by Rose, Carol
“Mr. Holt?” James Miller’s voice sounded uneasy and staticky as if distorted by bad cell service.
“James. You met with your board last evening?”
“Yes, we met.” Miller cleared his throat and said with a shade of aggression, “the offer’s not high enough. We’ve got assets valued at over a half a billion dollars.”
“That’s an interesting number,” Alex commented coolly. “How did you happen to arrive at that figure?”
“From our accounting firm, of course.” Miller sounded annoyed.
“Of course.” Reaching for the suit coat that hung waiting on a chair back, Alex allowed a pause. “Aren’t they under investigation?”
Dropping his feet to the floor, Bryan vacated the desk chair as Alex came around to sit down.
“Now listen, Holt,” James Miller said, his voice rising.
“I am listening,” Alex responded, opening his briefcase, “for the next three minutes.”
“Don’t be an ass,” Miller said irritably. “This is a multi-million dollar deal. There are bugs that need to be worked out.”
“Very understandable,” Alex conceded smoothly. “But I deal with bottom lines. Either you take what I offered or I go ahead with my alternative plans. The monetary amount we’ve offered stays the same. Any ‘bugs’ can be worked out with my lawyers once that issue is settled.”
“You can’t expect a corporation of this size to just rollover and play dead when you ask us to,” Miller sputtered. “We aren’t some penny-ante business. We survived the internet bust and we’re on our way back!”
“Good line,” Alex said pleasantly. “But you might want to punch it up when you try, for the tenth time, to get a bank to loan you the ten million you need just to keep your services on-line for the next twelve-months.”
“You have to offer us something more!” the man on the other end of the line said desperately.
“Goodbye, Miller,” Alex said, hanging the phone up gently.
Getting to his feet, he shoved a file back into the case and held it out to Bryan. “Let me know when they notify us they’re taking the deal.”
Bryan laughed. “There was a time when you were a little less sure of this kind of deal.”
“Was there?” Alex said, glancing over his shoulder with a smile.
CHAPTER THREE
“Wait a second. I know your position on the Millennium Tech acquisition,” Bryan said. “But what about the cosmetics deal? Do you think it’s a go? Eden will eventually agree? She’s putty in your hands?”
At the question, Eden’s image filled Alex’s mind. Her lips were soft and pliant; her body rounded in all the right places. Alex acknowledged to himself the hunger he felt for her. As to the Michele deal, he honestly didn’t see that she had many other options. No good ones, anyway.
He felt confident of a successful outcome to the deal. He could only hope to an equally successful results to the new promising relationship between them.
Alex had come to expect a fair amount of luck in his life and he saw no reason to anticipate this situation being any different, despite his uneasiness. Eden would be good with the final outcome. He’d make sure of it.
“She’s a smart woman,” he said, answering Bryan’s question. “As to how she’ll respond to our buy-out bid, technically, the jury’s still out.”
“Technically,” Bryan repeated with a wry smile. “You’re having dinner with her tonight to get her answer?”
“We are meeting for dinner,” Alex told his friend. “Hopefully, she sees our deal as her best option.”
Bryan smiled. “If she’s as discontented as we suspect, then we should be a go.”
Alex shrugged, refusing to worry about what he’d do if she told him to get the hell out of her life. “Once she’s had time to study the deal, I think she’ll see the offer as being consistent with her own best interests. We arrange a very lucrative severance package for her and she takes her resume and a fat bank account into her next job. Simple as that.”
Only it wasn’t. How did he begin to quantify the emotions she stirred in him. Business was facts and logic, this thing he felt for Eden wouldn’t be reduced to a black-and-white level.
“Did things get ugly when you talked about our interest in the company?” Bryan asked, his unease at the thought clear on his face. “I know you’ve been losing sleep over this deal with her.”
“You know I never sleep,” Alex said, shying away from a verbal admission. If he said aloud to his friend how much he’d been worrying about the relationship consequences, it was like asking for the worst to happen. “No, there was no ugliness. I never lied to her about who I am and she knew me by reputation. It wasn’t such a big leap for me to suggest using my talents to assist her in her situation.”
Bryan laughed, the sound grating in Alex’s ears.
“Assist her and assist yourself to several million dollars.”
Alex didn’t look up. “A solution that works for everyone. Like I said, Eden’s both very attractive and very intelligent.”
“Translation—she’s the kind of woman you could get seriously interested in,” Bryan pointed out.
There was a knock on the door and Alex opened it.
Rosie, stuck her head into the room again. “Your sister is on line two, Alex, and I’m running down the hall a minute.”
“Thanks,” Alex said absently, as he walked over to the desk and reached for the phone. Across the desk, Bryan seemed to sit up straighter and Alex hid his half-smile as he picked up the phone to talk to Lauren.
Razzing his friend, he said seriously, “Shall I tell her you’re here and that just the thought of talking to her makes your tongue go numb?”
“What?” Bryan said, flustered, “No—yes, no! You don’t have to say anything about me. Wait! Just tell her I said, ‘hi.’”
