Page 2 of Her Sizzling Billionaire
He studied me for a beat too long. His gaze dropped to my mouth and came back up, and my pulse did something I was going to pretend didn’t happen.
“You do this for a living,” he said. Not a question.
“I’m in PR.”
“You’re a good person to know.” He stepped back. “The piece of the truth the clip didn’t show. I’ll remember that.”
He walked out. No name, no number, no backward glance. No coffee, either—he’d left the line to stand next to me and never gone back to it.
I grabbed my iced latte and took the stairs to 3C, passing the girl from 3F on the second-floor landing. Dark hair, earbuds in, eyes down. She lived at the end of my hall, and I’d seen her a dozen times. She had never once said hi. One of these days, I was going to fix that.
By 7:30, I was showered, dressed, and walking through the glass doors of T. Tomlinson Public Relations. The office was half-empty. Renata and Chuck were at a crisis communications conference in San Diego through Friday, which left Tasha, me, and Dennis holding down a client list already too long for five people.
Tasha’s office door was closed. Through the glass wall, I could see her on a call, one hand pressed flat against her desk, jaw tight. The Glassman account. It had been on fire for a week.
Dennis intercepted me at my desk. “We got a call last night. Juniper Intelligence.”
Everyone in PR knew that name this week.
“Their CEO’s podcast clip went nuclear,” Dennis continued. “The board wants crisis management yesterday. Tasha took the call at eleven last night and said yes. She’s drowning in Glassman, I’m maxed on the Ridgewell rebrand, and she needs someone to take the intake meeting.”
My stomach tightened. “The intake meeting. With Juniper Intelligence.”
“Friday morning. Their offices. Standard intake—company background, timeline of events, his version of what happened on the podcast. Gather the raw material, bring it back, Tasha builds the strategy.” He pulled up a briefing deck on his laptop and turned the screen toward me. “Read through this tonight. Everything you need on the company and the?—”
His face filled the screen.
Dark beard. Dark hair. Tattoos disappearing under a charcoal suit jacket this time, but I knew exactly what was underneath it. The photo was corporate—boardroom backdrop, jaw set, no trace of the almost-smile he’d given me forty-five minutes ago at a coffee shop counter.
Maddox Vale. CEO, Juniper Intelligence.
Dennis was still talking. Something about the board’s timeline, the scope of the engagement, Tasha’s expectations. None of it registered. My iced latte was sweating a ring onto my desk and the hum in my chest had collapsed into something closer to free fall.
The man I’d told needed a publicist or a muzzle was now my client. And I’d already given him my entire strategy for free.
2
MADDOX
She walked into my conference room at nine a.m. on a Friday, and I knew her before she opened her mouth.
Different clothes. Hair pulled back. A leather portfolio tucked under one arm and a professional expression that hadn’t been anywhere near her face three days ago at that coffee shop.
But the same woman. Same mouth. Same steady brown eyes that had looked up at me while she’d dismantled my public image.
A publicist or a muzzle. Possibly both.
My general counsel made the introductions. “Maddox, this is the intake coordinator from T. Tomlinson. She’ll be gathering background for the crisis strategy.”
She extended her hand. “Saylor James.”
Saylor. I hadn’t gotten her name at the coffee shop.
Her grip was firm. Her smile was measured. Nothing behind it acknowledged that we’d ever breathed the same air, and I watched her commit to that fiction. Clearly, she’d been rehearsing it since she’d seen my face on whatever briefing deck her firm had handed her.
I shook her hand a beat longer than I needed to. “Maddox Vale.”
“Thank you for making time,” she said.
