The reporter paged through her notes, while behind her, seated in a chair by the door, a bored looking photographer picked at a leather strap and occasionally shook his leg. Nervous energy? A muscle spasm?

David didn’t know, but he shared some of the guy’s restlessness even if the trampoline inside his stomach wasn’t visible.

He reached for the coffee cup on his right, dipped it for a quick look, gave a little swirl and then shot the end of the brew, now cold and especially nasty, into his mouth.

Amy caught his eye as the cup met the saucer. She was half-laughing at him and half beaming with pride. Knowing she was there, seeing her face and listening to her talk was better than…well, he didn’t know what.

His Amy was everything.

“So let me reverse a smidge and go back to a point Ms. Peters made. Correct my take on this if I’m wrong but did you say there will be an AE Project office in every state?”

“Exactly right, Paula. The Project will have a presence in every state capital and Ms. Peters has taken the lead on bringing in some territories as well.”

“Puerto Rico, Samoa, the Virgin Islands,” Amy interjected.

He couldn’t help his broad smile of approval. They were a great team. She pushed him further, to think outside the norm and to have a little faith.

Paula Bern was a well-known local journalist. She covered everything—business, society, politics and pop culture. And she was smart. He liked her instantly and silently patted himself on the back for letting Amy do most of the talking. He had a tendency to sermonize when he felt passionate about something. If he’d gone off on a rant, the photographer would be snoring and Paula typing her grocery list into her phone from boredom. Mostly he took shit for being a nerdy babble mouth. Only Amy ever joined in when one of his flights of fancy kicked off.

‘I’m going to marry her.’

David froze. Did he say that out loud? He must have because Amy and Paula were looking at him strangely.

He chuckled. “Busted?”

The two women snickered and nodded in unison.

“How bad?” he asked. “Was there mumbling or just a slow fade?”

“Actually,” Paula hooted with a loud, brash cackle, “I thought you were having a stroke.”

Amy didn’t suppress her husky giggle. She wasn’t glaring at him or flushed beet red, so maybe it wasn’t that bad.

“Did you need a Visa for wherever you drifted off to?”

Oh, thank God! No babble mouth.

“Sorry. Was making a fantasy football roster in my head.”

Paula almost toppled out of her chair laughing. “Do you know my husband?”

The photographer chuckled.

“He uses that same tired line!” she added.

“It’s a good one, though, right?” He gave both women a cheeky grin.

Paula dropped her notepad on the desk between them and stretched. “Hey, don’t worry about it. I know these interviews are dry as toast. I don’t suppose you two would like to drop something scandalous into the back story? Great way to guarantee readers.”

He wasn’t sure if he was breathing, so he thought about it in the silence that greeted her offhand remark. Yep. Air in and air out. Good. At least he wasn’t going to drop face first onto his desk from lack of oxygen.

Amy was in the middle of putting some presentation folders in a pile on the edge of the desk but missed the surface when Paula’s comment ruffled her usual calm. The folders emptied as they fell.

Words, clumsy, stammered words filled the air. Not sentences. Just words and sounds. Some of the highlights included:

Huh

Uh

No

Well

And, Um

Smooth? Not in the least.

Paula eyed them with interest. “Oh, wait a minute,” she said. The ‘ah ha’ tone in her voice skittered across his nerves.

Oops.

“You two are a couple! Aren’t you? Oh my god. This is awesome,” the reporter remarked. Her glee was evident. “I want both of you.”

“Pardon?” Amy’s look and sound telegraphed what was happening inside him.

Paula whipped around and gestured to the photographer. “Bud, come here. Get a shot of these two at work. Nothing posed.”

“Wait, what’s happening?” David asked.

“Relax,” Paula drawled. “I get it. Office politics and a romance with the boss are career killers.”

She was studying Amy like a bug under the microscope in high school science class.

“No, no,” Amy hastily exclaimed. “It’s not…um, no.”

