An Accidental Date with a Billionaire
“Okay…” He glanced over his shoulder to the awaiting brunette. “Well, I should go. See you tonight at eight?”
She held her smile in place. “We’re still on?”
“Yeah, why wouldn’t we be?” he asked slowly, running his fingers through his hair.
She shrugged.
He smiled at Izzy. “It was nice meeting you.”
Izzy tipped her head, still not smiling.
He walked off and sat with his companion. He was close enough for Sam to hear his date ask, “Who is she?”
Taylor shrugged. “A…friend. Hey, are we still going to that fundraiser at the museum Friday night?”
The brunette nodded.
“Okay, I’ll make arrangements for a car to pick us up,” he said, pulling his phone out.
Sam didn’t stick around to hear another word. She pushed through the doors, the lump in her throat threatening to cut off her oxygen. He’d secured a night out with another woman, right after making sure she was coming to his place later that night?
This didn’t seem like something Taylor would do.
There had to be a logical explanation to this.
Taylor might not be the relationship type of guy, but she hadn’t taken him for a more-than-one-woman-at-a-time kind of guy. So that woman…who was she?
And why did Sa
m have an invisible spike lodged in her chest?
Chapter Seventeen
Later that night, Taylor paced the length of his living room, checking the clock impatiently. It was half past eight, and Sam had been scheduled to show up at his place at eight.
Where the hell was she?
He hated tardiness and veering off schedule.
To be honest, though, she’d acted weird when they ran into one another at Starbucks, but he’d written it off as her just being surprised to see him outside of their prearranged times and had told himself that maybe she hadn’t liked him saying hello to her in front of her friend. Or maybe it was something else altogether, and he was reading too much into that one encounter.
But if so, what?
“Sir?” his secretary said through the phone.
He tightened his grip on his iPhone. “Yeah?”
“Should we go ahead with pressing Mr. Harper for an answer? We’ve given him the allotted waiting period.”
He hesitated, thinking of Sam.
There was no doubt that she was determined to save Harper Enterprises, but the thing was, they were too out of touch with current technological advances. The most they could hope for was a peaceful death of the company and a generous buyout—something Taylor could give them.
But with Sam trying to work the case from the other angle, not knowing he was the buyer she was fighting, there was no denying his reluctance to pull the trigger. If he closed the company she was working so hard to save, it might be the end of them. But if he didn’t close the deal, hundreds of jobs would be lost.
At least with his offer, some of those jobs would be saved.
It was his duty to push for acceptance, after the appropriate waiting period passed. That time had come and gone, so he had to follow up with Mr. Harper and show him why closing the business was his best option, no matter how painful that realization might be. In the end, Mr. Harper would agree, he just needed help getting there. That was where Taylor came in.