I sat outside of the boardroom, staring blankly at my phone, waiting for them to call me inside. I wasn’t used to waiting, but the board was pretty pissed and I wasn’t in a position to complain at the moment.

I leaned back in my chair, putting my hands behind my head and staring up at the ceiling. How the fuck had it come to this?

That was a stupid question. I knew exactly how it came to this.

I founded Valor Tech when I was eighteen years old and writing code in my mom’s basement. I went on to design websites on the side, saving up money until I had enough cash to launch my real product: a real-time optical recognition algorithm. It started out with that, at least, but Valor quickly grew into an enormous tech conglomerate.

I wasn’t the sole leader of the company anymore, and hadn’t been for years. That wasn’t uncommon in the tech world. Founders weren’t usually the best businessmen, and that certainly described me. I hired some great CEOs to help run the company while I got to do whatever the fuck I wanted to do. I still owned a majority share, but that was shrinking every year as the board slowly tried to muscle me out.

Then came the scandals. Stupid shit at first, like partying too much, but the floodgates broke open when the media realized that people loved hearing bullshit stories about me. A lot of the stuff they “reported” was a total fabrication, but that didn’t matter to them. The media only cared about viewer numbers and sponsorships.

The last straw happened when I met this lovely woman at a charity function. She spoke very eloquently about my work in artificial intelligence and robotics, which of course got my cock hard as fuck, and I ended up letting her suck my cock in my car. What I didn’t know was that she was married, because she wasn’t wearing a fucking ring at the time. Turned out her husband was an engineer for our own fucking company, which was a real big goddamn scandal, and cost me a shitload of money. Naturally, the board used that HR nightmare to muscle me out a tiny bit more and threatened to get rid of me completely if I didn’t change my image.

Fuck my image and fuck the board. I did what I wanted to do because I made good things. Who cares if I liked to smoke weed, drink nice whisky, and get my dick sucked from time to time? I like pussy and I’m not going to apologize for that. I built Valor Tech from a basement, and turned it into an enormous and successful company. Now they wanted to muscle me out over some bullshit scandals?

It was such a stupid mess, but I wasn’t going to give in to their demands. I wasn’t going to change my life just because a bunch of old stuffed suits wanted me to be a good boy. Then there was that asshole Bruce Walker, the head of the board. He hated my guts and wanted to see me bleeding on the goddamn floor.

After all that, the solution appeared right in front of me. Evelyn came in and offered to get married, which surprised the hell out of me until she explained why.

The plan was simple. We’d wait a month or two, then elope and explain to the board and the press that we fell in love on a business trip. I’d tell everyone that I settled down and found the love that I really needed. We’d do some interviews, get the buzz out there, and I’d lay low for a little while until shit blew over. Then I’d wrestle back control of my company and go back to doing whatever the fuck I wanted to do, and Evelyn would get a big, fat check.

The plan seemed simple. At least it did until I met her daughter.

Emily was fucking gorgeous. There was no other way of saying it. She had big, pouty lips, round, gorgeous green eyes, and thick brown hair down to the center of her back. Her body was incredible, thick in the right places, and I wanted to strip her down so badly and feel that ass under the palm of my hand. The fact that she was appalled about this arrangement, and seemed to totally despise me, only made me want to break her even more.

“Mr. Green?” I looked up at Sheila, Bruce’s secretary. “They’re ready for you.”

“Thanks, Sheila.”

She walked off as I stood. I took a deep breath then opened the boardroom door and stepped inside.

The board was made up of twelve individuals, some from inside the company and some from outside. They were all-important shareholders and were tasked with steering the company’s big picture. For the most part, it was split down the middle, with half of the board supporting me and my vision, and the other half supporting the head of the board, Bruce Walker. Since we were deadlocked, nothing changed, but Bruce lately had been chipping away at my solid base, watering down my shares, changing the structure of the company.

That was going to end and end soon.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, walking to the front of the room.

“Why did you request this meeting, Carter?”

I glared at Bruce. He was an older man in his fifties with squinting blue eyes, wrinkles around his eyes, and thinning white hair. He was tall and gaunt, like the survivor of some horrible plague, and he always made me uncomfortable.

“I have an announcement to make. It will affect the future of this company.”

There was a general murmur around the table. I caught the eye of my biggest supporter, Nelson Pitts, and nodded to him. He nodded back.

“Get on with it, Carter. Our time is important,” Bruce said. His cronies snickered and I ignored him.

“Yesterday, I got married.”

There were more than a few surprised faces around that table. I grinned at them, enjoying the moment.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Bruce asked.

“Not at all. You’ve been begging me for years to clean up my image, and I decided to finally listen. As of yesterday, my secretary Evelyn is now my wife.”

There were more murmurs and some people looked genuinely angry.

“Is this a stunt?” Bruce asked.

“We fell in love a couple months back when she was consoling me over my latest media scandal. I know there’s a slight age difference, but we’re very much in love.”

Bruce shook his head, looking totally shocked. “This is insane, Carter, even for you.”

“Nothing insane about it. I’m sure more than a few of you in here have fallen for your secretary at some point. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am the victim of love.”

I was laying it on a little thick, but that was okay. These people didn’t care about subtlety, only about what was best for the company.

“How do you think this is going to help? The media will go crazy with this story,” Bruce said, shaking his head. “You’ve signed your own death warrant.”

“No, Bruce, I haven’t. The media is going to see a new version of me, a calm and professional version.” I smiled at him and I could tell he understood what that smile meant.

It meant that the professional version of me was going to slit his throat.

“This is more impulsive foolishness from you, Carter,” he said. “I hoped for more from you. This will never work.”

“You’re very wrong, Bruce. Evelyn and I are going to do a lot for this company, and the scandals are all behind me. This is the new era of Valor Tech.”

There was more murmuring and discussion of how to deal with the media fallout, but I didn’t stay for any of that. I said what I wanted to say, dropped the bomb I’d been so excited to drop, and so I left. I headed back toward my office, smiling to myself the whole way.

The look on Bruce’s face had been incredible. I wanted to bury that smug bastard, and couldn’t wait to begin putting the nails in his coffin.

The only problem that kept nagging at me was my new stepdaughter, Emily. I shouldn’t think of her as a stepdaughter, since she was barely ten years younger than me and gorgeous as hell. I knew I was going to have to exercise some serious self-restraint with her, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to.

And I wasn’t sure if she was going to play along. The last time we spoke, she was willing to help, but she was clearly reluctant. I didn’t know how long that was going to last, or if she was going to lash out. I trusted Evelyn, and she said that Emily would help, but I wasn’t so sure. I needed to keep an eye on her and be positive that she was going to play ball.

There were a lot of moving pieces and uncertainty with this plan, but that was okay. I worked best when I improvised, although I’d never had a distraction and a problem quite like Emily before.

I was going to need to learn some serious self-restraint over the next few months, or else I might not get what I wanted in the end.