Jeremy texts Max that Sebastian is in the building. ‘Give me 15 minutes before you come to my office. And don’t forget to pay up.’
Sebastian Colfer is in their office, and Max knows he came to see Clara and nothing else. The brothers had been betting on the two CEOs ever since the Installation three weeks ago. Max guessed he would be there after the one-month mark. Believing Sebastian would hold out and pretend he was not that interested in his sister. Jeremy said it would be less, claiming the CEO wanted to hurry things along.
His sister and Sebastian have been butting heads the whole time, but he could see that the attraction was not one-sided. Clara felt something, otherwise, she wouldn’t have risen to his bait. Typically, she would just walk out and give him the bird*, but she stayed the whole time. And the way Sebastian was propositioning his sister was blatantly admitting he was smitten.
Jeremy texted him he was giving Sebastian the lecture, and he turned on the cameras so he could listen in.
‘We love Clara to death. She is our whole world, and we will do everything possible to protect her.’
‘She is not one of your business ventures. Don’t look at her like she’s one of your new shipping lines or any unchartered territories you came to conquer.’
‘Nor is she one of your conquests. She will not be your flavor of the month.’
‘Damn, my brother means business, and I think I am shaking in my boots right now. Wouldn’t want to cross this guy. Geez, don’t make him cry, Jere.’ He wanted to make a joke, lighten up the mood, no need to insult Sebastian when he is still their client. But it was time for him to be serious, so just listened in.
‘It’s…,’ Sebastian tried to interrupt, but Jeremy was not finished with his tirade, ‘Shh.. let me finish.
‘If you’re here because you want to get in her pants, please leave. There is too much going on in her life already. She doesn’t need another heartache.’
‘If you are here to be her friend. Pretending to be there for her, so she could eventually fall in love with you. I would say no to that as well.’
‘We’ve already seen what happened to her relationships. In a couple of weeks or months, you’re going to break up with her because you’ll hate that we come first in her life. You’re going to be just like everybody else, finding issues about us spending so much time together,’ Jeremy warned.
‘Damn! My brother is on a roll. If I were Sebastian, I’d get offended. He’s letting a 25-year-old lecture him.‘
‘I’m not here to break her heart. Whatever relationship we have is between us, and thank you for the concern, but who do you think you are for you to judge me. You don’t know me.’
‘I’m not here to get into her pants. Yes, she intrigues me. Even lit a fire inside of me I once thought was dead. I want nothing more than to win her friendship and to challenge her to open her heart to me.’
‘I hope that she’d find it in her heart to trust me and allow me to show her how much I feel for her. This will be my cross to bear, so please let me do it. I can’t say I didn’t try.’
‘As for you and Max, I am not intimidated or insecure about your relationship with her. You guys are just protective, of course, you’re her brothers.’ he saw Jeremy’s eyebrow raised defensively. Even Sebastian surprised himself. He was able to say all that out loud.
‘That was just impressive.’ Max thinks as he walks to Jeremy’s office. ‘I think Sebastian might really be in love. How does one feel that way, anyway? Would I ever feel as strongly about somebody as he does with my sister? Would it even be worth it? What if she just leaves me behind, like my parents?’
Max comes by with a huge grin on his face. After watching their exchange, he sits down on the other chair in front of Jeremy and turns to Sebastian, ‘I know you had the talk already, and let me add this. We will make you suffer if you hurt her. You cause her to shed even one tear, and we will end everything for you,’ he winks.
‘Yes, that was a threat. Always remember that we are the eyes and ears of Navio. You invited us in, and you can never cast us out. I hope you’re scared.’
‘We’re still okay if you don’t sign the project, but remember, Clara is our life. She comes first.’
-=-
Max and Jeremy escort Sebastian to see Clara. They barged into her office, knowing that she was probably either doing paperwork or research. They checked her schedule to make sure they wouldn’t be interrupting anything important and saw that there was nothing until after lunch. She had blocked her cameras, and they couldn’t see what she was doing in her office. So they had no choice.
Max saunters in first. ‘Hey sis, how’s it going? Are you busy? You’re not, right?’ She ignored both of them. When they needed something from her, they just walked into her office like it was their own, never telling her they were coming.
It made him smile to see that she was sitting at her desk as she would at home, with one knee propped up and one cross-legged on her chair. At least her legs remain covered today. She had no regard for where she was most of the time. Taking whatever comfortable position she could, and did not care if her clothes were askew or if she was flashing people. They were used to it. This was the main reason she wanted people to announce themselves before they entered her office. So she could fix her appearance and look formal when accepting visitors.
‘Clara, I think you’d want to fix up yourself, coz, Tada! Look who the cat dragged in?’ Max said as he made the magician’s hand gesture to acknowledge Sebastian as he walked behind him, hidden from her view.
Clara set her feet on the floor and struggled to find her shoes. She forgot she set them aside by her trash can, but when she noticed Sebastian chuckling at her, she glared at him and folded her feet under her chair, away from his view.
'Uh oh, don’t get her mad,' Max thought.
‘Why are you here? Is there a problem with the system?’ She looked at him suspiciously. Probably wondering if he broke something intentionally so he could come to see her.
