Chapter 45
LIAM
Itossed a stress ball from one hand to the other, squeezing my fingers around the squishy rubber and watching London pace in front of the whiteboard. Deep in campaign brainstorming mode, her feet were bare, her hair thrown up into a clip on top of her head, and she was talking a mile a minute.
My eyebrows swept up and I leaned back in my chair, kicking my feet up onto the conference table. Everyone else had cleared out about an hour ago, but somehow, we were still here—half working, half-arguing about font pairings like the fate of the free world depended on it.
She rolled her eyes and turned back to the board, muttering something about creative liabilities.
Outside the boardroom windows, the sun was setting and strings of red brake lights snaked along the street below, rush hour traffic at its best on full display.
Maybe it’s for the best that we’re still here and not stuck in that.
“Our campaign is going to be wounded if we use that font.” She crossed the name of it out very deliberately on the board and nodded in satisfaction, some of the tension bleeding out of the stiff set of her shoulders.
“The Carringtons needs a font that projects confidence and luxury. Bold Serif does that. It’s striking, refined, and dramatic. In other words, it’s perfect for them.”
“It’s also pretty common,” I argued, tossing the stress ball to my other hand as I cocked my head and studied all the printed fonts stuck to the whiteboard. “If you really want luxury, I think we should go with something clean and simple, or perhaps even a script.”
She snorted and dropped her head back, groaning as her eyes slammed shut.
“Script? No. That’s way too cliched and some of them are very much carefree.
You don’t want to book a luxury cruise through a company that appears not to care, do you?
Would you get on a yacht that’s potentially been maintained with the same degree of lackadaisical carelessness as a script font conveys? ”
“So, what? Script is too whimsical for a luxury cruise brand? I think not.”
“Well, you think wrong.” She spun back to the board and squinted at each of the fonts, moving her head back and forth and up and down. “The entire rebrand will be a flop if we get the font wrong. Focus, Liam. We can do this.”
“We are doing this.” I squeezed the ball into my fist, taking a second to just to look at her while she was distracted.
The way her hair kept slipping out of her clip and that little crease between her brows when she got deep in thought? It made something tug in my chest that I didn’t want to name.
London crossed out a few more fonts, muttering furiously under her breath. She swiped some of the prints off the board and crumpled them up, tossed them toward the wastebasket and missed. She huffed out a frustrated breath, sweeping some more hair that had slipped out of her clip behind her ear.
As I watched her move the remaining prints on the board around, I let my gaze wander across her back. Her dress was cut low today, exposing a smooth expanse of skin that stretched from her shoulders to her hips.
The woman was shaped like a goddess, her curves so alluringly full, and feminine, and soft. I could look at her for hours and never get bored, mentally cataloging every freckle and admiring the effortlessly graceful way in which she moved.
“You’re staring,” she said without turning around. “What is it? Did I sit on something?”
“I wouldn’t know since I’m not staring,” I lied, yanking my gaze up and toward the board.
“What if we stick with the condensed Bodoni? It’s timeless, familiar, and it sort of matches the font they used on the yachts themselves.
We can’t change those names or the stickers already on the boats. It’s considered horrendous luck.”
“I know.” She sighed, turning slowly and crossing her arms. Her gaze met mine. A smug little smirk curved at the corners of her mouth. “You were staring. You do that when you think I won’t notice. Stare. It’s like you’re trying to figure something out.”
Busted.
Faced with two choices, I went with the one that might give me another clue. I could’ve gone with just denying it, but she already knew she was right. The only thing it would achieve if I said no was to make her dig in her heels.
Instead, I decided to go with what was behind door number two: a discovery of sorts.
Letting my feet drop from the table, I stood up and walked over to her, only stopping when I was close enough to smell her perfume.
That warm vanilla with the undertones of strawberry that messed with my brain enveloped me and I inhaled deeply, eyes hooking on hers.
“I don’t need to figure you out, London Walker. I already know you.”
For one split second, her expression softened and something sparked in her eyes.
Her lips parted and it almost looked like she was about to smile.
If she had been any other woman, I might’ve thought she was about to throw herself into my arms and confess her everlasting love for me, but she wasn’t any other woman.
She was her, and that meant she didn’t do either of those things. In fact, she didn’t even acknowledge what I’d said.
Instead, she cleared her throat and took a big step back, grabbing a folder and tossing it on the table with forced focus. “Alright, Shakespeare. Back to work. I’m out of here in an hour. We can revisit the font issue tomorrow. Let’s just get something on paper for these people for now.”
