I nodded before turning and walking out the door. Once in the hallway, I walked a few steps and then leaned heavily against the wall. I tried to catch my breath as I realized that I had not only rebuffed Jack Yates, I'd put my new boss in his place. I wasn't sure how this was going to play out, but I crossed my fingers and hoped that this was enough to keep him at a safe distance. I had my doubts.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jack
Once I'd stopped my nosebleed and cleaned the blood off of my suit, I went back to the office where I found Norma sitting at her desk eating a sandwich as she sifted through a pile of papers and sorted them into smaller piles.
"What on earth happened to you, hon?" she exclaimed as I walked through the door. "You look like a drowned opossum!"
"You should see the other guy," I said with a wry grin.
"No, seriously," she repeated holding the sandwich halfway between the plate on her desk and her mouth. "What happened to you?"
"Minor accident," I muttered as I quickly moved toward my office. "Don't get your panties in a bunch."
"Hon, I assure you that my panties have never ever been in a bunch," Norma said as she put her lunch down and picked up a stack of papers, following me into my office. She shoved them at me as she said, "Well, if you're okay, then you need to deal with these people who have been calling."
"Who are they?" I asked as I took the stack and began shuffling through the sheets.
"Delivery people, inventory trackers, bank representatives," she rattled off. "Your father was in the middle of renegotiating some of the contracts when he passed. So, some of these people are hanging in midair."
"I see," I said as I continued shuffling through the papers. I quickly realized that despite the fact that I had built a business based on developer apps, and made a lot of money selling my own technology, I really had no idea what it meant to run a business. My company had been in its infancy when I’d sold it to a mega-tech company that was now using it as a test lab for their own app development, so I'd never spent any time actually running the business.
I didn't have a clue how to negotiate contracts or deal with bank loans. All of this fell way outside my realm of experience.
"What the hell was he thinking?" I muttered as I looked over the paperwork and tried to figure out who I could ask for help.
"You have a visitor, Mr. Yates," Norma said in a formal tone that made me look up, confused. I looked up to find Sloan standing in the doorway smiling at me.
"Good to see you again, Jack," she said as she crossed the room. Both Norma and I watched her, mesmerized by her fluid movements and undeniable beauty. She was wearing a grey jersey dress that wrapped around her body like it had been made for her, and it probably had been. I looked at Norma and nodded as Sloan took a seat in one of the worn chairs across from my desk. Norma bowed out and shut the door behind her.
"How have you been, Sloan?" I asked as I eyed her warily.
"I've been good, but the question is how are you?" she asked, smiling serenely.
I had known Sloan since we were in high school. She'd been the first girl to show me any kind of attention, the first one to crack open my outer wall of defensiveness, and the one who'd taught me all about the mysteries of the fairer sex. She'd also been
the one who had stomped on my heart when she'd told me that whatever we shared would be over once we both went off to college in the fall.
I loved her in the way a teenage boy loves his first love, but she'd been far more practical and realistic than I'd been, and I knew that the likelihood of us maintaining our relationship while she was at Stanford and I was at MIT was pretty slim. Looking back, she'd done me a favor by ending it when she did, but the pain of being rejected still stung a bit. Even after fifteen years.
"I've missed you, Jack," she said as she flashed me the smile that had first hooked me. "It's been too long."
"We just saw each other at the wake," I said, trying to sound casual as I swallowed and looked down at my desk. I hated that she still had this effect on me, but there was nothing I could do about it. Being around Sloan was like taking the best drug ever, and when she smiled, it felt like the whole world opened up and anything was possible. "What have you been up to?"
"Oh, a little of this and a little of that," she said as she tipped her head and watched me carefully. "I ran my father's Beijing operation for a while and then came back to the states when he hired one of his golf buddies to do his bidding."
"That must have been a downer," I said, knowing that the relationship between Sloan and her father had been almost as contentious as the one I'd had with mine. That was part of the reason we'd bonded in the first place.
"It wasn't an uplifting feeling," she laughed softly. "But you know how it goes …"
"Why are you here?" I asked bluntly. I knew that if I didn't cut to the chase quickly, I would be tempted to allow myself to be caught up in the fantasy of Sloan's world again, and I could feel my body responding to her presence even when I was actively reminding myself of the ways in which she'd rejected me.
"Why I wanted to see you, of course," she said in a tone that sounded vaguely hurt that I'd assume she wanted anything but a friendly chat. "I was worried about you after the wake and wanted to see how you're doing. And it's been such a long time since we talked. I thought this was as good a time as any to catch up."
"You want something, don't you?" I said cutting through the sticky layers of her emotional manipulations.
"Why on Earth would you think that, Jack?" she said with a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes.