The Boss Man's Fortune

by Kathryn Jensen -

  "Hello?"

  "Miss Katie O'Brien, please," a deep voice intoned.

  Warmth rippled through her, restoring sensation to numb fingertips and toes at the thought of the handsome executive who had interviewed her earlier that day. His dark hazel eyes and striking face instantly came to mind.

  "Yes, this is Katie," she answered in a breathless whoosh.

  "Ian Danforth here. I forgot to inform the temp agency that you'd need to be on call weekends, as well as during the week. Is that a problem for you?"

  "I, well, I don't think so," she said, although it seemed a little odd to be expected to work seven days a week. Was that legal?

  Maybe Danforth was the kind of boss who would take advantage of her inexperience. She had hoped for some time to herself. Once she'd saved up a bit, she wanted to explore the local clubs, fun places where people in their twenties hung out when they weren't working.

  "That is," Katie added, "the agency said this was a minimum-wage position, and no one said anything about overtime pay."

  "Don't worry," Danforth said, "we compensate our employees more than fairly."

  But wasn't she, at least technically, an employee of the temp agency? Not a company employee.

  She decided to let it go. After all, this was her first job. She didn't want to make waves. If she did well in the week or two she'd be with the coffee magnate, she might then be able to find a permanent position with an even larger firm. That would be even better, because the more anonymous she remained, the harder it would be for her family to track her down.

  "All right," she said. "If I'm really needed on weekends, I can be available."

  "Good."

  When he said nothing more, she asked, "Is there anything else, Mr. Danforth?"

  "Ian," he said. "If you're going to insist upon me calling you Katie, then I'm Ian."

  "Fine," she said, considering the motives behind this last request.

  She wasn't normally suspicious of people, but she'd been around powerful men all of her life. As a Fortune woman, she'd learned to be wary when one of those men chose to cross the line between business and pleasure.

  She wasn't looking for romantic entanglements with any man whose authority or personal wealth came close to her own family's.

  "Then I'll see you tomorrow morning at eight." She made her voice as crisp and appropriately businesslike as possible.

  "Yes, of course." Ian sounded unsure, and she wondered if she'd come off just a little too imperious. She could almost hear an echo of her grandmother's tone when reprimanding a servant. Katie grimaced and held her breath. Maybe he'd guess she wasn't who she claimed?

  "Nine will be early enough," he said at last. "Be ready for a long day. There's a lot to be done." The line clicked, the dial tone returned.

  Still suspicious, Katie stared at the phone in her hand. She might be new to the working world, but she'd dropped in on her father's office enough to know that CEOs of high-profile companies didn't call temps to clarify working hours. They had staff to see to such mundane details.

  So, why had Ian Danforth called her?

  Katie sighed, all the triumph of the day fading away to worry. She'd have to be extremely careful not to blow her cover. She desperately wanted to do well, to be on her own and away from the smothering influence of her family. Away from her mother who so desperately begged her to consider marriage, although she was only twenty-two.

  Already, more than one suitor had approached Tyler Fortune, asking permission to court his daughter. But she wasn't in love with any of them, and she wasn't going to marry for less than love.

  Katie hung up the phone and opened the refrigerator door to study its contents. Eggs, milk, cheese, a cellophane bag of mixed greens. This would do for a very nice omelette and salad. She'd eat in—thereby saving money—and study the office file, maybe watch TV for an hour or so, then turn in early. She wasn't used to rising before nine in the morning, but she'd need to be up at seven if she was to have time to shower, do her hair, dress and be at her new job on time.

  Katie smiled. It wasn't going to be easy. Not any of it. But it was an adventure. Her adventure! And she'd darn well make the most of it.

  * * *

  Two

  « ^ »

  "This isn't an amusement park, Miss O'Brien."

  Katie dropped one foot to the floor and stopped the wheeled office chair from spinning. She'd arrived a little early but wasn't sure where to begin. The phone had been silent, and Danforth wasn't in his office.

