Always Mine (69th Street Bad Boys) Read online

  I could see the look of utter confusion on his face, but I also knew he wouldn't be able to resist the offer. Sometimes, me getting out of his way was when he did his best work, and I was hoping to come back into a thriving network of plans that had been executed and set into motion.

  “You sure?” he asked.

  “Positive. I’m gonna get out of here. Come check on me in an hour. If I’m not gone, fire me,” I said, grinning.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll come by in an hour,” he said.

  “Good.”

  This would be good for both Amelia and myself. It would give us some time apart to process everything that had happened between us, while giving me time to figure out why the fuck I was so disappointed after the conversation I’d just had with her. I wouldn’t be able to focus or sort through any of this bullshit while hanging around her at the office. Then, I could come back in a professional capacity, develop the professional relationship with her we all needed, and we could work together to bring this hotel chain up to the glory I first envisioned it to have.

  “See you in a week,” I said.

  “See you then, Lincoln.”

  Chapter 14

  One Week Later

  Amelia

  “Amelia?”

  “Yes, Drew?”

  “Lincoln’s about to come back in from vacation and he doesn’t sound happy. Brace yourself,” he said.

  “You mean a week of screwing beautiful women on the beach didn’t do it for him?” I asked.

  “Who knows? But, whatever he says, don’t take it personally. There’s a reason he never takes vacations. All he does is get in his own head.”

  “Got it. A gird my loins sort of deal,” I said.

  I figured Lincoln would want to talk about a few things anyway. A lot happens in a company like this when someone is gone a week—especially when the person gone is the owner. Lots of plans had been set into motion and I was finalizing things with the cancer treatment center, but the moment he busted through my doors I could tell he wasn’t simply upset.

  He was irate.

  “Miss Wilson, I did not authorize you to simply give my money away,” he said.

  I looked up at him, his glaring eyes staring down at me, and I motioned for him to sit. He sat down in the chair before he crossed his legs, but the fiery look in his eyes was only beginning to rage.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “This deal with the cancer treatment center. I gave the go ahead because I thought you had a decent head on your shoulders. I didn’t hire you to give away my money, Miss Wilson.”

  “Does someone need to define to you what ‘donation’ means?” I asked.

  “I would have never authorized ten percent!”

  “The deal is not to give away ten percent of what the hotels earn. The deal is—

  “To match ten percent of what the earnings of the entire company are and donate it,” he said.

  “Yes. So, we tally up your earnings at the end of every year, subtract the tax write offs from it, divide that by—”

  “Do you think I’m an idiot, Miss Wilson?” he asked.

  “No, but I think you’re incredibly angry at something that you should instead be very proud of. We are the first hotel to ever do this type of program. The public is going to eat it up, causing sales to skyrocket, and in the process we will be actually helping people. Where do you take issue with that?” I asked.

  “Ten percent is what I take issue with! Miss Wilson, giving away massive chunks of my money is not what I hired you to do. It is not the premise on which I built my investment banking opportunities, and it is not the premise I will build this hotel chain on. Giving away money means we are making less—”

  “But giving it to a charity can potentially bring in more than you could ever have imagined! Lincoln, I’ve—”

  “It’s Mr. Collins, when we are in the office, Miss Wilson.”

  “Mr. Collins,” I said, “ten percent is nothing compared to the projected earnings because of the part of the population you will sway with this deal. If you drop it, not only will it look bad—especially since the cancer center has already confirmed their end of the deal—but you will lose out on an entire market. And, you could end up compromising the rest of your market in the process!”

  “Of course they’re alright with the deal. They’re getting free money! Who in the world wouldn’t be alright with free money!? Setting aside our sexual history, Miss Wilson, this is not something I can allow to slide.”

  “Yet, you are somehow letting our intimate evening slide?” I asked. “It takes two to tango, Mr. Collins. I am not at fault for it any more than you are.”

  “But you are most certainly at fault for this. You’ve taken advantage of the rope I gave you on your leash—”

  “You hardly have me on a leash, Mr. Collins. You hired me to run this entire damn project. I’m going to make you rich and I’m going to do it while freshening up your image with the public. The media hates you, Mr. Collins. I can change that.”

  “I didn’t hire you to change that,” he said.

  “Mr. Collins, if you’ll just take a look at the profit you stand to—”

  “Can it, Miss Wilson. We aren’t going through with the deal. Call the cancer center and let them know there’s been a change of plans,” he said.

  I sat back in shock as I studied Lincoln. He was posturing, and I had a feeling he was doing so because of the intimate night we shared before he took this fun little vacation of his. Something had gotten into his head while he was gone, and I wished I could just reach in and figure out what the fuck was wrong with him. One minute he trusted me with this venture, and the next he was saying that he was forgiving some of my mistakes, but this wasn’t one of them.

