But she pushed all those other thoughts of him into the far corners of her mind. Because business was business was business. They’d been talking about the “synergies” between their two companies since they’d met—they were both purveyors of pleasure, after all. They were a natural fit, she reasoned, especially since she’d been guiding Joy Delivered down an expansion road in the last year and a half since her brother Jack had stepped down as CEO. Though she and Jack had founded the company together several years ago after she’d graduated from business school, he’d run the ship until the woman he fell in love with was offered a job in Paris. The romantic that her older brother was, he’d given up his post and moved overseas to be with Michelle. Their wedding was at the end of the month.
Joy Delivered had already been thriving when she became the woman in charge. Under her care she’d turned it into an even bigger and more profitable business with her new focus on partnerships with like-minded companies. She’d been relentless in her pursuit of success since taking on Jack’s role. She wanted to prove to the business world and to herself, frankly, that she could guide the company as well as he had.
Being a woman had never held her back, but she knew she had to work that much harder. When Casey wanted something she went after it passionately, with everything she had. It was ironic that the strategy had worked well at her company, but her approach hadn’t gone as swimmingly in her rather dismal personal life. A string of bad luck in relationships trailed behind her. Yup, laugh it up. She was the Sex Toy Princess who didn’t get any action beyond the battery-operated kind.
It wasn’t that she chose badly, or liked jerks. She didn’t. But there were two issues working against her. One, men didn’t ask her out that often, and when she did ask out a guy, he’d often admit her profession scared him. “Do you have any idea how terrifying it is to approach a woman who sells sex toys?” one guy had said. He hadn’t lasted long. The other issue was that she had a notorious habit of speaking her mind, and, it turned out, that didn’t always work for the guys she had dated.
“You intimidate me,” Scott, her ex, had told her, when he’d said sayonara the same night she’d been planning to ask him to move in with her. “You’re fun as hell, but I can’t see myself getting serious with an alpha female.”
Ouch.
She’d bristled at the designation. “Alpha female?” she said with narrowed eyes. “What are you talking about? That’s a term for a dog.”
“You’re great at business, Case. But your relationship skills are kind of lacking. You never let me decide anything. You want to be in control of everything. You want to make all the decisions, from dinner to movies to what position in bed.”
“I didn’t hear you complaining about any of those positions when we were in them,” she pointed out.
“It’s not hard for a guy to get off,” he said in an admonishing tone, and the message was loud and cruelly clear—I’m not into you in the bedroom.
Later, after the soreness at being left again had abated, and after she’d turned a few hairbrushes into projective missiles lobbed at the door, she was able to call a spade a spade. She did like control. She did enjoy picking and choosing, whether they went to an art gallery or a film, and she absolutely loved telling a man how she liked it—harder, faster, there, right there, don’t stop. What was so wrong with that? Hell, this was the field she worked in. She marketed sex toys, for goodness’ sake. Her days, and her late, late nights were spent finding new ways to communicate all the joys her toys could deliver. And yet, something about Scott’s condemnations had stung because they’d hit home. They’d touched down and felt true. She was an alpha woman. Strong and confident, driven and ambitious, and absolutely unafraid of saying what she wanted. It scared some men. It scared most men.
Good thing she and Grant were communicating then about business. She could be as direct as she needed to be.
“What do you think about such a partnership? We’re keeping the toy under wraps until we roll it out later this summer with our key retail partners, and I’d very much like to have Entice as one of those partners,” she said, then took a drink of her French martini as she waited for his response.
He draped his arm across the back of the royal blue couch, tracing a line absently with his fingertip. The thought briefly flicked through her mind of him running that same finger against her shoulder, her neck, her leg . . .
“I’ve often thought we’d make good partners,” he said, with a slight quirk of his lips, and a certain look in his eyes. A look that almost said there was an undercurrent of interest. Then he wiped his hand across his brow, as if it had gotten too hot in here. “And now you come to me with this sultry talk of a LolaRing,” he said, clearly enjoying the naughtiness of their professions. “What’s a gentleman to do?”
God, the man was a flirt, and such a fine specimen. The head of his company, surely he wasn’t one of those guys who’d be bothered that she was strong-willed, that she was in love with work. Because she was in love with love, too. She was a believer in happiness, in possibilities, in two people who fall madly in love. The kind of love her brother had with Michelle. The kind of love she was determined, bad luck be damned, to find.
She leaned her head back and laughed. “Then what do I need to do to get your bras and panties in bed with my hot new toy?”