When I sat in the seat across from her desk, she didn’t look up. “I shouldn’t be seeing you,” she said.
“Definitely not. I’m already in trouble for fucking one person in the office.” I tried to keep my tone light.
The look she gave me would’ve cowed the strongest of men. “Do you have that out of your system now?”
I sighed. “Yes.” Though she wasThe Boss, I’d worked with her long enough, and invested as much time in this as she had, that we were equals in private. “Do we really have to do this?”
“You knew this was a rule. Youknewyou couldn’t break it. We specifically discussed, and you said you understood.” Some days Judith joked. Today wasn’t one of them. In fact, she looked more tired, more stressed, than I’d seen her in a long time.
My ego would love to believe it was all because of me, but I suspected there was more going on I wasn’t seeing. “You knew I was doing it.” Could I not help myself? Apparently not.
She shook her head. “That had better not be your defense in front of everyone else.”
“It’s not.” Time to stop fucking around. Maybe beg a little. “I love this place as much as you do. I can’t give it up.”
“No one questions that.” She tugged on a loose lock of hair. “But what do you expect me to do?”
“I can’t lose this.” Yup. I was willing to beg. A lot.
She shook her head. “If you stayed, would you stop seeing him?”
Give up Link? The simple question hit me hard, knocking the wind from me. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. But an answer refused to be pushed past my lips.
Judith turned away from me. “I’ll see you in the meeting.”
The window of time that passed between then and the start of the next conversation was agonizingly long, and ended far too soon. When I walked into the conference room, to find the other four members of the AcesPlayed board, I felt like I was facing my executioners.
Wow, me. Fatalistic, much?
There was no need for introductions. Judith and I spoke almost every day, I’d known Scott for longer than not, Grant Lent, and Oliver Jaggers. And Ivan was here to take notes.
“So there are no misunderstandings, we need to state why we’re here, and what we need to accomplish by the end of the meeting.” Grant was an older gentleman who had been an investor in Rinslet since its early days, and was happy to fund AcesPlayed when we branched off to do our own thing. He was typically a silent partner, unless he thought his money was at stake.
Judith’s nostrils flared as she dragged in a deep breath. “The chat logs from our game that were recently made public involve Elliot Howard, one of our board members and one of the more public faces of the company. While this exposure wasn’t his doing, the content contained within puts us at a serious legal risk.”
“But does it really? Any more than normal?” I was going to fight this from every angle I could. “Nothing contained in those chat logs violates the rules of the game—a game that exists specifically to allow this kind of interaction, among other things. Anyone who supports the game can’t find fault with what I did.”
“It’s not about what you did, it’s about who you did it with,” Oliver said. He was with the same investment firm as Xander, the Rafael Group.
Could I play dumb? Like it was going to make things worse for me? “A woman whose face I never saw and whose real name I never asked for or wanted. Not at any point in the game.”
Judith clenched her jaw. “Do you want to bring her into this? Because things are already bad for you.”
No. Fuck.
“We’re talking about a man who works for you,” Scott said. “Whose career you hold in your hands. Who you have power over and who you have the ability to fire in a blink or destroy his career.”
“But I wouldn’t.” Not Link. There would never be a reason, but even if there was…
Scott furrowed his brow. “It doesn’t matter. You could.”
It was true, once upon a time I’d worshiped Scott, but we were equals. “You’re going to look me in the eye and tell me you would’ve done things differently with Kenzie? With—”
“Watch it.” The warning leaked into his tone.
I wasn’t sharing anything that was a secret, but I was treading a thin line for other reasons. “Would you have?”
“They don’t work for me anymore, and your situation is different.”