by Mia Caldwell
Lie to Me
A Contemporary BWWM Billionaire Romance
Mia Caldwell
Contents
Love Free Books?
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
About the Author
Join Mia’s Mailing List
Also By Mia
Excerpt From Undercover Billionaire Boss
Excerpt From Paris and the Prince
Excerpt from The Billionaire’s Baby Bargain
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Copyright © 2016 by Mia Caldwell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
This one is for D.
Thanks for always believing in me and my crazy dreams.
And also for my AMAZING readers, for coming with me as I share my dreams with you.
Love, Mia
Foreword
This book is an ADVANCE READER COPY intended for feedback from readers through reviews.
By reading this book you agree to provide an honest review of this story.
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If you have any comments, feedbacks or suggestions, please feel free to contact Mia at [email protected]
Chapter One
Africa…
Which is an unhelpfully vague way to set the location.
Africa is so much bigger than you think it is.
You know it’s big – that rather goes without saying – but however big you think it is, it’s bigger.
There’s no point in blithely saying, ‘Africa is beautiful’. Which bit? And there’s even less point in saying ‘Africa…’ and expecting the reader to paint themselves a mental picture – you could be talking about a city, a desert, a jungle. Anything from the Pyramids to Table Mountain.
All that having been said, when you just say, ‘Africa…’, most people think the exact same thing. They think of the vast plains; of lions, zebra and elephants; the bloated squat of the baobab tree; the savage beauty of the Serengeti. Which, as it happens, was not a million miles away from the landscape at which Zoe Blanchard was currently staring.
It was not the Serengeti specifically, she was in the wrong country for that, but, to Western eyes, the picture as she stared out of her tent was pretty much the same.
She was in fact in a national park in South Africa (the name of which is being withheld for legal reasons that will become all too apparent shortly). She was taking part in a guided, week long safari, and was currently looking out at the sun setting on the most majestic view she had ever seen in her life – the dying red light picking out the highlights of the landscape in a way that would have made Tuner or Monet throw away their brushes in embarrassment. And, on top of all that, Zoe was getting paid to be here. That she was not the envy of everyone she knew said a great deal about the personality of the person whom Zoe was paid to be here with.
Vanessa Reese knew exactly what a safari was supposed to be like. She was supposed to be decked out in white, possibly wearing one of those egg-shaped pith helmets favored by Livingstone and other British explorers, being carried on a chair supported by two wooden poles and held up by four native bearers. Behind her, there should be a long line of more native bearers, carrying her luggage (possibly on their heads), maybe an elephant or two for the heavy stuff. Beside her would stride a sunburnt British lord, with a fiery red moustache, corded muscles bulging through his open-necked shirt, and a rifle slung across his broad shoulders, so that he could protect her against vicious lions and recalcitrant pygmies.
In short, Vanessa had been expected to go on safari sometime during the 1870s, and the fact that native bearers no longer carried her travel trunk in return for a handful of shiny beads had come as a tremendous disappointment to her. Zoe hadn’t bothered to point out to her boss that if it was in fact the 1870s, Vanessa would not have been in quite the privileged position she was in at the moment.
However, the guides in 2016, who expected to be paid actual money for their time, lacked the respectful deference (not to mention fear) Vanessa had expected and which she enjoyed in the States. One of them had even called her by her first name!
Still, if Vanessa wanted respectful deference and fear then she could always turn to her personal assistant.
“Zoe!”
Zoe was startled from her admiration of the nocturnal landscape as the howl of her employer temporarily silenced the lions, hyenas and other assorted wildlife, who suddenly realized that there was something scarier than them in town. She hurried to Vanessa’s substantial tent.
“Yes, Miss Reese.”
“There are insects everywhere,” said Vanessa, as if Zoe was personally responsible for the class insecta and everything in it.
“They’re not inside the mosquito net are they?”
“No,” snapped Vanessa. “Of course not. But they are very noisy.”
“Right.” Zoe paused, not entirely sure what her boss expected her to do at this point. Shushing the bugs seemed unlikely to produce the desired result. “We are in Africa.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
It should go without saying that Vanessa was extremely beautiful – only beautiful people get to be this rude without anyone calling them on it. You had to be very beautiful indeed to be as big a bitch as Vanessa got away with being.
This was pretty much how it had been since day one of their arrival in Africa.
The trip was supposed to be a relaxing holiday for Vanessa, and she did seem to be enjoying it, but in between enjoying it she was also complaining about everything from the size of the insects (too big) to the size of the elephants (not big enough) to the color of the sunset (too much orange) to the lack of a single good sherry in the safari supply chest. All of which was apparently Zoe’s fault, and none of which Zoe knew how to fix.
