and Sela walked with me to the condo door to kiss me goodbye.
“Why the worried look?” I asked her after our lips parted.
“You’re going to be seeing JT for the first time since you found out what happened to me,” she said with a furrowed brow. “I’m nervous.”
“Don’t worry,” I told her with a confident smile. “I can keep it together.”
She knew what I meant by that. Our best chances of getting JT out of The Sugar Bowl all hinged on him coming to me for bailout money. For him to do that, he has to have trust in me. For him to have trust in me, I cannot appear to be anything to him other than a devoted friend and concerned business partner.
In other words, I’m going to have to not only act as if I don’t hate the son of a bitch, I’m going to have to pour on a little extra charm to keep him tied to me emotionally over the next two weeks until the fight.
It will require a great deal of acting and a hell of a lot of luck so I don’t lose my temper around him. But I’m not worried the way Sela was this morning. I have a driving motivation to make sure this all works. I can see the finish line and Sela is waiting there for me, and nothing is going to stand in my way to get there. If that means I have to sleep with the enemy so to speak for a few weeks, it’s a sacrifice I’ll gladly make to get what we deserve, and give JT what he most assuredly deserves.
As I pull open the glass front door to the Townsend-North lobby, I take stock of the fact my heartbeat is steady and my palms are cool and dry. Not an ounce of nervousness or worry on my part, and that’s because my motivation and need to make this work outweighs any need to let my temper get out of control around JT.
In fact, I’m almost looking forward to seeing the fuckwad. I’ll be setting out the bait that will help compel him to come to me when he gets in trouble, and that thought makes me giddy with excitement. Hell . . . I can practically taste the justice on my tongue as I smile at the receptionist when I walk by.
Linda welcomes me back with a wide grin as I approach her desk. “I trust Vienna was to your liking?”
“It was fabulous,” I tell her as she hands me a stack of message slips. “You totally are getting a bonus for scoring those tickets to the Vienna State Opera.”
“I bet the performance was marvelous,” she says wistfully, but I just smile silently on the inside because I was actually thinking about the amazing sex I had with Sela in the private box.
“Is JT in yet?” I ask as I flip through the messages.
“He is,” she says as I look back to her. “And he asked that you go see him as soon as you got in. I think you made him anxious with your spontaneous trip away with your girlfriend.”
Laughing as I turn toward JT’s office, I tell her, “I’ll smooth out his ruffled feathers, no worries.”
Smooth them out, ease his worries, invite him further into my web.
“Good morning, Mr. North,” Karla says in a flat voice as she sees me approaching. His secretary doesn’t like me very much, and I’m guessing it’s because Linda gets more perks than she does. I reward those who do great work, and sometimes it causes some animosity toward me and my own. Why she just doesn’t hate JT because of her poor work environment is beyond me, but apparently it’s all my fault he’s a douche.
“Good morning, Karla,” I say jovially, leveling her my most charming grin. It bounces right off her face set in stone and falls flat between us. “Is JT with anyone?”
“No, sir, but he does have a meeting in fifteen minutes.”
“I won’t keep him long,” I say as I turn toward JT’s closed office door. I give two sharp raps with my knuckles and then turn the knob before he even can respond.
JT sits behind his desk, leaning back casually in his office chair. He has one leg propped over the other and is perusing a document in his hand. His face lifts slightly to look at me and then drops back down to the papers in his hand.