Clapping his hands together, Rylan rose from her couch. “Well, then. I’ll let you two get to work. Status meeting at eleven?”
“We’ll be there.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Maybe you’ll even have time to read your reports before then.”
“Nice, comfortable bed,” he teased, taking his leave.
And she almost missed it, but out of the corner of her eye, she caught the way Dane’s nostrils flared at just the mention of a bed. Heat shimmered beneath her skin at his reaction. At the way his gaze went immediately, unerringly to her.
For half a second, their eyes locked.
She’d just moved into this enormous office, but in that moment, she regretted not demanding an even bigger one. Whenever Dane looked at her like that, the room felt too small, the air suffocating and sultry, the neglected need between her legs suddenly sharp and desperate.
She forced herself to look away.
A few months ago, she’d plucked Dane from the temp pool more or less at random, unsuspecting of the big, rough-looking man who would arrive at her office dressed to kill. Unprepared for the way he would step into her life and her work, handling every task she threw at him with a quiet grace. Ruthlessly competent and ruggedly handsome, he pressed her buttons and tested her control at every turn, and there was a part of her that was tempted to throw him right back into the pool. Someone else would snap him up in an instant, and it would save her so much grief.
But then he took two steps forward, the warm amber scent of him washing over her and blanking her mind. Anticipating exactly what she needed, he plucked the files from the corner of her desk and held them up. “Checked, sorted, and filed?”
She nodded, throat tight.
He tucked the folders beneath his arm. “Skinny caramel latte.”
Again, she nodded.
“And then?”
What the hell had she been thinking, even imagining sending him away?
Recrossing her legs, she leaned back in her chair. His gaze blazed its way down the center of her body. It was shameless, and it was a thrill; it was playing with fire, but she had yet to get burned.
Fighting to appear unaffected, she sat up straighter, but she couldn’t keep the huskiness from her voice. “And then we’ll see.” She turned to face her desk, refusing to watch his ass as he left.
The instant he was gone, cool air flooded in all around her until she could breathe again. She sighed, her whole body deflating, and for a minute she had to close her eyes.
This simmering attraction between her and her assistant, this uncomfortable emptiness behind her ribs . . . they were nothing. She could handle them.
Or more likely, she could work through them.
Opening her eyes again, she reached for her computer, where the report from earlier was still spread out across her screen portending doom. A short bark of a laugh escaped her. Who’d have ever guessed she’d be so excited to see their European division in flames? Happy for the distraction, she dove into the numbers, scouring them for a pattern—or better yet, a way out.
She didn’t look up from them except to reach absently for the latte that had magically appeared beside her elbow while she hadn’t been paying attention. Not until almost an hour later when that single rap sounded out against her door. She whipped around to find Dane standing there, his gaze wary as he took her in.
No wonder. Her normally neat desk was a shambles, covered in printouts and financial statements, earning reports and stories from the news.
She lifted the single document that mattered from the pile. Feverish, she said, “I know what we have to do.”
What the hell had gotten into Lexie?
Dane hastened his pace. He’d been one step behind all day, oversleeping his alarm after getting home late from his weekend camping trip upstate, and then he’d returned from running Lexie’s morning errands to find her in the middle of some kind of capitalistic haze. She’d kept him jumping since. Clutching her second—ill-advised, if you asked him—latte in as many hours in one hand and the paperwork she’d had him rush past legal in the other, he got the handle of the conference room door with his elbow. Lexie’s coffee sloshed dangerously, a couple of scattered droplets flying from the opening on the lid, and he bit back a curse. His mom gave him enough shit about his dry-cleaning bill without his being careless.
Just his luck, the status meeting was already under way. He gave terse nods all around as he slipped in, with an extra-deep one to Rylan. He didn’t really care, and this one wasn’t even his fault, but it grated at him to be caught running late twice in one day. Taking the chair at Lexie’s side, he handed over her caffeine fix and her documents, accepting the folio and tablet she passed him in exchange.
“Thanks,” he said under his breath. He hadn’t had time to grab his things on account of her errands, but it wasn’t her job to cover him like that.
Maybe that was why he liked it so much when she did.
Dane was enlightened enough of a male not to go all caveman about having a woman for his boss—and a woman he was itching to take to bed with him at that. He could separate his preference to be in charge and his desire for control from his work. But the part of him that ached to put her on her knees sure stood at attention when she did anything like taking care of him. When she took the initiative to see to his needs.
In a moment of weakness, he gave himself a second to indulge the thought. To let his gaze really linger, sweeping from the cool blue of her eyes to her tits to the long lines of her legs beneath the hem of her skirt. Fuck, she looked good today. She always did, of course, manicured to within an inch of her life, and sometimes he ached to mess that perfection up a little. To see that silky black hair of hers curled loose around her shoulders or all mussed and ragged from a good, rough fuck. To watch porcelain skin gone pink from a stroke of his hand. To hear the sounds she made when he took her apart.
Shit. This was not the place to be getting a hard-on. He was at work, and her big brother was in the room, for fuck’s sake.
