4. SOFIA
4
SOFIA
O h. My. God.
“You’re not going to believe it,” I said to Elena when she answered her phone.
“You got a big promotion?”
I rolled my eyes. “You know that’s not going to happen. An increase after this project, maybe… but that’s it.”
“Right… wait. Could have? ”
“Yeah,” I said and groaned. “You know how they told me last minute I have to go to Georgia on some important project that just popped up?”
“Yeah?”
“Guess who my boss is.”
Elena waited for a beat, actually thinking about it.
“It’s Ben,” I said to put her out of her misery.
I wish I could have put myself out of my misery.
“What? Wait, I’m confused. Ben from the bar? Ben you slept with?”
“Yeah. It turns out he’s Benjamin Blackwood, lead of the plane sales division and partner in Blackwood Inc. He’s one of the four infamous brothers.”
“Oh, shit,” Elena said. “How is that possible?”
“I’ve been asking myself that same question for the past hour.” I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. I’d shut my office door to get a bit of privacy from all the interns walking around. My head ached and my fingers trembled. I wasn’t sure if it was adrenaline or low blood sugar.
Maybe both.
I took out a chocolate bar from my bottom drawer and peeled it open, just in case.
“How did we not recognize him?” Elena asked. “Isn’t he in the papers?”
“Yeah, sometimes,” I said. “But not as often as his brother, Alex. Besides, he doesn’t have the best reputation, so I guess they’re trying to keep him out of the limelight. Personal Relations can be pretty crazy about stuff like that. Image is everything, and with the Blackwood brothers and all their money, it’s even more so.”
Elena was quiet for a while.
“Are you still there?” I asked.
“I’m just trying to process.”
I sighed. “Yeah, also what I was doing for the past hour. He’s nothing like he was at the bar, though. He’s cranky and grumpy and seriously upset about me being with him on the trip. I have no idea why.”
“Maybe he’s just in a bad mood.”
“That’s what he’s always like, from what I hear,” I said. “Maybe that was why I didn’t recognize him at the bar—because he was so charming and charismatic. But he’s seriously pissed that I’m the one going with him.”
“Didn’t you have a great night with him, though?”
I flashed on his body, naked and writhing, pinning me down. The stubble on his chin grazing my neck. Or my nipple. His hardness driving into me…
Great night was a hell of an understatement.
“Yeah, but maybe he really is the hit-and-run type, and he’s not happy that he has to see me again.”
Or maybe he didn’t think it was such a great night , a small voice in the back of my mind worried. What if I thought he was incredible but he didn’t like it, and now he’s upset that it’s me he has to deal with?
I squeezed my eyes shut. If he thought I wasn’t worth it, wasn’t good enough, then it was my nightmare all over again.
“What if this is the same as with Phil?” I asked in a small voice.
“Don’t you dare ,” Elena threatened. “Phillip was the fucking problem, not you.” When Elena started swearing I knew she was really angry.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, but it wasn’t that easy to just accept it as fact. Phillip and I had been in a serious relationship for four years. I’d been ready to give him everything.
Only to find out that, apparently, my everything hadn’t been good enough. I’d wanted a family with him, a life that I could look back on one day when I was old and smile, telling myself I did good. Kids, grandkids…
All I had now was my career and damned if I wasn’t going to rise to the top with that since I’d made my peace with the fact that it just wasn’t going to happen for me that I had a family.
I’d created a new dream. People did that all the time, right?
Phil had really done a number on me, and I’d worked long and hard to put him in my past.
And still… thinking that Ben might not have thought I was good enough, that he was grumpy because he’d hoped he could just forget about the night altogether, was still difficult not to have rolling in my mind over and over again.
“Don’t overthink this,” Elena warned. She knew me well enough that she knew that was exactly what I was doing right now.
“I won’t,” I said. “I just want this project to work out so that my superiors can see what I’m worth.”
I wasn’t going to let Ben get in the way of that, no matter what a pain I’d just found out he could be.
“Good,” Elena said. “That’s exactly the mindset you should have. When are you leaving?”
