“Come again?”
Lukas Brandt is sure he must have heard his assistant wrong when she tells him that Stephanie Fairgood née Perreault is downstairs at security asking if she can see him.
“Whoa! Isn't that the girl who—” his brother, August, begins to ask. He’s currently occupying one of the guest chairs in front of Lukas’s desk.
“Shut up,” Lukas growls before his little brother can finish asking that question.
Ironically, Lukas had called his brother in here to yell at him for letting his personal life overlap with business. The previous evening, Lukas had to pay off a couple of paparazzi who’d gotten pictures and were all ready to report on the youngest scion of the Weiss Fox Beer family cavorting on the beach with some influencer/actress after using their company jet to ferry her to the Victory Islands.
It was a gross misuse of company resources, not to mention bad publicity for the company Lukas is trying to turn around. Lukas does not need his younger brother acting exactly like their playboy dad.
But now, instead of giving his brother a long lecture about maintaining both corporate and social responsibility, he just snaps, “Get out.”
Usually, when Lukas gives an order, it’s obeyed without hesitation.
He was only named CEO a year ago, so all of his corporate-level employees either survived his razing of the C-suite with lowball severance firings or were hired after to replace his father’s good-old-boy work cronies.
But unfortunately, his father, Lukas Brandt III, was the worst kind of born-on-third-base stereotype and had insisted on extending his “board seat at twenty-one” privilege to both of his sons.
That had worked out for the younger Lukas in one aspect when he acquired the CEO seat much earlier than his father intended by forcing a no-confidence vote against the older Lukas.
However, Lukas IV hadn’t been able to undo all the damage his father had done with stock buyouts and severance letters.
His brother, August, for example, though only twenty-one, is unfireable. And they both know it.
Instead of scurrying out of the office, August sits back in his seat and asks, “Are you really going to let her come up here after what she did?”
The answer to that question, to both Lukas’s and August’s surprise, is yes.
Yes, he is still bitter. But no amount of bitterness can eclipse the curiosity her sudden appearance at his office building in downtown St. Louis arouses.
“I’m sorry I led you on. I shouldn’t have done that. The truth is, I was saving myself for him the whole time. I belong to him now…”
Why is she here after telling him that at the Tessier Ball? After all this time?
He has to know. And for that reason, and that reason only, he tells his assistant, “Send her up.”
Then he points toward the door and tells his younger brother, “Get out. I don't care about your board seat. I'll have security throw you out of the building if you don’t get out now.”
August tenses in his seat. But he’s not stupid.
By the time Lukas’s assistant escorts Stephanie into his office, the younger Brandt brother is nowhere to be seen. And Lukas has assumed a Master of the Universe position by the window wall, which looks out upon the Arch-facing side of Downtown St. Louis.
“Lukas?”
He unclasps his hands from behind his back and turns around with a plan to pretend not to be at all shaken by her sudden appearance.
But he’s only human, and she’s still so beautiful.
Not in the aggressively up-kept way she’d been before she dropped out of Tulane, though. Nor in the trashy way she’d shocked everyone with when she turned up at the Tessier Ball with the name of that hoodlum stamped across her back.
This Stephanie wears her hair in bouncy curls that stop right under her ears. And she is dressed in jeans, paired with a silk tank and a darling cardigan.
She’s eight years older than when he saw her last at that Tessier Ball. But somehow, she looks more innocent than she ever has.
She looks like…
Lukas swallows hard.
She looks like someone he'd want to marry. Like an unusually pretty girl next door who anyone would want to marry.
This is a mistake. His chest constricts with old feelings he’s almost forgotten were buried underneath all his bitterness.
It is one thing to break up with someone. That was fine. He had initiated plenty of those before and after Stephanie. But it was another thing to get tossed aside the way she had done him, even though they were perfect for each other.
As cool as Lukas wants to play it, he can’t keep the anger out of his voice when he asks, “What are you doing here?”
“I…” She looks him up and down, as if she’s trying to reconcile this version of him the same way he’s trying to reconcile the current version of her. “I spoke to your employee yesterday about a possible collaboration between the Amy Fairgood Foundation and Weiss Fox on an ambitious housing initiative.”
