Logistics aside, I didn’t understand why. The timing made no sense. Yeah, sure I’d let her go on thinking what she’d seen between Laine and me was whatever she’d assumed, but . . . shit. I had to stop letting myself go down that line of thinking. What was I going to hope for? That she’d been secretly saving herself for me, even while I was busy going out of my way to make her think I wasn’t interested?
If I was strictly following the whole boss first, friend second, boyfriend never plan, I would’ve patiently waited for her and the guy to go inside. I’d stay right where I was and keep my mouth shut.
But there was another angle to this whole thing, and it was one I planned to exploit. “Hey!” I shouted. I started climbing up the hill but immediately regretted not walking the short distance to the side, where there were perfectly good stairs cutting up the steep incline. Instead, I was forced to duckwalk upward with both Miranda and the mystery guy staring down at me. “This is an employee-only retreat,” I said. I’d made it halfway up the hill and was starting to breathe heavily.
Miranda and the guy waited patiently until I got to the top. I fought the urge to rest my hands on my knees. I was in perfectly good shape, but that was a steep-ass hill, and I was too pissed to be breathing properly.
“This is Max Frost,” Miranda said.
I tried and failed not to laugh out loud. I calmed myself, closed my eyes, and straightened my features. Then I broke into another burst of laughter.
Max watched me with a look that said I wasn’t the first person to laugh at his name.
“Sorry. Sorry,” I said again. “It’s just that I was pretty sure there was an old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie with a bad guy who shared your name. But he wore spandex and shot ice out of his hands.” I felt my lips quivering and threatening to break into another smile, but I finally held it back.
Miranda was glaring openly at me. “Max is a news anchor. He heard about Sion’s acquisition of Bark Bites and thought I’d be a great starting point to research the story.”
“The story?” I asked.
Max stepped forward and reached to shake my hand. I took his hand in mine, and we both tried to squeeze as hard as we could. I locked eyes with him and squeezed a little harder. He squeezed back until I was sure either my knuckles or his were going to pop out of our hands any second. His thick black eyebrows drew together as we locked eyes.
Miranda cleared her throat. Max’s eyes darted to her, and then he let go of my hand.
I stood a little straighter. That’s right, dick. Then I felt like a child a moment later. Since when did I get into masculine pissing matches? Since you started trying to deny your feelings for Miranda Collins.
Max Frost—I still could hardly even think the name without wanting to laugh—looked exactly like a news anchor. He had a thick, well-groomed beard, masculine features, and bright-blue eyes. He looked like he probably liked to wear turtlenecks and drink eggnog when it got cold out, and he was also probably the type of guy who could get into a passionate argument about the merits of charcoal grilling versus propane or natural gas. I immediately hated him, and I didn’t think it was just because he was obviously trying to move in on Miranda.
“The story,” Max said. He had a deep, ridiculous voice too. “Like it or not, when a billion-dollar company headed by three of the country’s most well-known faces does something out of the ordinary, it’s a story.”
“This is hardly out of the ordinary,” I said, even though I knew exactly what made him curious about this. I wanted to disagree with him just because agreeing with him would’ve left a sour taste in my mouth.
“Bark Bites was valued at just over a million when you acquired it,” Max said. “Prior to Bark Bites, the smallest company Sion has acquired in the past four years was valued at more than fifty million.”
“That’s all very interesting,” I said in a bored voice. “But this is also an employee-only retreat. So if you don’t mind, you could drop off my vice president’s bags, collect your tip, and head back to wherever you came from, because there are no available rooms for you here.”
Miranda’s glare was practically molten now, and it took a serious effort not to flinch away from the heat of it. “Do you mind giving us just a second, Max?” she asked.
Even the sweet way she spoke to him made me want to break something.
“Sure,” he said, smiling.
Miranda took me by the arm and pulled me a few feet away from him. I was painfully aware of how good she looked and even smelled standing this close. “Why did you give me this job?”
“What?” I asked.
“Did you give me the job because we have a past, or because you believe I can help you turn this company around? And don’t give me some bullshit answer. Tell the truth.”
I stared right back at her. The full truth was complicated, but I knew the truth I had decided on—the one I was going to operate based on moving forward. That truth was going to have to be good enough, because I did believe it, even if my feelings for her might have influenced my decision too. “I believe in what you can do,” I said.
“Then let me be helpful. Max is going to give us publicity. He brought a drone and a camera crew. This whole thing is going to be a great look for Bark Bites, okay? All you have to do is stop looking at him like you want to kill him. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” I said through gritted teeth. “But I can’t promise I’ll stop thinking about killing him.”
Miranda looked incredulous. “What is your problem, anyway?”
“My problem is that I went out of my way to make this an employee-only event, and you brought some reporter. I also don’t trust the way he went about this. What did he do, flag you down on your way out of the airport?”
“Sometimes you have to make the best of unexpected circumstances.”
“Did you read that on a fortune cookie?”
“No. I learned it firsthand. So, do you want to trust me on this or not?”
I sighed. “Fine. But if he does anything creepy, you—”
“I am a big girl, Nick. And I certainly don’t need my boss trying to police my personal life.”
“Wait. Personal life? When did Max Frost and his stupid-ass name stop being a business opportunity and start being part of your personal life?”
Miranda took a step back and raised her voice again so Max could hear. “You said my cabin actually had two bedrooms, didn’t you?”
“No,” I said quickly. “Completely out of the question. As an employee, you—”
“You can crash in the other bedroom.” She was ignoring me now and talking to Max like I’d spontaneously puffed out of existence. “I think it’s the kind that is separated by doors with locks, so we can each have our own space.”
I was going to kill him, especially when I saw the brief, smug glance he threw my way. He thought he was winning. I wondered how smug he’d look if I accidentally knocked him down the hill.
Calm. Down.
I was losing my goddamn mind over this. Max Frost was a distraction—a stupid one with an appropriately stupid name. He’d caught me off guard, but I still knew my plan, and he wasn’t going to change it. That was all I needed to focus on.