Wolfe’s cell phone buzzed, and he glanced down at it. “Don’t forget about dinner at my parents’ place on Friday evening.” He tapped the phone to dismiss whatever he saw on the screen. “Mama wanted to make sure you’re available and don’t have to be off someplace saving the world.”
“The only thing I’m out there saving on a regular basis is your ass.” Nichelle smiled at the thought of his mother, a petite and fashionable fifty-something woman who’d given birth to thirteen energetic kids and somehow still had the time to successfully fulfill her role as chief operations officer at the family-run Diallo Corporation. “You know I’ll be there.” She pulled out her iPhone and checked the calendar to be sure. “It’s already on the schedule.”
“Nice to know we rate a slot in your precious schedule.”
“Of course.” With a gracious smile, she stood up from her improvised window seat. “You always do.”
Wolfe came around his desk to walk her to the door. “By the way, I’ll have Kathleen in HR draw up Brooks’s dismissal letter today.”
She paused in the doorway, her head tilted in consideration. “No, don’t do that.” After all, Steve Brooks had a sister he was helping put through college. He needed the money. “I’ll keep an eye on him for now and let you know what happens.”
He nodded. “Keep me in the loop.”
“Of course.” She walked out into the hall and headed to her own office, mind already on her next meeting. “Later alligator.” The heels of her stilettos rang sharply against the hardwood floors with every step.
* * *
Wolfe very consciously closed his office door instead of watching Nichelle walk away. She was cripplingly beautiful. And those ridiculously sexy shoes she insisted on wearing every day never failed to stir his...interest.
He knew his feelings for her were inappropriate. She was his business partner, the person he trusted more than anyone else on earth. When he was eighteen, he took his father’s half-million-dollar antique Bentley without permission. He drove it all over Miami and returned it with, unfortunately, a tiny scratch on the driver’s side. His father was furious, demanding the one who stole the car to confess. Wolfe never did. The scar stayed on the car for months before his father eventually grew frustrated and fixed it himself. Nichelle saw Wolfe return the car, though. To this day, she never told a soul. After that, Wolfe trusted her with all his secrets, large and small. She hadn’t disappointed him yet.
But in addition to being the keeper of his secrets, Nichelle was also the epitome of walking sex with a genius IQ and a sense of humor that never failed to make him laugh. He’d have to be made of stone not to notice and appreciate everything about her, and he was certainly not made of stone.
At his desk, he reopened the text reminder about dinner from his mother. As always, he felt that uncomfortable mix of love and resentment whenever she reached out to him. Each overture from her seemed like an attempt to make amends for that terrible thing she’d done to the family when Wolfe was sixteen years old.
He didn’t trust her.
When he’d needed her the most, she’d packed her bags and left the family for another man, a successful painter who’d taken her away to Vanuatu. She was gone for nearly five months, having disappeared into a place Wolfe hadn’t even heard of until his father announced a sudden trip there, then brought her back pregnant and far from penitent.
It was a lapse that no one in the family talked about, not even Wolfe’s older brother, Kingsley, who must have noticed the same things Wolfe did. After his mother gave birth to her child—a child his father never treated any differently—she settled back into the routine of family life as if her five month defection had never happened.
But for Wolfe, it was the single most defining act of his childhood.
He swiped a finger across the phone screen and brought up his mother’s number, then sent her a text arranging for them to talk later that day. He was checking in on her. He knew it, and she did, too. It irritated him that after sixteen years, he still had the need to call her at least once a week to see where her head was. As if anything he could say would ever change her mind if she decided to leave the family again. Once she wanted something, there was no stopping her from getting it. That was one of the many things, unfortunately, that they had in common.
Wolfe glanced at the closed door of his office and remembered the sleek silhouette of Nichelle standing in the doorway. Her hourglass figure and sinful shoes. How she had sucked on the inside of her bottom lip as she considered the annoyance that was Steve Brooks.
Now that, he thought, was something he shouldn’t want. But he did.
* * *
At the end of a long day, Nichelle was finally getting to the last pieces of mail in the secondary pile her assistant sorted for her every morning. It was mostly junk and solicitations addressed just to her. She fanned them out like a bad hand of poker and tipped them in the recycling, reject or respond pile as necessary. She frowned at an envelope from Sterling Solutions marked “private.” There was nothing private she had to discuss with Teague Simonson, her former boss, or anyone else at Sterling. But her assistant, following protocol, hadn’t opened the envelope. She tore it with her letter opener.
Nichelle,
It was a pleasure seeing you at the New York sustainability conference last month. I meant what I said about having a place for you to come back to at Sterling. I see the stellar work you’ve done with Kingston Solutions and want you to come back and work that same magic for us. Nothing less than full partnership and a corner office for you, of course. Let’s talk. I’ll run some numbers by you and see if we can’t come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Teague
Nichelle tossed the letter in the recycle pile. She’d already told Teague, at least half a dozen times, that she wasn’t interested in leaving Kingston. Now his unwanted communications were just obnoxious, no matter their tone. She wasn’t going to respond to this latest one. What was it about certain men that wouldn’t let them take no for an answer?
She sighed and glanced at her computer’s clock. It was nearly six. Wolfe had left the office an hour before for a late meeting, and most of the staff was already gone. Time for her to head out. Nichelle grabbed her purse from its drawer and reached for her cell phone. Her elbow knocked over the carefully sorted pile of mail.
“Damn!” The letters slid halfway across her desk, some falling on the floor. It was definitely time to go home.
She haphazardly scooped the mail in a pile, determined to deal with it another day. Purse over her shoulder, she quickly left for the parking garage. In her car, she turned on her favorite classic R&B station and eased out into rush hour traffic. Seconds later, her phone rang.
Her sister’s face showed up on the small screen. “Hey, Madalie.”
“What are you up to?”
“Leaving work, which I’m sure you know.”
Her sister giggled. “Yeah, I have you in the sights of my high-powered rifle now. I know exactly what you’re doing.” Madalie was currently indulging her obsession with spy novels and action movies. Everything was a gun or improbable martial arts metaphor.
“I’m at the beach kickin’ it with some nice people. You should come.”
Nichelle glanced from the slow traffic outside her window to her dashboard clock. “Do you have any idea what time it is?” It would take her at least forty minutes to get to the beach in that traffic.
“Of