Fireball: An Enemies to Lovers Romance eBook

He hates me for some reason. I will not rest until I change his mind.

People always like me. It's kind of my thing. All the employees at my tech startup think I'm the best boss, and the community partners and investors I woo not only trust, but adore me.

Everyone likes me, except him.

I may have been caught off guard when I accidentally insulted AJ Trachtenberg, but I'm pulling out all the stops trying to make it up to him…and it’s not working. Offering his students a swanky field trip doesn't win him over—it only seems to make him grumpier.

Unfortunately, grumpy looks very good on him. AJ is tall, dark, and annoyingly handsome and he’s got a giant chip on his shoulder. Honestly, his smoldering is distracting.

I can’t afford any distractions right now, not with the media hounding me as I try to take my company public. Maybe I can swing a one-time naked distraction, though. That doesn’t have to mean anything, right? I'm not looking for a happily-ever-after here. I'm just trying to get him out of my head.

Alas, when it comes to business and bossy men, I have trouble letting go.

I will sell this house today. I always channel Anette Bening in American Beauty when I think I have more on my fork than I can chew. I will sell this house today, I chant, symbolically referring to nailing an interview with a reporter from Forbes and meeting community leaders and all the other tasks that come with running a tech startup on the cusp of going public. 

Forbes is just another interview. I’ve done a hundred of these by now. 

Mirror check reveals my hair is looking fabulous. My skin has that peachy glow I get after a nice workout. Not a hardcore Pound workout with drum sticks—a nice stroll on the treadmill in the company gym before popping up to my office.

I check my watch. 7:55. Just a few minutes until my assistant arrives and just a few more minutes until the reporter strolls into my space. I lick my teeth and check the mirror again. Hearing a tap on the door, I turn my head, smile in place. 

“Oh.” I shake my head, seeing my CFO, Logan, and not my assistant. “Hey, friend.”

She struts into the room holding a small bundle of yellow flowers. “Just wanted to bring you some sunshine before your big interview.” She shrugs and sets them on my desk. 

I look up at her, awed by the gesture. “That was really freaking nice of you, Logan.” 

She winks and pats the desk. “Knock ‘em dead, Sam. I know you will!” Logan makes her exit and I pick up the flowers, giving them a sniff even though I know tulips don’t really have a scent. I never know what to do when people do nice things for me like that, out of the blue. 

It makes me uncomfortable, and I fully recognize that that’s probably really telling, in terms of my mental health. I remind myself I’ve bought Logan flowers plenty of times. 

Another tap on my door frame reveals my assistant, but she’s not alone. It’s go time.

“Morning, boss,” Audrey says, nodding her head at the sleekly dressed man by her side. “I’ve got Mr. Childers here, from Forbes.”

He flashes a toothy grin and I clench. I don’t like this guy. My spidey senses tell me he’s out to portray me in a bad way. But I’ll win him over. I always do. 

He hurries over to me with his hand outstretched. “Call me Isaiah, please.”

I offer him my standard firm-grip-handshake. “Pleasure to meet you, Isaiah. Audrey, would you be able to put these in some water for me when you get a chance? I’d love to have them on my desk later.” She smiles and gestures for the bouquet. 

Isaiah starts talking. “So, Sam. Can I call you Sam?”

I hold up a finger for him to wait as I make sure Audrey gets what she needs and is on her way. Once she closes the door I sigh and put on my public smile. “Sorry. Hello. Sam is fine. Where should we start?”

He gestures around the room. “This is an impressive upgrade from a tiny dorm room.”

I laugh the expected laugh and tell him about starting Vinea in my “spare” time in college, coding the software late at night when I should have been sleeping but needed to silence all the shouting in my head. Between the demands of my statistics degree program and my siblings calling me for all the things teenagers typically ask of a parent…well, let’s just say I had a lot of anxious energy to burn off. 

“Yes, I can tell you’re very … energetic.” Isaiah thumbs through some notes. “So, you’ve compared Vinea to relationship management software? Tell me what that means.”

“Vinea has become essential for a half million scientists worldwide,” I tell him. “Our software is cloud-based. Do you know how many researchers were relying on paper? Emailing spreadsheets back and forth? Version control is a real problem, even for brilliant minds.”

Isaiah frowns. “So it’s an online version of a spreadsheet? For researchers?”

I shake my head, trying not to roll my eyes. “Vinea lets scientists track, measure and forecast their scientific work. There is so much repetition in labs, and researchers studying living cells…well there is just too much data to track and manipulate by hand. I know there’s a problem in the world of life sciences research, and I know that Vinea can solve it.”

A buzzing sound interrupts my train of thought and I look down to see my phone dancing across my desk. My brother’s name flashes on the screen and I silence the call, turning the phone upside-down. “Sorry,” I say. Isaiah nods. “As I’m sure you know from your prep work, my focus is tailored solutions for research institutions. Academic researchers use Vinea free of charge to track their work.”

