As soon as she says that, as soon as she violates Numbers Fifteen and Seventeen in the Ridgeway Guide to Success: Never apologize for being wrong and never resort to self-deprecation, I know I’ve let my shit conversation with Kieran pollute the meeting.
I should keep being an asshole about it because this is how I learned. Trial by fire. Meetings where men my father’s age laughed in my face at work I had spent painstaking hours putting together. Olivia could handle it. Hell, I could put her in front of any of those men and she wouldn’t break a sweat because she basically has ice in her veins.
Fuck it, though. I let Kieran poison any chance Olivia and I ever had of a relationship. There’s no way I’m going to let him do the same thing to our professional relationship. Olivia deserves hell and high water and everything in between, but she doesn’t deserve to have me mess with her career.
“Don’t do that,” I urge, moving forward to rest my forearms on my desk. “Nobody is born knowing this. The reason you’re here is to learn, not to listen to me berate you because you don’t know how to factor in synergies.”
Both of her eyebrows rise. “You’re not going to tell me that I’m an idiot and that I’ll never get a job at Davenport-Ridgeway?”
“Why would I say that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because one of the only stipulations that you put in our contract was that you could say whatever you please to me…”
“That’s when I’m fucking you. When it comes to your career, I don’t mess around.”
Olivia, to my surprise, lowers the screen to her laptop and her mouth curls into the subtlest of smiles. That coy, unexpected look has me steadily hardening under my desk.
“What?” I grit out, while simultaneously thinking about taxes and kale and fleece vests and every other definitively unsexy thing that I can come up with.
“Nothing,” she replies, raising her shoulder to give off an air of nonchalance. “Just that I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say anything hotter before.”
Shit, she’s good. “You mean me talking about fucking you?”
“No, you saying that you care about my career.”
I can’t help but smile when she says that, which is a clear violation of Number Thirty in the Ridgeway Guide to Success: Stop smiling so goddamn much.
“There we go,” she muses, raising her chin at my face. “I knew I could get you out of whatever rut you’ve dug yourself into today.”
“You noticed?” I ask before I think about whether I genuinely want to know the answer.
“When I got here you were storming out of your office like Helen of Troy was on the other side of the door. I figured something was wrong.”
I let out a long exhale. “You have no clue.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I’d rather teach you about synergies and clean up your financial analysis,” I deflect. “How does that sound?”
“It sounds like we can do that right after you tell me what’s bothering you.” She even goes so far as to close her laptop. “What’s wrong?”
I take in her expression, noting that the concern on her face looks genuine. Still, I know better than to trust that. She’s a great liar, after all. We had nice exchanges like this in Amsterdam, when all the while she was planning to humiliate me for pay. I never suspected a thing.
But in spite of all of that, I hate that Kieran exists in the space between Olivia and me, and I wonder if she deserves to know that my relationship with my younger brother has basically been in shambles since she walked into our lives.
“Kieran.” My brother’s name spills out before I can stop myself. Once it hangs there between us, it’s like a poisonous cloud. Her face wrinkles at the mention of his name, and yeah—I get it.
“What did he do?” she demands, her tone suddenly sharper. “Sourcing more women for you?”
“Shockingly, we didn’t make a habit of that after you. No, this time he wanted to make the toast at our father’s birthday party, which I tend to do.”
“Oh,” she murmurs, looking away as a puzzled expression spreads across her face. When she looks at me again, she’s outright frowning. “Do you even like doing that?”
At first, I’m curious how she knows that I actually dread doing it every year, but have dutifully fulfilled that obligation since I was sixteen. Then I remember I confessed it to her in Amsterdam—that I admitted how much public speaking gets under my skin. She was the first person that I ever confessed that to; the only other person who knows about it is the executive coach that I hired after I graduated from business school.
“Not at all.” I let out a soft chuckle. “I hate it, actually.”
“Well, that sounds like an easy solution to me. Let him do it.”
“I did. Happily. He came looking for a fight though.” I exhale like I’m breathing out the lingering fibers of anger that stick in my lungs when I talk to my brother. “As usual. He lives to fight with me about things like this.”
“Matters of self-importance?”
“Basically.”
“You know,” she says as she places the laptop on my desk so she can lean forward, “I’ve been wondering why Kieran doesn’t work here.”
“Same. But it’s par for the course. Gray is going to be CEO one day and I’m going to be Chief Financial Officer in a few decades. When my father and Gregory Davenport put together these succession plans, they never factored in Gray’s siblings or mine.”
“Why not?”
I furrow my brow at the question because the answer is such an obvious one. “Why do you think?”
“Because families are messy,” she concludes after a beat. “Because nepotism saps credibility and sometimes the heirs to the throne didn’t inherit the leadership gene.”
“Exactly. But I think Kieran has always resented that for one reason or another.” I raise a shoulder. “I mean, fuck it. He resents me because I’m our father’s favorite.”
“Well, couldn’t he ask for a job?”
“Probably.”
She frowns again. “And he doesn’t because…”
“Because he wants to be asked.” I shake my head and look to the side, wishing the whole thing didn’t make us sound so spoiled. “I think he understands that, but he’s afraid of our father.”
“But you’re not.”