Lustfully Ever After by Kristina Wright Read Free Book Online Page A

turned his chair away and stood up. The CEO was a notorious figure among the employees who sat in the offices on the lower floors—his internal ugliness had become legendary, making his chosen reclusion in his office welcome among all who worked for him. The impeccability of his blue suit and expensive gold jewelry did nothing to hide the beastly disposition his workers had always seen in him.
    Across town, Julie Bellevue had been called from her small cottage by the lake by her father, who had fallen from his ladder and hurt his ankle as he was fixing the siding on his house. Julie hovered now by her father’s hospital bed as the doctor informed them that the ankle was indeed broken.

    Mr. Bellevue moaned. “Oh, what am I going to do? I have my first appointment with Castle Jewelers in an hour. I must be there!” Julie, who was his youngest daughter, reached for his hand, her beautiful face drawn with sympathy. He turned to her. “Julie. Sweetheart, I’m going to need you to go and take over the job in my place.”
    Julie felt some apprehension at this request. The young woman was already an employee of her father’s consulting business that specialized in conflict resolution for businesses and organizations. Though her father had been grooming her in his line of work for years, and the recent acquisition of her master’s degree in transpersonal psychology was already supporting the next step of her getting to take on her own clients, she had not yet served in a capacity beyond providing her father assistance with his cases.
    “Please, Julie. This is a very important client—I can’t afford to lose it right now.”
    Julie recognized the desperation in his face, and she knew this job was a significant one, both financially and for his reputation. If it were lost, the hard work he had put into forming and running his consulting business for the past several years could be in jeopardy.
    So, to save her father’s business, Julie agreed to go to Castle Jewelers headquarters in his place. As she was about to take her leave of the room, her father called to her again.
    “Julie,” he said, concern evident on his face. “Your meeting is with the CEO—Heath Castle. The board has hired us to work with him individually in addressing the conflict between him and, well, the rest of the company. I was to coach him in sensitivity training and interpersonal communication.
    “I want you to be warned—Heath is not said to be a nice individual. He has, in fact, an ugly reputation. He is reputed
to be a rather beastly manager, very difficult to work with. His workers mostly vacillate between fear and loathing of him, and he’s not even usually seen around the workplace. Generally he locks himself in his office in the highest tower of the building.”
    “What makes him so not nice?” Julie asked her father.
    Her father shook his head. “I don’t know.” His face crinkled into a smile. “That’s what they pay us to find out.”
    Julie smiled and leaned down to kiss her father’s cheek, then turned and hurried out the door and across town to make her father’s appointment at Castle Jewelers on time.
     
    At the highest office in the top of the headquarters building, Julie met the eyes of the company’s thirty-eight-year-old CEO. As she’d read her father’s file, she had been struck by the young age of the head of such a large and lucrative company. Upon reading further she had found that the circumstances surrounding his position were a bit mysterious—it was a family company, and Heath’s mother had taken over after his father had died several years before. She had run the company for a short time before Heath had abruptly assumed the leadership role. There was no further information about his mother’s current status with the company or why this turnover had taken place.
    The man in front of her had a tall, sturdy, and potentially intimidating build as he stood behind his desk with his arms crossed. His hair was