Christmas at the Tycoon's Command

by Jennifer Hayward

  “I am not my mother,” she said, a raw edge to her voice. “She was larger than life, Nico. She had incredible charisma. I don’t have that kind of a story to tell.”

  “I’m not asking you to be her,” he countered. “I’m asking you to be you, Chloe. You created your own signature fragrance at seventeen that sold like wildfire. How is that not a great story to tell?”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “How is it different?” He shook his head, mouth flattening into a straight line. “This is your Achilles’ heel, I get that. You’ve never been comfortable in the spotlight. You don’t think you can live up to this image you have of your mother and Mireille, so you hide yourself away in the lab, when what you really need to be is comfortable in your own skin.”

  The oh-so-accurate assessment hit her square in the chest. She knew her weaknesses. This, however, was not one she had the bandwidth to deal with right now.

  “You would regret it,” she told him. “I am a loose cannon with the press. They start firing questions at me and I freeze. Put a camera in front of me and I’m worse. I can’t answer a question, let alone articulate a vision.”

  “You will improve. You’ll have the best training available.”

  She bit her lip. “I can’t do it.”

  “You won’t do it,” he corrected harshly. “This isn’t about you anymore, Chloe. It’s about a company we’re trying to save together.”

  “No, I can’t.” She clenched her hands into fists, the band around her chest tightening until she felt like she couldn’t breathe. “I know what I’m supposed to be, Nico. I’ve spent my life trying to live up to that. I have given you Vivre, what I know will be a smash hit. But what you’re asking of me now is too much.”

  “Why?” Harsh, implacable.

  Because if she stepped into her mother’s shoes, she would have to admit she was gone. She would have to acknowledge a pain so deep it might shatter her into pieces and she might never be able to put herself back together again. Because she was barely hanging on as it was.

  Heat lashed the backs of her eyes, swift and unrelenting. She walked unsteadily to the window, where she stood staring out at a glorious amber-and-yellow-painted Central Park.

  “Chloe,” Nico said huskily, closing his hands around her shoulders. She shrugged, attempted to jerk out of his hold, but he sank his fingers deeper into her flesh and turned her around to face him.

  “I know you can do this,” he murmured, fixing his gaze on hers. “You just have to believe you can do it.”

  The dark, sensual scent of him wrapped itself around her. An irresistible wall of heat that drew her in a way she didn’t want to acknowledge, he was overwhelmingly solid in a world that seemed to have dissolved around the edges. She knew she should look away, put some distance between them, because he was the last man on earth she should be drawn to in that way. But she couldn’t seem to do it.

  His eyes darkened. Electric currents vibrated the air between them as he lifted a hand to stroke his thumb along the line of her jaw. The tension coiling her insides snaked tighter, caging her breath in her lungs.

  Walk away, Chloe. It was the smart thing to do. Why, then, would her feet not seem to move?

  A discreet cough cut across the charge in the air. Her pulse beat a jagged edge at her throat as she stepped back, inordinately grateful for the distraction. Pivoting, she took in the elegant blonde standing in the doorway.

  Nico’s date, she assumed. Who was one of the most beautiful women Chloe had ever laid eyes on. Shoulder-length blond hair cut into a sleek bob, curvaceous figure clad in a sapphire-blue beaded dress she wore with sky-high heels, she was undeniably his type.

  Turning on that effortless charm of his, Nico asked Helene to give them a minute. Chloe turned back to face him as the blonde retreated to reception. “Your nonhot date?”

  “The president of Germany’s largest department store chain,” Nico corrected. “She has a thing for Mario Conti. He’s doing Tosca at the Met tonight.”

  “And you are solidifying that relationship.” She lifted her chin as an ancient hurt lashed her insides. “A specialty of yours.”

  His gaze narrowed, razor-sharp, as it rested on hers. “The Source Minerale deal was signed a month before my relationship with Angelique began, Chloe. So whatever your list of my faults, you can take sleeping my way to the top off it.”

