The Royals Series

by Bay, Louise

  A few minutes later, Harper walked into my office, Donna trailing behind her. “Donna, can you close the door, please?” She gave me a pleading look, clearly desperate to know the answer.

  Harper watched as Donna shut the door, then turned back to me, glancing at me from under her lashes. Shit, my dick began to stir. I needed to focus.

  “Have a seat, Harper.” I gestured toward one of the chairs opposite my desk. She took the one I wasn’t indicating. Of course.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  She grimaced. She thought I meant about us. “Regarding a phone call I just had.”

  “Oh,” she said, and she smiled.

  I was going to have to just come out and ask her. “Are you related to Charles Jayne?”

  Her eyebrows pulled together and she clasped her hands together. “I’m not sure what my last name has to do with anything.”

  I sat back in my chair and exhaled. I had my answer. She was Charles Jayne’s daughter. Donna had been right.

  “You’re his daughter?” I asked.

  She stood up. “I’m not here to talk about my father.”

  “He just called me,” I said, ignoring her glare. “He wants me to meet him and I’ve wanted to add him as a client for so long—”

  “Is that why you hired me?”

  Her voice got higher as she spoke. I was handling this all wrong.

  “Is that why you fucked me?”

  I winced. Christ, I could see how it might look that way. I walked around my desk and leaned against the other side, not wanting to get too close, despite her pull. I had to stop myself from reaching out and touching her.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” she said.

  “I didn’t know.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I’m serious. Donna told me this morning. And anyway, I don’t recruit . . .” How did I say her position was too junior for me to have anything to do with? “I don’t get involved with human resources stuff.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself. “Be honest. How long have you been wanting JD Stanley’s work?”

  “Harper, JD Stanley’s one of the most successful investment banks on Wall Street, of course I want to work for them. And you know better than anyone that they protect their research like it’s gold bullion. That’s why they do almost all of it in house. Any person in my position would want to work with them.” I could really do with her inside knowledge.

  She stared at me as if I were toxic.

  I tapped my fingers on my desk. This could be a win-win situation. “I need your help,” I said. Now that she was here, I may as well use it to my advantage. “I want you to work on the pitch with me. Help me land this thing.”

  “Wow. You don’t waste any time, do you? We fucked last night and now you think I’ll help you get ahead.”

  That’s not how it was at all. I thought she’d welcome the opportunity to work on such a high-profile account. “No, I just thought you’d want to—”

  “Want to get used by a man who wanted to land a new client bad enough to sleep with someone?”

  She turned and headed out of my office before I could respond. Once again I’d managed to say the wrong thing. It was becoming a habit as far as Harper was concerned.

  Chapter Seven

  Harper

  I’d called Grace right after my fight with Max, and we’d met at a bar on Murray Street in Tribeca. I waved to the bartender. “Can we get more cocktails and a snack? Something with cheese as a major component.” The bartender nodded and I turned back to Grace.

  “Okay, I’m totally confused now. You’ve been banging Max King, the person you hate most in the world?”

  “You’re totally focusing on the wrong thing.”

  “Rewind and tell me what the fuck has been going on.”

  She was looking at me as if I’d just told her I’d decided to move to Alaska.

  “I think I got hired by King & Associates because of my sperm donor.” I should have changed my last name. We’d never had any sort of connection, so it didn’t feel like his name to me.

  “The sperm donor being your dad?” Grace asked and I nodded. “How do you know?”

  “And he slept with me, like some kind of whore.” I shivered. “Well, little does Max know that my father and I only communicate through lawyers these days.” How could he have been so cold? I should have trusted my instincts about him.

  “We’ll get to the sex later. You didn’t answer my question.” Grace tapped me on the arm, trying to get me to focus. “Who told you that you’d been hired because of who your father is?”

  “Max. In his office.” I took a sip of my mojito.

  She tilted her head to the side. “He said, ‘I hired you because of who your father is’?”

  “Of course not. He claimed he didn’t know. But he was clearly lying.” He’d said himself that he really wanted to work for JD Stanley.

  “Okay.” Grace paused, her eyebrows drawn together. “And you were sleeping with Max? How did that happen?” She wiggled her eyebrows. “Late night in the office?”

  “He lives in my building. He’s penthouse man.”

  Grace’s eyes went wide. “The couple who fucked like bunnies? You banged that guy? Jesus, I’m jealous.” She took out the cocktail stick from her martini glass and bit off one of the olives.

  I tried hard not to smile. She should be jealous. Max knew what he was doing with his cock, that was for certain. He probably should have hooked up with Grace in the first place. After all, her family’s connections were far more impressive than mine.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked. “Is he boyfriend material?”

  “I have no idea. And of course not.” I placed my elbows on the bar and pushed my hands through my hair. “What was I thinking, fucking my boss? Now I have to quit.”

  “He said he didn’t know who your father was. Wouldn’t he have said something already if he did? Is he the liar-y type?”

  “Liar-y?” I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye.