“Fetch me a brandy,” said Vanessa, since the insects seemed to be going nowhere. “Think you can manage that?”
“Yes, Miss Reese.” Zoe hurried off. One of the reasons that Zoe had entered the business world, and risen swiftly to the dizzy heights as Vanessa Reese’s personal assistant, had been her desire to avoid serving drinks for living – the irony was not lost on her. Privately she rather wished that something terrible would happen to Vanessa. Nothing life-threatening of course (Zoe was not a cruel woman), just enough to reinforce Zoe’s belief that there was at least some modicum of fairness in the universe.
Although, as far as she knew, her dreams and private wishes had no effect upon reality, Zoe did have the good grace to feel guilty when, the following day, her boss was lightly trample
d by a herd of stampeding wildebeest, resulting a broken leg.
“Very funny,” observed one of the guides as Vanessa Reese was helicoptered off in the direction of the nearest hospital.
“Funny?!” Though she did not like her employer, Zoe found that a little shocking. She turned to him, her dark brown eyes widening in surprise.
“Oh, I am sorry.” The guide held up a hand in apology. “My English is – how do you say? – woefully inadequate. What I meant was: hilarious.” He laughed in a deep, bass tone, then added, “Because she is such a bitch,” by way of clarification.
And, though she did feel guilty about doing so, Zoe could see his point of view. Still, it was rather disappointing to have her own safari brought to so abrupt an end. And from a business point of view there were bound to be other implications of Vanessa Reese being so suddenly out of action. She held a position of considerable power and influence in their company and the business world was like a spider’s web; when you touched one thread, the tremors ran through it elsewhere.
Those tremors could travel across the world.
Chapter Two
“Three months!” Adam Rothberger wailed in a far less manly way than he had at first intended. “Three months,” he repeated in what he hoped was a deeper, more masculine timbre.
“Bad break then?” asked his brother Nick, who stood on the other side of the bar.
“In every sense,” said Adam. He picked up a shot of whatever had been put in front of him (he really did not care at this stage) and downed it. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Do you need her that badly?” asked Nick.
Adam let out an exasperated snort. “Haven’t you listened to a single word I’ve said?!”
Nick shrugged. He was, generally speaking, an honest man and did not like to lie to his brother. “For the first half hour I think I listened to every word. After that it began to slip. I reckon now I’m catching about one in five. In my defense, it wasn’t that interesting to begin with and you keep repeating yourself.”
“And yet you have still failed to grasp the salient points.”
Nick shrugged again. “Well, like I said: it wasn’t that interesting to begin with. I hung in there for as long as I could.”
Despite being brothers, Adam and Nick Rothberger were very different men. They shared DNA, possessed a taste for the finer things in life, and had both been heftily whacked with the handsome stick, but apart from that (and an allergy to cat hair) they had little in common.
When their mother and father had retired, ownership and running of the family business of RothCo (a substantial concern with more divisions than could be listed here without boring the reader) had been split between the pair, who became joint CEO’s. Adam had dived into it, reveling in the day to day running of the company, laying out an ambitious expansion plan to take place over the next five years. Nick meanwhile had announced that he would prefer to remain a silent partner, and bought himself a bar.
The bar was called Nick’s.
He wasn’t an imaginative soul.
Few of the people who got drunk at Nick’s of an evening would have guessed that the man wiping down their glasses and replenishing the peanuts was worth an eye-watering eight figure sum, and that was how Nick preferred it.
“Explain it to me again,” Nick said. “I’ll listen this time. Promise. Firstly: Remind me-- who’s Vanessa? What does she do again?”
Adam buried his head in his hands. “If I go grey before I’m thirty then it’s because you never help out.”
Nick shook his head. “If I strode into the office tomorrow and told you I’d decided to become an active CEO -- instead of a silent partner type, then you’d have one of your lackeys throw me out. And if I was very lucky they’d use the door rather than the window.”
“I don’t have lackeys,” said Adam. “I have minions.” The trace of a grim smile crossed his face.
“My point remains.”
Adam had to concede that it was a fair point with a great deal of truth to it, and they returned to the central issue. “Vanessa Reese is senior Vice-President of RothCo.”
“You’d think I’d know a thing like that.”
“Yes, one would.” Adam’s tone was pointed and he rolled his eyes at his brother. He continued, “She is one of the sharpest minds on the board, our best negotiator and the only person with a chance of closing the Jourdan deal.”
Nick’s brow furrowed once again. “That sounds familiar… Remind me.”
