CHAPTER SEVEN

      “NO. ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT.” Cameron shoved out of his chair and nearly threw his phone across the room. It wouldn’t help anything and finding a new phone was a pain in the ass, but that didn’t kill the impulse to banish Aaron’s voice from his ear.

      His partner was, naturally, totally unsympathetic. “I already had Trish book the flights. Concord Inc. is a huge company and if we can impress them, they’ll keep us on retainer going forward. That’s not the kind of account we can afford to turn away just because you’re an asshole who hates people—or because you have a history with the COO.”

      “I don’t hate people.” He didn’t sound convincing, which was just as well because he and Aaron had had this conversation more times than he could count. “They just waste my time.” He growled. “And it’s hardly a history.”

      “For the potential price tag attached to this account, it’s the opposite of wasting your precious time. Hell, I took time out of paternity leave to talk to Nikki Lancaster. They’re not going to wait on this.”

      Cameron paced another circle around his office but slowed as everything Aaron said finally penetrated his irritation over being commanded to leave the city. “You said ‘flights.’ Plural.”

      “Yes. I did. Because Trish is going with you. It’s a huge-ass leap to toss her into shark-infested waters by doing this, so you’re going to have to buck up and try not to make her job harder than it’s already going to be.”

      “She can’t go.” The sentence burst out before he could stop it.

      For the first time since Aaron called, he paused. A second. Two. Three. “Why can’t she go?”

      Because I have the picture of her naked imprinted on my brain and I’ve jacked myself off to the thought of tracing her freckles with my tongue every night since. A truth he would cut out said tongue before admitting aloud. Cameron scrubbed a hand over his face. “She’s too new. Nikki Lancaster will eat her alive.” Nikki had taken over as COO of Concord Inc. when it was a struggling corporate business and had almost single-handedly turned it into a Fortune 500 company over the last five years. Aaron was right—securing that account would not only be a shit ton of money in the bank, but it would open further doors.

      Tandem Security wasn’t hurting for cash. They accepted the contracts they wanted, when they wanted, and without having to travel to do it.

      “Trish can handle it,” Aaron said carefully, as if feeling his way.

      “It makes more sense for her to stay here and handle the office while I go and deal with Nikki.” There. That was a nice logical solution.

      That Aaron shot down without hesitation. “She’s too new to be left alone, and having on-site experience negotiating with a new client is an asset.” He paused.

      “Unless there’s some problem neither of you have told me about?”

      “No problem.” No way to get out of this without setting off Aaron’s internal alarms, either. He had no choice but to go forward with this trip. Cameron sat on the edge of his desk and stared hard at his closed door. “We have this covered.” He might not like the idea of being in close quarters with her—closer quarters, technically, since they’d been working together for over a week since the morning she overslept. It didn’t matter if they were going over notes before a client meeting or painting the boardroom. Trish kept a painfully bright barrier between them and deflected anything that might resemble flirting with a beaming smile and blatant change of subject. There was no sign of the temper she’d flashed before she took off in that cab, and the lack bothered him almost as much as having her tear him a new one had.

      “Cameron?”

      Shit, he needed to keep his head in the game. “Sorry. I missed that.”

      “I can tell.” If anything, Aaron sounded more concerned. “Do you want me to come in and go over the details with you before you go?”

      He clenched his jaw to keep his first response inside. Recent years hadn’t been kind to his track record when it came to dealing with clients, so Aaron’s offer wasn’t completely out of line. Aaron knew him better than anyone. Cameron’s patience wore thin with increasing regularity, and he found himself snapping at them before he had a chance to dial it back. So he stopped bothering to dial it back at all.

      He and Aaron had met in college, and he knew his friend always assumed there was a deeper backstory to his being a dick. Some tragic past he never talked about. Some defining event that made him wash his hands of all the social niceties.

      There wasn’t.

      Cameron’s parents were good people. Nothing outstandingly bad had happened to him growing up, and if being a black man in this country came with its own set of bullshit and headaches, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. There were always others who had it worse.

      No, the truth was that he preferred machines to dealing with actual humans because machines made sense. There was always a concrete answer, one that wasn’t open to interpretation. Every aspect of a computer was clearly defined and had its own set of rules to work around—but those rules were clearly stated from the beginning.

      People were nuanced and managed to be multiple things, often at the same time. They said things they didn’t mean, and then got pissed when he took those things as truth and acted accordingly. They had masks within masks and motivations they rarely put out in the open. Cameron didn’t get people, and maneuvering through their needs and emotions, even for surface-level interactions, left him exhausted and feeling like an asshole.

      Because he fucked it up. Every single time.

       Just like you did with Trish.

       I couldn’t take what she was offering. It would backfire and she’d have been hurt in the process. There is no good exit route once we step past the point of no return.