Hot CEO: An Enemies to Lovers Romance

by Charlize Starr

  I hang up, pour myself a large glass of wine, and turn my phone to silent. If he does call, maybe he should wait for me this time. I tuck myself into bed with my wine and don’t look at my phone until morning.

  Chapter Eighteen - Jacob

  The floor is hard underneath me. It’s about the only sensation I’m sure of.

  My vision keeps coming in and out, or maybe I keep passing out and coming to again. I can’t tell. I don’t know what day it is or much time has passed. I don’t know if I’ve been on the floor here for days or minutes. I don’t have any clue how I even got to the floor. My head is throbbing and my bones feel like heavy concrete. My brain feels like it’s crawling, running at half speed and sometimes backward through a dull, burning feeling. Somewhere near the floor, my heartbeat feels erratic: much too slow and then much too fast.

  I’m sure, when I can think, that this is poison. I’ve never been poisoned, but I did once take an antibiotic I turned out to be allergic to. I’d been hospitalized, my stomach pumped, and put on twelve hours of continuous fluid. This feels like that, only magnified a hundred times over.

  I move, slowly, every inch seeming like a mile, across my floor. There are dark shadows in my vision, so I feel my way along. I know that in my emergency kit, I’ve got something that might help if I can just make it there. I slide along, bit by bit. The effort of it is almost too much, and I close my eyes sometimes, not sure how much time has passed when I open them again.

  I feel each floorboard as I move, using the grooves in the old wood to pull myself along. I’m about halfway there when a floorboard gives out under my hand. Not the whole board, but just enough that my hand slams through. My fingers catch on what feels like a piece of paper, dry and crumpled and folded. I can’t quite figure out what to do about it. My vision is crossed with shadows in the corners, and I know that if I have any chance of not dying, I need to keep moving. I need something to focus on to keep me going, to keep from slipping back out of consciousness again and reach emergency supplies so I can pull myself together long enough to call for an ambulance.

  Mia, my brain shouts at me immediately.

  So I take a deep breath and keep my mind focused on Mia as I pull myself across the floor to the kitchen. That first morning, with all her cute, fiery energy, all her indignation in calling me out on my shitty first impression. The memory pulls me along another couple of feet.

  Our flirtation over the phone, our conversations about our grandparents and their recipes. Her laugh. Her beautiful smile. The way her hair falls on her face, the way she waves her hands around when she’s getting all worked up about something. It’s hard to keep a clear picture through the haze around my eyes and the dark fog in my brain, but I block everything else but her out as I pull myself along.

  Our conversations at her job, the sound of her breath hitching over the phone at the words I’d said, the things I’d told her I wanted to do to her. The way I’d felt it in person, her pulse racing and her heart fluttering for me, sitting on her couch, kissing her for the first time for real the other night. How incredible it had felt to be inside her, to taste her and have my fingers in her and make her melt under my hands, make her come over and over.

  I don’t know how long it takes me to reach my emergency kit or even how long it takes me to open the kit itself, but it’s the thought of Mia that pulls me all the way over and up to where it’s stored in my kitchen cabinet. Inside, I find the survival remedy I’d learned to make when I’d first moved out here. I take the bottled water out along with the mixture of charcoal and powdered bone broth, and mix it all up to the best I can. I make myself drink all of it, not letting my eyes close again until I do.

  When my eyes open again, I feel clearer and better. Not good. There is still a throbbing in my head and my heart rate still feels all wrong, but I feel like I can move now, and think. I slowly sit up, watching those same dark shadows swim in front of my eyes. When I can, I move to standing and then walk carefully across the floor, holding onto furniture as I go.

  I make it to my computer and open it, pulling up the security footage for the cameras on my property. I have a suspicion I know what happened. I don’t want to be right about it, but it seems like the obvious answer.

  I wince when I see I’m right. When I see the actual evidence. When I watch my own brother try to kill me.

  He’s there on the footage, out behind the cabin, swaying and staggering a little as he dumps a generous amount of something deadly into my well. On the footage, I can see him squinting at a label on the canister like he wants to make sure he did it just right.

  I call the police and tell the operator what happened. I don’t see how I have any choice now but to give up on him and turn him in. The operator says they’ll send a squad car and a paramedic to check me out. I hang up to wait.

  I remember, in a flash, that floorboard my hand had gone through, and make my way over to figure out what it was.

  The paper is old, but it’s neatly and precisely folded like it had been placed there on purpose. I unfold it and have to sit down again, not sure if I’m lightheaded from my brush with death or from what I find written on the paper.

  It’s instructions for making whiskey, with my great-great-grandfather’s initials written at the bottom.

  Chapter Nineteen - Mia

  Today is the start of my fifth day without hearing from Jacob. Five days. That’s one-hundred-twenty hours, or seventy-thousand-two-hundred minutes, every single one of them breaking my heart even more. I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s true. I can’t believe how much it is true hurts. I’ve had relationships that lasted for nearly a year and didn’t sting this badly when they finally fell apart.

