“What do you envision me doing at Spectrum?” she asked cautiously.

“Executive vice president of sales and business development.”

Brooke blinked. She’d been thinking he planned to offer her an assistant general counsel position, but this was something else entirely.

“You seem surprised,” Palmer said.

“Actually. . . yes,” she admitted. “I’ve always considered myself a lawyer first, businesswoman second.”

“Once you take the position, I’d be happy to have the legal department send a few problems your way,” he joked. “But I think you’ll be busy enough.”

“You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”

He leveled her with his gaze. “Very serious. I believe in striking while the iron is hot. I don’t know what’s driving you, and frankly, I don’t need to know. I just want to tap into it. So I think you need to ask yourself something: are you ready to step up to the big leagues?”

What popped into Brooke’s head right then was a similar meeting she’d had, two years ago, when Ian asked her to join Sterling Restaurants. She remembered the excitement and thrill she’d felt when first taking over as general counsel—feelings she still had to this day.

But she also remembered the promise she’d made to herself long ago: that she was going places.

“Just how big of a league are we talking?” she asked.

Palmer smiled, knowing that he had her attention now. “Seventy-five-thousand-dollar signing bonus. Three hundred thousand base salary, plus another one hundred and fifty thousand in stock via our equity incentive plan. You’ll also receive a bonus of one hundred percent of your base salary, assuming you bring in the kind of deals you’ve been landing at Sterling.”

After Brooke recovered from a split second of being absolutely dumbfounded, she pulled herself together and quickly did some math. If she did her job well, which—hello—of course she would do her job well—Palmer was talking about a compensation package, for the first year alone, that totaled $825,000.

Wow.

“Also, we’ll obviously pay to relocate you to our headquarters in Charlotte,” Palmer added.

That snapped Brooke out of the green haze of dollar signs floating before her eyes.

Right. Of course. She would need to relocate for this job. All the way to North Carolina.

“That’s quite an offer, Palmer,” she said.

“Trust me, you’ll earn every penny. I won’t sugarcoat it—you come to Spectrum and you’ll work your butt off for me. I’m offering you a lucrative position, but also a demanding one. Lots of travel, schmoozing with clients, you know the drill. Although from what I hear, you’re already putting in long hours. At least I can pay you more for it.”

Certain parts of Palmer’s speech were buzzing around in Brooke’s head like annoying gnats. Work your butt off. Demanding. Long hours. She shook it off, remaining focused. “You’ve certainly given me a lot to think about.” She saw Palmer raise an eyebrow, as if waiting for more. She chuckled. “You don’t actually expect me to give you an answer on the spot, do you?”

He laughed. “No. Although I thought I had you for a minute there.” He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a business card. “Call me after you’ve had a chance to think everything through. What I’d like to do is fly you out to Charlotte to meet the other executive officers, get a feel for us, get to know Spectrum better. Not sure if you’re married or have kids, but the whole family is welcome. You could make a long weekend out of it and explore the city.”

Brooke shook her head. “No husband or kids. Just me.”

Palmer grinned confidently. “That makes things even easier, doesn’t it?”

Twenty-eight

“SO AS IT turns out, your idea wasn’t totally lame.”

Cade looked at Zach, needing to squint in the noon sun. Belatedly, he realized he should’ve worn his sunglasses, although the decision to eat outside had been spur-of-the-moment.

They perched on one of the stone ledges in Daley Plaza, just a few feet away from the city’s iconic fifty-foot Picasso sculpture, eating burritos from a restaurant across the street. Zach was downtown for the afternoon—some errand to run, he’d said—so they’d agreed to meet. While walking to the burrito restaurant, they’d heard a blues band playing a lunchtime concert in the plaza, and had decided, along with many other Chicagoans, given the size of the crowd, to grab a seat for a few minutes and enjoy the eighty-degree weather.

“What idea?” Then he noticed Zach’s sneaky smile and remembered—the poetry book. “You talked to Paige, didn’t you?”

“Sure did,” he said slyly. “Got a date with her Friday, too.”

“Way to go,” Cade said, high-fiving him. “So? Tell me what happened.”

“I decided to tweak your original idea. Instead of giving her the book, I figured I would pretend to read it myself at her dad’s ice-cream shop, hoping that she would come up to me and ask about it.”

“Coward.”

“Ha. What you fail to understand is that, in this day and age, women want to take charge. So I was merely being supportive of Paige’s natural feminist instincts by giving her the tools and the opportunity to approach me first.”

“Nice try.”

Zach grinned, conceding. “Okay, fine. Maybe I wussed out. Anyway, it was really busy in the shop that day, and I was getting bored waiting for everyone else to clear out, so I figured I might as well actually read the book I was pretending to be reading. And, you know, there was some stuff in there that was pretty cool.”