Mesmerized Read online

  “Would you tell him it’s Gretchen Laughlin from Fawn, Michigan calling, please?” I was making a conscious effort not to snap at the secretary. None of this mess the corporation had caused was her fault. “I think he might want to take this.”

  “Just one moment, Ms. Laughlin.”

  The elevator music returned, and I turned my back to the display case to instead look upon the business I’d built my life on. No matter what Marshall had said, and no matter how much money I was offered to sell it, I couldn’t imagine parting ways. Getting another apartment and finding a new store location just wouldn’t be the same because they wouldn’t be mine. In this historic building, I had my past, present, and I was determined to have my future.

  “I’m not leaving you, Grandma,” I whispered beneath the soft, breathy sounds of the beachy soundtrack.

  My neck grew warm, and I felt the hairs there stand on end. I was certain my grandmother’s spirit was there with me, resting her hands on my shoulders as she had done so often when she was alive, and a hefty dose of determination intermingled with unexpected calm washed over me.

  The horrible music gave way to another brief bout of silence, and then I heard a man’s voice speak in a rich, southern lilt that made my knees weaken. “Well, well, well. Ms. Gretchen Laughlin, as I live and breathe. This is a lovely start to my morning, I can assure you.”

  “Thank you for taking my call, Mr. Pennington.” My grandmother’s presence had steeled me, and I sounded more controlled and amicable than I could’ve hoped.

  “I couldn’t say no once Daisy told me it was you on the line, now, could I?” He chuckled, and I was reminded of warm brown sugar. “You’ve been quite the tough one to break in, haven’t you? I’m glad you’re finally coming ‘round to see things our way.”

  Though the way he curved his words and heated his tone sent shivers up and down my spine, the message within the delivery made me crunch the letter he’d sent into a ball that I gripped so hard my knuckles turned white. He was such an arrogant prick.

  But I wasn’t going to let him know he’d gotten to me.

  “Actually, Mr. Pennington, I’m calling because I think someone in your organization is a crayon short of a box.” His brown-sugar tone didn’t stand a chance against my maple-syrup sweetness. I became a diabetic’s worst nightmare. “You see, I’ve turned down your offers with letters, phone calls, and emails. I’ve ignored, and I’ve responded. I have even paid postage out of my own pocket to send your numerous letters back to you. And yet, nobody seems to have heard me. So, I’m reaching out to you, Mr. Pennington, CEO, because I know you must have the intelligence to understand me. One would hope, anyway.” My tongue was sharp, my determination sharper, and I tilted my cheek toward the phone until there was less than a centimeter between my lips and the mouthpiece. “I. Am. Not. Selling.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cash

  She was a yellowjacket, and I’d hit the nest with a baseball bat. The stings injected their poison to raise welts on my ego, but I didn’t run. It was hard to run with an erection.

  A photo of the woman on the other end of the line smiled serenely at me from my computer screen. She looked peaceful and genuinely happy in the way that made those of us with daily stressors ache with jealousy.

  Mesmerized, I studied the way her strawberry-blonde hair fell over her shoulders in loose waves, and doe-like mossy eyes willed me to drop everything and go to the store she called hers. If the Gretchen Laughlin I was speaking to had been the same goddess I’d seen in the picture, I would have asked how she managed to get such a mouthwatering tan all the way up in Michigan, but I had a strong feeling the question wouldn’t be accepted gracefully by this spitfire lobbing insults of honeysuckled contempt through the phone.

  “I bet you didn’t even look at my newest offer.” I twirled my fourteen-karat gold fountain pen in its holster just to watch it spin as I talked. “A reasonable woman like you surely wouldn’t turn down such generosity.”

  “And a reasonable man like you wouldn’t waste his time beating a dead horse,” she countered.

  No, but a riding crop would likely tame that smart mouth of yours, Ms. Laughlin.

