Executive Perks
Angela Claire
Virginia Beckett had always known she’d run the family business. Ivy League degrees and a flawless pedigree prepared her for it. So when businessman Aaron Winston buys a stake in her company and threatens to launch a takeover, she plans to fight him off with every Wall Street lawyer she can buy. Fight his corporate advances, that is. His personal ones, she’s not so sure about.
Aaron Winston plays hardball. How else could an orphan from the Bronx end up with a successful business and boast-worthy bank account? He doesn’t plan on letting one corporate princess’s disdain for his methods get in the way of the deal, no matter how sexy she is. Although he wouldn’t mind removing that silver spoon and putting her luscious mouth to better use.
When a dead body ups the ante in their corporate war, Aaron and Virginia join forces in a trek that leads the unlikely lovers from fast-paced Manhattan to bucolic Connecticut to an isolated island off the coast of Oregon. Through it all, they learn nothing is more deadly than desire.
Ellora’s Cave Publishing
www.ellorascave.com
Executive Perks
ISBN 9781419938818
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Executive Perks Copyright © 2012 Angela Claire
Edited by April Chapman
Cover design by Caitlin Fry
Photography: Daniel Nagy, Yun Acurs, Nejron Photo/Shutterstock.com
Electronic book publication January 2012
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Executive Perks
Angela Claire
Prologue
“Have you ever heard the expression ‘I want her tit in a wringer’ or words to that effect?”
Phillip Carstairs cast an annoyed look at the disembodied voice behind the theatrically embossed silk screen, wondering if this could get any weirder. First the guy, whoever the hell he was, insisted on meeting him in this hole in the wall in Chinatown and then he hid behind a screen with a voice distorter and quoted Richard Nixon. Really. It was almost beyond what a respectable investment banker would do for fifty thousand dollars for an hour of his time. And Phillip would do just about anything for fifty thousand dollars for an hour of his time—unless it was illegal, of course. That cost more.
“Yes, I believe I have heard that expression.”
“Good. That’s the amount of pressure I need exerted in this situation.”
“I’m still a little foggy as to what you think I can do. I don’t really have a relationship with either of the parties you mentioned in your email.”
The email in question had magically disappeared from Phillip’s screen scant seconds after he had opened it. But it was there long enough for him to see the names of the two rather well-known business persons, the time and date of this meeting and, most importantly, the reference number for the fifty-thousand-dollar deposit into his account.
“For now, I simply need you to arrange a deal, Mr. Carstairs.”
“That’s what I do.”
“You’re to approach the gentleman I mentioned with an offer he can’t refuse.”
Great. Now the guy was quoting The Godfather.
“There will be made available to this gentleman a block of the privately owned stock of a certain company owned by the other aforementioned party.”
Whoever this guy was, he had to be a lawyer.
“The name and other particulars of the seller are in an encrypted email on your BlackBerry. Please read it as soon as you leave here and commit it to memory. These details will not be accessible by any other means.”
“I’m game on approaching Winston, but why would he bite? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind doing it, though frankly I wouldn’t sic him on my worst enemy.”
“Which is of course the point.”
“Oh yeah, the tit-wringer thing. But what does Winston get out of it? He’s a shark, all right, but there has to be a little blood to get him in the water. Or else the fish has to come to him and I don’t see that happening. This little fish is pretty self-sustaining.” He dropped the metaphor. “BFD is locked up tight. As private a company as there could be.”
“You let me worry about the details. This is all I need from you right now. I look forward to seeing the fruits of your labors. And rest assured there will be additional compensation.”
The waiter who had initially showed him in to the back room of this Chinese restaurant mysteriously reappeared, ready to show him out again. Phillip nodded. Additional compensation—that’s all a businessman like him needed to hear. What did it really matter who this disembodied voice was? He did wonder, though, what the hell Virginia Beckett had done to piss him off.
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Chapter One
Aaron Winston scanned the room dispassionately. The same old cast of characters. Many of them he knew by name, but the rest he knew by type—the preppie investment bankers; the anxious lawyers; the monotone accountants. Most were men, he noted absently. But the few women present fit their mold just as neatly as their professional brothers. Aaron’s attorney, Rye Kinsey, pushed his perpetually slipping glasses back up on his nose and ran one hand through his riot of light brown curls. The plush mahogany conference room in the offices of Rye’s firm, fifty-eight floors above the Manhattan skyline, buzzed quietly with the low level of activity that preceded the commencement of a business meeting. “And so I said to Tammy, what the hell do we need a slate roof for, for God’s sake? What am I, made of money?”
Aaron listened with half an ear. For all the fees he paid Rye, the guy could afford a slate roof for twenty houses. Perpetually claiming a rich man’s version of poverty was annoying. Aaron had known what it was like to be poor, really poor, in a way that nobody else in this room likely did. It made him distinctly unsympathetic to Rye’s discourse on married bliss with his wife Tammy, the errant spendthrift.
He stood up abruptly. “Is there a vending machine around here somewhere?’
“Why? I can have whatever you want brought in.”
“Just point me in the right direction. I want to exercise my legs before we get started.”
* * * * *
Virginia Beckett stretched, crossing her arms in an arc above her head, her long blonde hair swirling from side to side as she began to roll her neck from shoulder
to shoulder. It was a futile attempt to rid herself of the tension that had lodged at the base of her neck from the moment Aaron Winston had come into her life.
For as long as she could remember, Virginia had assumed that she would take over Beckett Family Delicacies when her father retired and run it until she was ready to retire. Her father’s unexpected death had tragically sped up the process, but she certainly was not going to let Aaron Winston prematurely end it by swallowing her company. It wasn’t about wealth or security or even pride—it was about identity. She was the head of BFD first and anything else—even a woman—second.