*Giving the bird means to make an offensive gesture at someone by pointing the middle finger upward while keeping the other fingers folded down.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/give%20%28someone%29%20the%20bird
‘These bozos can help you with that. I have no time right now,’ she said dismissively as she looked at her papers.Sebastian replied, ‘Oh, I had a meeting with someone at the Embarcadero yesterday and thought I’d drop by to see you guys - say hi.’ Max caught the intense look he gave her. ‘There was is no tamping down the intensity with this guy.’‘I remembered you cycled, so I was going to invite you to show me the trail near your area. It looked very scenic. I remember Max saying it circled a lake, and your social media was full of pictures of it. So I wanted to experience it firsthand. Will you give me a tour?’ he asked confidently.Max kept on texting Jeremy regarding their bet.
-=- Clara’s secretary called her brothers to come to her office for lunch as she laid the food on the table, but there was nobody in the office, and she did not know if Clara came back from her bike ride, so she left. Max and Jeremy came in laughing. They were teasing each other and betting on Clara again. They were trying to guess where they would find the two CEOs, and what they would be doing. Yeah, it was a bit mean to bet on their sister, but they had nothing else to do at the moment, and her love life was the hottest news right now. Their plan was to catch them, ‘making out,’ they both said in unison as they barged into her bedroom. When they saw Sebastian with his arms wrapped around Clara, they high-fived. But when the couple never pulled apart, it seemed lik
Every time he closes his eyes, he can see Celine’s teasing smile when they flirted that night. And then that guy Dante showed up the next day. It showed him she was no pushover. He liked that she was feisty and asked him to leave, which meant she had a fire in her, and he wanted to see it burn brighter. He wants to be the person who made her fire shine. ‘I wonder how she is in bed? I hope she’s as equally responsive.’ He was getting a hard-on just thinking about kissing her, having her in between the sheets, under hi--‘Sir, please return your seat and your tray back in its upright position. We are ready to land.’ The flight attendant interrupted Max’s sexy daydream, alerting him to how close he was to seeing the object of his fantasies. He adjusts himself before doing what the attendant instructed. He can’t scare his fellow passengers by sporting a boner.
-=-Celine was nervous. This was their first official date. After that disastrous night at the club. Then followed by the equally unpleasant lunch. Even she wouldn’t want to go out with her. It seemed like trouble followed her wherever she went. And just to prove her point, the zipper of the flowy Sunday dress she was going to wear broke apart, leaving her with no option but to ditch the dress and look through her closet for another one.She tried to pretend not to care about this date. It wasn’t a big deal, just another regular date. That’s what she said to herself, but she knew she wanted it to be special. There was something about Max that drew her to him. Actually, it was their group. The siblings looked like a very fun group to be with. With their ages being close together, she envied that they looked like they were each other's bes
Now she understood why the hostess bothered her. It was because Max was smiling at them as they walked toward him. Celine hoped his smile was only for her, and it seemed the hostess felt the same way. ‘Is she seriously competing with me?’She stared Max straight in the eye, testing to see if he was going to break contact and look at the blonde bombshell coming toward him, but he never strayed. He had passed her test. It seemed that he only had eyes for her. ‘For now.’ her evil conscience taunted her. ‘He’s only looking at you because of what you’re wearing.’She was wearing a simple dark blue A-line dress with butterfly sleeves and a deep V neckline that led down to gold buttons on the front of her dress and stopped at her knees. It would look simple if someone else wore it, but on Celine, Max thought she looked s
After dinner, Max invited her to walk around the outdoor shopping area that surrounded the ‘V.’ There were little gift shops, cafes, ice creams parlors, and restaurants that littered the area to entice people to relax and go shopping.The food they ate didn’t really satisfy their hunger, so they stopped at a cafe to have some cake and coffee for him, a milkshake for her. The atmosphere at the cafe was more relaxed, probably due to the fact that it was a more open environment, and there was less expectation to act more sophisticated and classy because the cafe was more casual. Which lightened the mood a bit until Max started running his hand up and down her arm while they were talking about mundane stuff.She was so aware of how his thumb was lazily caressing her arm, giving her goosebumps, and the nerve endings from her arm were just igniting
Celine kept refusing her friends, but they kept begging and dragging her to the bar so they could ask her about her date. They knew he wasn’t from the area, or they would have heard about him already. Most of the time she could stand mingling with the women who talk about nothing but fashion and the latest shopping sprees, but these women that spotted her were the ones she called “the vultures.” They were prey animals that loved criticizing and making fun of people who were not up to their level, and right now, Max was on their radar.These women always knew what was happening in town and would disseminate news as fast as their fingers could type on their phones. Celine would have gladly not have associated with them. But she learned that it was always better to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.She tried not to be a
He probably wouldn’t even know how to tell the sign that what he was feeling was more than lust, even if it hit him in the face. He had long denied the fact that he wanted to fall in love, that he wanted to feel that all-consuming feeling his friends go through when they say they found the woman of their dreams.It was all relative to how rich you are and if your parents are still alive. Orphans do not get the same liberties regular people with families do. In this society, people from the upper class reject orphans. For them, orphans are not good people worth marrying, they have shady pasts. They are without direction and their blood should never mix with the tainted orphan blood. It did not matter how successful a person was, the stigma was loud and clear.What people don’t realize is some people are orphans even if they have parents. If one