FAKE DATING WITH BENEFITS MY BILLIONAIRE BOSS (Ophelia Corrigan) novel Chapter 174

CHAPTER 174

– JAMIE

The apartment’s home office was lit only by a couple of lamps and the glow of our computer screens. Outside, Manhattan was still wide awake. Inside, the only sounds were Simon’s typing and the occasional ping of a notification.

I should’ve been asleep. I had work the next day.

Instead, I was comparing distribution spreadsheets for one of the Hart Group’s makeup brands.

Simon had taken off his tie. A glass of water sat beside his laptop, and the look on his face was enough to make any executive reconsider their entire career.

“You’ve been staring at the same line for five minutes,” he observed without looking up.

“I’m double-checking something.”

“Your mind’s somewhere else.”

I stopped typing.

“Simon, do you remember talking to Chloe last night? After you’d been drinking?”

He looked up. For a moment, he seemed to be mentally retracing the previous evening.

“Chloe?”

“Yeah. You even mentioned her name when I got home.”

He frowned.

“I’m not sure. I remember going to get some water. Maybe I ran into her. Why?”

“No reason. She mentioned you were acting differently.”

“Differently how?”

I shrugged.

“She didn’t say.”

Simon leaned back in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“All I know is I’ve had a hell of a headache all day. If I talked to someone in the hallway, it wasn’t a particularly memorable conversation.”

He didn’t seem to be hiding anything. And I knew this man. Simon could be provocative, but he wasn’t the type to dance around something he wanted to say.

“Okay,” I replied.

“Jamie.”

“Seriously. Let’s finish this.”

He watched me for another second before returning to his work.

I cross-referenced the batch numbers with the complaints received by customer service. Some customers had provided their purchase dates, while others had photos of the packaging. We were separating what we could verify from what still needed confirmation.

“Look at this,” I said. “Most of the complaints involve two shipments, but not all of them.”

Simon came over and rested a hand on the back of my chair.

“What about the formula?”

“The ingredient everyone’s blaming is listed in the approved formulation.”

“Phenoxyethanol,” he said. “Common preservative. At concentrations permitted in cosmetics, it shouldn’t cause a reaction on this scale by itself. That doesn’t prove the product is safe, either.”

“Or that it’s the cause.”

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