Page 25 of Shopping for a CEO's Fiancee
“I am.” She gives me a bitter smile and slowly opens the robe, revealing my smartphone tucked neatly under one breast. She must have magician’s genes in her. How does it stay in place?
I reach for it, the metal warm, the glass slightly wet with her perspiration.
“Tell me what’s going on behind those beautiful eyes.”
She looks up, coquettish yet guarded. “Shannon says they fight all the time about Declan being a workaholic.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
“And that you’re worse.”
“Worse?”
“You work even more hours than he does.”
“I do. That’s how this works. I’m CEO now. It’s not a job—”
“It’s a life,” she says, echoing me.
“Dec says that to Shannon, too?”
She nods.
I tip her chin up. “I work so hard and so many hours because I’m taking over Dad’s legacy. But truly? I’ve always worked so much because I didn’t have anything else in my life. Anterdec was it. Until now. Until you.”
She melts.
I knew she would.
All I want is to spend the day in bed with her, our only interruptions the delivery people bringing food. How many orgasms can we generate in a twenty-four-hour period? My competitive nature rises up.
Among other things.
“I know your idea of work and my idea of work are in different columns,” she says seriously. “Work is what you do to get ahead. To pay the bills. To find meaning.”
“Work isn’t some separate category,” I add. “It’s integrated into who I am. I am Anterdec now. I am not just the face of the company, Amanda. Being a CEO is different than having any other job on the planet.”
“I know.”
“I’m not saying that to be arrogant, or brag.”
“You don’t have to explain it to me, Andrew. I understand.”
“Do you? Really?”
“I’m trying to. Your reality is different from most people’s. Your family lives a life very removed from most of us.”
“You make me feel like I’m exiled,” I say, half joking.
Half.
“In a way, you are. Sometimes I feel sorry for you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not in a poor-little-rich-boy kind of way. But fame and fortune have costs I never realized before.”
“Like what?” I settle in, setting aside my work mind. I’m intrigued.
“It’s not just the busyness. Not just the demands on your time, or the fact that, like you said—you are Anterdec. All of you except Terry. I’m seeing that better now. Your company isn’t some institution your father created to make money. It’s like giving birth to a child and raising it. And you’re being handed your father’s baby.”
“Is this part of the whole ‘you’re bad at analogies’ problem? Because I am my father’s baby.” Sounds weird to say it that way, but truth is truth.
She laughs. “So is the company. And you’re struggling with the transfer of power. You’re in massive transition right now.”
“In more ways than one.” I take her hand and watch as she reacts, changing before my eyes. “We’re in transition, too.”
“Yes.”
“Each of us, separately, and both of us, together.”
“Mmm hmmm.” Her mouth is full of coffee.
“What about you?” I ask. “Did you always want to be a mystery shopper manager? Work in marketing?”
As the words come out of my mouth, her eyes change from purely curious to suspiciously confused. “What?”
“Was this your career goal?”
“You’re joking, right?”
“No. Why would I joke?”
She sighs. “Exhibit #1, Your Honor.”
“I’m on trial? For what crime?”
“Being exiled.” She frowns. “I went into marketing because it was a job. With a paycheck, and the holy grail of full benefits. I didn’t set out to be in this field, Andrew. I found it out of necessity.”
“What did you want to do? When you were younger?”
“You mean, what’s my heart’s work? Follow your bliss and all that?”
I groan. “God, no. I hate that phrase.”
“You do? Why?”
“Because no one actually finds meaning and money in their bliss. You can’t. It’s like...” I fumble for the right words.
“Trying to orgasm and pee at the same time?” she offers.
“Exactly like that.”
“Maybe I don’t suck at analogies after all.”
I kiss the top of her mussed head. “No. You do.”
We chuckle as the wind whips the rain against my closed balcony slider. It sounds like a phalanx of kids with BB guns shooting at us.
Amanda looks at the rainstorm. “Glad I don’t have to go anywhere immediately.”
“I can just have Gerald or Lance take you wherever, anyhow. You never need to set foot outside.”
She gives me a funny look.
I drink my coffee and shut up.
“I assumed you’d have your pick of careers. You were raised with wealth. Access. The finest educations and all that. I’d assume kids raised the way you were raised could major in basket weaving and not worry about money.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Illuminate me.”
“Maybe it works that way for some of the kids I went to Milton with. But if it did, I didn’t know any of them. The rest of us had the pressure put on us in preschool. Like a fire hose aimed at your permanent record nonstop.”
“Why?”
“Why? Why did our parents hold us to high standards?”
“Yeah.”
“For Dad, it was about making sure we could take over the company. Keep the McCormick name in stellar shape. Grow Anterdec and turn it into an international giant.”
“So far, so good.”
I shake my head. “It’s been Dad, mostly. Dec’s done some good deals for the hospitality branch, but it’s all on me as we move forward.” A rush of responsibility fills me, like the crush of a crowd trying to make it to the front of a stage at a huge rock concert. Thousands of work details, big and small, shove at me.
“You’ll do well. James wouldn’t have picked you if he didn’t believe in you.”
“You really think that?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I think Dad picked me to punish Declan.” There. I said it. Amanda’s the first person I’ve ever confided in.
“Really? He’s still mad? After all these years?”
“It’s never going away. Never.”
“I don’t understand that kind of anger. Why keep it inside? Why let it eat away at you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know any different.” Amanda finishes her cup and plucks my empty one from my hands, turning away, walking through the door.
Leaving me dumbstruck.
I grab my phone. Text from Vince.
Outdoor session canceled. Meet me at your office. Will turn you into a puddle indoors.
I snort.
Or whimper.
It’s hard to tell the difference.
I am still texting just as she returns, steam spooling up from the two fresh coffees in her hand.
“Work?”
Need to talk. Want to know the rest of the story, I text Terry.
“Yes,” I say, smiling as she hands me the coffee, dipping down for a kiss.
By the time Terry replies, I’m buried.
In her.
Chapter Fourteen
“I can’t believe we have to suffer through this,” I grumble as we climb out of the SUV, Gerald dropping us off at Declan’s building. We’ve been home for two weeks, barely enough time to catch up, and now we have to spent a rare Saturday night being tortured by my brother’s mother-in-law.
I am not legally related to her.
But crazy has its own gravity, flowing from older brother to younger.
“You’re the best man. I’m the maid of honor. We have to go to the wedding-gift-opening party.”
“Terry was the best man, technically.”
Amanda gives me a look that says I’d better shut up or I’m on the fast track to a no-sex night.
I shut up.
“Dec and Shannon have nearly seven hundred wedding gifts to open, and we’re all going to help them.”
“Great. Just what I want to do with a Saturday night. Spend it at my brother’s house with his crazy mother-in-law, opening china and tablecloths, oohing and aahing over crap no one really uses. Let’s take wagers on how many fondue sets they get.”
As we enter the elevator, she gives me a funny look. “That’s what you really think about weddings and registering and gifts?”
“Yes.”
She laughs, giving a sigh of relief. “Me, too.”
My thumb worries the spot where my wedding ring used to rest.
I miss it.
We’re the last to arrive, the room filled with the same people who were at the rehearsal dinner. Has it really only been a month since that night? I count back.
About six weeks.
Not long enough between parties involving Marie.
Even my cousin Hamish is here, which is strange. Why would he be here?
Oh. Right.
A party involving Marie. That’s why.
“Andrew! Amanda!” Marie squeals. She’s wearing a purple get-up that sets her now-platinum hair apart, like corn silk on top of a lavender field. For the wedding, she dyed it auburn for some reason, but now she’s back to normal, whatever that means for Marie.