Forcing his gaze away, he snuck a hand beneath the surface of the table to adjust himself in his pants, struggling to focus on the meeting going on around him.
Fortunately, it didn’t seem like he’d missed much. Rylan finished giving his update on one of his new initiatives before turning to his sister. “So. Lex.” He twirled his pen between his fingers. “What the fuck is going on in Europe?”
She raised a brow. “I gather you had a chance to look at the new numbers?”
“I did, but take us through them anyway.”
One corner of Lexie’s wicked, red mouth twitched upward, a there-and-you-miss-it show of annoyance. Damn, Dane loved it when she showed her claws—and she had more than enough reason to, if you asked him. She worked harder than just about anybody here, and she always got short shrift. Rylan was good, but Dane still didn’t know why Lexie let him wear the crown when she could’ve run the place just fine on her own.
Lexie rose from her seat, her short black skirt riding up for a second before she smoothed it down. The red soles of her stilettos winked at him with every step she took, and Dane swallowed hard.
“So.” With a press of a button, Lexie displayed the main graphic from the report she’d been obsessing over all morning on the big screen. Walking a slow circle around the table, she pointed out the important bits. In the few moments he managed to drag his gaze away from the shapes of her calves, he took notes—not about what she was saying but about the reactions of the people around her. She always wanted to know that kind of thing. The girl was good at playing a room.
She’d been talking for a few minutes before her brother tapped the end of his pen against the table. “Basically, what you’re saying is we’re fucked.”
There went the edge of her smile again. “At present, yes.”
“And in the future?”
“I believe there are steps we can take to mitigate the loss.”
That was Dane’s cue. Unfurling to his full height, he p
assed out the prospectives she’d had him get printed between coffee runs. She flicked over to the next slide.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you El Escudo.”
Rylan cocked a brow. “Spain? Really?”
“The country as a whole has been hit hard by the current financial crisis, it’s true. But that’s why it’s so ripe for investment. This particular asset has a solid foundation, and its core business is bulwarked against the instability that’s plagued the sector as a whole.”
Rylan scanned the documents in front of him for a long minute. Nervous rustling of papers was the only sound in the room. Dane spent a moment scrutinizing each face in turn.
Scared. They were all scared. Passive, too. No one else was speaking up. Which meant that whatever Rylan decided was going to fly. And Rylan was pretty much always on their side.
Rylan set the papers down. “You think you can make it turn a profit?”
“And bring the whole division with it.”
“Music to my ears. I want you handling this personally.”
The glow to Lexie’s face was subtle, but it took Dane’s breath away. She kept her cards so close to her chest most of the time, and she was doing a damn good job of it now, even. But he’d spent enough time with her. He knew her tells.
And inside she was dancing.
“I’ve already got a meeting booked. My flight leaves tomorrow evening.”
Okay, that part was news to Dane. His head whipped around. It shouldn’t bother him that she’d gone to someone else to get her travel arrangements sorted out, but somehow it did.
Their gazes met, and she all but rolled her eyes, glancing pointedly at the things he’d brought. Fine, sure, she’d had him running from the moment he’d walked in the door, but still.
She was . . . his. Sort of. Not in all the ways he wanted her to be, but in a lot of the ones that counted.
Before he could get too bent out of shape about it, Rylan leaned forward in his chair, sliding the report away. “Take a team. You and Dane, a couple of analysts. Smart ones, too. And someone from legal and accounts.”
“Excuse me?” Lexie’s calm exterior rippled.
She was still doing a hundred times better at hiding her surprise than Dane was. The bottom of his stomach fell out.
Rylan waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, like this was nothing. “If we mean business, make it clear that we mean business. We’re there to acquire. You don’t have to phone home to make decisions. You’ve got the full authority to act in the company’s best interests and the people you need to advise you. Tell them the minute you walk through the door—you’re not leaving until the deal is done.”
Oh Jesus. This was worse than Dane could have imagined.
“Sir,” he said. Where the hell was he supposed to even go with this?
He’d just been volunteered by the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to go on an international business trip. An open-ended one. Fuck even knew how long that could go on. Weeks. Maybe months.
Months of being on call. He’d never been on a business trip with Lexie before, but he knew how she commandeered his time here in New York. Early mornings and late nights and calls at all hours, and he was fine with it. Being in close proximity to such a beautiful woman while not being allowed to touch was torture, and having to care about finances and jam himself into a fucking suit was almost worse. But he could do it. He’d been doing it for years now. Ever since Jake had died and his mom had whisked him clear across the country in her grief. Since she’d sat him down and told him all his plans, all his dreams—they had to go.
The only way he’d made it through his life in office worker hell was a strict policy of being out the door by five p.m. on Fridays and never walking in before nine on a Monday. That was his time, and he spent it however he wanted to, getting the rush he needed to be able to suck it up for the other five days of the week. He found the control he’d lost over his life in the stripes he laid up and down a woman’s spine and in the shape of her mouth when she came. He let it go by jumping off mountains.