The reporter stood up, so he did too. Amy came to his side. The photographer was watching them like this was a reality TV show.

“Look,” Paula told them. “I'll consider this privileged information, okay? I’m not in the business of outing people for any reason. I like you two and to be perfectly blunt, I’m fascinated by the personal dynamic behind what looks like a game-changing move for Beck Industries. But this isn’t my first behind-the-scenes peek. This project you’ve developed together grew into something enormous because it came from a secret place.”

“I like the way you think,” Amy muttered.

“I want you for an article about the twenty most influential power teams changing the way we do business in the 21st century. Please note,” she said with a pithy drawl, “that I said teams. Not couples.” She shuddered and made an exaggerated face. “Ew, ya’ know?”

She and Amy did an exploding fist bump that struck him as enormously funny. My god. Women were so much cooler than men. They saw things, felt stuff and noticed shit that never failed to shut him up with wonder, shock, and sometimes annoyance.

Right then and there, David made some decisions on the fly. He wanted the article. Not for him. He certainly didn’t need any more publicity than he already got as head of Beck. But Amy? Shit. Being featured in a write-up about influential people? Her family would go ape shit.

She worked harder than three people smashed into one. Her grasp of current trends and ability to plan strategically helped make her a masterful player. She didn’t need to sleep with the boss to get ahead. Shit. The truth was she would eclipse him someday.

Were they a fearsome team? A power team, as Paula put it? Fuck, yeah.

He was fairly sure everyone was shocked when he extended his hand and told Paula, “Come back to me after the launch. Let’s see how that goes.”

They shook hands as he laid it out for all to hear. “My relationship with Ms. Peters is…classified. For the moment. You help us keep it private, and we’ll talk about your article.”

Paula lit up like a Christmas tree. “Can I get an exclusive? Maybe break the story that the head of Beck Industries is involved with a brilliant associate who shows far-reaching potential?”

He snickered and made a face. “Oh, balls. I see how this is going to go.”

Bud, the photographer, was snapping pictures as he circled them.

“Damn straight you see it,” Paula chortled. “The rich kid who inherits a business is the oldest, most yawn-inducing trope out there. Blah, blah, blah. Yadda-yadda, ugh. But rising female stars? Move aside boys, there’s a new alpha in town, and she sells a shit-ton more copy than an expensive three-piece suit.”

“Truth,” Bud murmured.

Amy swung from seeming dumbfounded to looking at him like a five-pound box of gourmet chocolates.

It took him a while to get here, but that’s how shit sometimes happens. He was tired of keeping their relationship hidden away. Amy Peters was a fucking goddess. A more perfect partner he couldn’t imagine. His mother could pound sand or take a tranquilizer. Whatever. Time to move on because he and Amy had shit to do, places to go, a world to change and a family to make.

He pushed the meeting to an end, made a bunch of promises, shared contact information and locked down details as Amy stayed close by and the photographer kept shooting. Almost as an afterthought he harshly blurted, “I want final approval of the images you publish.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Bud scoffed.

Paula’s hand shot out and stopped her photographer with a wave. “No, it’s fine.” She pinned him to the spot with a heavy look. “Agreed. Full approval.”

He nodded.

“In exchange for an exclusive.”

Well, well, well. It turned out to be quite a morning. Unless he was misreading the signs, he’d taken a giant leap out of his comfort zone and publically allowed what was essentially relationship scrutiny. He was either insane or the luckiest son of a bitch who ever lived.

“You’ll be at the launch?” he asked.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Paula answered. “Can I get five minutes with your mom or is that pushing my luck?”

He scoffed, snickered, and rolled his eyes all at the same time. Amy cleared her throat.

“Only if you wear flame retardant underclothes,” he drawled with a mocking bite.

Paula Bern laughed and hoisted a clunky designer bag onto her shoulder. “Getting Quinn Sanderson to speak on the record is like chasing elves through the woods. Just when you think she’s cornered, another escape route appears.”