  A rush of color stained her cheeks. She tugged her lip between her teeth, caught utterly flat-footed. “It was everywhere in the papers, Nico.”

  “The announcement was strategically timed to coincide with a key anniversary for Source Minerale. The deal, however, was done way before then.” His mouth curved in a mocking smile as he crossed the room to his desk. “Don’t lose any sleep over it. I’m sure you’ll find at least half a dozen of my other failings to cling to.”

  Her skin stung from the rebuke. She watched as he dumped a sheaf of papers into his briefcase. Considered this new piece of information. If Nico had not slept with Angelique to seal the Source Minerale deal just days after they had shared that passionate encounter at the Fourth of July party, it could only mean his preference for the beautiful Angelique had dictated his actions.

  A low throb pulsed inside her where his betrayal still lived. Clearly what they’d shared had always meant far more to her than it had to him, and she needed, once and for all, to realize that, instead of thinking he was something he wasn’t. Instead of imagining moments between them like that one just now that weren’t real.

  Nico snapped his briefcase shut. Set a level gaze on her. “We have a deal, then?”

  She lifted her chin. “You’re leaving me no choice. But I guess you know that.” She scooped up her things and stalked to the door. “Enjoy your evening. Apparently, Mario Conti brings down the house.”

  * * *

  Mario Conti did bring down the house in the first half of Tosca at the stately, always magnificent Metropolitan Opera House. Puccini’s dramatic story of love, lust and murder against a backdrop of the politics of soon-to-be Napoleon’s Rome was spectacular, with Conti playing the opera’s protagonist, the doomed Angelotti, to perfection.

  But Nico’s mind was on Chloe instead of the moving performance, and her high emotion as she’d stormed out of his office. Had he pushed her off the edge of the cliff with his demand she be the face of Evolution? Was it too much pressure for her to handle?

  He was also, he acknowledged, as Conti took an extended bow, annoyed with her and with himself for letting her goad him into dredging up ancient history in Angelique. Because he’d hurt her again. He’d seen it in her face. And perhaps, in hindsight, ending things like that between them might not have been the right way to go about it. But he’d been young, his emotional IQ not yet fully developed.

  His honor, however, he fumed inwardly, had never been in question. And that was what annoyed him most of all. If it hadn’t been for his honor, he would have taken everything Chloe had been offering that night. Which would have been a disaster for them both.

  The standing ovation complete, he escorted Helene to the bar for a drink. While she went to the powder room, he installed himself at the bar. Attempted to right-side his mood. But the bar was jam-packed, which left him cooling his heels with ancient memories of that night with Chloe imprinted in his head.

  A kiss in the garden as fireworks had exploded over their heads. Chloe’s silky-soft curves beneath his hands. The raging hunger of his youthful hormones as she’d returned the favor with an innocence that had nearly brought him to his knees. He’d put a stop to that soon enough, because that would have been true insanity, but he’d touched her plenty, her short, cherry-colored dress an irresistible temptation, with even softer skin to be found beneath.

  His throat went so dry he almost crawled across the bar and poured the drink himself. If he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget the sound of her cries in his ear as he’d brought her untutored body to the peak of pleasure. It had nearly unmanned him.
<
br />   He threw some bills at the bartender as he arrived with his drink. Took a sustaining gulp of the Scotch, welcoming its smooth, hot burn.

  “I didn’t figure Puccini as your thing.”

  A smile touched his mouth as Santo, his youngest brother, slid into place beside him at the bar. Dressed in a sharp black tux, he had their mother’s coloring, as light as he and Lazzero were dark. Electing to scruff up his impossibly perfect golden good looks tonight with some dangerous-looking stubble, it did nothing to make him look any less angelic.

  “Not so much,” Nico commented drily. The arts were Santo’s thing. “Who’s the lucky female? I’m assuming you brought one.”

  “Kathleen O’Keefe, a business reporter for one of the dailies.” Santo caught the bartender’s attention and ordered two glasses of wine before he leaned back against the bar, arms crossed over his pristine Armani. “We’re sitting two boxes over from you. I tried to get your attention, but you were someplace else. Who’s the hot blonde, by the way? She would have distracted me, too.”