  “It’s in the Dictionary of Grace. Look it up.”

  I hadn’t thought Max was the sort to lie; he was too direct. But it was perfectly possible I’d just been taken in by his hard body and beautiful green eyes. Had I been seduced by his genius brain and passion for what he did? “Does it matter? He knows now. My father invited him to pitch.”

  “And he said your father told him?”

  I waved my hands. “No, he said he put two and two together, and then he asked for my help with the pitch.”

  “And you don’t want to work for your father?”

  “Not because of my last name.”

  Grace nodded vigorously, alcohol clearly loosening her body parts. “I get that, but you are where you are. Max is saying he didn’t know. Are you going to cut your face off to spite your nose by quitting?”

  “I definitely won’t be cutting my face off, or even my nose, but I do think I have to quit. It’s all too humiliating. Everyone’s going to know who my father is and why I got the job, and I can’t work with the man who fucked me to get ahead.”

  “You’re thinking like a woman. You need to think like you have a penis.” She slapped her hand on the bar and the bartender jumped before setting down a cheese plate on the counter. “However you got this job, you need to prove you deserve it because you’re good at what you do, not because of your last name and not because you’re banging the boss.” She took a sip of her cocktail. “Men have been getting ahead using the old boy’s network for years. You have to take opportunities when you can get them. So not only can’t you quit, you need to go in there and tell Max that you should be working on your father’s pitch because of your name.”

  She made no sense. “How would that help? That would only make everything worse.”

  Grace set her glass down, her drink sloshing over the sides. “This, as they say,”—she threw her hands in the air—“is a win, win, win.”

  I shook my head and ch
ecked the time on my phone. I should be getting home, job or no job to go to in the morning.

  “Are you listening?” Grace asked.

  I wasn’t, because she wasn’t making any sense, but I put my phone down and gave her my full attention.

  “King & Associates does the kind of work you want to do, right?”

  “Correct.” I nodded.

  “And they’re good at it, right?”

  Why were we recapping this?

  “Correct again. Another and you’ll win a set of steak knives.”

  “So, why would you leave a company like that?”

  She interrupted me before I could speak. “You just need to shift.” She grabbed my barstool and pulled it toward her. “You need to shift your focus. King & Associates is the best place for underpinning capitalism, feeding corporate greed, and all the geeky stuff you do. Am I right?”

  I rolled my eyes and took another sip of my drink.

  “So stay there. And demand to work on the project. Because your dad is the best at what he does, so the person who lands that account is going to get huge kudos, right?”

  “You get the steak knives, yes.”

  “So play this smart by sticking around. And, while you’re at it, prove to your dad why he should have offered you a position in his company over his children who have penises.”

  I set my empty glass down as I took in what she was saying. Was she on to something? “You’re saying I keep working at King & Associates?” Could I bear to keep working with Max?

  “Yes, because however you got the job, you’re there. So make the most of your opportunity.”

  “And demand to work on my father’s account?”

  “As you’ll be a star if you land it, right? And you’re flipping the bird to your father at the same time. Like I said, it’s all win for you.” Grace indicated to the bartender that we wanted the check.

  “Unless we lose the account.” That would be even more humiliating.

  “When have you ever lost at anything you wanted?” she asked as she slipped off her stool and handed her black American Express card to the bartender.

  “You didn’t need to pay,” I said.

  “I didn’t. That was courtesy of my daddy.”

  “Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Park Avenue,” I called out. “You might be on to something about not quitting. This could be my opportunity to prove to my father that I can do more than stay at home and lunch for the rest of my life. I’ll show him that I’m worth more, and that he should have been begging for me to work for him and his stupid investment bank.”

  I jumped off my chair. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” I grabbed Grace’s face in my hands and gave her a smack on the lips. “You’re a genius.”

  * * *

  Somehow between leaving the bar and getting back to my apartment building, all my patience had disappeared and the cocktails I’d consumed over the evening had convinced me it was a great idea to tell Max I would work on the JD Stanley account immediately.

  “I’ll do it,” I said as Max opened his front door.

  “Harper, hi.” He rubbed the heel of his hand over his eyes and yawned. “I wanted to speak to you earlier, but you ran off.”

  What was I doing? Standing at my boss’s front door in the middle of the night, clearly a little drunk. Did I want to get fired? I stepped back until I hit the wall, but let my eyes trail down Max’s hard, naked torso and follow a trail of hair gathering at his belly button before disappearing beneath his pajama bottoms.

  “I think you’d better come in,” he said, his voice gravelly and deep.

  I shook my head in an exaggerated way and slipped my hands behind my back. He stepped toward me and pulled at my elbow. “I said come in.”

  I lost my balance and toppled toward him. Reaching out to save myself, I pressed my palms on the hot, tight skin of Max’s chest. I pushed away, but he pulled me closer, spun us around, and walked us back into his apartment.

  “You’re drunk,” he said as he pressed me up against the wall in his entry and kicked the door shut with his foot. His face was just an inch from mine. I wanted him closer.