“You’re sad,” Alex said, pushing the button to engage the line where his sister waited to talk to him. “Hey, Lauren. Bryan says, ‘hi’. Listen, I’m going to have to come over another night. I have an important date this evening.”
His sister’s voice came clearly through the phone. “Say ‘hi’ back to Bryan and I hope your date is pretty and very friendly.”
Alex laughed at her teasing. To Bryan, he said, “Lauren says ‘hi’, too.”
He went back to his sister. “Your good wishes are always welcome.”
“The girls will miss seeing you tonight, but they know you need some grown-up time.”
“Bless their little, rough-housing souls. They’re doing okay?”
“Yes. Kelsey’s been sick and had a couple of bad nightmares last night, but she’s better today.”
“I feel her pain,” he said, his voice level. His niece’s troubled sleep wouldn’t long disturb her, he trusted, but it still drew his heart-felt sympathy.
“Yes,” his sister replied. “I know you do. How is that going anyway?”
“How is what going?” Alex asked, waving as Bryan left his office.
“You know. The sleep thing,” Lauren said, her voice exasperated at his obtuseness.
“Oh, about the same. There are good nights and other nights.”
“Alex,” Lauren’s voice grew serious. “Even if you hadn’t fallen asleep that night, it still would have happened.”
“I know, sis,” he said, “and, if I didn’t know, the therapist I saw when I was in college told me the same thing.”
“But you’re still not sleeping well,” his sister said sadly. “And you still aren’t married or even seriously involved with someone. You know you won’t let her down, whoever you finally let count on you.”
Alex laughed, appreciated her concern. His sister and her children added a lot to his life. “The sleeping is okay and I’m fine. I’ve learned to live with it…and my ‘uninvolved’ love life. I don’t want you worrying about me.”
“No,” she said, a dry note in her voice, “you never want to worry anyone.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” he disagreed, chuckling.
“Kelsey’s calling me from her room. I have to go,” she said. “Have a good time tonight and do not bring these kids a toy when you come over on Saturday!”
“I’ll try to remember that,” he said mendaciously. “Bye, Sis.”
Hanging up the phone, Alex snagged his briefcase and left his office, his mind moving ahead to the evening.
If things went in the direction he hoped between he and Eden, sleep would be the last thing he wanted to do at night.
***
Ignoring the loud thump of the phone receiver settling into the cradle, Eden leaned back in her chair, Greg’s words echoing in her head.
Alex Holt had been buying Michele Cosmetics stocks for the past three months. Three months! The bastard. So much for his pretence of caring about her and dreaming up his take-over bid in revenge for Michele’s treatment of Eden!
Feeling hot and cold all at once, Eden was glad the office had emptied out for lunch. Around her the building seemed silent, the ventilation system sighing on and off like a respirator.
Not a bad analogy, she realized grimly. If she didn’t do something fast, the company was as good as dead. With buzzards like Alex circling overhead, they’d be picked clean in no time.
In the past five years, business columnists had proffered respect at his thoroughness. He struck swiftly, encircling a weakened business with breathtaking efficiency before he administered the death blow. There had been the occasional dissenting voice on the ethics of Alex’s business, but most opinions merely acknowledged his success. Few challenged his capability to make money where others couldn’t.
Greg had uncovered the truth, along with a scattering of other financial information about Alex. Not that any of the rest mattered. The list of his donations to cancer research and hospice charities, his seats on various boards and his low-profile, big-yield fundraising for breast cancer treatment were all aspects of his financial profile.
But the fact that hit her between the eyes were those damn stock buys three months ago. Two months before he’d met her and supposedly got interested in Michele Cosmetics to help Eden.
Damn him! He’d been too good to be true! She should have known better. Usually, she could spot a player by the glint in his eye. Five years before, she’d gone out with the king of players.
She’d thought she’d learned to expect duplicity from the world around her, even as she’d decided to keep her own ethics. The fiasco with a married lover only reconfirmed that. Her brief relationship with Dave Sanders had, in fact, taught her a number of good things. Never date anyone connected with work and always be suspicious if the guy doesn’t let you know where he lived. Still, she could look back on it as a learning experience. Everyone had an agenda. She knew that and while it wasn’t her natural mode of operation, she’d learned to incorporate it into her expectation of others.
Hell, she and Dave met these days without a shadow of self-consciousness. Not that he’d stopped trying to get her back into the sack, the fool. But she’d had his number for a long time now and forewarned was forearmed.
Dave meant little to her. She even felt a kind of forbearing tolerance for the idiot despite thinking that being married to him would be a good example of hell.
Still, she usually recognized insincerity. How had she misjudged Alex so completely? He wasn’t just playing her in the dating sense, he was after her company, the lying rat.
It hurt less to think about the threat to the company. In the dating world, she’d suffered her share of disappointments, but this one with Alex hurt down to her toes. Promising relationships weren’t easy to find and she’d hoped Alex was different.
Lots of rich men gave millions to charity. The tax deduction was incentive enough. He might have a conscience when it came to sharing his wealth, but apparently that didn’t extend to how he earned the money.