He clenched his hand into a fist against the instinct to be sick.
Months. He’d never make it.
“Sir,” he said again. Fuck, there had to be something. Some reason he couldn’t go.
But before he could get a word out, the pout of Lexie’s mouth hardened into a line.
Oh shit. He knew that look.
She threw her shoulders back, tension in every inch of her. But those cool blue eyes were all resolve.
Nodding, she said, “You know you can count on us.”
chapter TWO
“Ms. Bellamy? Ms. Bellamy, wait up.”
Ha. If anything, Lexie walked faster. She was in heels, for fuck’s sake. If Dane couldn’t keep up, that wasn’t her problem.
His low growl of a sigh carried all the way down the corridor to her, his footfalls heavy as they quickened. A lick of warmth uncurled inside her at the idea of him literally chasing after her, but she pushed it down. Without a backward glance, she stepped into the waiting elevator at the end of the hall.
“Heading to your office, Ms. Bellamy?” the operator asked.
“Yes please, Marcus.”
Marcus pressed the button without even asking her if he should wait for Dane. She knew she liked him for a reason. The doors slid shut, but it wasn’t until the car started moving that she allowed her shoulders to slump.
That was not how she’d expected that meeting to go.
During the recent takeover, when she and Rylan had been scrambling to save the company, they’d had a whole series of conversations about the future of the place. About the nature of their partnership. According to the corporate charter their bastard of a father had drawn up, she wasn’t old enough to be CEO, so she had needed Rylan—and it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been suited to the job. But she’d been here. She’d been the one to stay behind.
On some level, she’d always been the one to stay behind.
As the elevator rose, she leaned against the wall and tipped her head to blink at the ceiling, the past year’s loneliness closing in on her all at once. It was the kind of memory that had teeth and claws, and both of them sunk in deep.
Her father’s crimes had rocked them all, no one more so than Rylan. He’d spent his whole life trying to live up to the old man’s expectations, and that betrayal had broken him somehow. The instant the sentence had been handed down, Rylan had been gone, storming off with no intention to return. Her mother and their younger brother, Evan, hadn’t even shown up for the trial.
And her ex, Jordan . . . well. He’d still said hello to her occasionally, if they happened to pass in the hall.
So she’d done what she had to do. She’d buckled in and held on. She’d single-handedly held the circling sharks at bay. She’d kept the place afloat.
When they’d agreed that Rylan would be named CEO, it was with the understanding that she’d be an equal partner with him, and he’d never made her feel like anything but.
Today, though . . .
She’d crunched the numbers. She’d seen an opportunity, and she’d brought it to her brother the way she would’ve brought a deal to their father. Deep inside, she’d been fully prepared to be shot down. But he hadn’t done that. He’d believed in her, not just backing her up but doubling down, and this dam inside of her had just about burst.
She hadn’t realized how badly she’d needed someone to believe in her.
And fuck if she wasn’t going to prove her brother right.
“Ninety-ninth floor,” Marcus announced.
Crap. Lexie sucked in a deep breath and fluttered her lashes a couple of times, trying to get her eyes to dry. By the time the doors slid open, she was standing tall again, the persistent knot beneath the knob of her spine pulling tighter than ever.
And of course, standing right beside the elevator bank, hardly even bothering to look rumpled, was Dane.
Right. Because he was in good enough shape to run five floors in the
time it took the elevator to get there and not break a sweat. Like she didn’t have enough problems in her life right now.
Oh, wait, except she did. Her brother’s blessing was a double-edged sword, conveying both approval and a challenge. What she’d thought would be a basic fact-finding mission, poking around and feeling the other company out, had turned into a full-on corporate takeover, and if she wanted to prove herself, she needed to make it work. With less than two days to pull it all together, she had to pick a team and hammer out a strategy, run all the numbers and put together an offer and a business plan to guide them through the acquisition, presuming she even got that far.
She stepped out of the elevator, head spinning, that spot between her shoulders aching.
“Ms. Bellamy.” Dane fell into step beside her, and at least he had the grace to sound a little out of breath. “About this trip.”
“We’re going to be working around the clock if we’re going to be prepared for it, I know.” Already, her brain was skipping ahead. Maybe she could steal Laura from finance for her team. Oh, and Simon, he was a must. Then it occurred to her. She stopped, pivoting on her heels to look at him. “Please tell me you have a valid passport, because if we have to get an expedited one—”
He opened his mouth only to shut it again, a flicker of guilt passing across his eyes. Oh, interesting. She filed that reaction away for later. “I do,” he said, jaw clenching.
“Good.” She started moving again.
“But do you really think it’s wise for everyone to go?”
There was a thinly veiled note of desperation to the question.
Oh. Oh. That moment’s hesitation just now, that guilt—he’d been considering lying to her, hadn’t he? He . . .
He didn’t want to go.
An ache formed right behind her temples. Why would he want to go? An all-expenses-paid trip to fucking Barcelona, oh no, what a terrible burden.
Maybe he just didn’t want to go with her.
Nine Kinds of Naughty Page 2