Just like that, the moment had passed. She rolled a chair back, sat down, and didn’t even look at me again before she got stuck into whatever was in that folder.
I honestly didn’t even know what she was working on, but I hadn’t made it back to my chair yet when her brow was furrowed in concentration, her mind already back in the game.
Mine was pretty far from it. All I could think about was that spark in her eyes and how they’d softened.
Although the moment was gone and there was no way to get it back, I knew that if she ever gave me the green light, I’d never look back. I’d leave it all behind, the flirting and the women, my days of living with my best friends and watching the game late into the night.
If I had her as mine, I wouldn’t even miss those things, but she was definitely putting some guards up.
I didn’t have to like it, but it was happening.
She’d clearly meant it when she’d said that the lines were blurring.
While that was good news on the one hand, on the other, it meant I had yet another fight ahead of me.
London’s walls could go sky high. If she put them all up, it would be a hell of a job tearing them down again. I’d do it, but I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.
As I sat back down in my chair, I picked up the stress ball again and pulled the Carringtons’ folder closer. “I’ll take a look at the layout suggestions for the website. It’s the most important public-facing aspect, so we’ve got to get it right.”
She glanced up at me and nodded. “I trust you. We just need it as user friendly and easy to navigate as possible. I’m talking intuitive, clear, and informative without being cluttered.”
“Gotcha.” I knew exactly what she wanted because in this instance, it was the same thing I did.
As I shuffled through the mock designs our team had come up with, it was easy enough to discard some without paying much attention, but I already knew I wouldn’t be making a final decision right now. I was way too distracted.
But London seemed to be trucking along without any problems whatsoever. I caught glimpses of her from the corner of my eye as she scribbled things down in a notebook and crumpled up a bunch more papers.
She was so intensely focused on her work, she seemed to have lost herself in it, but she had a tendency to do that. For London, her job was a reprieve. A sanctuary. When nothing else made sense to her, this did. It was one of the things I loved most about her—and also the biggest hurdle in my way.
If I couldn’t make her understand that she wouldn’t have to give it up no matter what, this thing that was brewing between us was dead in the water. We were in the danger zone right now, the first real crossroads we’d ever been at.
I knew which way she was leaning, but I’d be damned if I just let her go on her merry way without ever letting her know that she’d never have to choose. That moment just wasn’t the time to bring it up.
After forcing myself to get to work on the Carrington draft pitch, I managed to narrow down the potential website designs to two I liked best and I put together some basic strategies, but that was it.
The evening raced by in a blur of work and London, and before I even knew it, I was home, in bed, and on the phone with my older sister.
Bella had been trying to get hold of me for a couple days, and while I’d seen that I’d missed her calls, I hadn’t gotten around to calling her back just yet.
“He lives,” she said happily when she picked up. “Where the heck have you been, stranger?”
“Busy.” I chuckled and leaned back against my headboard, looking mostly at my own reflection in the glass windows since my lights were still on. “I’m sorry I missed you. Things have been pretty hectic around here.”
“Catch me up,” she said. “What have you two kids been up to all the way out there in Florida?”
“Oh, you know,” I muttered vaguely. “This and that. Mischief, mayhem, and getting an entire branch of one of the busiest marketing firms in the country off the ground.”
She laughed. “How’s that been going? I feel like I haven’t spoken to you in forever.”
“Well, I can do you one better than a catch-up over the phone. London and I are heading back home for the weekend. Any chance you’d be able to squeeze me into your busy schedule? Or are you too cool for me now?”
“I’ve always been too cool for you. But of course! I can’t wait to see you. I miss you so damn much.” She paused for a long beat. “I, uh, I have a lot to fill you in on.”
“Like what?” I asked, but an ominous feeling was already creeping up on me. “Did you get a tattoo or something? What’s been going on over there?”
“Oh, just the usual,” she said, but there was something guarded in her tone before she tacked on, “Just our father.”
I went quiet for a beat, exhaling harshly out of my nose. My eyelids slid shut. “Why couldn’t it be a tattoo? But fine. We can talk about it when I see you, okay? Anything I need to know about right now?”
“Nah. This weekend will be fine. What’s bringing you two back to our neck of the woods?” she asked, steering our conversation away from whatever my dad had been up to.
While I didn’t know for sure what it was about just yet, I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t going to like it. More often than not, that was the case when my dad was involved, but this time, I had a feeling I was going to like it even less.
Because I was pretty sure that his patience with me had run out—and that could not possibly mean anything good.