Kate tried not to appear deflated. “Oh.”
“Clarice handles most of the smaller details around the office. I just make sure the business part keeps running.”
Kate bristled at the mention of her superior—or, as Kate had come to think of her, her arch nemesis. It was pure force of will that kept Kate from rolling her eyes, which was why she didn’t have any left over to stop her mouth from running. “No wonder everything feels so stiff. We’re all walking around inside one of her stilettos.”
Her employer appeared to be biting back a smile, his blue eyes twinkling mischievously. He considered her, standing in his office in her pencil skirt and white button down blouse. “Clarice can be a bit of a...”
“Ballbuster?” Kate supplied before her brain could tell her mouth that that was an incredibly stupid thing to say to her employer. There seemed to be a lot of miscommunication between her brain and mouth today.
Kate waited for the reprimand to come—surely she had finally crossed the line—but was pleasantly surprised when Blaine merely laughed.
“Yes,” he admitted with a smile that showed two gorgeous dimples and crinkled his eyes charmingly. “I couldn’t have said it better myself. But Clarice is still the best at what she does. I’m sorry that you’ve gotten off to a rough start with her.”
Pushing back a lock of thick, wavy hair that had escaped from her clipped back tresses, Kate found herself smiling back at him. “It was my fault. I should have been more careful with what I was doing.”
Blaine merely waved a large hand dismissively. “This is only your second day. You’ll adjust.”
Kate cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, you called me in for coffee.”
An amused look crossed his features. “Yes, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Of course.” Kate gave him a curt nod, then turned away from him, heading out the door. As she did, she had the odd sensation of him watching her go.
She returned in only a few minutes—after checking to make sure her tape recorder was working properly—carrying a cup of coffee with two lumps of sugar and just a hint of creamer. She had filled the mug a little too high in her haste to get back into the office and now it threatened to spill over the lip.
Walking slowly to be careful, Kate silently decided that heels were a terrible idea. Between trying to keeper her balance and not tip the mug, she was using what felt like all her brain power. That was the excuse she was going to use to explain what happened next.
She came around the side of his desk so that she wouldn’t have to lean over it to place it beside him. She was just going to place it on his desk, but he ended up reaching out for it instead. It was hot, she was holding it by the handle and didn’t want him to burn himself—that would not have been a good mark to her job performance—so she ended up jerking it the wrong way. And promptly spilled its contents all over his shirt.
“Oh god,” she muttered, horrified.
Immediately, she pulled out several tissues from a box sitting on his desk, then leaned over to try desperately clean off his shirt. She used her left hand to balance by placing it on his armrest, while the right hand tried to clean up the mess.
It was useless. She could already see that the white material was turning a light brown color, becoming transparent as it soaked up the coffee. Beneath it she saw the outline of his abs and as her hand continued to frantically dab at the spot, she felt how hard they were.
At this point, she knew it was useless, but she continued to dab at him. Her movements were no longer frantic, though, but lingering and soft. His muscles flexed under her touch and she felt more than heard his sharp intake of breath. Heat began to spread through her face and down her neck. She looked up to apologize—again—but when she caught his eyes, no words could escape her mouth.
They had become a brilliant blue, almost flashing, and in their depths was a sharp heat.
Her breath caught. All those features she had noticed earlier suddenly seemed far more appealing, more intense, now that she considered them with that gaze.
“Ms. Kaufmann,” he murmured, his voice so deep it was more of a vibration through her body than a sound in her ears.
“Kate,” she said before thinking.
He smiled. It did nothing to soothe the intensity in his eyes. All it did was make him look hungry.
“Kate. Would you be so kind as to get me another shirt?” His gaze dropped to her lips, her neck... “There should be several in the closet outside.”
“Of course.” She could have killed herself for how high pitched her voice sounded. “I’ll... I’ll go do that. Now.”
With a deep breath, she straightened herself and walked as quickly as she could in her heels. This time, she knew his eyes were locked on her retreating form.
Shirt, shirt, shirt, she thought to herself over and over again, trying to focus. It was easier once she left the office, his presence no longer overwhelming her entirely. But her fingers still tingled and her skin felt like fire where his eyes and grazed over her.
Shirt, she reminded herself.
She looked in the closet outside the door and sure enough there was a stack of pearly white, perfectly folded dress shirts. Kate grabbed one off the top, assuming it was the appropriate size, and went back to the office door. She paused and fixed her skirt, her shirt, her hair before pushing open the door and walking in.
Only to stop immediately.
There stood Lucas Blaine, six feet three inches of what she decided was gorgeously formed male, shirtless. His smooth, naturally tanned back was towards her, his defined shoulders and arms a little tense.
At the sound of the door, Blaine turned and revealed his cut chest and abs. His slacks were belted almost on his hips and the finest trail of golden blonde feathered out beneath his belly-button.
When Kate finally managed to pick her jaw up off the ground, she walked on unsteady feet towards him. She stopped a fair distance from him, almost afraid to get too close. Her arm extended as far as it could, offering him the clean shirt.
