Personal Assets (Texas Nights) by Kelsey Browning Read Free Book Online Page B

persuading.
    This was going to be more fun than she’d had in...possibly ever. She should start the affair off with a bang. Okay, maybe not a bang bang, but something fun and sexy and guaranteed to get his attention.
    Tie him to her bedposts and rub him down with Roxanne’s mango massage oil?
    Too conservative.
    Introduce him to her Promise Keeper XL?
    Too forward.
    Take him parking?
    Just right.
    Now she simply had to get him to say yes.
    The crystal-shattering shrill of her cell interrupted her happy thoughts. When she dug it from her desk drawer and her father’s private number at the bank flashed on the screen, her jaw spasmed. She’d avoided him this morning, but she couldn’t run forever. It wasn’t adult or professional. Somehow, he reduced her to the approval-seeking eight-year-old girl she’d been when her mom died.
    Enough.
    She punched the talk button. “Personal Assets. Allie speaking.”
    “Alice Ann, I’ve been trying to reach you for several days, and yet you left the meeting this morning before I could speak with you.” His tone was impatient, bordering on condescending. “That’s no way to treat your father. Or your banker.”
    So the squirrelly feeling she’d had in her stomach wasn’t a fluke. Whatever he wanted to talk about wasn’t going to make her nearly as happy as her sexy Cameron thoughts.
    She rose from her desk chair and sagged into her comfy chair, the one she used during counseling sessions. She’d found it under a pile of broken picture frames at an estate sale, and its faded tapestry always lifted her mood.
    Not today.
    She twisted her mom’s ring and clenched it inside her fist. Her dad was right. Her mom always taught her it was fine to disagree, but not to be disrespectful. Avoiding her father for this long was veering into disrespectful territory.
    “I apologize I missed our original appointment.”
    “Come to my office immediately so we can discuss this urgent business.” His computer keyboard clicked along as he spoke. He never simply talked to her without engaging in another activity at the same time. Even when they were face-to-face, her father found it necessary to be busy. Typing an email. Running profit-and-loss figures. Practicing his golf stroke.
    She’d waited almost twenty years to be important to him. He could wait another day. Setting terms and boundaries wasn’t disrespectful. It was self-preservation. “I’m about to leave my office for the day and I have a previously scheduled meeting.” At Cameron’s garage.
    “We must talk as soon as possible. It’s a matter of the Shelby family name and the bank’s financial security.”
    Checking her calendar, she told her father, “I can stop by before lunch Monday.”
    “See that you’re in my office at 11:30 a.m. Sharp.” With that, the silence of dead air hovered in her ear.
    “Good-bye. Love you too.” How could a man whose only desire was to control her love her back?
    She would not cry. She was a grown woman and it was past time she stopped dancing to her father’s demanding tune. Allie carefully laid her phone on the side table, rather than give in to her temptation to hurl it into the trash.

Chapter Five
    By the time Allie made it to Cameron’s garage that evening, she had buried the dejection from her dad’s phone call under confidence about tonight’s outcome. Business was for later, Cameron was for now. The garage lights glowed from under a half-open overhead door. She limboed underneath and scanned the bay. Stains, grease and dirt were the major decorative themes. Then again, Cameron worked on cars, not people, and cars cared a heck of a lot less about beautiful surroundings than women did.
    Hers and Cameron’s work spaces did have one thing in common, though.
    Pictures of naked women.
    Although the centerfolds tacked and taped around the garage’s walls were more...hmm...pop culture than the paintings and prints she’d hung at Personal Assets.
    She studied Miss January 1989. A