  I shifted in my seat, a high-backed swivel chair upholstered in buttery black leather, and tried to ignore the thick throbbing in my groin. Her spunk had me wildly aroused. It wasn’t often I met a woman who straddled the realms of ladylike expression and unapologetic hostility with such finesse, and it was certainly the first time I’d had the pleasure in business. If we hadn’t been a thousand miles and a critical company transaction apart, I would have asked her out.

  As it was, however, I had big shoes to fill, and I intended to fill them. “The horse is still breathing, darlin’, and I plan to break it, not beat it.” I heard her huff in disgust. “How does seven-fifty sound?”

  “Like a joke.” She wasn’t so sweet anymore. There was gravel in the bowels of her tone.

  I bristled slightly. “You know good and well that psychic shop of yours couldn’t sell for more than a half-million on the market, and that includes the land it’s on. A deal like this won’t come around again.”

  “Good, because I’m getting sick of saying no. My store is priceless to me.”

  “Everything and everyone has a price, Ms. Laughlin.” I leaned toward my computer to more closely inspect her picture, almost as if I was trying to impress my point into her pixelated eyes. “I just haven’t found yours yet.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Pennington.” She was back to sounding like a dessert, sweet and tempting. “I can’t be bought.”

  Though I didn’t think of her as a prostitute by any stretch of the imagination, the idea of purchasing this sweet piece of ass before me was more thrilling than I would ever have admitted. I forced my stare upward to the website header — Auras: A metaphysical specialty store in charming Fawn, Michigan! — in an attempt to lessen my growing erotic need.

  “Let’s see. If I remember, our file on you says you bought the land, building, and rights to the business from Adam Reinhardt, also known as Madam Adam, three years ago for the sum of one-hundred-forty thousand.”

  “Your file on me?” Her voice rose a note. “You have a file on me?”

  “Why, yes, I do.” I spun in my chair to reach the bottom desk drawer where I kept all files related to the Fawn property takeover. Gretchen’s was at the top. Taking it, I shut the drawer with my foot and flipped the folder open in my lap. I tapped the portion indicating the property’s last purchase price with my index finger. “Aha. One-hundred-forty-five thousand. My mistake.”

  She sniffed. “I don’t know how that’s any of your business.”

  “It’s public record, darlin’. If you take my offer, that’s a pretty profit you just made.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Her tone was still raised, but she coated it in sugar. “Have a good day, Mr. Pennington.”

  The line went dead before I had the chance to needle her further, and I placed the receiver back onto the base with a scowl. There wasn’t much more to be said for the moment anyway. My colleagues and I had been well-aware of Gretchen’s reluctance to sell all along, despite her inferences that the message had gone unheard, but she had successfully gotten a new point across. We wouldn’t be able to convince her to sell her crazy psychic store with any of the methods we’d already tried. I had no intention of throwing in the towel, though. It was time to put on our thinking caps and get creative.

  I punched the only button on the phone’s unit whose face had been worn down to blankness.

  “Yes, Mr. Pennington?”

  “Daisy, call the board members.” I closed Gretchen’s file with a snap and kicked my shiny loafers onto the desktop, crooking my arms behind my head. “We need to have a meeting.”

  ***

  The conference room was my least favorite part of the towering building that was Pennington’s headquarters. Ours was one of the tallest buildings in Tulsa at twenty-two stories, rivaled only by the J.P. Morgan buildin
g a couple blocks over, and my father had taken care to ensure every exterior wall was lined with floor-to-ceiling windows that allowed plenty of Oklahoma sunshine through on the days we weren’t battling vicious storms.

  Except the conference room. For whatever reason, he’d had the cockamamy idea that a nice view detracted from the seriousness a conference room ought to convey, and he’d believed the business deals done in that room with international guests were more likely to end up in our favor because they would be eager to hurry things along and escape the claustrophobic space. He might have been right, but I always thought he was a superstitious fool whenever I was unlucky enough to be summoned there.

  I could’ve changed it, now that I was CEO, but I didn’t have the heart. No matter my feelings toward my father or the room, there was a legacy there, and I didn’t want to be the one to disturb it. People were irrationally loyal to legacies in the heart of America, myself included.