  “Helene Schmidt, the president of Stil 049.”

  “Gorgeous and successful,” Santo murmured. “Tell me this is ending up horizontal.”

  “I don’t date clients.”

  Santo fixed him with an assessing look. “Santo Nico,” he drawled. “Mamma had the names all wrong.”

  Nico took a pull of his Scotch in response.

  “I saw your little bird the other night,” Santo said idly. “She looked...fantastic. When are you going to admit she is a problem for you, fratello? Or should we saint you now and get it over with?”

  Nico swirled the amber liquid in his glass. “She isn’t my little bird. And I took care of that problem a long time ago.”

  “You think so?” Amusement dripped from his brother’s voice. “The first step in addressing a problem is admitting you have one. Chloe is all grown up, Nico. She doesn’t need your brand of protection anymore.”

  She sure as hell did. She’d been as delicate as a wisp of wind in his office tonight. And what had he done? He’d piled more pressure on her.

  “Anyway,” Santo said with a dramatic sweep of his palm, “Kathleen gave me a piece of intel last night in bed. I wanted to pass it along.”

  “Save that for yourself,” Nico deadpanned. “I’ve never had any complaints in that area.”

  Santo’s mouth quirked. “Very funny. Kathleen is a business reporter. Her editor had lunch with Giorgio Russo last week. Giorgio spent the whole lunch giving him the background scoop on the ‘political unrest’ at Evolution. He said he has half the board in his pocket.”

  Red blazed in his head. His hand tightening around the crystal tumbler he held, he absorbed a burn of pure fury. He’d been content to watch Giorgio spin his wheels with his fruitless internal campaign to discredit him, but taking it public was crossing the line. He wasn’t worried about the board being solid behind him because he knew that they were. But if Giorgio was shooting his mouth off to journalists, it could create an aura of political instability around Evolution with the very forces that determined its future—the analysts, the market, the shareholders—worried the company would implode from the inside out. And that he couldn’t have.

  “Grazie,” he murmured to Santo. “That is good information to have.”

  Santo lifted a brow. “What are you going to do?”

  “Shut him down.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THERE WERE PRIMA DONNAS and then there was Lashaunta. The pop singer took the concept to a whole other level.

  Chloe buried her head in her hands as the diva walked off the set for the fifth time to take a phone call from her boyfriend, with whom she shared some strange kind of bizarre pseudo-addiction. From the high-end champagne she’d demanded for her dressing room to the red roses that needed to cover every surface because they put her in a good “mental place” to the incessant phone calls with Romeo, they hadn’t captured even one decent piece of footage all day.

  Given the singer went on tour for a month tomorrow, it was a problem. Chloe rubbed her palms against her temples, massaged the dull ache beginning to penetrate her skull. She must have been crazy to think she could do this. The timeline was insanely tight, with absolutely no room for miscues. If she went down in flames with this launch, so did Evolution.

  You are only as good as your supporting team, Nico had counseled in their morning meetings in which she’d done her best to behave and listen. Trust them to execute this for you. Which she did. Now if only her pop sensation would save her torrid romance for the midnight hour so she could wrap this spot up before she and Nico left for Palm Beach on Friday. Which was key because Lashaunta kicked off the campaign in the middle of November, with Desdemona following her—a one-two punch that would hopefully put her perfumes on everyone’s lips.

  Lashaunta sauntered back onto the set. Chloe took a deep breath. Walked down onto the set and took the pop singer through the concept for Be. Again. Lashaunta stared at her blank-faced. OMG.

  “Can you think of a moment in your life,” Chloe said patiently, “when you realized you had become what you were destined to be? When you let yourself be stripped down, naked, raw, to hell with what anyone else thought, because this was you, and you couldn’t be anything else but what you are?”

  The pop singer’s exotic eyes brightened. “Sure. When I met Donnie,” she said dreamily. “I mean, we are real with each other.”

