Perception (Club Destiny #6)(15)
Author: Nicole Edwards

“Meeting with Shane,” he answered easily.

Shit.

Glancing over at the clock, Mercedes noticed it was fast approaching nine o’clock. She hadn’t slept that late in… hell, in as long as she could remember. Her days generally started before dawn on a good day.

“Is he coming here? Or to your place?” she asked, trying to sound casual as she shoved the creamer back into the fridge.

Most of the time, they held their business meetings at Xander’s. His condo had double the amount of space that hers did, and he had three offices, his, his assistant’s, and an empty one, along with a conference room that he used for God knows what. Unlike her setup, his offices were separate from his actual living quarters. As for Mercedes, she merely worked out of her condo’s secondary master bedroom that she’d had converted into an office.

“I told him to come here,” Xander answered as she approached, placing his iPad on the table and sliding the bagels toward her. “You’re looking a little pale,” he added, tipping his head slightly to the side as he studied her with another of his infamous smirks.

“I wonder why,” she blurted, immediately regretting her lack of filter.

She blamed him.

“I hear orgasms will do that to you.”

Mercedes glared at him from across the table, letting him know with her eyes that she wasn’t going to take his shit this morning. She was not getting into this with him. What happened last night shouldn’t have happened. It was a demonstration that had gotten way out of hand.

So what if he’d given her one of the best orgasms of her entire life. With his fingers.

It wasn’t like she was going to tell him as much.

Refusing to dignify his statement with a verbal response, Mercedes reached for a bagel and opted to move the conversation back to neutral ground. “What’s Shane coming over to talk about?”

Xander grinned, an all-out, panty-melting smile that had Mercedes fighting to keep from looking away from him. Rather than say something entirely inappropriate, which Xander was known to do from time to time, he morphed into the business professional that she knew him to be, his smile fading away entirely.

“We need to talk about the two properties we’re planning to bid on,” Xander explained.

“By ‘we’, you mean you and Shane are bidding against each other? On both properties?”

Xander kept his eyes on her. “Honestly, I could give a shit less about the land, he can have it if he wants it that bad. I want the Milton building.”

Mercedes knew about both properties, the one hundred plus acres off of the toll road up in Frisco and an old office building off of Milton right there in downtown that had just come on the market. Both of them were zoned for either commercial or residential, which was the factor that always put Shane and Xander at odds with one another.

Admittedly, Mercedes had significantly more knowledge regarding the Milton building. After all, Xander had been interested in it since she first brought it to his attention, so she had looked into a few specifics and taken him on a tour earlier in the week.

“I think that’s smart,” she told him. “The Milton building will be your best option of the two. He’ll want to turn it into condos anyway, and there’re an overabundance of them in that area. He’s better off with the land. Much more opportunity for residential development up that way.”

That wasn’t going to make Shane a happy camper, but then again, going up against Xander in a bidding war wasn’t exactly one of Shane’s favorite things to do either.

Mercedes had known both men for quite some time. She knew how their minds worked because she’d worked with them both on practically a daily basis for the last decade.

She sold commercial real estate, and they dealt in commercial and residential property development, respectively. And many of the property transactions they dealt with were handled by her. Although she had a handful of other high profile clients, Xander was definitely her bread and butter. He knew it too.

Before they could go into further detail, her home phone rang. Grabbing the handset that was on the breakfast bar, Mercedes greeted the doorman, letting him know it was fine to send Shane up.

Rising from her chair, Mercedes contemplated getting more coffee before heading to her office. She definitely needed caffeine and a much more structured atmosphere or she would likely do something foolish such as allow Xander, or worse, Shane, know exactly what she was thinking. And the absolute last person who needed to find out what happened last night was Shane Gibson. If he found out, she would never live it down.

“Let’s do this in my office,” she told Xander when she turned back to look at him, her face flaming when she realized how that sounded.