He flopped his lanky frame onto one of the bar stools.
“How was school?”
“Meh…our math teacher still sucks,” he made a disgusted sound.
I sighed in relief that he wasn’t moody tonight. I wasn’t sure if I could deal with his sullenness on top of my work crisis. After my mom died, a lot of anger built up in him and it inevitably spilled over into our relationship. It didn’t help that I had to uproot him from everything he knew: his school, his home, and his friends.
Not for the first time, I wished I had the money to pay for his old private school. I had to pull him out when we couldn’t afford the tuition. Marcus said he understood, but I knew he missed his friends and especially the teachers, who were able to give him enough individual attention and to design assignments that challenged him.
I might be biased, but my brother was a mathematical genius. Just like our father.
Sometimes Marcus reminded me so much of our dad, with his long serious face and dark brown hair. He also had my dad’s soulful hazel eyes, which I thought were way more interesting than my plain brown ones. We both inherited our full lips from our mom, but Marcus’s face hadn’t grown into them yet.
I thought he had an endearingly unique face, but Marcus would probably disagree. He was in that phase where it was more important to fit in than to stand out.
“Well, you probably already know the stuff anyway.”
“Yeah, but it’s the principle of it. If you’re going to call yourself a math teacher, you should teach!”
I chuckled softly and put my hand on his shoulder. “Well, we can’t reform the public education system tonight. Would you please get plates and forks?”
When he stood up, I realized my little brother was not so little anymore. For the first time, I noticed he was taller than me. Tears stung my eyes as a jumble of emotions coursed through me. I wished my parents were still alive to witness this milestone. My mom would have burst into happy-sad tears. My dad would have clapped Marcus on the back and declared him a man.
I breathed deeply to keep my tears at bay. Marcus would not appreciate a side dish of grief with his pasta.
Dinner was a quiet affair. I was preoccupied with thoughts of my dilemma and Marcus was never a talker to begin with. I relished our dinners together, quiet or not. Even when he was truculent, I still wanted to see his familiar face across from me. Our dinner ritual was the only thing I felt like I had control over nowadays.
“I’ll do the dishes, Marcus.”
“Okay. Thanks for cooking dinner.”
I smiled at the evidence of my mom’s etiquette lessons.
Always show the cook your appreciation.
“Don’t stay up too late,” I called out as he headed to his room.
“Night, Cora.” His door closed with a click.
I sighed, knowing I wouldn’t see my brother again for the rest of the night.
The ten-year age gap between us meant we were never super close. I was almost a pre-teen when he was born. As a teenager, I was too cool to play with my baby brother.
Our dad died when Marcus was five and I was fifteen and I had been too busy dealing with the grief to pay attention to anything around me. Then before I knew it, it was time to move away to college.
It wasn’t until our mom got sick and I moved back home that I started to get to know Marcus. He was understandably wary about his older sister’s sudden interest in him when I’d been little more than a stranger in his life. During the time my mom was sick, he treated me more like a live-in nurse than his sister. And ever since our mom died, we had been trying to find our way to some sort of meaningful relationship.
Some days, it felt like the barriers between us were insurmountable. And other days I was filled with hope.
After the dishes were done, I retreated into my bedroom. Every time I entered my room, I was startled by how small it was. My double bed took up most of the space. My dresser was wedged against the opposite wall and there was a nightstand next to my bed. I had to turn sideways to access my dresser and the only place to sit was my bed.
I changed into my comfy cotton pajamas and crawled onto the mattress with my laptop. Tonight, I had to do some research on Jake Weston. I never did an Internet search on him because I never felt the need to. That had all changed today. If I wanted to avoid working for him, I needed to find out what made him tick.
I typed his name into the search engine and an infinite number of results showed up. The most popular ones were sites documenting his dating habits. I scrolled down and clicked onto the next page. I sniffed disdainfully as I saw how much effort the media spent on documenting every woman coming and going in his life. And there were a lot of women. A visual scan of the headlines told me famous actresses and models seemed to be his preference.
Having zero interest in his sordid love life, I skipped the gossipy sites and clicked on an interview he did with a national newspaper. The article was dry and only documented his latest business deal. The only information I gleaned from it was that the billionaire was a shrewd businessman.
Jake Weston was twenty-nine and had already doubled the value of the company since he took over three years ago. According to the reporter, he had an uncanny ability to predict the direction of the market. His business rivals described him as ruthless, but fair.
I moved on to a story in Business Week. I skimmed through the article and frowned as I read the quotes. The billionaire playboy was definitely not modest about his accomplishments.
“What an arrogant prick,” I muttered. The guy was obviously a business genius, but he came off as cold and unfeeling. At the bottom there was a picture of him, in a tux, escorting a supermodel I recently saw on the cover of a fashion magazine. As an objective observer, I would have to concede that he was one of the most gorgeous men I had ever seen.
He had jet-black hair with just the hint of a wave to give him an unruly, bad boy look. I couldn’t see the color of his eyes in the photo, but he had sharp cheekbones and a square jaw. His nose was slightly too large for his face, but it lent an additional air of masculinity to his otherwise too pretty face.
“Pretty is as pretty does,” I quoted one of my mom’s favorite phrases when she thought I was being too shallow. With that sage advice ringing in my ears, I snapped my laptop closed.
Going through my nightly rituals calmed me and when I crawled into bed, I had convinced myself I could talk Jake Weston into giving me back my old job. All I had to do was to stroke his giant ego and he’d cave.
Chapter 2
My grand plans fell apart before I even left my door.
The pipe under our kitchen sink started leaking– and it wasn’t the slow dripping kind which could wait to be fixed– and I had to call the super first thing in the morning. Disgruntled at the early morning wake-up call, he took his sweet time to get to the unit.
By the time he got it fixed, I knew I would be late. I took a cab I could ill afford and made it to the front of the building with five minutes to spare, but I was disheveled and sweaty when I took the elevator to the executive floor.
The morning’s fiasco had put me off my stride. I had dressed in my most professional outfit– my black merino wool skirt and maroon button down shirt. I even wore my mom’s pearl earrings to add a dash of class. The powerful color combination was supposed to inject me with confidence, but with my shirt sticking uncomfortably to my back and the wool clinging to my thighs, I felt frazzled and off-kilter. It was not an ideal state to be in when I wanted to bear the lion in his den.
When the elevators opened, a woman looked up from the reception desk. She was very pretty, with straight blonde hair, its strands so fine it looked like filaments of silk, a patrician nose, and shapely lips slicked with bright red lipstick. But her ice blue eyes made me shiver. I had never seen her before, yet she seemed to dislike me on sight.