  But now Ian hung in the doorway like a thundercloud.

  Katie stood up quickly, still a little dizzy. "Just testing the equipment," she said with as much decorum as she could muster.

  "The chair works," he said dryly.

  "Yes, it does … seem to." She looked down at it, trying to appear concerned about some mechanism that hadn't functioned quite to her satisfaction. "I think it will do."

  "Are you ready to get to work?" he asked. Not a hint of a smile lifted his lips or lit his eyes.

  "Yes." She cleared her throat. "Absolutely ready."

  "Good." He pointed to the computer on her desk. "Please bring up my agenda for the day. I'll also need files pulled for the coffee-bean suppliers I'm scheduled to meet with in the next few weeks. And there's everything required to make coffee in that cabinet over there. I take mine black."

  "Agenda," she repeated, nodding solemnly as he started through the door to his office, "files and coffee. Right away, sir."

  This was going to be a snap. And a wonderful learning experience, she assured herself as she settled into her well-tested chair and flicked the toggle switch that turned on the computer.

  The chair bit had been sort of childish, she admitted to herself, but fun. Life, even the working life, didn't have to be so very solemn and drab, did it?

  She waited while the PC booted up. She'd had a laptop computer since she was a child, and used one all through college. But she'd had to leave it back in Arizona for lack of a way to carry it. She'd needed clothes more.

  The desktop screen appeared on the monitor. Everything on it looked foreign to her.

  She tried to access several files, but every one of them requested a password. She couldn't recall reading anything about that in the file she'd studied last night. Katie rummaged through several drawers but found nothing that would help her.

  Her phone buzzed. Katie sat up straight and grinned at it. Her first official call! Her heart raced as she reached for the receiver.

  "Danforth and Danforth, Ian Danforth's office," she announced formally.

  "Are you planning on delivering my day's agenda sometime before the day is over, Miss O'Brien?"

  Katie gritted her teeth and glared into the earpiece of the receiver. She counted very slowly to three. "I'm having a little trouble accessing the calendar. It will take me another minute or two." She hung up.

  With a huff, she squinted at the screen. She typed a few letter/number sequences. No matter what she tried, angry amber words blinked at her: Access Denied.

  "Under the blotter."

  She looked up, startled.

  Ian leaned against the doorjamb, his suit jacket off, white shirt cuffs rolled up to reveal muscular forearms. "Gloria left access information under her blotter. Not the most secure arrangement, but she wanted to make sure I wasn't locked out of the system."

  Now that he mentioned it, she seemed to remember something about the blotter and a code. But there had been so much data in the file to absorb. And it was more than a little distracting, working in a private office with a man who looked like something off the cover of GQ.

  Ian approached her desk. "Never mind, I need the time of my first appointment now." He reached over her shoulder for the keyboard.

  "No, really, I'll do it," she insisted, trying to body-block him while prying up the corner of her blotter.

  She pulled out a neatly typed three-by-five card, but he wheeled her chair aside with her in it. "Save that for later," he grumbl
ed. "I'll bring up today's schedule. Apparently you'll need a good twenty-four hours to find it."

  Katie saw fire.

  Her rage wasn't of the puny match-flame sort. All of Savannah was ablaze.

  Rocketing out of her chair, she squeezed herself between Ian and the computer, knocking his hand aside with the well-aimed thrust of one hip. "This is my job, and I'll do it!" She spun around to confront him.

  He stepped back from their chest-to-chest face-off and scowled down at her. The man was a good two heads taller than she, outweighed her by at least eighty pounds of pure muscle, and his hazel eyes were menacingly dark.

  She didn't care. She wasn't going to let Ian Danforth bully her any more than she was going to let her family push her around.

  "Go back to your desk," she commanded. "I'll bring you a cup of coffee along with your day's appointments in ten minutes. Do you think you can wait that long?"

  He looked more intrigued than angered by her nerve. Without a word, he meekly retreated into his office.