Adam bit back another cutting remark concerning his brother’s level of knowledge about where all his money came from, and continued. “Jacques Jourdan is the head of Jourdan Wines and Spirits.” He pointed at the bottles neatly arranged behind Nick’s head and glowered at him.
“Ah,” Nick perked up. “I do know who he is!” He ducked beneath the counter and produced a bottle sporting the logo of the Jourdan vineyard (est. 1812).
“Good for you,” said Adam sarcastically. “Anyway, Monsieur Jourdan is retiring and, since none of his family is interested in taking over, and since he’d quite prefer the money anyway, he’s decided to sell Jourdan Wines and Spirits.”
“And we want it?”
“Yes we want it! Of course we want it! Do you have any idea how much money this business makes? And how much our distribution contacts could add to that?!”
“No,” said Nick, honestly.
“We’re talking serious money,” said his brother. And when Adam – someone for whom ten grand was mere pocket change - said ‘serious money’, he meant serious money, money so serious that it read Kafka and wore a black polo neck. “And now we’ve lost Vanessa.” The distraught CEO downed another shot. “The only person who could seal the deal.”
Nick pulled a face. “She can’t be the only person. There must be other sharp-minded negotiators on the board. Otherwise what sort of people are you employing?”
Adam shook his head. “You don’t understand. It’s not just that Vanessa is good at her job. There are… intangibles.”
Realization dawned on Nick. “You mean Jacques Jourdan fancies her.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily go that far,” Adam hedged. “But he appreciates a certain… type of woman.” It was the most ‘PC’ way he could put it. “You’ve got to remember that this is a man who has spent the better part of his life working in the wine industry – you deal with a certain type of person. Vanessa is cultured, charming, well-educated…”
“Fit?” suggested Nick.
“Yes, alright she’s beautiful,” admitted Adam. “You make it sound so sordid. The point is; she had the right kind of beauty. The kind Jacques fancied. Matured like a fine wine. One dinner with her and Jacques Jourdan will be putty in her hands.”
“And there’s nothing that ruins a charming evening of sophisticated conversation quicker than the woman limping in on crutches?” guessed Nick.
“Precisely. And she couldn’t even limp if she wanted too. She’s stuck in her hospital bed in God-knows-where-Africa with her limbs elevated in traction.”
“How long is Vanessa out of action for?”
Adam sighed. “Three months give or take.”
“Oh, that’s what you were moaning about.”
Adam nodded. It seemed like a lifetime ago now when this conversation had started, but yes: Vanessa Reese was, according to her doctors, going to spend the next three months laid up in a private hospital bed in Johannesburg.
Which, as he thought about it, was probably as bad news for the nurses as it was for Adam.
“And there goes my deal,” said Adam, glumly. “There goes my three billion dollar deal.
Nick shook his head and whistled. “That’s a lot of money.”
“You have an uncanny way of getting right to the heart of the matter. Brilliant deduction,” snapped Adam. “Yes, Nick, it is a lot of money. It is a lot of money, even for RothCo. And I simply don’t have anyone else with Vanessa’s class, skills, knowledge or anything else. No one but her can do it.�
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But Nick shook his head. “I don’t buy it. It’s a simple business deal. You turn up, ‘wow’ the guy, write a check. Easy peasy.”
Adam held up his hands. “With all due respect Nick, I think I know a little more about making business deals than you do.”
“Well, since you’re willing to just walk away from this one without even trying, I’d say that I deserve your attention.”
Adam downed another shot, stared at Nick until the two images of him that he was now seeing resolved into one, and spoke. “Alright; what are you suggesting?”
“Has Jourdan ever actually met Vanessa?”
“No...”
Nick shrugged. “Then get someone to pretend to be her.”
Adam shook his head. “They may not have met but they have corresponded.”
“Over Skype?”
“No.”
“Facebook?”
“Does the aging head of a French Vineyard sound to you like the type of man to be on Facebook?”
“Have they ever seen each other?”
Adam considered the question for a moment, now becoming more thoughtful and less dismissive. “No. ”
“There you go.”
For a while longer Adam pondered, but then shook his head once more (immediately wishing he had not as the room started to spin). “No. Can’t be done. He knows what she looks like—He’s seen her picture on the company website. There’s no one else in the company who can look like her—even sound like her. Not imitate her voice I mean. But who could talk about wine, about opera, sailing, good food. There’s no one who can dress like her or walk like her. It’s stuff you can’t just teach. It has to be ingrained at a young age at some posh finishing school. She and Jacques had common interests. For one thing they both spoke French.”