at her building, so I held the door open while she walked into the lobby. She didn’t say anything else until we got into the elevator.

“Derek told me that you used to be in the CIA,” she said as the elevator carried us up.

I wasn’t surprised he’d told her, and my previous employment wasn’t confidential. But I didn’t like talking about it. People made assumptions, or asked too many questions.

“Yeah.”

From the corner of my eye, I could see her looking at me. “I guess that’s what makes you so mysterious.”

“Mysterious was never my angle.”

“No?”

I shook my head. “Because of my size, I played the muscle. People would assume I was all brawn with no brains. My partner and I took advantage of that.”

“Interesting. What does your partner do now? Is he semi-retired too?”

My back stiffened and I stared straight ahead. I didn’t want to talk about him. “No.”

The elevator dinged and the doors opened.

“Sorry,” she said softly, then walked toward her office.

I let out a breath, feeling shitty. Some things in my past were classified. I literally couldn’t talk about them. Those secrets weren’t hard to keep. It was the ones I could talk about, but chose not to, that seemed to weigh the heaviest.

But that was simply something I had to bear.





12





Cameron





I dropped my purse on my desk and grabbed the iced coffee Brandy had waiting for me. Not that I needed the caffeine. I’d spent the morning at one of our testing facilities and my body buzzed with the excitement of innovation. Our research and development team had made huge strides with our new heat-resistant exterior plating. It was light and thin but extremely durable, and preliminary tests were promising.

Since I’d taken over, I’d managed to secure a number of lucrative government contracts. Those were important because they were generally long-term and they represented stability for the company. But I had bigger plans for Spencer. We were one step closer to a prototype of a revolutionary long-distance passenger aircraft. Many of the new technologies we were working on had been ideas I’d sketched in notebooks a decade ago, before I had the resources to develop them.

It was one of the best parts of my job.

I’d also enjoyed showing off our research facilities to Jude. Instead of hanging back like a disinterested layman, he’d struck up a lengthy conversation with one of the lead engineers on the project. From the snippets I’d caught, Jude was more educated in aeronautics than I’d realized.

I also got the impression that he might know how to fly a plane. And maybe a helicopter. I glanced at him through my open door, seated at the desk Brandy had set up for him. It made me wonder what else I didn’t know about him.

Probably a lot. But I wasn’t going to ask. He’d made it clear he didn’t want me to, which left me feeling oddly lonely, and I couldn’t understand why.

I settled in at my desk, took a sip of coffee, and went to work on my overflowing inbox. A few hours out of the office and I had at least fifty unread emails. Some I forwarded to Brandy; others I flagged for later follow-up. Then I got to one of the few names I always dreaded seeing. Noelle Olson.

Today she was edging out Bobby Spencer for the title of biggest pain in my ass.

She’d been with the company longer than I had, and when Milton had announced he was retiring, she’d assumed the CEO position was as good as hers. Milton had disagreed. Noelle blamed me. I’d hoped that she and I would have been able to develop at least a cordial working relationship. But she was just as hostile toward me now as she had been the day she’d stormed out of the high-level management meeting when my promotion had been announced.

I clicked on her email to find out what sort of trouble she was going to cause for me today. She wanted justification for the increased expenditures in the commercial R&D division. Noelle had long maintained that Spencer needed to focus entirely on government contracts and abandon our commercial projects.

With a sigh, I went to work drafting a diplomatic but very clear response. It was important that she remembered who was in charge.

Once I held a majority interest in Spencer, I was going to have to make some hard decisions about the leadership in this company. Noelle had good qualities that made her excellent at her job. But the way she constantly opposed me wasted a lot of my time.

Another email popped up just as I hit send, and I clicked on it.



Do the right thing. You’ll know.



My brow furrowed. That was odd. And mildly threatening. What did that mean? There were no links. No signature. Nothing else in the email. Just those two sentences.