her completely off guard. He entered her office, bringing with him a wave of foreboding that sent a chill up her spine...even though she didn’t know why.
“Hi,” she said, and smiled at him, trying to act normal, as if their time on the island hadn’t changed anything between them when it came to working together. After all, that had been their promise—that what happened at the resort, stayed at the resort.
He didn’t return her greeting, or her smile. Instead, he braced his hands on the opposite side of her desk and leaned toward her, his expression furious. “Are you seriously going to sit there and act as though you didn’t screw me over?”
She jerked back, stunned by the bitterness dripping from his voice and the contempt in his gaze—as well as his abrasive, confusing question. “Excuse me?”
“Don’t play stupid with me,” he said, his voice a low, savage snarl. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. According to Perry, you pitched my goddamned matchmaking concept and won the St. Raphael account.”
Two things hit Chloe at once—the startling fact that Aiden already knew about her meeting with Edward Luca, and that Luca had already chosen Aiden’s campaign. On the heels of that knowledge came the more painful realization that Aiden had jumped to the automatic conclusion that she’d passed off his presentation as her own to steal the account from him.
A crushing pressure banded around her chest. She was devastated that he could so easily think the worst of her, that he honestly believed she’d betrayed him without giving her any opportunity to explain or defend herself against his harsh accusation.
A muscle in his jaw clenched, and his gaze narrowed. “Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”
She pushed aside the pain enveloping her heart, and let her own anger surface. “Why should I?” she said with a shrug that seemed to piss him off even more, but she didn’t care. “You think you have it all figured out.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but a brusque knock on her office door, and the sound of Perry’s voice, stopped him before he could reply.
“Hey, you two,” Perry said in a cheerful tone, oblivious to the heated conversation he’d just interrupted. “I need to see both of you in my office right away.”
Perry moved on, and Aiden glared at her. “I guess we’ll settle this in Perry’s office.” He pushed off her desk and stalked down the hallway toward the executive rooms.
Chloe slowly stood up, realizing her legs were shaking as she followed Aiden from a distance. The emotions swirling through her ranged from devastation and hurt to indignation. But it was the latter that she focused on as she took a seat beside Aiden in Perry’s office.
Their boss looked from Aiden, to her, and frowned, finally sensing the animosity radiating off of Aiden. “Everything okay between you two?”
“No,” Aiden said immediately. “Just to be clear, the matchmaking concept that Luca wants for his campaign was my idea, not Chloe’s.”
Perry looked taken aback by Aiden’s very pointed claim. “When I called you last night, I never said it was Chloe’s idea,” Perry said carefully. “What I said was that Chloe pitched a matchmaking concept, Luca loved the idea, and is going with it.”
Aiden still didn’t look convinced, and it killed Chloe that he thought she was capable of doing something so deceitful, that after two years of working with her and spending a very intimate week together, he didn’t trust her to have his back. The conversation they’d had about his ex-wife came back to her, how the one woman who should have been the most loyal to Aiden had betrayed him and their marriage for the sake of career.
She understood that he’d been burned badly in the past, but the fact that Aiden had lumped her into the same category as his ex-wife wrecked her in ways that made her wonder if she’d ever recover. Chloe was the first to admit that she was competitive when it came to her job, but she wasn’t devious, underhanded or unscrupulous. She’d certainly never steal a concept or idea from a coworker to win an account.
Somehow, she managed to keep her own temper in check and addressed Perry. “I’d like to explain exactly what happened yesterday.”
Perry waved a hand in the air. “By all means, please do,” he said, obviously anxious to clear up the misunderstanding.
“Yesterday, I overheard the boys with the Metro Ad Agency, who were being very persistent about pitching to