A soft, feminine growl filled the air, and the reverberation of it rolled in his gut, clenching the muscles there so hard he nearly grunted in pain. With the wrenching came the dark but HD-clear image of her, head thrown back, all that hair sprawled across black sheets, beads of sweat dotting the slender column of her throat. And that same, rumbling growl vibrating from her. Only it sounded hungrier, needier...
Christ, he needed her out of his office.
“I’m assuming that king-of-the-manor-got-no-time-for-peasants thing intimidates other people, but I hate to break it to you. It does nothing for me.” She crossed her arms over her chest, and if Jesus had come down at that moment and warned him against giving in to his baser needs, Joshua still wouldn’t have been able to stop his gaze from dipping to the slightly less-than-a-handful but firm breasts that pushed against the plain white dress shirt. Guilt streaked through him, slick and dirty. He wasn’t his father; he didn’t ogle women or treat them like eye candy, there for his pleasure. Even women who made his dick hard but he didn’t particularly like. “I’m telling you now—like I did in my last voice message and two emails—I’ll be writing my story with or without you. But it would be a better one with you.”
Story. What story?
A sense of foreboding wormed its way into his chest, hollowing it out. Making room for the churning unease.
“I repeat,” he stated, the flat tone revealing none of the steadily encroaching panic that crept into his vision, that squeezed his rib cage like a steadily tightening vise. “What are you talking about?”
“The anniversary piece on the Black Crescent fiasco that I’m writing for the Falling Brook Chronicle. And unlike all of the articles written about that time period, I would like to include an interview with the company’s current CEO.”
Anger crystallized within him, hard and diamond bright. And sharp enough to cut glass. The “get out” burned on his tongue, singeing him. But he extinguished the words before they could escape him, refusing to betray any emotion to this woman who sought to rip open the seams of the past, to expose old but unhealed wounds for public consumption. To relive the nightmare of his father emptying the family bank accounts as well as embezzling millions from his clients and disappearing, abandoning him, his mother and brothers to the wolves. The abrasive rub of judging eyes and not-so-hushed whispers. The smothering guilt that ten families were left devastated and destitute because of his father’s actions. The agonizing pain from being deceived and abandoned by the man who’d raised him, who’d loved him and who he’d respected.
This woman had no clue about the pressure from the weight of that guilt, that responsibility. How they straddled his shoulders to the point of suffocation at times. How dealing had become second nature to him. There’d been no one to lean on when his father disappeared, when he’d taken on the responsibility of repaying the families so they wouldn’t sue for the remaining money his father hadn’t disappeared with. When his mother withdrew from the exclusive community of Falling Brook, New Jersey. When his twin brother, Jacob, fled to Europe to backpack his problems away, and his youngest brother, Oliver, dropped out of college and become the poster child for professional playboy, complete with a nasty cocaine habit.
Nothing in his Ivy League education—not even the economic courses he’d taken at his father’s insistence—had prepared him for being alone, grieving and terrified with the fate of not just his family but ten others on his still-young shoulders. Of having to make the bitter decision of burying his own dreams so he could repair those of others.
He’d grown up fast. Too fast.
And damn if he needed an article written by an ambitious reporter—no matter if she possessed the face of a fairy queen and the body of a Victoria’s Secret Angel—to drag him back to those desolate, black times when he’d breathed fear as much as he did air.
“No.”
Joshua gave her credit—she didn’t flinch at the flat, blunt answer.
Instead, she tilted her head to the side, that fall of thick caramel-and-sunlight hair sliding over her shoulder, and studied him as if he were a problem to solve. Or an opponent to wrestle and pin into submission.
“I can understand why you would initially be reluctant to speak with me—”
“Oh, you can?” he interrupted, trying but failing to keep the bite from his voice. Silently, he cursed himself for revealing even that much. The last fifteen years had taught him that he couldn’t afford to betray the slightest weakness of character lest he be accused of being just like his father. Other people were allowed room for mistakes. He was not offered that courtesy. While others could trip up in private, his missteps were splashed across newspapers and online columns for fodder. Including her paper. “So you’ve had a—how did you so eloquently put it?—fiasco in your life and had every paper in the country report on it? Including the Falling Brook Chronicle? Which, if I remember correctly, was one of the harshest and most critical? Well, good,” he continued, not granting her the opportunity to answer. “Since you have experienced it, you’ll understand why I’m ending this conversation.”
“I’ve read the past articles from the Chronicle, and you’re right, they did cover it...punitively,” she conceded. In the small pause that followed, the “can you blame them?” seemed to echo in the office. “But those reporters aren’t me. You don’t know me, but I graduated from Northwestern University with a BS and MS in journalism. While there, I worked with the Medill Justice Project that helped free an unjustly convicted man from a life sentence in prison. I’ve also won the Walter S. and Syrena M. Howell competition, was a recipient of the NJLA’s journalism award and was a member of the journalistic
