Tempting the CEO(22)

I stopped. “You did not. Tell me you did not!”

He flashed me a tentative smile. “It depends on how mad you’ll be if I did.”

“Furious!”

“Okay, in that case, I have to meet my mother for dinner at that steak house you like on the bottom level, but I’ll be at your place to have wild sex with you by about nine. How’s that?”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“My mom won’t like that.”

“Jed! How could you do this to me?”

“I didn’t. She did. She was threatening to fly commercial to Detroit just so she could meet you. And if you knew my mother, well, she doesn’t fly commercial anymore, and she’d be blaming me for it if I didn’t let her have the plane to come here, and then by extension she’d be blaming you and, well, then she’d really not be in the proper mood to meet you. So she flew in with me this afternoon.”

“Why didn’t you at least tell me?”

“What? I had to meet your mother at the spur of the moment on our very first date.”

“You call that a date?”

“It’s what I was calling it with my mother. And once she found out I’d met yours, you know how that is. It’s a status thing, I think.”

I shook my head. “You are so going to pay for this later.”

He grinned. “Bring it on.”

With a great deal of sighing, I continued walking to the restaurant and he fell in beside me.

“And here I was absolutely certain I’d cured you of that high-handedness thing,” I said.

“It was a momentary setback for the greater good.”

“What greater good?”

“Getting you to meet my mother.”

We were almost at the restaurant and I stopped him again and leaned forward to whisper, “Shouldn’t we just go to my place and do what we usually do the first night we’re together? Well, every night we’re together, I mean.”

“You’re not going to make me stand my mother up by giving me an erection.” He kissed me. “Unless you’re willing to do something really creative with it. I always did want to have sex in an elevator.”

“The scenic glass ones?”

“Exactly.”

I pulled away with a laugh. “Another time.”

“Don’t say I didn’t offer you an out.”

Actually, though, I was kind of glad the decision was taken out of my hands. Now that she was here, I couldn’t refuse to meet her. And I had been slow about agreeing to do it, even though I’d been to Denver quite a bit since Jed and I had taken the plunge from hookup to exclusive, which was on the second day I even knew him, now that I come to think of it. I’d met Vernon, a shy, thin boy who looked as if he’d been to hell and back but was recovering. Clean six months. I met some of Jed’s other friends.

I was crazy about this guy. So, what the hell? I guess I should meet his mother.

The steak house was dim, but I recognized her immediately, even though I had never seen a picture of her. She didn’t resemble him much. It wasn’t that. In fact, she had red hair, a natural redhead it looked like, and she was tiny. But she looked like him somehow. Confident and funny and—even though it would normally seem odd to describe such a pixieish woman this way—powerful. I shook her hand as Jed set down my briefcase and introduced us.

“It’s such a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Worth. Jed’s told me so much about you.”

“Please, call me Mary.” She gave her son a playful scowl. “And I can just imagine what he’s been telling you about me.”

“All good things, Mom.” He kissed her cheek and took a seat next to me, across the table from his mother.

“He’s not still using that one about how I think he’s saving himself for marriage, is he? He gets such a kick out of that one. Came up with it when he was seventeen to keep his girlfriends from wanting to meet me.”

“An oldie but a goodie,” he said without remorse. “Can we have the wine list?” he asked a passing waiter.

“I was just happy,” she continued, “that the first time I met you, Angie, wasn’t when you were walking down the aisle.”

I glanced over at Jed uncomfortably.

“Mom likes to bring up a wedding in the first two minutes of meeting one of my girlfriends. It’s kind of like a litmus test,” he said to me in an aside over the wine list.

I laughed. “Oh. Okay then. Well,” I told her, “you ought to meet my mother. You two would get along great.”

“I have and we do.”

Jed muttered, “I had absolutely no hand in that.”

“Yes, Natalie was at a spa in the Denver area and we got together for lunch. You two look just like sisters, I have to say.”