“Which employee?” he immediately demands. “There is no cause worthy enough on earth to make me agree to collaborate with you.”
“Yes, that’s what she told me. She also said…” Stephanie takes a deep breath, but it sounds like she’s choking out a question when she says, “We used to date?”
He tilts his head at her. What is with the uptick in her voice, making that last statement a question?
“Yes, you wasted a year and a half of my life. Was that not enough for you? You had to come here and waste even more of my time?”
“So it’s true?” Her face falls. “Was I? Was I cheating on Galen? With you? Or maybe using you as a cover boyfriend my mother would actually approve of before she died?”
Lukas stares at her. The urge to flip a piece of furniture like a CEO version of the Hulk courses through him. And at that moment, he’s grateful he decided to stand by the windows, beyond reaching distance of anything he can touch.
But there’s no keeping the hostility out of his voice when he asks, “Are you kidding me right now?”
She takes a step back. Like he’s the one with the dangerous reputation, not that criminal she chose over him.
“Okay, I’m looking for answers, but I should’ve explained as soon as I came in here. I was in an accident, and unfortunately…”
Lukas listens, barely able to keep his mouth from falling open, as she explains that she lost nine years' worth of memories, including their time together.
“So I thought I dropped out of college to marry Galen. And I’d assumed we were dating pretty seriously before that. But after that breakfast meeting with your employee, I received some disturbing accusations about my husband. And now I’m…”
She pauses, as if trying to come up with the right way to qualify her misgivings, then seems to settle for, “Not so sure. So, if you could just maybe explain to me why I would date you at the same time as my future husband, maybe I could make some of this make sense.”
“I have no idea what you were thinking when you decided to date both of us at the same time,” Lukas answers before he can think better of it. “You made me sign a virginity contract that basically said I couldn't touch you before we were married. Then you led me on for over a year and ghosted me the night I planned to propose.”
“What?” She’s not nearly as concerned about not showing any emotion as Lukas. Her mouth falls open for a full second before she snaps it closed to ask, “Why would I do something like that? To anyone? That’s cruel, and it doesn’t even sound like me.”
How many times had Lukas asked himself that same question?
“I didn’t see you again for three months after you disappeared on me and dropped out of school without so much as sending me a text,” he tells her. “And when I confronted you about it at the Tessier Ball, that criminal you decided to—wow, marry apparently—attacked me, and you flat-out told me you had been saving your virginity for him the entire time.”
Stephanie shakes her head. “No, my father gave me the virginity contract when I was sixteen. And I know for sure Galen and I weren't dating before I turned nineteen. I remember all the way up to when my mother told me she had terminal cancer. And then it’s just…fog.”
She looks so confused and helpless. Lukas falters. Back when she first dumped him, he had wondered if perhaps her mother's death hadn't led to what he could only assume was a complete mental breakdown on her part. Maybe he really had gotten this all wrong.
“Well, that's what you told me,” he answers, setting his tone to cold and removed. “I don't know how to explain your past actions to you.”
He looks down at his wing-tipped shoes and mutters, “I can barely explain them to myself.”
She looks down at her own shoes, a pair of dove grey wedges. But then she peeps back up at him to say, “I need to find someone — someone from my past named Amira. And I thought, since you were the one other person who might’ve known me intimately from the time I forgot, I was hoping maybe you could help me find her. But now I can see I had no right to come here. And I can’t apologize enough for disturbing you, Mr. Brandt. I'm so sorry for wasting that year and a half of your life. I'm sorry I hurt you. You didn’t deserve that.”
Her words soothe a wound he didn’t know he was still carrying, even as her seeming sincerity provokes more questions. Questions he’d been too hurt to ask in his early twenties.
Also, she needs his help? A bad feeling churns in his gut—one he tries to push it down.
Stephanie expels a shaky breath and pastes on a brave smile. “I’ll just go now.”
Okay, she is leaving. Good. He should be happy to see her so vanquished and confused after what she did, whether she remembers it or not. It was no less than what she deser—
Christ, what am I thinking? Was he really going to say that someone who wounded his ego deserved a traumatic brain injury?
Ah, hell….
“Hold on, Steph. Wait…” After expelling a long breath, he asks, “What exactly do you need? Maybe I can help.”