  I didn’t know what he thought about that night, but the last thing I thought of it as was a mistake.

  “Mr. Collins, I have a meeting to get to. Feel free to brood in here, but when I get back, I’ll expect you to be gone,” I said.

  “I’ll stay here as long as I like,” he said.

  “Go pout somewhere else. I don’t know what’s crawled up your ass, but I’m not your girlfriend. I’m not dealing with it.”

  Before he could get another word in, I grabbed my purse and started out of my office. It was ridiculous how many times he had chased me out of my own space, but I knew I needed to get away. I’d talk myself right out of the job fighting with him if I allowed him to draw me in, and I apparently had a phone call I needed to make anyway.

  But, when my phone began ringing and the cancer center’s name flashed on my screen, I felt my stomach roll with guilt before I picked up the phone.

  “Amelia Wilson speaking.”

  “Miss Wilson, this is the Cancer Center Hospital calling for you. Is there a way you could get down here?”

  “Yes, I was actually about to call you guys. I’ll be there in a few minutes,” I said.

  “We’ll have a room prepped for you.”

  “Wonderful. See you all in a bit,” I said.

  I sighed as I cut the call and took one last look at Lincoln. He was still sitting in that chair staring out the window, probably thinking about the next thing he could with argue me on. He had slumped down into his chair with his legs still crossed, and for a split second he seemed to be nothing more than a tired, lonely man.

  Maybe that’s why he was pissed.

  Because he was alone on his vacation.

  “Not my problem,” I murmured. “Time to go break some more hearts.”

  And with that I started for the car, so I could drive over to the cancer center.

  Chapter 15

  Lincoln

  I sat down at my desk and began making phone calls. I started with the investors, calling them one by one to let them know how sorry I was. There was no way in hell we would be as lucrative as I’d thought we would be, so long as Amelia wanted to give away the bulk of the money being earned from these hotels, and I needed them to understa
nd that I would fix the issues that were popping up.

  I read through the paperwork for the deal Amelia had drawn up. Luckily, she still had yet for all the investors to sign off. I could tell the hospital that not everyone was on board and that, for now, we had to pull the program. I would also have to do damage control with the media, so I jotted down a note to get in touch with a public relations representative. I would be too angry to deal with the media face-to-face, and I could dip into the budget we hadn’t yet used for the person I’d have to hire to right the blazing ship that was the media presence.

  I was hanging up the phone with one of the many public relations people I had to call today when Drew knocked on my door.

  “Hey, hey. Got a sec?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “Got a lot to do.”

  “Whatcha working on?” he asked.

  “Damage control from this bullshit Amelia pulled,” I said.

  “What did Amelia do?” he asked.

  “The hospital donation shit, Drew.”

  “Why are you having to do damage control?”

  “Because she’s giving away all my fucking money, that’s why. Once I can get this under control, she’s fired,” I said.

  “Wait a second, you gave your go ahead on that before you left. A percentage of profits to donate in order to align yourself with a cause,” he said.

  “She’s giving away fucking ten percent, Drew. This isn’t a dime off every soda we sell. It’s ten percent of the fucking annual earnings of the company.”

  “Did you not read the paperwork?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did,” I said.

  “Then you would know that’s wrong. It’s ten percent of what the annual earnings are of the hotel chain after all the tax write offs have been taken into account,” he said.

  I scrambled for the paperwork and began reading while Drew crossed his arms over his chest. I knew he was judging me, but I didn’t care. That woman couldn’t get away with taking that much of my profit and giving it to a charity I had no fucking clue about. The only reason I gave her the go ahead was because I thought she had a level head on her shoulders. I figured she would at least give the benefit of the doubt towards the monetary situation at stake and choose the least lucrative route for this donation bullshit.

  “This thing was growing by leaps and bounds. The investors put in more money than they ever had. Your media presence is better than it’s ever been. If we can pull in the kind of people to stay in these hotels in the droves that they are following you on social media, this hotel chain would easily rise to the top. People are already asking us when the hotels overseas are going to be opening, Lincoln! Have you even turned on a television?”

  “You know I don’t do that. Not after what happened last time,” I said.

  The last time I had popped up in the media, I was slinking out of a woman’s house that was married. We’d met at a gala function, we went to get some drinks, she took me back to her place, and I woke up to her husband stumbling in drunk. He fucking fell into bed with us and kneed me in my damn dick, for crying out loud.

  It had almost ruined a merger I was trying to dictate at the time, and it single-handedly could’ve sank my investment banking future.

