One Night with the CEO Read Online Free PDF Page B

compliments or anything, but I’d like to know.”
    Ethan pushed Mark’s arm off him and twisted his waist as he bent into an overly dramatic runner’s stretch. After several seconds of that ridiculousness, he straightened and flexed his biceps. “It’s the guns, right? Gracie loves them.”
    Mark barked out a laugh. “Nope. It’s that big, bulging…brain that makes you so hot. It’s so huge, it’s a wonder you can keep it under a hat.”
    “Yeah, I get that a lot. Okay, back to the finding a wife thing. Let’s not call it that. Let’s not call it anything, for that matter. Let me and Gracie set you up. No pressure. No expectations. If you find a wife, fine. If you find the love of your life, great. The point is, you’re looking for something more than casual, right?”
    “Right.”
    “Okay, Gracie will eat this up. So give me the details. What kind of woman are you looking for?”
    Mark’s thoughts turned to Karen. Gracie would clobber him if he showed any interest in her “baby” sister, particularly because she’d convinced herself he embraced his bachelor status with more enthusiasm than most. On this issue, she and Ethan agreed. They both swore he was hiding a harem. Neither was right, but he’d never disabused either of them of their incorrect assumptions.
    He approached his answers to Ethan’s questions with two purposes in mind. One, he sincerely wanted to give Ethan information that would be helpful to the task. Two, he needed to remind himself how incompatible he and Karen were, so he could move on with no regrets. “I’d like to meet a woman around my age. A professional in a good rhythm career-wise.” In other words, someone nothing like Karen. “Someone busy like me who would understand the pressure of our respective positions and wouldn’t make unreasonable demands on my time.” Karen probably wouldn’t make unreasonable demands on his time, though. Soon, she’d be a medical student. Great. Just like that, he’d circled back to Karen.
    Ethan pretended to scribble notes on a pad. “Okay. What else?”
    “Settled.” As his father had told him countless times before, Mark’s mother had nearly suffocated under the burden of being tied down to a husband and a kid well before she was ready. He wouldn’t repeat his parents’ mistakes. “She should be settled in life.”
    “Meaning what?”
    They’d reached a fork in the trail, a weathered bench marking the spot where bikers were no longer permitted to ride. Ethan sat on the bench, and Mark followed suit. Mark raised his face to the sun, enjoying the warmth of its rays on his skin. “She’s figured out the answers to the big questions. What she wants to be when she grows up. Where she wants to live. The kind of man she’d enjoy spending time with.”
    Ethan nodded. “Got it. What about children?”
    Mark imagined a life without kids. Definitely doable, but someone who’d rule out raising children altogether was probably a nonstarter. “She should be receptive to the idea of children, let’s start with that.”
    “Throw out some traits.”
    “Confidence, both socially and in the bedroom. That’s a definite turn-on.”
    “I’m not sure I’d be able to vet someone on their confidence in the bedroom. Gracie would flash-fry my balls in a skillet.”
    Ouch. “For fuck’s sake, Ethan, that’s not even funny. Let’s focus on confidence in general, then.”
    “Okay. What about physical traits? I have no idea whether you’re a leg man or a breast man.”
    Mark waggled his eyebrows. “I’m partial to wings, actually.”
    Ethan simply stared at him and that blank stare prodded Mark to take the question seriously. He winced when a vision of Karen’s face popped into his head. Fucking Karen. Her image refused to go away.
    She wore her long, dark brown hair loose, a mass of waves dancing around her heart-shaped face. What was the opposite of that? Oh, that was easy. “I’m not one to pick apart a woman’s features, but I