Had he come to the AIDS charity event looking for her? He must have. How would he have struck up an acquaintance if he hadn’t be so lucky as to come by when she was being mugged?If that hadn’t been part of the set-up….
Eden replayed the sequence of that night over in her head. Shit! How very convenient for him to have come along right when she was being robbed. And the mugger had “dropped” her purse!
A short, hard laugh escaped her. Alex drew the line at stealing a woman’s purse, but apparently her job was fair game, the son-of-a-bitch.
Leaning her head back against the chair’s headrest, Eden briefly allowed herself to remember his kisses and the heated feel of his hard body next to hers as they danced.
He’d have been a terrific lover. She didn’t trust him, but that didn’t change the heat generated between the two of them. Still, he was just as much a threat to her as was Wendi. More really, because Alex was smarter.
What the hell was she going to do? She had to meet him in six hours, had to act like nothing was wrong, like she hadn’t confirmed her suspicions that he was a weasel. And when they met, he’d greet her with an open-mouth kiss as he pulled her into full-frontal body contact, like he always did.
Her heart rate kicked up at the thought. The guy knew how to kiss.
He would also be expecting her answer to his supposed solution to “her” problem here at work.
A grim smile eased on to her stiff face. What would he do if she said she didn’t care to get revenge? That she’d decided Michele was right, she wasn’t ready to run the company? Just the thought of saying those words made her throat close up in protest, but she could force herself to say them if necessary.
Even if Alex didn’t believe her, he couldn’t very well come out and challenge her decision. That would mean he’d have to confess and be direct about his agenda.
Damn him. Like everyone else, he had his agenda and his was a doozy.
The bitter disappointment in her chest made breathing more difficult. She hated caring so much that he’d used her.
Stiffening her backbone, Eden got up and crossed to her coat closet. Inside a small refrigerator contained her stash of chocolate milk, the electric cord slithering under the door and around to the nearest outlet. A plant hid the cord nicely. She’d never felt it necessary to share her weaknesses with the world. If nothing else, corporate life had proved that to her over and over again. Alex was doing the same.
She should have suspected him of something like this immediately when she realized who he was. Corporate raiders weren’t known for their ethics.
But he’d seemed different. Decent and honest somehow. She’d have nominated him for sainthood if she’d found out about his donations for low-income breast cancer patients without finding out he was playing her.
Silently, Eden scoffed at herself. Her ideals had died a hard death and, all the way around, this situation was shoveling the dirt on top of them.
With the chocolaty richness still soothing the back of her throat, Eden tried to calm the fury in her chest. Taking another swallow, she made herself focus. She felt battered and bruised in the cardiac region, but this wasn’t just about her heart. Alex Holt had his sights set on her company, and he’d get it, too, with the way Michele and Wendi were running things.
Damn Michele and her elderly lothario!
But what the hell was Eden going to do to prevent the death of Michele Cosmetics and her own dreams with it?
Leaning back in her chair, she took a deep breath and considered the problem. Tough situations called for tough decisions. Maybe she needed to ramp up her own ballsiness and get into the game alongside Michele, Wendi and Alex.
Reaching for the phone, she dialed Jessica’s number, her head buzzing with possibilities as she caught a sample lipstick threatening to roll off her desk.
“Jessica?” she asked when the phone was answered.
“Where have you been all morning?”
“At Greg’s mother’s,” Jessica replied. “Why? What’s up? Has that old battle axe done something else stupid?”
“No,” Eden responded, knowing her friend was referring to the woman who had been her boss and was still Eden’s. “Actually, I’ve discovered that Michele isn’t my largest problem.”
“What do you mean?” Jessica’s voice sharpened.
“Greg hasn’t called you?”
“No,” her friend said tersely. “I’ve just walked in this minute and my cell phone is dead. Why? What did he find out?”
“Alex Holt started buying Michele Cosmetics stock three months ago.”
“My God. Three months ago?” Jessica fell silent for a moment. “That’s it, then. From what Greg was telling me last night, your Alex is a barracuda. He’s very efficient and he doesn’t move on a company unless he’d pretty sure of himself.”
“He’s obviously not ‘my Alex’,” Eden pointed out grimly, “and I don’t care what the hell he’s got planned, I’m not giving up easily.”
“Well, what can you do? I mean if your uncle is such an asshole, you can’t work at his company? Unfortunately, he’s hit it right on the nose about your job potential in the cosmetics industry. I mean, that’s partly why I’m sitting home with baby food in my hair. This is a competitive biz. You’re caught in a catch-22. Another cosmetic company might be willing to hire you, but you know they’d expect you to give over on what you know about Michele’s products. They wouldn’t be as finicky as your uncle, by any means. Still, if the company goes down, does it matter?”
“No one’s as finicky as George,” Eden said, her voice strong. “But I don’t want to be part of the company going down. I’m not willing to do that to the people I’ve worked with for the last twelve years. I’m to the point that maybe I don’t mind giving Michele the shaft. She as good as promised me I’d be running the company when she retired and then she screwed me over by getting with Carl and bringing Wendi in. But I do still feel a loyalty to everyone else who works here. They’re like my family. Heaven knows, they may be the only family I have in my old age.”