HIS STRIPPER, HIS WIFE novel Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Adrain

55 vouchers

The corridor outside the conference room smelled like fresh paint and I couldn’t help but wonder if they had to repaint the whole place to impress me.

Everything was trying too hard, the lobby with its marble floors that were just slightly too shiny, the receptionist who smiled just a little too wide, the directors who met me at the elevator like I was royalty arriving for a coronation. I could tell that all of it was performance but lucky for them, I am used to it.

Felix walking beside me, tablet in hand, reading off the last items on the schedule in that clipped way of his that I had come to rely on over five years.

“After the address, you have the departmental review at two, then the legal handover documents need your signature before four,” he said. “And Mr. Alfred is requesting another call about the project in…”

“Cancel Alfred.”

“Sir, he’s called three times this…”

“Then cancel four times.” I stopped walking and turned to look at him. “Felix.”

He adjusted his glasses. “Yes, sir.”

“After today, I won’t be coming back to this building.”

He blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“The acquisition is done. The integration team can handle the transition from here. I don’t need to be physically present for any of it.” I straightened my cufflinks. “Schedule the departmental review remotely. Everything else can go through the branch manager.”

Felix was quiet for exactly some seconds, which for him meant he had opinions he was choosing not to share. “Understood,” he finally said. “I’ll reschedule accordingly.”

“Good.”

I turned back toward the conference room doors and he stayed behind, already typing on his tablet, already rearranging the world to match what I had just said. One of the things I like about Felix, he never wasted time arguing with the inevitable.

A director, I had already forgotten his name, was waiting by the door with an outstretched hand and a smile that was doing too much.

“Mr. Delacroix, we’re so glad you’re here. Everyone is very excited.”

I shook his hand because it was necessary, not like I wanted to. “I’m sure they are.”

He pushed the door open and I walked in. The room was full, fuller than I had imagined. They had brought in extra chairs and some people were still standing along the walls.

Everyone turned to look, the way people always turned to look, and I let my eyes move across the room in one smooth sweep

This was the part I was good at. Walking into a room and taking it without saying a single word. My father had taught me that. You don’t announce your presence, you simply occupy a space so completely that everyone else feels it.

I quickly sat down, this company’s project is one of those family joint projects that I never enjoyed doing but here I am,

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Chapter 9

about to get my hands dirty.

55 Vouchers

One of the directors stood up and began to talk, and my mind drifted from it all back to her again. I had spent the better part of two days trying not to think about her, which meant I had spent the better part of two days thinking about nothing else.

That almost never happened to me, I had sat in my apartment the morning after and tried to work through it logically. I could not stop thinking about the way she said please, the way she pulled me closer when I was already as close as I could get, the way she looked at me after like she was surprised by her own reaction,

“It was a circumstance. It was nothing more.” I told myself again. Except that I had told myself that forty or fifty times over two days and I still did not entirely believe it.

The director beside me said something that pulled me out of my thoughts. I nodded at the appropriate moment and moved toward the front of the room, shaking the hands that were extended to me, saying the things that were expected.

And then I looked up, because I always did one final scan of the room before I spoke, she was sitting at the back. Mynind did not immediately accept what my eyes were seeing. It did a thing I was not accustomed to, it stuttered. Just for some seconds, the whole room went slightly out of focus and then snapped back.

She was in a black skirt and a white blouse, her hair pulled back, her eyes down at a notepad in her lap. She had a pen in her hand and she looked like she belonged exactly here, then she looked up.

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