Persuasion Skills
Authors: Laurel Cremant
Evernight Publishing
Copyright© 2013 Laurel Cremant
ISBN:
978-1-77130-473-3
Cover
Artist: Sour Cherry Designs
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
WARNING:
The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is
illegal.
No part of this book may be
used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission,
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
This is a
work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or
dead, is entirely coincidental.
DEDICATION
To my best friend and other-half, thank you for being my own personal
He-Man, and encouraging chapters one through thirteen.
To my mother, please skip chapters one through thirteen.
To my sister, please don’t let me know if you relate to chapters one
through thirteen.
To all my readers, please enjoy chapters one through thirteen and may
you all find yourselves stranded with your own best friend and enjoy a life
time of smexy days together.
~
Laurel
PERSUASION
SKILLS
Boardroom Acts, 1
Laurel
Cremant
Copyright
© 2013
Chapter One
This is where
dragons be.
The silly phrase from spontaneous childhood
road trips with her family flickered through Pepper’s mind as she drove along a
jagged dirt road. One no doubt built to destroy a car’s suspension and bruise a
passenger’s ass. As a matter of fact, calling the bumpy, rocky path a road was
a kindness.
Gritting her teeth, she gripped the
steering wheel harder as she drove through yet another deep rut and bounced roughly
in the driver’s seat. No amount of expensive soft leather seating was enough to
protect her rear end from hurting.
She mentally catalogued every bounce and
responding bruise, adding them to Jaxon Grey’s list of sins. She growled softly
as the anger she’d kept leashed all morning came rushing back to the surface. He
was the reason she was driving through the cold
Colorado
Mountains
instead of being in the warm,
welcoming climate back home in
Miami
.
Her ever-reclusive, volatile business
partner, and fast approaching former best friend, had been missing in action
for several weeks, and she was long past exhausted from holding down the fort
without him.
Together, they both owned equal shares of
their company eTheorial Inc., a research and development firm specializing in
electronics.
She smacked her hand against the steering
wheel in frustration. Like Jax was handling his fifty percent at the moment. He
was
handling
diddly squat! He’d left
her high and dry to take care of it all.
It was ridiculous that, although he was seven
year her senior,
she
was the mature
one in their relationship.
They’d met in college and became fast
friends while she majored in business and he focused on both computer and
electrical engineering. When they had started the company, the joke was that
she was the brains and he was the talent. They made a great team, and the
company had grown and prospered over the last few years through blood, sweat,
and tears. He went about creating magic in the lab, and she slew dragons in the
boardroom.
Snorting loudly, she slowed the car down to search
for the “slight right” the GPS insisted was up ahead.
“I didn’t sign up to play Indiana Jones,”
she mumbled. Spotting the turn, she let out a groan. This new road seemed in
even worse condition.
“The things I do for the company.” She
sighed and shook her head before maneuvering onto the path. Thinking of how
hard they had both worked to make eT a success only made her more determined to
drag him back to
Miami
one way or another. The phrase
dead or
alive
flashed through her mind after she hit a particularly deep pot hole.
Sadly, the poor condition of the road
made her feel better about her decision the week before to postpone her trip up
the mountains.
She’d originally planned to make the
drive eight days prior. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had seen fit to start the
snow season early that year, effectively delaying her plans for several days.
She continued to bob by endless rows of
snow-tipped trees and bit back a curse. Basic common sense and logic proved
that he wasn’t responsible for the weather, but she was adding it to his list
of transgressions anyway.
As much as she wanted to physically maim
Jax and drag him home, she wasn’t crazy enough to drive along unfamiliar
mountain roads through the snow. No way was she going to become the basis for
some
Lifetime
Movie Of The Week.
So she’d bided her time and waited for
both the weather and road conditions to clear before setting out on her trip.
She gritted her teeth at the soreness
seeping into her rear end.
Under normal circumstances, she would
have hired a driver familiar with the area. However, a small part of her brain
also worried about anyone else witnessing just how upset she
was with her missing-in-action partner,
so she didn’t want anyone around when she finally confronted Jax.
Her lips tightened as she thought about
the last set of text messages they’d exchanged.
He’d postponed yet another important
meeting with the company’s lawyers to discuss the finalization of the purchase
of Lubtech, an up and coming software firm. A takeover that she’d spent the
last year and a half working hard to make happen. Without Jax present, she
couldn’t move forward, and he refused to give her his proxy.
He-Man:
Hey Pep, can’t make the
Lubtech meeting. Reschedule.
Me:
We can’t postpone again. Get back
to Miami ASAP!
He-Man:
No can do.
Me:
Then give me your proxy. I
will handle on my end.
He-Man:
No
Me:
Stop being an ASS!
He-Man:
Stop being a BRAT! See you in
a few weeks.
That last text had caused her to throw
her phone across the room, smashing it against the opposite wall. The device splintered
and shattered into small electronic pieces, giving her a split second of
satisfaction before she added its demise to Jaxon’s list of wrongdoings. It was
the third phone she’d destroyed since he decided to pull his disappearing act.
As she’d stared at the shiny broken parts
scattered on the floor across the room, she’d made the decision to come looking
for him.
She’d already tried previously to get the
manifests from their corporate jet, but Jax had somehow managed to bribe the
flight crew from telling her anything. When she approached their VP of Research
and Development, the woman had only blinked owlishly at her and said that Jax
phoned her twice a day to make sure everything was running smoothly in the
labs. Outside of that, the woman knew nothing of his whereabouts.
After a few more fruitless conversations
with staff and a short phone call to his sister, she had no choice but to lure
his ever-efficient assistant away from his desk long enough to search for Jax’s
latest billing statements. He was notorious for liking the finer things in life
even before their success with eT, so wherever he chose to hide out, he would
leave an extensive money trail.
After some quick spying, she’d been
surprised to see that there had been only one major charge to his credit cards
in the last three months — a cabin rental in somewhere named
Lissit
,
Colorado
.
When she’d investigated further, she’d learned that Jax had rented the cabin
through the remainder of the year. The news had only fueled her anger. No way
was she waiting another two months for him to decide to return to
Miami
.
Thinking of that blaze of anger made her
stomach burn with acid. The ensuing rush hadn’t helped matters, either. She was
on the plane to
Colorado
within twenty-four hours. When she’d arrived, she’d taken the time to buy a
satellite phone, some warm clothing, and rent an SUV equipped for trekking
through the mountains.
The weather delay had only served to
increase her frustration. She had a lot of work still left to do regarding the
acquisition of Lubtech, and there was only so much she could get done from her
laptop within her hotel room.
It also gave her too much free time to
think about Jax and the state of their relationship.
She ran a hand over her face and shook
her head in confusion.
After years of friendship, she couldn’t
believe that Jax would just up and abandon her when he knew how hard she had
worked to secure the deal. She just didn’t understand his behavior lately. They
had been friends throughout college and had survived financial ups and downs,
family tragedies, and recent health issues together.