  “Well, you should. Right now, at least. Maybe it would help you to see the fucking mistake you’re making right now. Because I know once you get through whatever the hell it is you’re doing, you’re gonna actually fire Amelia. And that would be devastating to this project,” he said.

  “If she’s willing to give my money away now, she’ll do it again. You don’t build a business on the premise of just throwing the green shit out the window. Especially when the investors are investing more into a venture. We’ll need it more than ever to recoup their money, so thanks for giving me the main reason to go through with this,” I said.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Collins? Is Miss Wilson here?”

  I looked up and saw one of my investors walking in with a massive bouquet of flowers. Lilies and chrysanthemums in pale pinks and whites clouded his face before he poked his nose off to the side.

  “I’m sorry, but Miss Wilson will no longer be with us very soon. If you’d like her home address, I can dig it out for you so you can deliver that massive bouquet of flowers over there,” I said.

  She probably slept with him, too.

  “Oh, really? Holy hell, that’s a shame. She was really classing this place up. I would like her home address, yes. I was hoping these flowers would make her feel better,” the investor said.

  “Feel better. She sick?” Drew asked.

  “Yeah. I guess she’s over at the cancer center. My wife found out, probably through that gossip chain of hers. Anyway, she called me and told me to get some flowers over here to cheer her up,” he said.

  “Back at the cancer center?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Her cancer’s back. I figured that’s why she wasn’t here,” the investor said.

  In the streaming moment of one second, the entirety of this picture fell into place. The passion she had to donate and the reason she picked the hospital. The reason she set the percentage so high and why she was so desperate to keep her job. If something like that was back, that meant she had medical bills to pay.

  And now she’d be stacking up more.

  “Amelia’s got cancer?” Drew asked.

  “For the second time, yeah. She’s just finding out I guess,” the investor said. “Mr. Collins. Would it be too much right now to bother you for that address?”

  “You can set them on her desk,” I said.

  “But, I thought you said—”

  “Disregard everything I said over the past ten minutes,” I said.

  Holy hell, Amelia had cancer. She was sick, and probably in that hospital alone getting treatment. I felt my stomach hit my toes while my head began to spin, and bile rose up my throat as I got to my feet. How the fuck could I have been so selfish. How the fuck could I have actually been pissed off at the woman I’d hired to run this damn project, when she had a heart so big she was willing to donate everything to a hospital that was actively treating her?

  Why the hell had I been so caught up in the money that I was actually considering firing her?

  In one fell swoop, I realized why this job was so important to her. I realized why she balked every single time I told her she wasn’t right for this position. Every offhanded comment that didn’t quite make sense now made perfect sense, and I realized why this was so important to her.

  Why donating to that specific place in that specific way was so important to her.

  “Lincoln?” Drew asked.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m here,” I said. “But, I’ve gotta go.”

  “Then, go,” Drew said, grinning. “I’ll be here when you get back. Want me to make that phone call to the hospital for you?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The phone call. To the hospital. About putting the donation program on hold?”

  “No, no. Don’t worry about that. Just get up with the contractors and make sure they’re staying on task. And then get the construction crews together for the building of the hotels overseas. Amelia was supposed to do that today.”

  I slung my coat over my shoulders before I grabbed my briefcase. My office was not where I currently needed to be, and I wasn’t planning on staying.

  “Lincoln?”

  “Yes, Drew?”

  “Give her my love and stop screwing around,” he said.

  “Will do.”

  Chapter 16

  Amelia

  “Sadie, what the hell’s going on?” I asked.

  “Amelia, it took a lot of sweet talk for me to be the one to tell you this, so I’m gonna give it to you straight, alright?” she asked.

  “That’s just fine with me,” I said.

  “It’s back, but it’s treatable,” she said. “A bit of chemo here, a bit of radiation there. Shouldn’t be any longer than four months of treatment. You probably won’t lose your hair as
badly as you did last time, and since you’ve already been through all the rigmarole, your body will be better able to handle the rest of the side effects.”

  “It’s—b-back?” I asked.

  “Amelia, look at me,” she said, taking my hands. “It’s small. We go in, carve out what we can, and get you started on treatment. You said so yourself, you haven’t been in too much pain. We’ve caught the relapse early. That’s a really good sign.”

  I was diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma—otherwise known as kidney cancer—a few years back. For a period of time, I had to find a new job other than the part-time desk work I was doing at a hotel. I had to take a night job at a bar waitressing and occasionally bartending so I could do classes and treatment during the day, then I got my mind off things by running around a music-blaring, alcohol-guzzling cantina by night.

  That’s when I’d met Lincoln, at the tail end of my treatment.