“I’m going this weekend.”

“What time? I’ll come with you.”

“Shouldn’t you be interviewing some poor fool for your assistant’s position? And, by the way, Mark is not picking up your dry cleaning, so stop asking him to.” David knows I’m lying about going to see the play, that I enjoy theater about as much as I enjoy golf, which is exponentially less than, say, sitting on hold with the tech help desk or waiting for my nail lacquer to dry.

“Not for another hour.” He grabs my apple off my desk and settles into the chair across from me, legs splayed.

“Try not to scare this one into early retirement, too,” I mutter, focusing on my computer screen as I scroll through my calendar and then my emails, opening one up to read.

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll make sure this one is much younger.” He bites into my apple, and I do my best to ignore his penetrating gaze.

How I fell under the spell of David Worthington, I’ll never understand. I guess it was for the same reason most women fall for him at first: the thick, coiffed blond hair, the playful azure-blue eyes, the square jaw, the straight white teeth, the muscular body that he treats like a temple with daily workouts and zero refined sugar. Physically, he’s an Adonis, and from the first day he strolled through the doors of CG three years ago as the new executive, he had my attention.

Add the fact that he’s Ivy League educated, whip-sharp, charming, born into the right pedigree, and highly successful, and you have a man who always gets what he wants. For a time, that was me. For almost two years, in fact. But then he slipped that gaudy two-carat diamond bauble—that spoke more to his taste than mine—on my finger and the polished veneer gave way to the ugly reality that David is a classic narcissist.

I realized that somewhere between him putting a deposit down on a house he knew I didn’t want, telling me about his “guys’ Vegas weekend” trip while he was already on the way to the airport, and strongly suggesting that our marriage would fare better with only one of us working at CG.

So I set the engagement ring on the dining room table and moved out. It was an easy decision but a tough life lesson, compounded by the fact that I have to see him almost every day. Literally. His office is directly across from mine. I look up from my desk and there he is.

He devours half my apple before I finally snap with irritation. “Seriously, what do you want, David?” His name is a curse upon my lips.

“Any highlights from the meeting?”

“You’ll get the meeting notes by end of day. And why weren’t you there, by the way?”

“I had a call with Drummond.”

“Right.” Our potential anchor tenant for the Waterway project, the draw for other retail space leasing. We need them to commit before our project unveiling next month. “How’d it go?”

“Ninety percent there.” He pauses. “I heard Tripp’s still being a dick.” At least his voice has lost its obnoxious edge.

Maybe it’s because I miss sounding off about work to David, or maybe it’s because I have no one else to talk to about it—venting to Mark wouldn’t be appropriate—but I abandon my computer screen and lean back in my chair. “It’s like he wants the Marquee to tank out of sheer bitterness.”

“More like he wants you to tank.” There’s no love lost between David and Tripp. It was Tripp who objected vehemently to my father going external to hire a then thirty-two-year-old David from a New York firm, pushing for Dad to instead bring in one of his cronies to fill the role.

David frowns in thought. “He’s been here for, what is it, twenty-eight years now?”

“I don’t care if he laid the first brick to the very first building we ever developed, there’s no excuse for the way he’s been acting.”

He holds his hands up in surrender. “All I’m saying is that he’s finally seeing the writing on the wall. He’ll never run this company and he’s not liking it.”

I can’t help the snort. “He’s getting paid enough to fake liking it.” The old toad has a new luxury sedan every year and lives in the swanky estate community of Ferndale with his third wife. He’s far from hard up.

David smooths his index fingers over his eyebrows. It’s a small tell of his, something he does when he’s thinking, without realizing it. I used to always tease him about it. “Have you said anything to Kieran yet?”

“I’m not running to my daddy about issues with Tripp.” What would that do, besides prove that I’m not ready to be in this position, let alone take over when he retires? “It’s on me to handle, and I’m handling it.”

He aims and tosses the apple core across the room, into my trash can. “Where is the silver fox today, anyway? I thought he was back from Tokyo already.”

I smirk, my gaze drifting to the closed office door at the end of the hall. My father, an arresting presence in any room, is more attractive and fit at sixty-six years than a lot of men two decades younger. Which is why he has no problem finding women three decades younger to date. “Industry meeting.”

“Oh, right. He’s shooting eighteen at Bryant Springs. He told me about that.”

I roll my eyes. Of course he told David. My father tells David everything. They text like schoolgirls. David is the son Kieran Calloway never had, despite the fact that he has a son. Rhett, my older brother, a guy who wants nothing to do with the corporate world. Or my father.

My father was joyous when David and I announced our engagement and furious with me when I ended it. There was a point, right after the breakup, when the very air circulating around David and me was toxic, when I asked him to fire David. He told me he’d do no such thing because his quasi son is too good for the business. Then he kicked me out of his office for even coming to him to suggest it.

I considered quitting out of spite, but decided I’d already given David enough of my past; I wasn’t going to lose my future because of him, too.

Silence lingers in my office.

And then David sighs wistfully and waves a hand between us. “This is nice, isn’t it? Us, talking like this again?”

“Yeah. It is,” I concede.

“Let’s do it again sometime. Like over dinner tomorrow—”

“No.” I stand and round my desk, heading for the door. It’s the only way I’ll get rid of him. “It’s over and you know it.”