That Night with the CEO. Karen Booth

course I want to talk to you, but I was hoping to talk to Dad and see how he’s doing.” He peeled off his socks and tossed them across the room, connecting with the hamper.

      “Your father’s fine. I’m screening his calls. Otherwise, he takes work calls all weekend and never gets any rest. He needs his rest.”

      Dad. Once a workaholic, always a workaholic. “Has he been tired since he got home last night?”

      “Yes. Fridays are the worst. I don’t know why he continues with this charade of going into LangTel every day.”

      “I don’t know why he does it either.”

      LangTel was the telecom corporation Adam’s father started from the ground up in the seventies. Adam had grown up heir apparent, but once he went to Harvard Business School, he realized that—just like his father and every Langford man before him—he would never be content taking over someone else’s empire. He wanted to build his own, which was precisely why he started his first company while he was still in school. It made him his first fortune before the age of twenty-four.

      Even so, when his parents had asked him to help run LangTel from behind the scenes after his father first fell ill, he had done his familial duty. At the time, Roger Langford’s prognosis was uncertain and they didn’t want him to appear “weak” for fear of the company stock plummeting.

      It was meant to be a dry run and Adam passed with flying colors, but it was the worst year of his life—preparing to launch his current company while running interference at LangTel. The timing couldn’t have been any worse—right on the heels of his fiancée ending their two-year relationship. LangTel had worn a hole in his psyche.

      “At some point,” Adam continued, “we’re going to have to tell the world that his cancer is far worse than anyone realizes. I’m tired of the song and dance.”

      “I agree, but your father doesn’t want to say a word until things have been cleared up for you with, you know, the newspapers.”

      His mother couldn’t bring herself to utter the word scandal, and he was thankful for it. At least it had been only photographs that had been leaked and not something worse, like a sex tape. Adam glanced at his Tag Heuer watch, which sat atop the mahogany bureau in the center of the closet. It was nearly nine thirty and Melanie had been clear that she was ready to get to work. “Hey, Mom. Can I put you on speaker?”

      “You know I hate that.”

      “I’m sorry. I just have to get into the shower in a minute.” He pressed the speaker icon on his iPhone. He shucked his basketball shorts and boxer briefs and tossed them over his head, but missed the hamper this time. “I’ll talk to Dad about it when I’m back in the city. Maybe I can come by on Sunday afternoon after I fly in.”

      “Be sure you call first. There are still photographers camped outside our building. You might have to sneak in through the service entrance.”

      Such a pain. It was one thing for him to have to deal with the photographers, quite another for his mother and father to have to do it. “Okay.” He grabbed his robe from the end of the bench and slipped it on.

      “If you want to stay for dinner, we could invite your sister, too. Your father and I would love that.”

      “That sounds great. Anna and I can work on Dad, see if we can talk to him some more about working Anna into the succession plan for LangTel. We both know she’ll do an incredible job.” He no longer talked to his parents about the fact that he didn’t want to run LangTel. It was always dismissed as ludicrous. Now his focus was getting his dad to give his sister, Anna, the chance she wanted and deserved.

      “Your father would never dream of letting your sister run the company. He wants Anna shopping for a husband, not sitting in a boardroom.”

      “Why can’t she do both?”

      “I’m about to lose your father, and now you don’t want me to have any grandchildren? You won’t have any until you find the right woman, and Lord knows when that will happen.”

      There she goes. “Look, Mom. I have to go. I have a houseguest and I need to shower.” He strode into the bathroom, across the slate tile floor.

      “Houseguest?”

      He reached into the shower, cranking the faucet handle. “Yes. Melanie Costello, the woman Dad hired to do this futile PR campaign.”

      “It’s not futile. We need to preserve your father’s legacy. When he’s gone, you’ll be the head of this family. It’s important that you’re seen for your talents, not for the women you run around with.”

      He sighed. He didn’t like that his mom saw him this way, but he also didn’t like feeling as if he couldn’t make his own damn decisions, bad or not. He’d be thirty-one soon, for God’s sake.

      “So tell me. Is she pretty?” she asked.

      He couldn’t help but laugh. “Mom, this isn’t a date. It’s work. Nothing else.” He couldn’t tell his mother that he wouldn’t mind if this was a date or that he and Melanie had a past. He certainly couldn’t tell her how much he loved being around Melanie, even when she got mad. It made her already vibrant blue eyes blaze, which was particularly intoxicating when packaged with gentle curves and those unforgettable lips.

      The mirrors in the bathroom began to fog up. “I need to go, Mom. Tell Dad to call me if he has a chance. I’m worried about him.”

      “I’m worried, too, darling.”

      Adam said his goodbyes and slid his phone onto the marble vanity. He dropped the robe to the floor and stepped into the spray, willing the hot water to wash away his worry about his father, if only for a moment. His mother wasn’t doing well either. He could hear the stress in every word she said.

      He lathered shampoo and rinsed it away. However heartbreaking his father’s illness, he could do nothing about it except to make his father’s final months happy ones. That was much of the reason Adam had agreed to the PR campaign. The final deciding factor he’d kept to himself—the instant he looked up the Costello Public Relations website and saw Melanie’s picture, he had to say yes. After a year of wondering who she was, he not only knew the identity of his Cinderella, he’d be working with her.

      Adam shut off the water and toweled himself dry before heading back into his walk-in closet, bypassing the custom-made suit he’d worn on the corporate jet into Asheville. Those clothes were made for the city, and he relished a respite from Manhattan and the media microscope. He certainly preferred the uniform of his freer existence in North Carolina—jeans, plaid shirts and work boots. Choosing to dress in exactly that, he headed downstairs to find Melanie, curious how she planned to air his dirty laundry in public.

       Four

      The inside of Melanie’s purse might have resembled a yard sale, but she never forgot where she put something.

      “Have you seen my binders? The ones with the interview schedule?” she asked, peeking behind the cushions of the massive sectional in Adam’s living room. Nothing.

      Adam was tending the fire, a welcome sight even though the rain had cleared up. “Not the binders again. Can’t you send that to me in an email? I’ll read it off my phone.” He stood and brushed the legs of his perfect-fitting jeans. She had a weakness for a man in an impeccably tailored suit, but a close second was a guy dressed exactly as Adam was. Each held its own appeal—in-command businessman and laid-back mountain guy. So of course Adam had to knock both looks out of the park.

      “I like paper. I can rely on paper,” Melanie said as she headed into the kitchen and tapped the counter. “It’s so weird. Did I bring them up to my room?” She went for the stairs, but didn’t make it far. Her notebooks sat mangled behind one of the leather club chairs. She scooped them up. “Did you feed these to Jack?”