Tempted by the Billionaire: A Hometown Hero Series Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

she’d leaned over him, her arms long and slender, one on either side of his body, as she pressed her weight against him. He sighed ruefully. His divorce proceedings hadn’t technically begun, and he’d already forgotten his wife’s existence. Okay, he and Meghan had barely had a marriage, but what did it say about him that he was so easily to dismiss her as irrelevant?
    He shifted his weight to his other elbow, and kicked an ankle over his knee. With true regret, he forced his brain to focus on the words his mother was barrelling down the phone.
    “Yes, mother, I understand. When is the meeting?”
    “Two weeks. You can’t put this decision off forever, Mattias. McCain Industries needs a chairperson, and you’re the only candidate.”
    He ground his teeth together, trying to ignore the sense of inevitability that crushed against him like a wave. He grunted, and in that one sound, he perfectly conveyed his sentiments to his mother. She might have been a whole continent away, in her beachfront mansion in Maine, but she knew her son well enough to understand him even at that distance.
    “It was your father’s dearest wish that you would follow in his footsteps one day,” Eleanor McCain pushed softly.
    He shook his head with a wry smile. Leave it to his mother to play the one card he found it almost impossible to resist. “Yes, but he imagined my time as Chairperson would come well in my silver fox years. Not now. There’s so much more I want to do with my life.”
    Eleanor sighed heavily. “What you want with your life, darling? None of us wanted this. Do you think I prepared for this? A life without your father?”
    Matt closed his eyes, guilt searing through him. “Of course not, mom.”
    He could hear her pull herself together, taking a fortifying breath as she composed herself. He knew her pale blue eyes would be shimmering with unshed tears, her long lashes webbed by moisture. “You’ve been allowed more latitude with your life than your father would have indulged,” she pointed out primly. “Marriage to that woman . A military career that put you in harm’s way, every day. You, our only son, and the only heir to the McCain Industries fortune.”
    “Serving in the army was something I did for dad. For dad, and myself, and to honor his death.”
    “There was no honor in his death,” she whispered stoically. “No honor, and no sense. The honor was in his life, and the best way to uphold it is to follow the footsteps he laid down for you.” She tsked down the phone. “You’ve been given enough extensions, Mattias. I don’t think I’ll be able to hold the board off any longer.”
    He shook his head from side to side. The weight on his chest became gradually heavier, until he felt that his lungs might burst. “How can I spend my days in a boardroom?” He asked finally, wearily. It was the antithesis of how he would choose to spend his time.
    “You will not always be behind a desk. You will have great scope to dictate your own movements. But McCain needs you at the helm, and it needs you now.”
    “Why?” He demanded, sitting up straight as his spine tingled with an unspoken warning. Something in her tone, perhaps, had conveyed to him an urgency that she wasn’t relaying.
    “It’s a question of timing, that’s all. The board is hunting for a replacement for you. I fear that if you don’t take up the seat now, you’ll lose the chance forever.”
    “Good. Let them find someone. No doubt they’ll choose a candidate eminently more suitable than I am.”
    “No one is more suited to this than you. It is your destiny. You have completed two degrees with this position in mind, and you have the company in your blood. Stop moping about that whore leaving you and get back to Manhattan.”
    Mattias shook his head, his mother’s vitriolic assessment of his wife unsurprising and not completely unwarranted either. “My marriage breakdown lays squarely at my feet.”
    “Bullshit,” Eleanor