His blue eyes had found her green ones again. The intensity in them hadn’t faded in the least.
“Thank you,” he told her and his voice momentarily made her forget how to breathe.
“Of course,” she whispered, then turned and got the hell out of there as fast as she could.
Chapter 3
Alone in her apartment after her second day at the Blaine corporation, Kate found herself more determined than ever to find what she needed and get this story done—fast. After her first encounter with Lucas Blaine she realized that she couldn’t waste time trying to get on anyone’s good side. Especially Blaine’s.
An image of his bare sculpted chest flashed through her mind and she had to forcibly push it away.
She had to keep her personal attraction to him in check. It wasn’t worth her career. In all likelihood, whatever heat was flashing in his eyes that day would fizzle and die not long after she threw away everything in her life for him.
“Not that I would ever do that,” she mumbled to herself.
Grabbing her tape recorder, she played back what she recorded in her boss’s office earlier in the day. She had been right in guessing it was French he’d been speaking. Making some quick notes of what he’d been saying, she spent most of the night translating it.
Unfortunately, when it was all said and done all she discovered was that he enjoyed traveling to Paris and hoped he would be able to make the trip again to further engage with clients located there. Not to mention he loved their food.
Feeling a slight letdown, Kate shut down her laptop and laid down for the night. She would have to find something more concrete tomorrow.
“I need to get into his office.”
* * *
Kate didn’t have any luck the next day. It turned out that Blaine had a meeting half-way across the country and would be gone for just shy of a week. At first, Kate had been hopeful that this would be her opportunity to get into his office to snoop around
without him noticing.
Then she ran into Clarice.
“Mr. Blaine will be out of the office for the next six days,” she explained in that brisk way of hers. “In that time, I have a list of tasks that you need to perform. The completion of said tasks will determine whether or not you will be able to continue working for Mr. Blaine.”
And that’s how her week from hell started. Kate still had hope that maybe she could find what she needed from Blaine’s office—it wouldn’t matter then if she was fired or not—but all of Clarice’s tasks required her to be driving all around the city doing errands. Every time she came back into the office, Clarice would have something new for her. She was never left alone long enough to even try to sneak in.
After stopping by Lorenzo’s, a high-end dry cleaner, to pick up several incredibly expensive suits, Kate went back to the office to drop them off and realized that it was the end of the work day.
“Well,” Clarice said, her lips pursed in that lemon juice way. “It looks like you’ll be staying with us another day still.”
The rest of her week continued like that. Every day, Kate found herself coming home exhausted. She would stay up a little bit doing research on Blaine, but she couldn’t find anything directly useful.
Mostly, she discovered that he was an entrepreneur, starting a small business when he was only nineteen and selling it when he was twenty-three, then diving back in to work his way into a senior management position at another corporation. By the time he was twenty-five he had managed to buy enough stock in the company to take it over. It was renamed Blaine Enterprises and supposedly cleaned up its act.
There were rumors out there that he dealt in underhanded deals with everyone from the mafia to the Chinese black market, but there was never any evidence to support the claims. In the end, only a handful of lawsuits were presented against Blaine and all of them were dropped.
Blaine always came out squeaky clean. And if that wasn’t enough to discourage her, she found that he was also an active participant in almost a dozen charities, most of them having to do with children. His name was plastered on at least two libraries and one hospital.
If the man looked any better on paper, they’d have to give him his own portrait on American currency.
Exhausted, Kate sat back in her chair, staring at a deliberately posed photograph taken for a cover of Billionaire. He wasn’t smiling, but his lips still had that gentle curve in them that suggested he wanted to and the brilliant blue of his eyes on the screen couldn’t come close to what they were in person.
“Damnit,” Kate said to herself, not for the first time. “I’ve got to get into his office.”
Blaine would be in the office the next day and Kate hoped that her tormenter, Clarice, would be busy enough that she would give Kate a chance to do her real job.
Kate’s cellphone rang, lighting up and showing her editor, Peterson, calling. She let out a groan. The last thing she wanted to do was explain her progress.
“How’s it going?”
“Nothing yet, but I—”
“Nothing. Jesus Kate,” he said in a gruff, agitated voice. “If this turns into another fiasco, you’re through. Forget about journalism, no one will take you after this, not even if they wanted to. God knows I’d keep you, but there’s no chance with the kind of reputation you’d have.”
“I’ll break this, Pete,” she said fiercely—mostly to hide her fear. “Everyone’s got secrets and the fact that these are buried so deep only means that they’re dirtier than everyone else’s. I’ll crack this story. I just need some time.”
She heard him sigh. “You’ve only got three more weeks, Kate. We can’t sit on it any longer than that.”
There was a click. He’d hung up and it was for the best. There wasn’t anything else to say after that.
* * *
The following day was a Friday. Blaine had spent the majority of the workday in his office having phone conferences with people from everywhere: Paris, Tokyo, London. And Kate didn’t get to listen to any of it. Blaine hadn’t called her in for so much as a cup of coffee—though in all fairness, after the last time it was hard to blame him.