  Right after college, when I’d first moved to the city, I’d dated a man named Jeremy who had been wonderful for eight months, except for the part where he’d apparently been cheating on me for two of them. I had locked myself in my apartment for an entire weekend, not wanting to talk to anyone, watching sad movies and crying and calling Jeremy every name in the book in my head, even the few I didn’t call him out loud when we broke up. I’d been so devastated and angry, I’d felt like I’d never recover, and I’d sworn to myself I’d never let myself feel that way again over something as trivial as a man.

  But this feels worse. Somehow, Jacob just ghosting me completely makes everything with Jeremy feel like nothing. I’ve only known him for a month – and maybe I never knew him at all, all things considered – but somehow, this stings more than finding out I was being cheated on because of a text message sent in error.

  I feel more betrayed by Jacob’s silence than anything else that I’ve ever been through. I think it’s because I really felt that Jacob was different, that what we had was special, that it was already building toward something real. There is – no, was, I remind myself – something about us that just seemed to fit together like we were balancing each other out. Knowing it was nothing but an illusion. That I’d fallen hard and fast for a man who didn’t actually give a shit? It feels impossible. It feels like –

  It is ridiculous and dramatic, I know it is, but I can’t stop feeling like maybe I’ll always end up alone. That instead of being destined for the wondrous romance of my grandparents, I’m destined to never find a man to really love at all. I hadn’t realized I was already starting to pin all those sorts of hopes on Jacob, but I’m afraid I was. I guess I thought it had seemed like fate, coming to this town my grandparents loved so much, literally running into a man who I’d fallen for over conversations, whose voice had quickly become my favorite sound in the world. It had seemed like maybe my life was coming together, here in these mountains, faster than I could’ve ever imagined when I came here.

  Now it seems like my life is falling apart even quicker.

  I know I shouldn’t put so much on this, that I should be stronger than this, that I shouldn’t let a man make me feel this way. Jacob hadn’t felt like just any man, though. I hate that he was. I hate him for bei
ng someone who could make me feel this way.

  I can’t even find good distractions, can’t pull myself out of my own thoughts for long enough to get any peace from them. At work, it seems that everyone who comes into the shop is buying something for their special someone. I swear I’ve never seen so many couples come in together, teenagers buying hot chocolate and holding hands on dates, honeymooning couples with glittering rings on their fingers wanting to know what pairs best with champagne, elderly couples sharing chocolate-covered fruits as a special sentimental treat. And if people don’t come in together, they still seem to all be buying treats and gifts for someone at home waiting for them. Not one, but four men today alone have asked me what arrangement of chocolates I thought would make the best anniversary gift.

  “We have four gourmet arrangements that feature selections of our best sellers. They all make great gifts, and we can specialty wrap them in a favorite color,” I recite, far away on autopilot. “You can also create your own arrangement. It’s priced by each individual item with fifteen percent taken off that total for making it an arrangement, so it’s still a wonderful bargain.” My voice still sounds cheerful and I know I’m selling the chocolate well, but my heart doesn’t feel in it. I’m faking it in a way I’ve never had to before at this job, and it feels like advertising creeping in all over again.

  “What would you want?” the customer asks me. He’s a handsome man, probably about forty, in an expensive-looking blue suit that makes me sure he’s not a local. “It’s our fifth anniversary, and my wife always talks about how small-town chocolates are the best. I want to get something she’ll love. If it were you, what sweep you off your feet all over again the most?”

  “Well,” I say, bracing myself against the counter because his question makes me feel like the wind has been knocked out of me, makes me want to hide the backroom and cry. I don’t, of course, but answering makes me feel even lower than I’ve been feeling all day. “I’m not married, but if it were me? I’d want my husband to make his own arrangement of things he knew I loved. I’d want him to know I love the ones with the caramel stripes and put in extra of those. I’d want him to know not to put in any with cherries, because I’m allergic to those, but to make sure to throw in a strawberry or two. I’d want it to not just be chocolate, but chocolate customized for me.”

  “If I write down a list of what I know she likes and doesn’t like, can you help me do that?” the man asks, looking at me like I’ve just given him some sort of great relationship advice. He ends up being by far our biggest sale of the day, and I hope his wife loves them. I really do hope they have a fantastic anniversary. But I feel absolutely miserable about the whole thing.

  Later, as we’re closing up, Martin brings me over a cup of hot chocolate, smiling at me.

  “It looked like you could use this today,” Martin says. “Take a seat for a minute.”

  “Thank you,” I say gratefully, sitting. Everything today has felt like an effort, and the idea of sitting with some hot chocolate does sound like a relief.

  “That was quite some pitch you made for the custom arrangements out there earlier,” Martin says, looking at me curiously. “Is everything okay, dear?”

  “Just having a bit of rough time,” I admit. I don’t want to tell Martin the details of my love life, but I don’t want to lie to him, either. I take a sip of my hot chocolate and close my eyes for a minute, momentarily distracted for the first time all day. It’s warm and soothing, every bit as a good as everyone always says, and the taste of it takes me right back to the days of my grandmother’s kitchen.

  “Anything I can do?” Martin asks.

  “The hot chocolate helps a little,” I say, opening my eyes again.