  Katie let out the breath she'd been holding. What had possessed her to talk to the man that way? She was a temp; he could fire her on a whim! Then where would she be? The agency might refuse to place her again if she messed up her first assignment.

  But she couldn't let him just walk all over her, now could she?

  Coffee, she thought, flinging open cabinet doors and finding a drip-type coffeemaker. She'd promised the man coffee, and she could use a cup, too. She had been in such a rush to reach the office on time she hadn't eaten breakfast, although there was a nifty-looking coffee shop on the first floor. Evidently, Ian liked a steady supply close at hand, hence the in-office brewing station.

  She found a stash of D&D's brand, premeasured gourmet-coffee filter bags. Soon a fresh, steaming pot was dripping away. It smelled heavenly, and she was tempted to pour herself a cup and gulp it down before taking Ian his. But she figured she shouldn't press her luck.

  While the coffee finished up, she tapped out the keystrokes from the card and up popped his agenda for the day. She grinned, pleased with herself.

  When she entered Ian's office minutes later, carrying a tray with a tall blue ceramic mug brimming with fragrant coffee, he was standing in front of a wide expanse of glass. Beyond the windows spread the elegant old city, glimpses of blue river showing between buildings both historic and modern.

  "It's beautiful," she commented, setting the tray on his desk, then placing the neatly printed agenda beside

  * * *

  He turned to look at her. "Yes." A moment passed, and he seemed lost in thought. Then he was suddenly alert again. "My favorite time of year—the spring. What's it like where you come from, Katie?" The question was asked so casually that she didn't feel threatened.

  "Hot. Arizona in May is already summer."

  "You'll have trouble getting used to our humidity here," he said, moving back toward his desk. "Desert heat is much different from ours."

  "Yes, I suppose. I have to get to that filing now," she said quickly. She could have lied, made up something about coming from another part of the country, but that sort of information was too easily checked. She'd already decided to tell as much of the truth as possible, keep things simple.

  "The filing can wait," he said, stopping her in her tracks. "Where's your cup?"

  "I thought I'd wait until I'd given you your agenda and started the filing."

  He glanced down at the sheet she'd given him. "We're going to be busy in here for quite a while. If you want any before lunch, you'd better get yourself a cup now."

  Katie shrugged. "All right."

  She found a second mug, pale green with magnolia blossoms, and poured herself some coffee. Before adding her usual sweetener and creamer, she sniffed the dark concoction. It was deliciously fragrant but she'd never drunk her coffee black. She loaded it up, snatched steno book and pen from her desk, and returned to his office.

  Ian seemed intent upon papers on his desk and didn't look up at first. She sipped her coffee absently, opened the notebook to a clean page and awaited his instructions.

  "You ruined it, didn't you?" he said, without looking up at her.

  The cup stopped, suspended in front of her lips. "I what?"

  "You doused D&D's best with chemicals. I can smell that god-awful stuff clear across the room."

  "I like it this way," she said primly.

  He shook his head in disapproval.

  Katie straightened in her chair and took an unhurried sip. "Do your employees need your permission to choose what they eat and drink while at work?"

  Ian placed his pen on the desk, laid both hands flat over his paperwork and glared at her. "I was only trying to educate you, Miss O'Brien."

  "Katie," she said demurely, and took another sip, all the more satisfying for the knowledge she was provoking him. "This really is pretty good coffee."

  He looked as if he might be choking. "Pretty good?" he demanded, his face turning an interesting shade of red. "That's all you can say about my coffee?"

  "Well, it is. Very rich, lots of body. I might have had better."

  "I doubt that!" he roared. "We import only the very highest quality Colombian beans. And the roasting process is a secret known only to our plant managers."

  "Really."

  "Really. And if you stopped dumping garbage into your cup, you'd be able to tell the difference between excellent and pretty good."

  Now that is quite enough, Katie thought. She put her cup down on the low glass table in front of her, laid her steno pad beside it and stood up.

  Ian stared at her. "What?"