  “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today on such short notice.” I stood at the head of the enormous mahogany table, making eye contact with each of the twelve board members before continuing. “This hopefully won’t take up much of your time.”

  “What’s goin’ on, Cash, m’boy?” The man barking to me was Silas Benedict. He was round, gray, and as jovial as Santa Claus. He’d successfully turned my mother’s annual Christmas gala into a massive sing-along at least six times in my youth.

  “I received a call today.” I fixed my gaze on Harlan Dade, the only person in the room I considered a genuine friend and the man who’d been guiding me in my new role as CEO since my father’s passing. “From Gretchen Laughlin.”

  An outbreak of gruff mutters and mild exclamations took the place of my voice, and I sank into the thirteenth chair. Gretchen’s file, along with the other folders relative to this Fawn project, had been placed neatly on the table by Daisy where I was to sit, and I opened to the same page I’d referenced on the phone with her earlier.

  A Yankee woman named Denise, whose last name I still couldn’t pronounce, leaned forward to look past her neighbors at me. “When did she call?” There was fuchsia lipstick on her teeth.

  “This morning around eight.” I’d spent the hours between Gretchen’s call and the meeting fighting a raging erection and continuously flipping back to the browser tab with the picture of the green-eyed beauty. Her brazen spirit had wrapped fiery tendrils of lust around my cock. Even mundane tasks like sifting through voicemails about additions to inventory didn’t spare me from hot ripples of arousal cascading over me every time our conversation crept back into my brain. “She’s insistent she won’t sell.”

  “Most of the others on that block refused initially as well.” Harlan’s lined eyes were hard with steadfast determination, as usual. He’d been part of the company for so long that no perceived obstacle seemed to rattle him anymore. “She’ll throw in the towel eventually.”

  “I agree, but after speaking with her, I’m sure she’ll only get more stubborn if we keep trying the way we have been.”

  There were more murmurs, but Harlan was concrete. “Then we negotiate in person. People back down when confronted directly, most of the time.”

  “Get’er on a plane today. We’ll have that property come tomorrow mornin’.” Silas thumped his fist on the table and cast a broad, scruffy grin to the room at large.

  I shook my head. “Believe me, this woman isn’t going to be brought anywhere. She’d let us pay for the flight and miss the plane on purpose just to watch us throw our money away.” I leaned back in my seat. “We’d have to go there.”

  “Michigan?” Silas snorted a snotty, throaty sound that made Denise beside him cringe. “I ain’t goin’ to Michigan. I got the arthritis. The cold ain’t good for the arthritis.”

  “It’s fall, Silas. Not winter.”

  “Damn bit colder up there in October than it is down here, I’ll bet.” He crossed his arms over his chest and jerked his chin in my direction. “Send the kid. He’ll be more likely to get through to her than a bunch of old cluckers like us.” A sly grin tweaked beneath his silvery mustache. “Charm her with them good looks of yours. That’s what your daddy used to do in his earlier years, you know.”

  My mouth tightened into a thin line of its own accord, and I brushed past the comment by turning my attention back to Harlan. The room was starting to close in on me already, but I wasn’t sure if it was because of the undecorated, windowless paneled walls or because the pressure of securing the Fawn location was starting to rest entirely on my shoulders.

  It was the biggest task I’d had to handle since my father’s passing six months ago, if the rest of the board agreed with Silas’s suggestion. “I think we’d make a bigger impact if we went as a group. Not necessarily everyone here, but a few. It would give us the chance to get Marshall Dodd to finally flip too.”

  “Marshall Dodd already flipped.” Denise pulled out a piece of paper from a burgundy binder and slid it up the length of the table toward me. “That was in my inbox this morning. Gretchen Laughlin is the only business owner left to turn.”

  I picked up the printed-out email and skimmed the contents. It appeared Denise was right. Mr. Dodd had accepted our last offer for the property and was prepared to vacate by the end of the month. I fished his file from the pile of folders and slipped the sheet inside, my heart starting to beat in the base of my throat. “That’s good news, then.”