“I’m supposed to fly out with him tomorrow morning in a private plane.”
“A private plane? Wow.”
“Yeah.” I pressed my hand against my forehead. “I should have put all the pieces together. Partying at Jester, a private car to take me home afterward, and that penthouse suite… why didn’t I figure it out?”
“You shouldn’t beat yourself up about this,” Elena said. “What happened, happened. You can’t change the past, and focusing on it is just going to make you panic.”
She wasn’t wrong. Anxiety was something I struggled with from time to time. I didn’t have full-blown panic attacks because I noticed the signs early enough, but it was still something I had to keep an eye on.
“I’m just worried about the flight,” I admitted. “A private plane, with just Ben… it sounds up close and personal.”
“It’s just a business meeting,” Elena said. “A fancy office that happens to take you to Harborview. See it that way. Professional, calm, collected.”
“Right.” I nodded. “I can do that. I do it every day.”
“He’s just like one of your interns. You handle them firmly but politely.”
I snorted. “This isn’t like that.”
“Well, no. I know he’s not like an intern. I mean… he’s Benjamin freaking Blackwood . But still, you can put on the professional face, right? Besides, if he wants to be grumpy with you, then you just handle him like the child he’s being.”
I giggled, thinking about Ben’s large, muscular body, his upright posture, the way he carried himself. He was very far from being a child.
God, just thinking about that body…
Stop it, stop it right now , I scolded myself.
If I so much as thought about him without a shirt I was going to lose sight of my goal and I couldn’t do that.
What happened between us was in the past, just like Elena had said. There wasn’t anything I could change about that, but I could face forward and march on, putting one foot in front of the other.
“Thanks, El,” I said to my best friend. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She’d talked me down from the ledge of anxiety more than once.
“Of course,” she said. “But I want a play-by-play. Messages or calls about everything juicy that happens on the trip!”
I laughed. “It will be like a live episode of some dating show gone wrong.”
Elena giggled with me. “We can call it Harborview Heroes.”
“Harborview Anti-Heroes,” I pointed out.
“Harborview Hunks.”
I groaned. “You’re not wrong about that. Harborview Hubba Hubba.”
Elena burst out laughing, and I chuckled with her. The laughter was good—comic relief.
“It’s going to be fine, Sofe,” Elena said. “Just do what you do best, and the rest will fall into place. You’ve had tough clients before, and you’ve always pulled through. Just see it that way. Benjamin Blackwood might have a big name and a lot of money but in the end, he’s a person just like the rest of us. When you strip it all away, you and me and him and his friends… we’re all the same.”
I nodded. Was it really that simple?
I hoped so. I would do what she suggested—eyes on the prize and handle Ben the way I would handle any other colleague or client—with the utmost professionalism—and I wouldn’t let what happened between us change a thing.
“I have to go. I have to go through this information so I know what’s going on, and then I have to go home and pack.”
“Good luck,” Elena said.
We ended the call and I turned my attention to the work that would lie before me from tomorrow morning.
The file started with everything about the Blackwood factory and how they wanted to build another factory to create more business opportunities. The information was bittersweet to me—it seemed very self-worshipping of them to go on about how great they were that they could do the second factory, but the number of new jobs they were creating… and when I kept reading, I noticed that the inhabitants of Harborview could really use the help.
The town was poor . I hadn’t seen a town this rundown, looking at the photos.
My heart went out to the people. How could they live in such poverty and still survive?
I’d grown up in a very sheltered home. My parents hadn’t let me and my brother see too much of the horrors of the world, and sometimes I was glad about it. There was so much pain out there, and knowing I couldn’t do something about it made me not want to know about it at all. It just hurt too much.
But this… this kind of pain we could fix. We could do something about it, fix up the town and make it a place worth living again.
If Ben Blackwood was only good for his money and what it would do for the people of this town, then I would push even harder for this project to take off. The renovation of the town and finally building the factory was the goal, and I would do whatever it took to make that happen.
There was so much pain out there, but maybe we could lighten the load for at least one little corner of the world.
If that wasn’t worth dealing with all this bullshit for, I didn’t know what was.