  “I’m glad,” Martin says, smiling again. “This rough time isn’t anything that’s going to make you quit on me, is it? I’d hate to lose my best employee.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I say. In spite of everything, I still do love this town and this job. Martin is the best boss I’ve ever had, and I’m in no hurry to leave that.

  “Glad to hear it. I really do want to start leaving you more and more in charge of things around here. It’s time I stepped back a little, and I can’t think of a more fitting heir to my tiny empire than you,” Martin says. I smile. I know Martin never had any children. He’s a widower, and his wife had passed away when they were still very young. I think he’s been lonely all these years, despite how much the people in the town love him and how much of an institution this shop is. I like to think he and I are becoming a little bit like family already.

  “I’d love to,” I say. “This shop already means so much to me.”

  Martin smiles again. “I can tell,” he says. “Let me know if there is anything I can do for you. Any way I can help whatever you’re going through.”

  “Thank you,” I say again, smiling sadly. Martin obviously can’t help with this. He can’t make the past five days go away, can’t rewind to the time when I’d thought Jacob and I could make each other happy. He can’t make Jacob the person I’d thought he was. I need a friend right now, though, and having Martin in my corner does make me feel just a bit better about the whole mess.

  Chapter Twenty - Jacob

  The paramedics want me to go the hospital, but I refuse, especially after they tell me I’ve been out for five days. I can’t imagine what Mia must be thinking. I’m more concerned about that than I am about my health, honestly. I do allow them to hook me to some fluids while I give a statement to the police, and to do the fullest assessment on me they can with the equipment they have with them. They keep saying it’s a wonder that I’m alive – that it’s amazing I survived. Whatever Calvin hit me with was pretty nasty stuff, and on top of that, I went days without food or water, lying on my floor, unaware of the passing time.

  “I guess living up here makes you pretty tough,” one of the paramedics says as she takes my blood pressure. I nod. It’s probably true. I doubt I would have survived it had Calvin tried poison first. I wouldn't have had the survival skills to prepare up that remedy or the strength to keep myself going, crawling across the floor like that, without doing so much work around this place and spending so much time outdoors lately.

  “Yeah,” I agree. I wouldn’t have made it without Mia, either, without thinking of her. I’m itching to call her. I need to hear her voice.

  The police take the footage from my security cameras and my statement, and I tell them about the past attempts on my life and about Calvin’s threats. He’s already got a record with them, mostly drunk driving and disorderly conduct with a few later-dismissed assault charges thrown in. But no one is going to buy Calvin out of this one. Especially because that person is usually me.

  The footage on the tape is clear, and examination of tapes from farther back reveal other men sneaking around my property. Men I recognize as some of Calvin’s sycophants, his hangers-on – the kind he pays in VIP club access, unlimited drinks, and women. They’re almost employees for all the perks being in my brother’s social circle brings them. None of them have ever hesitated to do his dirty work, and it looks like that hasn’t changed a bit. It looks like Calvin had found me out a couple of weeks ago, and has been planning another convenient accident for me to have ever since.

  The police say they have more than enough evidence to go pick him up, and that it’s good I haven’t talked to anyone other than them yet. Anything that could tip Calvin off would likely make him run. With all the money and connections, Calvin is a prime flight risk who could be halfway across the world in no time at all. It feels so strange and cold to think about Calvin going to jail. My baby brother, Calvin, tried to kill me. He almost succeeded. These are facts I’m going to have to find a way to live with somehow.

  The police promise to call me with updates, and I promise the paramedics I’ll go to the hospital if I get lightheaded again, and then I’m alone. I watch them drive off my property, and then I head for my phone. I’ve got two messages, and I’m sure the
y must be from Mia. No one else calls me out here. I almost don’t want to listen to them. I want to just call her, but I think that’s probably cowardly of me.

  I listen to one and wince. The first one is polite but curt. The second message, however, is furious. I don’t blame her. What else was she supposed to think? I only hope she’ll let me explain, that Calvin didn’t ruin this relationship after all. I take a deep breath and a long gulp of bottled water the paramedics had left for me, and I dial her number.

  “Jacob?” she says, picking up on the third ring, her tone full of disbelief.

  “Mia, I’m so sorry – ” I start.

  “For being a total ass?” Mia cuts in, tone full of heat.

  “No – ” I start, and Mia cuts me off again, days of pent-up anger probably pouring out of her all at once.

  “It takes a lot of nerve to call me now,” she says. “It’s been days, and you call now and say you’re sorry?”

  “I need to explain,” I say.

  “Explain what?” Her voice is already getting louder, more on edge. “That you used me? That you lied to me? That – ”

  This time, I cut her off.

  “Mia,” I say softly, hoping to make her pause for a second. I want her to know right away that this isn’t what she thinks. “An ambulance just left my cabin.”

  There’s dead silence on the other end of the line for a minute.

  “An ambulance?” she repeats. She sucks in a long breath, and when she talks again, her tone has completely changed. “Oh my god, what happened? Are you okay?”

  “I am now, but I wasn’t,” I say, my hand shaking a bit on the phone as I recall how close everything was. “I was poisoned five days ago. I’ve been on my floor, mostly unconscious, ever since.”