Page 31 of Hate On

Business, she’d told him.

The gloves come off.

“Fuck,” he whispered, mindless of the customers milling around him. “We were had.”

Grabbing the briefcase’s handle, he spun on his heel and hurried back to the office, running once he was out of sight of the clientele. He had to call his father.

Although it had been less than fifteen minutes since they’d spoken, he was excruciatingly aware that it might be too late.

The courier’s on the way—wasn’t that what his father had told him?

He grabbed the cell phone from his desk and dialed his father’s direct number, pacing the room and eyeing the briefcase he’d left on the desk. Fury boiled inside him and he stormed over to the case just as his father came on the line.

“What is it, Roman? I’m in the middle—”

“Stop the courier,” he said, cutting his father off.

“What?” Michael demanded.

“Stop the courier!” he said firmly. He stared at the prototype in front of him, his fuck-up even clearer now than it had been. This device was larger, sleeker. More elegant, even. And clearly more advanced. He could see the echoes of the previous device in it and suspected what he’d taken had been an earlier model of this. Shit, had Templeton helped set him up?

You stole the damn thing from her purse, dumbass.

He ignored that voice as he spun away from the evidence of his mistake, speaking furiously to his father. “They switched out the prototypes, Dad. The one we took from Julianna the other night wasn’t the right one. We didn’t do tests on the current model!”

His father exploded.

It was a brief explosion, thankfully and Roman was put on hold as his father furiously made phone calls, attempting to catch the courier. When he came back on the line, Roman didn’t dare let himself breathe.

“I don’t know if we’ll be able to stop him. The company is calling, but the delivery might have already been made,” Michael said, a snarl evident in his voice. “Damn it, Roman, how could you have made such an amateur mistake?”

He wanted to point out that the plan had been formed with his father’s full awareness. If the son of a bitch was so smart, he should have offered some tips.

But he didn’t.

“Nothing to say for yourself?” Michael demanded.

“I have no explanation, no excuses,” Roman said. There was no point in trying to offer any explanations anyway. His father had never tolerated anything less than success. It had been that way his entire life. It wasn’t going to change at this late date.

A terse silence stretched out between them and finally, Michael said, “I don’t know what to think about this, Roman. You’re my favorite child—the one I’ve chosen to take over when I retire and yet you make a mistake like this. How am I supposed to react?”

“I can’t tell you that, sir,” he said stonily, staring at the wall.

He kept seeing Julianna’s smile as she turned, right before she walked away.It was fun.

Fun,he thought.

His family’s company might be at stake here and she thought it had beenfun.

12

Julianna

“To success!”

Julianna lifted her glass as her father and mother clinked theirs together.

They had a formal dining room, but since it was just the three of them tonight, they’d elected to eat in the smaller, more intimate family dining room. It sat just the five of them and her parents were sitting side by side, as they always did.