“What do you think she’ll say?”

She started laughing. “Yes. Eventually.”

“How do you know this?” I wondered as my heart rate finally started to normalize, and I moved to sit at my desk.

“I can be very persuasive,” she said, a smile still plastered on her face. “But I almost forgot.”

“What?”

“I told her you’d give her money.” She braced for my response.

I blew out a half-annoyed breath. I’d already assumed that I’d be paying her for her services.

“We established that yesterday.”

“But I said it was a lot of money.” Her eyes widened with the words, and I felt my body tense.

“How much?”

Kayla shrugged. “I didn’t mention a number. I just said it would be a lot.”

“Is two hundred thousand enough?” I blurted out the first amount that came to my head before thinking.

“I think that’s fair,” she answered, and she actually meant it.

“Fair? You think two hundred thousand dollars is fair?” I almost choked on the saliva in my mouth. It seemed a hell of a lot more than just fair. “Do you know how many lighters she could buy with two hundred K?”

“No wonder she hates you,” she ground out. “Anyway, I researched the firms last night, and you’d be paying close to that, if not more, depending on the number of events and who you ended up choosing. So, yeah, I think it’s a fair amount.” She huffed. “Plus, it will help sway her. That’s not a number she could easily brush off. No matter how much she hates you.”

I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about Sutton, and I couldn’t believe that I was actually pushing for this as hard as I was, but I needed her help.

“What else will we need to get her to agree?”

“I thought about this all night. We need to go over the schedule, so I can see how many events you plan on attending and when they are. Sutton’s schedule is crazy, so for this to even work, she’d need to know exact dates and times.”

“We can do that,” I said before it all hit me. “Kayla?”

“Yeah?” She looked up from her coffee, her head crooked as she watched me.

“What if we can’t pull it off?” Fear tore through me. “It won’t work if she genuinely hates me as much as you say she does.”

“She doesn’t hate you,” she said firmly. “She just thinks she does.”

I shook my head because that wasn’t any kind of logic that made sense to me at all.

“You two are basically the same person. Just one of you has a penis.”

“No thanks to her,” I spat, and Kayla laughed.

“Don’t forget about my raise,” she said before exiting my office, leaving me to worry on my own.