back to my hotel. Maybe we can meet in an hour.”
“Maybe we can meet now,” Pearson said. “I’m hungry, and I’m sure you look fine. I’m actually not far from there. I’ll be there in ten.”
“You really don’t have to.” I wanted to go back to my hotel room, soak in the tub, and come up with a plan to revive my business and crush my enemies.
He sounded resigned, but his voice was relaxed, and it really was smooth. A hell of a nice voice, to be honest. “We’ll never hear the end of it if we don’t do this.”
“So we’ll make something up,” I said. “We’ll tell Aidan and Sam that you took me out for a burger or something, it was nice, the end. They’ll buy it if we sync our stories.”
He laughed, and the sound made a sensation go down my spine that I wasn’t used to—pleasure. And actual interest. I realized I’d never seen what Noah Pearson looked like, but from the sound of him, he was hot. “Look,” he said. “You’re standing in front of an office building—”
“Sitting,” I corrected him.
“Fine, you’re sitting. Your meeting is over, it’s dinner time anyway, and you don’t know the city. Why don’t I pick you up and take you for an actual burger, and then we won’t have to worry about inventing anything? It can be relatively painless.”
I was hungry. My plan had been to gorge myself on room service while feeling sorry for myself in isolation, but suddenly that seemed pathetic. “I should warn you,” I said to Noah Pearson, “I have had the worst fucking day. I’ve just finished a shitshow of a meeting. Most men think I’m a ball-buster. And even when I’m not in this shit-tastic mood, I’m honestly a bitch.” I paused. “Oh, and I swear. A lot.”
“I love a dirty-talking woman,” Pearson said. “It’s music to my ears. Are you the hot redhead sitting on the bench, wearing two-inch heels?”
I turned toward the street. A silver BMW pulled up to the curb, slowing. Traffic behind it started to honk. The passenger window rolled down and in the depths of the car I could see a man with dark blond hair and aviator sunglasses leaning across the passenger seat, his phone still to his ear.
The cars behind him honked some more, louder this time. Noah Pearson grinned.
“Nice to meet you, Emma,” he said in my ear. “Get in.”
Two
Noah
* * *
Well, well, well. Emma Riley.
She was small—much smaller than me. Slender. Red hair that wasn’t natural, but who cared about that anymore? It suited her, made her look passionate, even though the red hair was tied up in a tidy and complicated knot at the back of her head. She was wearing a sheath dress of dark gray, and she’d matched it with black heels and a long silver necklace around her neck. She looked like a businesswoman, but with the red hair and her smart eyebrows drawn down in a scowl, she also looked like a fire-breathing dragon.
Still, she was a classy fire-breathing dragon. Until she opened her mouth.
“God, I’m so hungry I could eat a brontosaurus dick,” she said.
I pulled back into traffic. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”
“I told you, I don’t have any manners.” She put her purse in her lap and rifled through it. “Is it always this sunny here? It’s almost Halloween. I shouldn’t be sweating my lady balls off, trying to find my sunglasses. My sunglasses got put in a drawer sometime in September.”
She looked a little like her sister, Samantha, it was true. My business partner’s former executive assistant and now his wife. Aidan had always been the man women drooled over, but never got, until Samantha. Now he was happily playing the role of devoted husband, just like that. Cute nicknames and side-by-side toothbrushes and weekends in the Hamptons together. No fucking thank you.
Samantha was nice and all, but still. No way.
Emma’s features were a little like her sister’s but everything else was different. Her eyes, the set of her chin, her body, the way she carried herself. And she was very different from Samantha when she opened her mouth and said the swear words I had never heard Samantha say. Emma wasn’t cool and controlled—or at least not right now.
I turned back to the road, feeling a prick of interest I didn’t feel very often. There were a lot of gorgeous women in L.A. There were very, very few interesting ones. I’d been feeling