Page 17 of Rebellious Hearts

Stop it, stop it right now, I scolded myself.

If I so much as thought about him without a shirt I was going to lose sight of my goal and I couldn’t do that.

What happened between us was in the past, just like Elena had said. There wasn’t anything I could change about that, but I could face forward and march on, putting one foot in front of the other.

“Thanks, El,” I said to my best friend. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She’d talked me down from the ledge of anxiety more than once.

“Of course,” she said. “But I want a play-by-play. Messages or calls about everything juicy that happens on the trip!”

I laughed. “It will be like a live episode of some dating show gone wrong.”

Elena giggled with me. “We can call it Harborview Heroes.”

“Harborview Anti-Heroes,” I pointed out.

“Harborview Hunks.”

I groaned. “You’re not wrong about that. Harborview Hubba Hubba.”

Elena burst out laughing, and I chuckled with her. The laughter was good—comic relief.

“It’s going to be fine, Sofe,” Elena said. “Just do what you do best, and the rest will fall into place. You’ve had tough clients before, and you’ve always pulled through. Just see it that way. Benjamin Blackwood might have a big name and a lot of moneybut in the end, he’s a person just like the rest of us. When you strip it all away, you and me and him and his friends… we’re all the same.”

I nodded. Was it really that simple?

I hoped so. I would do what she suggested—eyes on the prize and handle Ben the way I would handle any other colleague or client—with the utmost professionalism—and I wouldn’t let what happened between us change a thing.

“I have to go. I have to go through this information so I know what’s going on, and then I have to go home and pack.”

“Good luck,” Elena said.

We ended the call and I turned my attention to the work that would lie before me from tomorrow morning.

The file started with everything about the Blackwood factory and how they wanted to build another factory to create more business opportunities. The information was bittersweet to me—it seemed very self-worshipping of them to go on about how great they were that they could do the second factory, but the number of new jobs they were creating… and when I kept reading, I noticed that the inhabitants of Harborview could really use the help.

The town waspoor. I hadn’t seen a town this rundown, looking at the photos.

My heart went out to the people. How could they live in such poverty and still survive?

I’d grown up in a very sheltered home. My parents hadn’t let me and my brother see too much of the horrors of the world, and sometimes I was glad about it. There was so much pain out there, and knowing I couldn’t do something about it made me not want to know about it at all. It just hurt too much.

But this… this kind of pain we could fix. We could do something about it, fix up the town and make it a place worth living again.

If Ben Blackwood was only good for his money and what it would do for the people of this town, then I would push even harder for this project to take off. The renovation of the town and finally building the factory was the goal, and I would do whatever it took to make that happen.

There was so much pain out there, but maybe we could lighten the load for at least one little corner of the world.

If that wasn’t worth dealing with all this bullshit for, I didn’t know what was.

5

BEN

What the hell was Alex thinking?

Actually, scratch that. I knewexactlywhat my brother was thinking. He didn’t trust me enough to do this by myself. He thought I needed someone to keep an eye on me, and now he sent some doll from project management to oversee me.

The fact that thatdollwas Sofia was even worse—how the fuck was I supposed to work with her when I knew what she looked like naked? And when I knew what her lips tasted like, what her voice sounded like in my ear when she moaned as she reached her climax…fuck.