“I’ll make the introduction,” he told her, “but my mother does as she pleases. Whether she talks to you or not is entirely up to…chance.”

Paula snickered. “All mothers are alike. She’s no different than mine. Or yours,” she said to Amy.

He hoped her observation was true. It would be nice if, in the end, his mom was a mom and not a ball-busting CEO. He wanted her support, and he wanted his mom to be happy for him. Women like Amy didn’t come along every day.

After the office was cleared, they sharked around each other for a few minutes in silence. He could hear her brain working. Finally, finally, finally, she looked at him.

“What did you do, David?”

He heard the worry and conflict in her tone. He also noted the edge of hopefulness, and that’s all he needed.

“It’s time, honey. We said that after the launch we’d start coming out of the shadows.” He offered a shrug. “Close enough.”

“Your mother,” she murmured. Her tension was evident.

“Oh, fuck my mother. Not literally, of course, but in the broader sense. I’m not a teenager who just watched his father move out of the house. The years of catering to Quinn’s victim charade are over. I know her. She’s not going to cause a scene because I’m in love with someone who happens to be among the thousands of people this company employs. And she’s not going to remove me from the company.”

“I don’t like the timing. There’s no way I can finish my degree before next summer. Going public will make things complicated.”

“No, it won’t,” he assured her.

She peered up at him when he gathered her close.

“We’re not the center of the universe. We’re involved. No big deal. It’ll be a weekend story that will be quickly forgotten. If things get weird or complicated—for you—I’ll take care of it.”

She might be slightly off-kilter by the sudden recalculation of their relationship parameters, but that didn’t mean she lost any of her innate firepower.

“I want this nonsense with Violet stopped. Immediately.”

There was no other way to say it—he gawked at her. Really? He was pushing them to the next level, and she was fixating on another woman?

“Don’t look at me like that,” she snapped. “And take your hands off me you arrogant jerk.”

Wait. What the hell was happening? He just started making moves to reveal their love affair, and her reaction was to get bitchy with him?

The gawking continued as he watched her zip around his office, gathering the stuff she brought to the interview with a tight-assed efficiency he found startlingly erotic.

Suddenly she whirled on him and slapped her hands on her waist. “That’s not how this works, Mr. Sanderson,” she bit out. “I will not be gossiped about.”

He wasn’t finding the thread all that easily. What the hell was she getting at?

“Oh for god’s sake, David,” she growled. Pretending to slap her forehead she went through a pantomime that called him out for being a dumbass.

“Thanks to Quinn, you’ve been parading through the society pages with that wretched bitch at your side. Did you imagine people thought she was your sober companion? A babysitter? Your bodyguard?”

Oh. Right. Yeah. She had a point.

“I’ll be painted as a sneaky slut who stole another woman’s man. You know exactly what you can do with that opinion, right?”

“Ah, fuck.”

“I’m going back to my office now before I come across this room and wipe that head-up-your-ass expression off your face.”

“Amy, hold up.”

“No,” she spat out. “There’s only so much, David—and you know it. Ditch the bitch with the fake smile, and we’ll talk. Until then—go fuck yourself.”

He was ready to do anything, anything at all to change her mind when he detected the slightest twinkle in her eyes.

Oh my god. She was playing him. Fucking fantastic.

He gave her an unimpressed smirk. “As you wish.”

Her expression didn’t change, but instead of a twinkle, her eyes flared.

As she went to leave in a grumpy, well-acted huff, he got the last word.

“I believe we have a date on Friday. Five o’clock, right? I seem to recall a particularly lewd promise of you coming all over my cock.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“That would be correct, Mr. Sanderson. Don’t be late.”

And with that, she turned and exited with a naughty hip swagger that put a shit-eating grin on his face.

Oh, he’d get rid of Violet. No problem there. He’d had a Plan B for her tucked away for some time.

But first, he was going to enjoy the wicked theater his sweet Amy planned. She had a way of making the mundane exciting and loved everything and anything that remotely smacked of sexy times role-play.