She’d died just a week after that.
Parker LLC was for people like my mom. The type of medication we were synthesizing would keep people alive because they’d be able to afford it. My company wouldn’t force them to choose between eating and staying alive. I was the only one who would make sure that mission came to life.
Involving a man like Grayson Asher could ruin that. He was interested in the bottom line. He’d want to ensure the drug made a profit and a handsome one at that.
In all likelihood, he’d cut me out as soon as I outlived my usefulness.
“I don’t have a price. Parker LLC is my company and I aim to keep it that way. You could offer me the world and I wouldn’t take it,” I finally answered.
His jaw tightened, not with anger, but with a smile of some sort.
I didn’t want to meet his hard stare anymore, so I took a sip of my coffee instead. I was grateful for the break in eye contact, honestly. Just being in his presence felt intense and I needed a second away from it.
I glanced back at him, only to notice that his smile had grown that much wider. I didn’t know what to make of that and somewhere deep inside me, a balloon of anxiety blossomed to life.
Slowly, he pushed his hands against the desk and rose to his feet. He rounded his desk with intention, steadily moving but not rushing until he stood behind my chair. Nervously, I pressed my thighs together, trying to decide whether I should run or not and debating exactly how I far I could get. My heart pounded in my chest and the coffee mug shook a bit in my hands, so I put it down before he could see how much of an effect that he was having simply by standing next to me.
I sat back and decided to be brave.
“You are everything that I hoped you’d be, Dr. Zoe Parker,” he murmured, and I stiffened. For a moment, I sat there speechless, trying to figure out the meaning behind his words. He caught me off guard when his fingers grazed along the expanse of my shoulder. I jerked away, but he pressed against me more insistently. His touch was gentle, but I hated the way it felt like it was setting fire to my skin.
“Take your hands off me,” I gasped.
He didn’t. His palm cupped the back of my head and when I moved to lean away, his fingers dug roughly into my hair. I squeaked in surprise as a fierce stinging pain radiated across the back of my head, but it didn’t stop there. He forced me to stand, never letting up, and twisted me around so that I faced him. He pulled my hair so effectively that it was if he had a handle on my body. I tried pulling away and that only made it hurt more.
“What are you doing? Stop this instant!” I shrieked.
He silenced my screams by covering my mouth with his. He kissed me deeply, possessively, and for a second I forgot myself and started to kiss him back. His lips were like a dark obsession, and I lost myself in them, but then his free hand started to linger down the cusp of my shoulder, down the line of my back until he cupped my ass and squeezed it hard enough to hurt.
I remembered myself then. With both hands, I shoved against his chest. I used every ounce of strength that I had to do it, effectively breaking the two of us apart. My lips throbbed. He’d kissed me hard. I wondered if he’d bruised them and even though I wanted to reach up and touch them to see if they were swollen, I didn’t.
Instead, I slapped him so hard that the sound echoed fiercely throughout the room.
His hand released my hair and those dark brown eyes bored into mine. To his credit, he didn’t reach up to soothe his cheek even though it was beginning to turn pink. For a moment, we just stared at each other as I tried to grapple with what had just happened between us.
He’d crossed a line. Maybe there was a reason Grayson Asher was single all this time. Maybe he’d tried to take more than his fair share. Maybe he’d paid the right amount of money to the right people to keep his reputation a secret.
I wasn’t going to stay and find out. This meeting was over.
“I reject your proposition, Mr. Asher,” I spat, and I turned to storm out of the room. I made it almost to the end of the hallway before his hand closed around my upper arm. His fingers held me firmly, digging in just enough to ache a bit but so hard that it would bruise.
He pulled me back into his office that way and I fought him with every step.
“Let me go. You have no right,” I demanded.
He simply chuckled.
“Listen, asshole. I said no. I’m not going to sell my company to you no matter how much money you throw at me. I don’t have to stay to find out what more you want either,” I snarled.
He dragged me toward his desk. I didn’t go quietly. I dug my heels into the carpet, using the power in my legs that I’d developed through years of spin classes, at-home workouts, and running at the gym. I was strong, but he pulled me along like I was nothing more than a bag of rice.
I tried to twist away. I tried to kick him so that he’d let me go. I tried to push at him in hope he’d release my upper arm, but none of it worked. Right then, it was as if he had the strength of the Hulk. Nothing I could do would be able to fight against that. I knew that, but I still didn’t make it easy on him.
He pulled me all the way over to his desk. With surprising swiftness that I wasn’t prepared for, he pushed me face down over it, and just when I slapped my hands against the surface in an effort to stand back up, his hand flattened across the middle of my back.
He kicked my legs open. He used his foot to spread them wider.
“You bastard. You won’t get away with this,” I spat. “You can’t force yourself on someone just because you have money.”