The CEO's Little Surprise

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?”