  "I think I'll leave now."

  "Where are you going?"

  "Back to Execu-Temps to request a different assignment. The working conditions here are intolerable." She started for the door.

  Before Katie could swing it all the way open, Ian had charged from his desk and dived in front of her. "What the hell does that mean?"

  She gathered up her five-foot-four supply of feminine outrage and met his angry gaze head-on. "It means, Mr. Danforth, there's a clear line between reasonable requests from an employer and interfering with an employee's personal life."

  "I was just suggesting—"

  "No, you weren't," she shot back at him, feeling heat rise up her cheeks. "You were dictating how I should drink my coffee. That isn't mentioned in the job requirements."

  "Oh, for crying out loud," he muttered.

  "It's not a little thing!" she insisted, getting more worked up by the moment.

  But she was also aware of how close they were standing. And his fingers had somehow gotten wrapped around her arm when he tried to stop her from leaving the room. She tried to put his proximity out of mind. That only made her more aware of the size and heat of his body.

  "Personal choices should be honored by other people," she stated.

  "And the way you drink your coffee is one of these choices?"

  "Yes." She gave him her best imitation of her grandmother, facing down one of her sons when she thought he'd stepped out of line.

  Ian sighed and let his hand drop away from her. "Fair enough. But will you do me a favor?"

  "What's that?" she asked, feeling a trifle meeker now that he had acquiesced to her point.

  "If you're going to mess with D&D's coffee, at least do it with quality ingredients. Then tell me what you think of it."

  She narrowed her eyes at him, but it seemed a compromise she could live with. "All right." Still, she shuddered to think what real sugar and cream would do to her figure if she got in the habit of using them all the time. "Just this once."

  "Agreed."

  She turned to retrieve her cup, but he beat her to it.

  "Let me fix it for you. Then you can tell me how it compares with your usual cup of morning mud."

  Arrogant, she thought. The man should have been born a couple centuries earlier … with a scepter in his hand. It was a wonder the woman she replaced had waited for a family emergency to jump s
hip.

  Katie followed Ian back to the outer office. He took a small carton of cream from the minifridge beneath the coffeemaker, poured a dollop of rich, thick stuff into her cup, then added a single spoonful of sugar and stirred before topping off the cup with coffee.

  "I take at least three sugars in coffee that strong," she said.

  "You won't need them. This coffee is an espresso blend, from a naturally sweet bean. You kill the flavor by adding too much sugar."

  The man was persistent, she'd say that much for him. But she would give him only her honest opinion, not empty praise just to satisfy his ego.

  "Taste it as you would a good wine," he advised.

  She took a sip and let the comfortably warm liquid settle over and around her tongue before it slipped down her throat. There was a silkiness to the coffee, a hint of spice and earth. A mist of aromatic steam rose to her face on the second sip, delighting her nostrils with a whiff of rain-forest nuttiness.

  "Oh my," she whispered after swallowing again.

  "What do you think now?" He waited, watching her expression intently. Her opinion, it seemed, mattered a great deal to him.

  "It's … why, it's wonderful. I've never had better." Although he couldn't possibly know it, her parents kept only the very finest foods and beverages in their home—much of it imported. Not until entering college had she been exposed to grocery-store coffee. In all ways, she'd truly been sheltered. "This is the product you sell in D&D's coffee shops?"

  "One of the blends, yes. It's my personal favorite."

  "I can see why." She drank heartily from her mug, holding it with both hands, never lowering it more than a few inches from her face to better breathe in the luscious aroma. "May I have another cup?" she asked as she swallowed the last of it.

  He looked pleased at her approval. "Certainly."

  "It's all right. I'll fix it this time." She tossed him a grin. "Don't worry. I won't kill it."

  He watched as she carefully followed his lead for the amount of cream then added half the sugar he had. "Now," he said when she'd taken her first sip of the fresh cupful, "I think we can get to work. That is, if you're willing to stay and slave under the whip of a dictator."