  Chloe almost cried. “I was hoping for something a little more impactful than that. Not that Donnie isn’t that,” she hastily backtracked when Lashaunta eyed her, “but you know what I mean.”

  The diva pressed red-tipped fingers to her wide, passionate mouth. “Yes,” she finally said. “When I was standing on the stage at the Billboard Awards last year. I’d just sung ‘Butterfly.’ It was the craziest moment—the applause went on forever. I just stood there and drank it all in. In wonder, really, because this was just me—the girl from a tiny Caribbean island no one’s ever heard of. I knew then,” she said huskily, “that finally I’d arrived. It was full-on, girl.”

  Chloe remembered it. It had held her and the rest of the world transfixed—the moment almost religious in its intensity. “Can you please,” she said evenly, “say that on camera?”

  “No problem.”

  Chloe was an hour late for her media training session by the time she flew upstairs to her office. Her headache had, unfortunately, elected to go south, but at least Lashaunta’s spot was in the can. Which faded to a pleasant memory as her media trainer, whom she liked to refer to as her military drill instructor, pushed her through two hours of brutal interviews. Which didn’t go well because she hadn’t had time to read the prep notes and was flying by the seat of her pants.

  “Better,” said the drill instructor when she’d finished her latest effort. “But can we do it again? I’m not really feeling the passion when it comes to what you do.”

  She gritted her teeth. Felt huge sympathy for Lashaunta. She knew what she was feeling, and it was an almost uncontrollable urge to strangle her instructor to a slow and painful death.

  Head throbbing, she pulled off her mic. “No,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’m done. We can pick this up tomorrow.”

  The trainer’s mouth fell open. “We have two hours left. And you have your big interview on Friday.”

  “Then we’d better hope I improve by then.”

  She snatched up her lab coat and stormed out of her office, the crew staring after her. And walked straight into a brick wall in Nico.

  * * *

  It hadn’t been that bad, Chloe told herself a couple of hours later as she pulled herself out of the pool in the rooftop executive spa, a perk that put working at Evolution on top of every Manhattanite’s dream job list.

  Nico had been furious with her for ditching the media training session, but thankfully he’d been on his way into a meeting. And she had explained what her day had been like to her stony-faced boss.

  And who cared,
really? She grabbed a thick towel and blotted the water from her skin. She still had work to do in the lab after the break she’d decided was mandatory. She was doing her best, and if he didn’t want to see that, well, tough.

  A glass of cucumber water beckoned, along with the steam room to ease a few of the knots in her shoulders. Slinging the towel over her shoulder, she hummed a tune as she pushed open the glass doors to the luxurious cream marble space. The sight of Nico in low-slung graphite swim trunks lounging on a bench stopped her in her tracks.

  She couldn’t be this unlucky. Her pulse bounded beneath her skin as she took him in. She definitely wasn’t staying—that was for sure. But first, she needed to stop drooling over the jaw-dropping washboard abs, which seemed as if they might be a gift from heaven as the sweat poured down them. The muscles that bunched thick in his shoulders. The thighs that were so powerful they took her thoughts to places they most definitely shouldn’t go.

  He was dead to her. He had smashed her heart into little pieces and left her like roadkill by the side of the highway. She kept that thought top of mind as she lifted her gaze to his. Not his normal calm, steely gray, she registered, noting the heated flame that burned there.

  A thread of unease tightened around her chest, then unraveled so fast her heart began to whirl. So he hadn’t cooled off.

  “Enjoy,” she murmured, pivoting on her heel. “I’ve changed my mind. I think I’ll shower instead.”

  He set an even gaze on hers. “Sit down, Chloe. I think we can share the same space without taking each other apart.”

  She wasn’t actually so sure that was true.

  * * *

  Nico could have cursed Santo. Because all he could think of beyond his extreme aggravation with the woman opposite him was how amazing she looked in that swimsuit.

  You couldn’t even say it was provocative. There was too much material to the fuchsia-colored bikini for that. Which made it all the more enticing because it left so much of her slim, curvaceous figure unexposed.