HIS STRIPPER, HIS WIFE novel Chapter 26

Chapter 26

Chapter 26

Adrian

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“It’s obvious he likes her,” Felix said casually, watching the floor below. “I mean, who wouldn’t? She’s a very beautiful woman.”

I shot him a look and he smiled back at me, completely unbothered.

“Sir, don’t worry about me, I know work relationships are not allowed,” he added.

“Good.” I nodded and looked away.

“Speaking of that,” Felix said, tilting his head slightly in her direction. “I think she’s really enjoying her time.”

I followed his signal without meaning to, she was across the room now, standing with one of the CEOs from a rival company, and they were both smiling about something. The man had’angled his body toward her in that way men do when they have decided they are very interested and want the other person to notice.

She was laughing at something he said, her head tilting back slightly, and I felt a specific kind of irritation move through my chest that I had absolutely no business feeling.

I looked away, then I looked back. “Stop this Adrian.” I was trying to have an internal conversation with myself about the fact that I was a grown man who ran a company and I needed to stop tracking a woman’s movements across a room like I had been assigned to her but it did not help.

The men did not stop coming, that was the problem. Every time I turned back to whatever conversation I was in the middle of, some new person had found their way to her side and was doing the same thing the last one had done, angling his body, laughing too readily, leaning in a little more than the conversation required. I lost count at some point so I stopped trying to

count.

Her dress was not helping anything either. It was elegant, yes, I had approved the selection, but in the actual lighting of the actual room with the actual way she moved in it, the word elegant was doing a lot of heavy lifting for something that was causing me this much trouble. Everything was where it was supposed to be and none of it was helping me focus on the evening’s business.

I finished one conversation and moved to another and somewhere in the background of every discussion I had for the next forty minutes, part of my attention was on her. What she was doing, who she was talking to, whether Adam was still beside her or had wandered off, whether the rival CEO had come back for a second round of whatever that had been.

By the time I reached Felix again I had already made the decision.

“Have them move Ms. Fernandes’ things to the family hotel,” I said, keeping my voice low. “She goes directly there from here tonight. And have them leave in twenty minutes.”

Felix did not ask further questions. “Okay, boss,” he said, and walked off to make it happen.

I went back to doing what I was supposed to be doing, which was networking and being present and making the evening useful from a business standpoint. I spoke to three more people. In what was supposed to be twenty minutes but felt longer, Felix’s message came through, “Done.”

I looked up and she was gone. Adam too. The space where she had been standing was just a regular room now, other people filling it in the way crowds do. I breathed out and went back to my drink.

The rest of the evening moved the way these things always did, gradually and then all at once. The formal parts wound down the conversations got looser, people who had been networking started just talking, and eventually the room began to than as the late hour sorted the guests into those who had morning obligations and those who didn’t.

I was in the car on the way home and coincidentally we passed the family hotel. I looked at it as we passed and then I looked

11:54 Wed, Jul 22 T

JT

Chapter 26

55 vouchers

away and then I thought about the state I had left things in between us on that jet.

She is in that hotel right now, Adam was also, presumably, somewhere in that hotel, with Felix’s words still sitting in my head. He had been talking about her since he left this morning.

“Tell the driver to turn back to the family hotel.” I sent Felix a message.

He did and car pulled in and I stepped out and told them to leave, that I would be staying for the night. I got the room” number from Felix’s tab as I walked through the lobby. I had glanced at it earlier when I was checking the arrangements and it had stayed in my head.

I took the elevator up and found the corridor and that was when I saw Adam.

He was ahead of me, walking toward her door slowly as he dragged her box with him. He had his hand slightly raised, about to knock when I moved faster.

“I will have her come for it,” I said, coming up behind him just as his knuckles were about to meet the door.

Adam stopped and turned and it took him a second to place me in this context, out of the office, in a hotel corridor, at this hour. The moment he could recognize me, he straightened.

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