Most people who knew me would tell you that my life was pretty good. Not like, I lived in a mansion and had a playboy bunny for a wife and she loved to cook good. More like, I hated my job and worked for my father and he didn’t know I hated my job and I felt like nobody took me seriously kind of good.

Yeah. That kind.

Despite my shameless whining, I really did enjoy my life. I had kick-ass friends and a house that I owned. My sister and I were close, and I received a steady, ridiculously inflated paycheck from a job that held a title that was just as ridiculously inflated.

Chief Operating Officer of Calder Financial Services, Inc. sounded big and important, because it was. We were a financial firm in Denver that employed over fifty people, and my dad had poured his entire life into those brick walls for the last twenty-five years. But every single time I sat down in a mindless meeting that could have been wrapped up in an email, I wanted to gouge my eyes out with a popsicle stick, just to see how long it might take.

The people across the table from me would give me side-eyed looks when I suggested such a thing. Gasp! No meetings? How would they all function? Imagine the productivity levels if we actually had to sit at our desks and get shit done.

The horror.

Given that I had zero popsicle sticks, I jammed my fingers in my eye sockets while my dad preached at me from the opposite end of his office after the last perfect example of the kind of meeting I hated. Roughly twenty-five percent of the square footage of the top floor of the building was dedicated to his office, and I always marveled at how he thought it was necessary. Not that it wasn’t nice. He had two leather couches, a full size conference table for twelve, mini fridge behind his L-shaped desk, and two solid walls of glass that showed nothing but the downtown Denver skyline. Specifically, the shining golden dome of the Capital building and the long stretch of the Rockies beyond it in the distance.

“Garrett,” he barked and I dropped my hands.

“Yeah.” I blinked a few times. “I’m listening.”

“You can’t do that in the middle of a meeting, son. You can’t make statements like that, the kind that basically tell your senior management team that they’re wasting their time with pointless bureaucracy.”

“They are wasting their time,” I mumbled, stretching my legs out in front of me and picking at a piece of lint on my charcoal colored pants. Fine. There wasn’t actually a piece of lint, it just gave me something to look at besides my father’s face.

Partially because it weirded me out sometimes, how similar we looked. Same height (roughly six-three), same hair (dark blond/light brown depending on the time of year), same strong nose (from his mother’s side), same dark brown eyes. The other part was because I was so familiar with his tone of voice that I had no desire to see the matching look of disappointment on his mirror-image face.

Believe me, I saw it often. You wouldn’t want to look either.

“Garrett,” he said wearily, and the creak of his leather desk chair made me lift my eyes briefly. “This is how it’s done. You can’t ask people that have been doing things a certain way for their entire career to cut out a massive chunk of the decision making process at this firm simply because you don’t think it’s necessary.”

“Dad, come on. We sat in that room for two hours this morning and the only clear thing that came out of it is that the danishes from the bakery downstairs suck and that we need to run an extra report at the end of each quarter.” I lifted my eyebrows. “You seriously think that’s a good use of company time?”

He held up his hands and leaned back in his chair. “I’m not saying it is. But you still can’t do that in the middle of a joint staff meeting. That’s not how a COO should— “

“Not how a COO should conduct himself,” I finished, since I heard it on a weekly basis. Bi-weekly, actually. Speaking of should, that should beg the question of why he wanted me as COO in the first place.

Of course, I knew. It wouldn’t help me to verbalize it. My younger sister Anna had a successful career as an interior designer, and no interest in working at Calder Financial Services. Which meant in order to keep it as a family owned and operated business, I was the heir apparent on the operational side.

Anna and I both owned shares of it, along with my parents, so it would take a lot for it to be owned by anyone else. But for my father to be satisfied with someone else running it? That was a horse of a different color, as they say. I didn’t say that. That would be weird, as I was thirty-four and not eighty-four.

“I get as sick of saying it as you do hearing it.”

I held up a finger. “I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that statement. I actually think you love saying it to me. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that saying that to me makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like someone just puked up gold at your feet.”

My dad sniffed, shaking his head when I said it. “Do you take any of this seriously?”

“Nothing gives me greater joy than for you to remind me that I embarrass you.”

“And to think,” he continued as if I hadn’t said anything, “I was just going to hand you a project that might make you happy.”

“Spit shining your shoes?”

He pursed his lips just as there was a knock on the door, followed by a female voice. “Rich, you wanted to see me?”

It was, in fact, a miracle that I held in the groan that I so desperately wanted to let out.

The reason I say that is because while my father constantly reminded me that I should be doing better, almost every single person in the company loved me. They smiled when I walked past, showed me pictures of their grandkids or new litter of puppies because I actually took the time to ask.

There was one person, however, besides my father that constantly made me feel like I was a little kid pretending to be an adult.

Aurora Anderson. It was so unfair that the Wicked Witch of Finance inhabited the body of a gorgeous woman my age.

“Rory!” my dad said with a big-ass smile on his face.

Rory, I mouthed at her, with my eyebrows lifted and she pierced me with a narrow-eyed glare that actually made my balls shrink up. No one called her that around the office, so it delighted me to no end that I had something I could use against her.