Still. Last week he had been practically undressing her with his eyes. Now he didn’t even call her over the intercom?
And while Kate spent the entire day convincing herself it was purely a sense of disappointment at not getting a crack at her story, even the back of her own mind told her it was something else. She had wanted him to call her in, attraction and lust shining in his eyes. Instead, he all but ignored her.
“He’s not ignoring you,” she muttered under her breath, though there was no one in the room. “He’s just a corporate CEO busy running a company.”
It made her feel a little better.
Finally, the end of the workday rolled around. Kate was typing away on her computer, responding to inquiry e-mails, when Blaine came out of his office. He was carrying a briefcase and glancing at his watch as he closed the door behind him. His long, brisk stride propelled him across the floor quickly and efficiently, but he paused at Kate’s desk.
He glanced at her, seeming to think something over. Kate did her best to simply finish her e-mail as he stared, then look up with a bland smile on her face. That smile nearly shattered when she saw his blue eyes again. The flickered and shone and she thought again that he looked hungry.
“G-goodnight Mr. Blaine,” she finally said, cursing herself for stuttering.
He gave her a curt nod, then continued his way down the hall towards the elevators, calling over his shoulder, “And to you, Ms. Kaufmann.”
When Kate heard the ding of the elevator and the sound of closing doors, she finally got up from her desk. She had seen Clarice depart almost half an hour earlier, unusual for the workaholic, so Kate was pretty sure she was in the clear.
Cautiously, Kate got up from her desk, checking down the hall to make sure no one was coming. She hastily grabbed several documents off her desk—just in case she got caught—and approached Blaine’s office. With a deep breath, she pushed opened the door, half-expecting it to be locked with an alarm or something.
“Guess not,” she mumbled. She slipped into the office, careful to close the door behind her and went immediately to the filing cabinets lining the left wall.
The first one opened without any trouble, revealing rows of thin folders labeled and alphabetized. She went through them as quickly as she could, but none of them looked very useful. Mostly they were just memos and notes, nothing like receipts, contracts, or ledgers. That would have been a goldmine.
Kate tried the other drawers next, but they were all locked. She pulled out the bobby pin that had held up her mass of brown hair, letting it tumble over her shoulders. With a few curses and several minutes of struggling, Kate managed to get the second drawer open.
Only to find that it was empty.
“Damnit,” she cursed to herself.
She glanced at the labels and realized they must have been filled with documentation for foreign clients. They were listed by last name: Hashimoto, Barineau, Bastian, Fredricksen, and on the list went. Kate took out her smart phone and snapped a few quick pictures of the file headers, planning on looking them up later that night.
Kate took the time to pick one of the other locks, but found that it was the same thing. File folders with labels and nothing in them. Suddenly, she had the sinking suspicion that Blaine had recently gotten rid of a lot of his documentation—and fast. The question then became, why?
Moving away from the file cabinets, Kate went to Blaine’s desk. She started opening desk drawers, searching for anything that might be useful.
“Come on, come on,” she muttered as she looked through paper after paper.
Her hands finally drifted over a large folder titled Mortensen Merger. Mortensen was an old man now who had built an empire in the shipping industry. His son was in line to take over within the next five years, but hadn’t shown much devotion as far as work was concer
ned. His playboy attitude was all over the papers on a regular basis, though.
It was impossible to say whether or not this deal was dirty, but Mortensen Sr. would never merge or sell his company, and Mortensen Jr. was a hot mess with too many Ferraris at his disposal. The file was heavy enough that Kate wanted a more thorough look at least. Especially since it was the only one she’d come across thus far that wasn’t missing altogether.
She started flipping through it and snapping photos, realizing that there was no way she could take this out of his office without him noticing. And if it turned out to be a bust, she would be fired with no way to continue her investigation.
Kate was about half-way through the file when she heard the doorknob turn. Eyes wide, she flipped the file closed and straightened up just as Lucas Blaine walked into his office.
The moment his eyes laid on her, he froze. “Ms. Kaufmann, what are you doing here?”
Clearing her throat, she indicated the file she had brought in with her, haphazardly thrown down on his desk. “I... I just came across a document that required your signature, that’s all.”
He began to slowly walk farther into his office, graceful and predatory. “And you thought to wait until I had left the office to bring me this document?”
Kate did her best to keep her cool, to not let him intimidate her. “I was leaving when I found the papers,” she answered smoothly. “I knew you had already left, so I thought I would leave them on your desk for you to address in the morning.”
Blaine continues to move steadily closer to her. He comes around the desk, eyes never leaving her face, and comes to stand only inches from her when he asks, “If these papers were so urgent, you could have called my cell. If they could wait until morning, why bring them to my office while I was gone?”
Panic filters into Kate, but it isn’t the only thing she’s feeling. With Blaine this close, she can feel the heat emanating from him. She can sense the tautness of his muscles. She can smell the light scent of his cologne, a musky aroma that mixed with his personal scent to become heady and full.
Exposing the Billionaire (Corporate Affairs, Book #1) Page 2