  “A little,” I confessed.

  “Why did you run off? You’re not quitting, if that’s what you think,” he said as he dragged his nose against my jaw.

  “Tell me when you knew,” I said, placing my hands on his bare shoulders.

  “Knew?” he asked as he began to kiss my neck.

  “Who my father was.”

  He pulled back and braced himself against the wall, his hands on either side of my head. “I swear to you, I found out today. I think Donna assumed there was a connection but she didn’t mention it to me until I got the phone call.” He paused and his eyes flickered over my face, as if he were trying to figure out whether I believed him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  I dipped under his arms and walked across the entry. “I don’t speak to my father. I don’t have anything to do with him.” I fiddled with my thumbnail.

  “Okay. Well you don’t have to work on the pitch. I just thought . . . JD Stanley is the only investment bank on Wall Street I’ve never done business with.”

  “So,” I replied, and I glanced up.

  “Well I can’t turn down the opportunity.”

  “I don’t want you to turn it down.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “I want you to win that fucking account—and I’m going to help you.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  My eyes hit the floor. “It doesn’t matter. You got what you want.”

  He took a step forward. “Tell me, Harper.” I knew I shouldn’t say anything more, but there was something in his tone that made it impossible not to comply.

  I huffed out a breath. “He has a lot of kids, right?”

  His eyes drifted over my face.

  “I’m the only girl . . . and the only one he didn’t offer a job right out of college.”

  “Because you’re a girl? Or because you don’t speak to each other?”

  I let his questions drip into my brain. Did he have good relationships with his other children?

  Max held out his hand. “Come with me.”

  All too easily, I slipped my palm into his, his fingers holding me tightly as he led me further down the corridor, deeper into his apartment. What was I doing? I didn’t like this man. I should go downstairs to my own apartment. “I’m sorry. It’s late. I shouldn’t be here.”

  “Shhh. Let’s get you hydrated.”

  He guided me to a barstool opposite a kitchen island in a huge room I hadn’t seen before. The other night I’d only caught the dusky outline of his bedroom and the entryway. I hadn’t appreciated the size of the place or how glamorous it was. Max either had incredible taste or he’d hired a great interior designer.

  “Drink,” he said, setting a glass of water on the white marble counter in front of me.

  I took a sip, suddenly much more sober than I’d been when I knocked on his door.

  “More,” he growled. Jesus, he was so bossy. But I complied and gulped down a couple mouthfuls of water.

  He rounded the counter and stood beside me, leaning on the marble. “Tell me about your dad. You think he didn’t hire you because—”

  “Because I have boobs.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

  “He offered me a big chunk of money.” I set my glass down. “It’s not that he denies my existence—he periodically asks me to dinner.”

  “So you do speak to him?”

  I really needed to leave. “Not since my youngest half brother started his job at JD Stanley the day of his twenty-second birthday. Three weeks after I graduated business school. But not really much before that either.”

  Max pursed his lips.

  “I thought maybe he was waiting for me to finish grad school, and of course I would have said no, but . . .”

  Max’s fingers stroking my arm scattered my thoughts. “He gave us money,
me and my mom, but what I wanted was a family.”

  Max withdrew his hand.

  “Sorry, I should stop talking.”

  “I like to listen. You have a lot to say.” His voice was quiet and even, as if he were being sincere, as if he wasn’t talking to a drunk woman who thought he was an asshole.

  I raised my eyebrows. “I’ve been drinking. I have more to say in the office, but you’re not so interested there.”

  He cupped my face. “How wrong you are.”

  His kisses were soft at first, and I closed my eyes, savoring each one.

  “We can’t do this.” My mouth protested, but my hands slipped up his naked back, his warm muscles bunching under my touch. “I can’t—”

  “I know,” he said. “If I’m going to go for the JD Stanley account, I can’t exactly be fucking the boss’s daughter.” As if his body hadn’t caught up with his brain, he pulled up my skirt. “But this ass, these legs. They’ve got me under some kind of spell.” He smoothed his hands over my hips and under my ass, slipping inside my panties, then pulled me off the stool and tight to his body.

  “We’re going to be working together.” I wrapped my hands around his neck. “I don’t need my head full . . .” . . . of thoughts of you. I couldn’t say that. I didn’t want Max to think I wouldn’t be able to concentrate if we were in the office together, but frankly, it was going to be a big ask. “We should focus on the pitch.”

  He nodded and captured my bottom lip between his teeth. Without thinking, I twisted my hips against his growing erection.

  “If my dad suspected . . . I need to show him I’m excellent at my job, not that I got to work at King & Associates because I’m fucking the boss.”

  “Focused,” he repeated. “No boss fucking.”

  “I’m serious.” I pushed against his chest. “Stop thinking with your dick.”

  “I’m serious, too, but you’re encouraging me.” He grinned. It was a shock because it happened so rarely. Just for a moment my heart stopped.

  “Don’t grin at me, you asshole.” I tried to twist out of his arms, but he just held me closer.