“Sorry I couldn’t be at the meeting this morning.” She crossed the office and clasped my dad’s outstretched hand. “I had an emergency at my condo a couple days ago and had to wait for the insurance adjuster.”

“Clogged toilet?” I deadpanned and she took a deep breath, never once looking my way. To be honest, that was fine. As much as I hated Aurora, which I did, she sure as hell was something to look at.

She was slim and tall, at least five-nine or five-ten without heels, which she wore without fail. Her blonde hair was always loosely curled and pulled back into a low ponytail. Her skin was tan in the way that made me think she spent a lot of time outside. Shocking, because I typically thought vampires would burn the hell up out in the natural light.

Honestly, I wasn’t even positive what her eye color was because she either glared at me or ignored me. That wasn’t true. We interned together at CFS while we were both finishing our MBA, even though my internships had merely been a formality. The first day we met, almost eight years ago at that point, I had to struggle not to gape when I introduced myself to her. She had the deepest blue eyes I’d ever seen in my life. Almost a purplish blue.

Like flowers or sunset or some shit.

But then she’d opened her mouth, and blew it all to hell.

“I’m not here to make friends, Prince Calder. If you stay out of my way, then we’ll both be happier for the foreseeable future.”

“Prince Calder? You don’t even know me,” I’d said on a shocked laugh.

Instead of answering, she’d flicked those remarkable eyes over my shoulder at the empty office that already had my nameplate on the door. “Sure I do.”

Then she’d walked away, taking her long legs and perfect hair and shockingly blue eyes away from me. I don’t think we talked for six solid months after that.

If you could believe it, our work relationship had gotten even worse since we first met. But I couldn’t fire her, even if it had been my call to make. For one, I had to grudgingly admit that she was incredible at her job. And also because my dad and Aurora’s boss, the VP of Finance, were completely enamored with her.

In a professional way. Not in like, the creepy old man way.

So if I’d tried to oust her, they’d probably throw my ass on the curb before I could blink.

“Earth to Garrett,” Aurora said, snapping me from my internal diatribe. The one I had often, where I fantasized about telling her to pack her shit and leave.

Since my dad couldn’t see her when she was facing me, she rolled her eyes when I apologized.

“Okay,” my dad interrupted before I could do something super professional like flip my middle finger up at her. “As I was saying to Rory, the two of you both think there are things we could streamline and subjects that could be handled more efficiently to cut down on meeting times.”

I glanced over at her, but she’d shifted in her chair and was facing my dad again. She and I agreed on something? With a quick look out the window to make sure the sun wasn’t dripping with blood or some other sign of the apocalypse, I nodded in answer.

“So, I’d like to assign you two the task of coming up with a new monthly and quarterly meeting schedule for the senior management team.”

He stared at us, waiting for a reaction. Aurora was completely still, and I was trying to choke down my laughter.

I cleared my throat. “Dad, are you sure you want the two of us to do this?”

“Rich,” she said immediately after I was done, not sparing me a single look. “I really think this is something that could be handled by just one person, with input from the senior management team via email.”

But my dad silenced her by lifting one hand. “I get it. You guys don’t like each other.” Aurora and I immediately started talking, but he gave us a look that shut us up pretty quickly. “It’s fine. And you know what? There’s no rule that you have to love everyone that you work with. However, you do have to be able to set aside the things that you don’t like, and be able to get your job done. And in this case, your job is to work together on this because I’ve asked you to.” He paused, leveling a serious look at both of us. “Despite the fact that you don’t get along, I think you’ll balance each other well if you set your issues aside. Garrett, your desire to streamline our processes, the ideas that you have are great. And Rory, you have a practical outlook and a logical head to work with him on that.”

Silence cloaked his office. Most likely because Aurora and I were both attempting to come to grips with the fact that this was the first time in eight years that we’d be working on something together. Not just together, but only the two of us together.

When I lifted my head, she was staring at me. Then she mouthed a curse word that I’m quite sure started with an ‘F’ and turned back to my dad.

The sides of my lips started to curve into a smile, so I coughed into the back of my hand to hide it.

“Okay, Dad.”

Rory nodded and gave him a small smile. “Sounds good to me.”

When I looked at my dad, he looked pleased in a way that made me ill. Like he’d just succeeded in some Machiavellian scheme to overtake a small country.

Then he rubbed at his chest and took a deep breath.

“You okay, Dad?”

He waved me off. “Heartburn. Shouldn’t have had that Chinese for lunch.”

Aurora stood from the chair she’d been sitting in and spared me a derisive glance. “When would you like this done, Rich?”

“Present me with your recommendations in two weeks and it’ll go to senior management when I’ve signed off on it.”

When she nodded and started her quick-paced walk to the door, I gave my dad an absent wave and jogged after her. I wished, I really, really wished that her ass did not look so spectacular in the simple black pants that she favored.

“Aurora,” I called out when she picked up the pace. “Come on, you can’t ignore me already. This’ll be a shitty two weeks if you do.”

“Watch me,” she said over her shoulder.

I caught up with her and hooked a gentle hand into the crook of her elbow and steered us into the darkened conference room.