  “No.” Harlan pointed a finger at me like it was a loaded weapon. “It’s useless news until we get that last property. We can’t start construction without it, and if she doesn’t sell, we’re sitting on a block of land we can’t use.”

  “Pack your stuff, boy.” Silas winked a droopy eye. “Sounds like you’re headed off to Michigan.”

  I shrugged. Being saddled with the responsibility of Pennington’s next big coup was a burden I didn’t want to bear, but my dad’s death meant it was only a matter of time before I was forced to prove myself to be as worthy a leader as he had been. On the bright side, I’d heard good things about fishing in that area. I could turn the business trip into a company-backed fly-fishing excursion.

  And I would get to meet the woman who’d turned me into a randy schoolboy from a thousand miles away.

  “Those in favor of sending Cash to secure the final Fawn property?” Harlan lazily lifted a hand and scanned the rest of the room. There were twelve hands in the air. He dropped his with a slap on his thigh and looked to me. “There you have it. Book a one-way flight and a hotel room. I’ve got a feeling you’ll be spending some time with Yanks, as hardheaded as this girl is.”

  “Great.” My cock pulsed. “That’s just great.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Gretchen

  “Abby, that last customer mixed some labradorite in with the obsidian. Would you mind fixing that, please?”

  “Sure.” The sprightly college student set her clipboard down on the meditation CD display and headed for the tabletop grid of loose stones. Abby was one of only two employees I kept on my payroll, and she was as eager to please as a puppy. There were times I considered hiring more people during the busy tourist season, but I lived upstairs, and it felt selfish to have people working in the store below while I was one floor up doing whatever I wanted.

  Playing an active role in the day-to-day goings-on of Auras was important to me, even though the tourism explosion was fading as the colors of fall faded from the trees. Maybe next year.

  I reached for my travel mug, the same leaky one I used every day despite my kitchen being right overhead, and took a long, refreshing drink. After the tea spill a few days before, I’d switched to plain ice water, and I was glad I did.

  Fawn was experiencing an unseasonably warm fall, which meant I had the door and windows flung wide open because the old building had never received the upgrade of air-conditioning. Even with the cool breeze coming off Lake Michigan, I still had tiny beads of sweat along my hairline and in the creases of my eyelids. My cluttered met
aphysical shop was hardly conducive to comfortable air flow, it seemed.

  As I started unpacking the new shipment of portable yoga mats and arranging them on the appropriate hooks, an elderly woman tottered over to me. She and her middle-aged daughter were currently the only people in the shop aside from Abby and myself, which had prompted them to lower their voices as they discussed various items.

  I tended to keep my distance when customers talked quietly because I didn’t want them to worry about offending me by conversing about prices or quality as many were wont to do. I was proud of what I stocked and had at least one of everything in my apartment to use and approve myself, so I didn’t feel a need to swarm customers with sales pitches and arguments. My employees were taught to do the same.

  “Excuse me.” The woman’s voice was brittle but sweet, and I straightened up from the box of mats to smile at her. She was holding a clear quartz sphere the size of a tennis ball. “Is this the largest size you have? I’m giving a bridal shower for my daughter. The theme is ‘Looking into a Beautiful Future’ and a crystal ball would be nice, but this is awfully small.”

  On a personal level, I disapproved of using spiritual items as props. The practice tended to bring bad energy, which subsequently brought a lot of things a nonbeliever couldn’t handle. It wasn’t my place to chastise the woman, however, so I shook my head in apology as I made a mental note to cleanse the ball after she left.

  “I’m sorry, we don’t. I can special order a larger size if you’re looking for a more Hollywood-style crystal ball, but I have to warn you, they cost many hundreds, sometimes well into the thousands.”

  Her creased eyes widened, and she retracted the hand-sized quartz like a lifeline. “Oh, goodness, no! That’s well out of my budget.”