Isaiah nods again and holds a finger in the air. “I think I’ve read that you get people hooked while they’re in school so they’re dependent on Vinea once they enter the workforce?” He arches a brow at me sinisterly. My phone buzzes again and I slap the side button, holding it in and hoping this turns the damn thing off. 

I smile again so I don’t shake him. “While it’s true I do want my solutions to spread like a vine and dig their tendrils into every lab, I want to be clear that the scientists using Vinea aren’t ‘roped in’ so much as they are transformed by how we can help them and their work. Think how much headspace these folks have to make sense of patterns and correlations once they have an accurate handle on the trends in their data.”

The phone continues to jump across the desk, more insistently now. “Do you need to answer that?” Isaiah frowns at the phone. 

“No, please accept my apologies. It’s my family calling. I think they’re just excited for me. You know, talking to such an important publication…” I try to stall as I succeed in turning off the phone. My family has no idea I’m talking with Forbes today. My brother probably needs help ordering new underwear and doesn’t know his damn size.

“Isaiah,” I tell him, trying to take back control of the interview, “in the past year Vinea has secured over $200 million in seed investments and we have a valuation of $900 million. My investors find us because all the life sciences companies in their portfolios adopt our solutions. Because biotech company leaders and entrepreneurs become accustomed to my software in graduate school. We believe this is the future of—“

The door to my office opens and Audrey pokes her head in, grimacing. “I’m sooo sorry, Sam. It’s the Colonel on the phone. He says it’s urgent.”

* * *

Audrey hurries to take Isaiah on a tour of the building and I hope she catches my nonverbal cues and prayers to take him by Logan’s office. Logan can charm even the slimiest of slime balls, and Isaiah seems none too pleased at being interrupted. 

“I’m the CEO of a company,” I tell myself. “A reporter should expect my time to be in demand.” 

I’m really good at appearing confident on the outside, when it’s usually chaos in my brain. I take a deep breath and stare at the phone on my desk for another beat. The red “hold” light flashes at me insistently. I pick up the handle. “Hello?”

“Samantha.” My father’s sharp voice makes me shiver as if he were in the room to me, yelling at us Vine kids as if we were his soldiers. “I’m not happy to be making this call this morning.”

“Well,” I tell him. “I’m also not happy about the interruption. May I ask what’s so urgent?”

“You did not send the notarized paperwork your brother requires in order to sell the beach house, Samantha.”

I blow out a breath. I recall hearing something about paperwork but Audrey hasn’t put anything on my desk recently. “I don’t believe I received paperwork.” I have to speak this way to my father, as if we are colleagues, rather than father and daughter. This is how he’s always been, and this is how life was growing up with the Colonel at the helm of our family. 

“I don’t have time for impertinence, Samantha. Your brother has important real estate development on the line here.”

I’m the CEO of an almost-billion-dollar company, I want to scream at him. I have important shit I’m in the middle of, too. But I can’t say these things to my father and my brother is incapable of hearing them. My brother never remembered to actually send me the paperwork, and we both know it.

“Please tell Sean I’m happy to sign paperwork if I receive it,” I tell him. “As you and he are aware, we have notaries on staff here at Vinea. I can and do handle these requests promptly. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a reporter waiting and I cannot take advantage of his time.” 

I’m able to hang up with my father only because there’s another person’s time to consider. I don’t have to check my email to know I’ll be receiving a frantic attachment from my brother’s attorney. It’ll be couched as a “resend” but the time stamp will show the real story.

And it won’t matter. This will all just be another example of Samantha not doing enough to support the family in their time of need. My mother devoted everything to taking care of us, and when a pulmonary embolism took her from us in my teens, everyone just shoveled her responsibilities onto me.

I take another deep breath and remind myself that this is why I’m a terrific CEO. This experience is what has allowed me to squeeze more hours out of every day. I stand and smooth out my skirt, taking off down the hall in search of Isaiah.

“I’m soooo sorry, Sam.” Audrey hurries up from her desk and starts to chase after me. “He was just so mean on the phone! I thought it was a real emergency this time.”

I squeeze her arm. “You don’t have a thing to apologize for, Audrey,” I tell her. I know how my father speaks to people. “I’m sorry you had to field that call. Now, can you take me to that reporter so I can finish what I started?”

She smiles and gestures down the hall toward the conference room. I freeze, because I momentarily forgot that we invited all these people to come in today. My community relations manager said it would be good for Isaiah to see how Vinea gives back and builds partnerships, and make it easier for the reporter to grab quotes from people all at once. I can only imagine what Isaiah will try to worm his way into getting them to say.

I groan and then form fists, squeezing a few beats and releasing, trying to redirect all the energy flying around inside my body. Then I push open the door, stick a smile on my face, and head into the room, keeping my eyes fixed on Isaiah and his smarmy smile.