From Boardroom to Bedroom

She parted her lips, but after a second snapped them closed. Oh yes. Only proper decorum and being potential fodder for gossip trumped getting in the last word.

“Cherise, it’s so wonderful to see you again,” a feminine voice intruded.

The pleasant, soft tone shouldn’t have scraped him raw, leaving an oily slide of disgust. He didn’t need to glance behind him to identify the woman. He’d be able to identify that dulcet tone, that light floral scent anywhere.

Identify it, then crucify it.

“Adalyn,” his mother crooned, a smile erasing her frown as she moved toward Adalyn Hayes with outstretched arms. “Don’t you look beautiful?”

Grayson shifted to the side, studying his mother as she warmly embraced his ex-girlfriend. The woman who’d almost become Mrs. Grayson Chandler.

The woman who’d stabbed him so deeply in the back he still had phantom pains from the scar a year and a half later.

She hadn’t changed at all. Still stunningly beautiful with oval-shaped green eyes, delicate features, pretty mouth and long sleek hair as dark as a raven’s wing—or as dark as her heart. A midnight blue gown that glittered as if stars had been sewn into it clung to her small breasts and willowy frame before flowing over slender hips to pool around her feet.

she hadn’t changed a bit. But

stirred desire inside him. Those embers had long turned to dust, incapable of being lit

him and linking her arm through his mother’s. “I didn’t know you would be attending the gala this year. It’s wonderful

“Hello, Adalyn.”

if he’d lie just for the sake

disappeared and just the two of them existed in the crowded ballroom of the

mother chimed in, patting Adalyn’s hand. “We’ve

dinner party for next week. You and your parents are invited. I’ll call your mother to officially issue

conversation sounded benign, but something seemed...off. Too jovial. Too

Too false.

that didn’t reflect the cacophony of distaste and rage roiling

when you insist on flitting from woman to woman, behaving like a male whore,” she snapped, and no, it wasn’t the

Playboy. Embarrassment. But again, that damn not-so-thick skin. The barbed insult pricked him like the cockleburs that would sting his fingers when he visited his grandmother’s horse farm as a child. Back then, he’d plucked them off and rubbed away the nip of pain. Now, with his ex a witness to his mother’s disdain, those nips drew

“Thank you, Mother. Now tell me what you really think because