The Billionaire's Illicit Twins - Holly Rayner Page 0,30

it over, and plant a kiss right on her palm, and how I was going to invite her out for drinks later.

How I was going to find a way to get her alone so we could actually talk about this. So I could tell her what I thought about it all and try to figure out whether she’d actually… I don’t know, let me get to know her.

I mean, call me crazy, but she was going to be the mother of my kids. I thought that was probably a good enough reason to spend some time together. Unfortunately, I had a feeling that she was going to argue with me about that one. See the thing I said above about our professional histories.

She was going to take that problem a whole lot more seriously than I was, because if we got caught it would mean endangering her career—and her plan for her life. I also didn’t get the idea that she was really that interested in going off-script.

And suddenly deciding to get into a relationship with the guy you’d sworn not to be seen with? Yeah, that was pretty off-script.

Which just meant that I was going to have to do a really good job of talking her out of feeling that way. And that would start with this meeting. Where I had a completely reasonable and unarguable reason to be seeing her.

As was standard for us, my lawyer and I were there early. We’d found that getting to a meeting first, especially when it was this important, was a great way to own the room. Get to know the feel of it and get the upper hand. In this case, we were meeting in a room in the courthouse so that no one would have the home-field advantage. Getting into the room before the other team… well, it gave us that advantage anyhow.

We were going over what we were going to offer and how we were going to play it when Bella and Josh Lee walked into the room, both of them looking slightly green around the edges. Not that I blamed them. They might have won the case, but they were still going up against a very large corporation. They’d had balls of steel to file the suit in the first place.

Now it was time to see whether they could close the deal.

I know, I know, they had a judgement. But this negotiation was our chance to figure out how it was going to work. And I meant to make sure that it worked toward the company’s advantage.

At least, I had… until I saw Bella. Her hair was drawn up into some fancy twist on the back of her head, leaving her face exposed, and her eyes looked like they’d never laughed once in her life. She was wearing a black suit with a turquoise blouse, and the blue-green color made everything about her pop. Her hair. Her eyes. The freckles on her fair, rosy skin.

I wondered suddenly if the freckle that sat at the base of her throat, right in the hollow, was also popping from that shirt, and my eyes flew down to it, trying to find it. Then I realized what I was doing and pulled my gaze back up—only to find her own eyes on me.

“What are you doing here, Mr. Parker?” she asked bluntly. “You’re not needed in this negotiation. I’m sure your attorney would have taken care of it for you.”

There was no mistaking the flash of nerves—and something else—that flew through her eyes, though she shut it down quickly. I also didn’t miss the slight shake in her voice as she said my name.

Perfect. She hadn’t expected me, then, just like I’d thought.

Bella was right; it was very unusual for someone of my stature to be at a relatively low-level meeting like this one. Generally, I would have left it up to one of the attorneys, trusting them to do right by the company without me being there to babysit them.

But this was a tricky case. I didn’t want Harmon-e to get a reputation for stealing the work of others—even if we had literally stolen the work of Josh Lee. Still. I wanted to make sure that whatever contract we hashed out with him and Bella was a strong NDA in terms of the details of the case and what we’d done. If we could salvage Harmon-e’s reputation, I was going to make sure we did. That was the only reason I’d