.Chithority
“I don’t care anymore. I have friends now. I’m sure you made plenty in London.” She didn’t look affected at all. The coldness of it actually made me shiver.
“You’re being immature.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Watch your tone. I’m still your boss.”
“My apologies, Mr. Montgomery,” she said, quiet now.
“Don’t I get a welcome-back hug?” I asked, hoping, now that we’d finally said something real, she’d give an inch.
Jasmine Ray and Japheth Montgomery were best friends before they were anything else — before four years of silence turned two children into strangers wearing grown-up names.
Then he comes home. As her boss.
Japheth is handed a company in crisis, a rival who wants to watch him fail, and the one person he never stopped thinking about, sitting behind a desk with a stranger’s coldness in her eyes. Jasmine is handed something worse: a father who’s spent nine years reminding her what she owes this family, and a man she trusts turning that debt into a weapon.
Because someone close to them needs one thing — a signature, one document, one moment of Japheth’s total trust — and he knows exactly how to make Jasmine get it for him.
She has one impossible choice: protect her family by becoming, once again, exactly what she swore she’d never be to Japheth again. Or risk everything to tell him the truth, and pray he doesn’t throw her out of his life a second time.
This time, staying quiet isn’t safety. It’s the same mistake that cost her everything once already.
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