Her Alpha CEO

“You really want to marry me?” she asked.

He nodded. “Yes. I do.”

“You really love me?”

He nodded again. “More than anything.”

This time, she nodded, too. But it was a slow nod. A thoughtful nod. The kind that indicated she was thinking, not agreeing. Finally, though, she told him, “Then I think, Brian, before we go any further with this, we need to talk about the terms.”

Good businesswoman that she was, she insisted they be dressed for their discussion. Conceding the point, Brian decided they should also have access to coffee. So after dressing and having breakfast, he and Nina took their coffee out to the deck, where a warm summer breeze skidded off the lake, and where the golden sun washed over them.

They took their seats on the big Adirondack love seat, settling comfortably into the patterned cushions. Brian took solace in the fact that Nina sat close enough to touch him, tucking her bare foot under her denim-clad leg comfortably. Her white cotton shirt was embroidered with white flowers and edged with lace, feminine enough to be unprofessional, another good sign. He, too, was barefoot, his blue jeans as worn as hers, his polo an old, lovingly faded green one that was his favorite for those few occasions when he kicked back and relaxed.They were talking terms, he thought, but for something much more important than business.

“Where would you like to start?” he asked.

She sipped her coffee and gazed out at the lake. “It occurs to me that if I agree to this merger, it’s not the first time you’ve attempted this kind of thing. And I want to be clear that, although I’m not the first candidate for the position you’ve offered me, I’m your first — your only — choice.”

He looked at her, confused. “I’m not sure I follow.”

She sighed, then turned to face him. “Two words. My sister.”

He smiled a little self-deprecatingly. “Ah. I guess that’s my signal to tell you about my

botched wedding attempt, isn’t it?”

Nina nodded. “I tried to be subtle, but you men just don’t have the subtlety gene.”

He nodded. “That explains a lot, actually. Like how my engagement happened in the first place.”

He looked at Nina, who had placed her hand on the seat cushion between them, so that her thumb touched her own thigh and her pinky touched his. Her eyes glistened in the morning light, the sun flickered in her hair, first orange then red then gold, and her face lifted into the warm breeze. Her entire being seemed illuminated from within, as if it were she, not the sun, that brought warmth to the day. And to Brian, too. Because he’d sat in the sunshine plenty of times, but never had he felt the way he did in that moment. As if everything in his life that had come before it was only preparation for this moment. As if this moment signified the beginning of something new and wonderful that would last forever.

How could he have missed Nina’s beauty all those years? he wondered. How could he have missed Nina? How could he have not seen what should have been obvious from the first? That she was a rare, exquisite jewel amid the meaningless rubbish of his work. How could he have thought his work was the most important thing in the world, when every day she was with him was a sign of how there was so much more?

“Brian?” she said softly.

He lifted a hand to thread his fingers through her hair, then hesitated, in case she didn’t want him to. But she leaned her head forward, toward his fingers, toward him, and he closed what was left of the distance gratefully, loving the way the soft, braids felt cascading over his fingertips. “Hmm?” he replied absently.

“The engagement?” she prodded gently. “You were going to tell me why it happened.”

Right. He had been planning to tell her about his now-defunct engagement. Which was weird, because there was another engagement he wanted to talk about so much more. Of course, that engagement hadn’t happened…yet. So maybe it would be best to divest himself completely of the old one. Then he could move ahead to the new.

“It was actually Sabrina’s idea,” he began. “We were talking about gaming and how her business as a writer was so suited to development in gaming companies over dinner one night, and when the food came, the conversation turned to more personal subject matter, because it’s hard to talk business when you’re eating.” He adopted his best professor voice as he added, importantly, “Because as everyone knows, it’s an unwritten rule of business etiquette that you should never talk about important things with your mouth full. So talk about unimportant things with your mouth full instead.”

Nina chuckled at that. “Yeah, personal matters are so much less important than

professional ones.”

He nodded. “You learned well at my knee, grasshopper. Unfortunately, a lot of what I taughtyou was wrong.”

She smiled at that. “As long as you understand that now.”

“Oh, I understand a lot now that I was clueless about before.”

She lifted her hand and cupped his cheek affectionately. A very good sign. “We can talk about that, too,” she said. “In fact, I look forward to it. But first, you’re talking to Sabrina…”

“Right. Sabrina mentioned that she was in the market for a permanent position, and that a business arrangement would suit her perfectly.”

Brian nodded. “She claimed she’d gotten used to being swindled by businessmen, and a permanent contract would be best.”

“And how did she convince you of that?” Nina asked. “Somehow, I’ve never pictured you as the sort to mistrust your own judgment.”

“Too true,” he said. Except that, like so many other things, he’d been wrong about that, too. His judgment, at least when it came to matters of the heart, stank. Or, at least, it used to. “But your sister can be quite a persuasive woman, and she made some excellent points about why it would be beneficial to merge our relationship as well as our work. And since I’d never planned to marry, marrying Sabrina made sense.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Nina said. “I don’t follow that logic at all.”

“Of course not,” he said. “You don’t have the convoluted logic gene that men have.”

“Ah.”

“The convoluted logic goes like this,” he told her, smiling. “Try to keep up. I’d never planned to marry, because I never planned to fall in love.” Something else he’d been wrong about, he thought. Man. Where had he ever gotten the idea that he was savvy? “So marrying for love made no sense to me. Marrying for business, however…”