Which might explain why she hadn’t had a date in God knew how long.
Virginia scanned the soda offerings in the cafeteria vending machine. Diet Coke being her particular poison, she slipped two dollars into the slot and made the selection.
She had agreed to meet Winston and his troop of lawyers ostensibly to get some indication of his intentions, not that she didn’t already know them. Nobody paid that kind of premium for a minority stake in an essentially private company. She fully expected to be screwed, Wall Street style, by one of the best corporate raiders in the business—unless she could figure a way to get him to back off. Making a pit-stop in the cafeteria while the rest of her entourage went directly to the conference room was just putting off the inevitable. She reached for the can of Diet Coke.
“I know we can come to an agreement.”
The deep voice behind her startled her and she dropped the can. When she turned around, she recognized Aaron Winston. From his words, he clearly recognized her as well.
He picked the can up from the polished linoleum floor. “I’d advise you not to open that for a while,” he said as he handed it to her. She noticed that his eyes were a very dark blue, an interesting contrast to his black hair. Although she had seen him at a function or two, across a crowded room, she had certainly never been this close to him and was momentarily distracted by the blue eyes, the long lashes.
She looked away. “You’re full of suggestions for me, aren’t you?”
His mouth slanted up, head cocking to one side, and he leaned a little toward her and smiled, teeth white against his faint tan. “You don’t know the half of them.”
The forwardness of it, given the context, annoyed her.
“Nor do I want to,” she answered stiffly. For all she knew, there might have even been a double-entendre in there somewhere, although maybe she was getting paranoid. “I agreed to meet you because I want to put an end to this nonsense. But I don’t intend to cut some kind a deal in the back alley, er, cafeteria, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t run my business that way.”
“I’m quite aware of that, Miss Beckett. Your business is very well run, especially since you took over from your father. That’s what attracted me to it in the first place.”
“You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t find it a compliment to be taken over.”
She knew she was being surly, but she didn’t care.
He leaned casually against the vending machine. “How do you know I’m proposing taking you over?”
“An educated guess.”
He seemed to be studying her and when his black lashes flicked down, she got the most bizarre sensation. It was somewhere between outrage that he might be checking her out and a visceral excitement at it. Jesus, she was getting pathetic. She really had to break down and go out on a date once and a while. Once this was all over, of course.
“Well, I’m not going to be coy with you, Miss Beckett. I don’t operate that way.”
“No, nothing coy about you. Just the old sledgehammer.”
“Look, can we chill out?”
She warmed to the slightly annoyed tone. Those intense blue eyes were focused squarely on her face now. Good, she’d gotten his attention.
“I’m not interested in chilling out, Mr. Winston. I’m interested in making you go away.”
“Why are you so anxious to get rid of me?” he asked softly.
He was edging closer to her—how tall was he, anyway?—and she unknowingly moved backward toward the soda machine. “Look, Mr. Winston, getting your hands on that stock was an anomaly. It should not have happened, but nothing like that will happen again. I can promise you that. You’ll have paid a great deal of money for something that will never be anything more than a powerless minority voice in a family owned company. So why don’t you just name your price and get the hell out of my company.”
Clutching her can of cola as if it might prove to be some kind of weapon, Virginia Beckett looked royally pissed off. It didn’t exactly surprise him. Most of his targets were at first. So he knew that he should stay away from her for now and let her cool off. No good could come out of any one-on-ones between them at this point. But when he’d recognized her in the cafeteria, it had seemed like fate and he hadn’t been able to resist approaching her. For one thing, he was surprised by how sexy she was in person, with dark blonde hair and big gray-blue eyes, not to mention a killer body. Full, high tits with mile-long legs. They didn’t capture that kind of detail on the cover of Fortune. It made him half regret they weren’t meeting under friendlier circumstances.
Unfortunately, he’d already dropped a hefty amount into her company and wasn’t willing to kiss off the investment just yet. He knew what he should do was present her with the solution he had come up with, or march back to the conference room and present it to her and her lawyer. But he couldn’t resist teasing her first. Something about the uptight corporate exec vibe she was giving off made him want to for some reason.
“Any price?”
Virginia visibly relaxed, smiling smugly, and stood her ground, no longer inching away from him. “Greenmail is a dirty word these days,” she said, referring to the practice of certain corporate raiders of threatening to take over a company to extract a bribe from management to go away. “Just be careful not to get too greedy.”
Aaron flashed a gaze down her body, the gray silk snug against her tiny waist and the high curve of her breasts hidden by the demure neckline.
How about fucking you? Is that too greedy?
For one terrified second, he was afraid he had uttered the crude, completely inappropriate words out loud. He froze.
Since he was still standing and hadn’t been belted one, he assumed he hadn’t.
Instead he said, “You seem pretty fond of BFD and I’m going to assume it’s not for the same reason most CEOs cling to their jobs, namely for the fat pay packages and petty little fiefdoms.”
“For the sake of the civility of our negotiations, I’m going to pretend that you didn’t say that,” she murmured icily.
For half a second, he was tempted to say, “Good, then you can pretend that I didn’t do this either.”
He’d place his hands on her shoulders and gently nudge her back against the soda machine, then close the space between their bodies, feeling the luscious length of her against him, and before she could react, he’d kiss her lightly, his tongue tracing her soft, surprised mouth. The can she had been clutching would drop with a clatter to the floor and he’d move his hand down to her ass.
That’s when the slap would undoubtedly come, probably as hard as she could possibly make it, given her mood.
It would almost be worth it, though.
He cut short his daydream and smiled faintly. Smutty fantasies usually didn’t overtake him in the presence of business associates, not to mention about them. He chalked it up to surprise at how attractive she was.
“You didn’t hear me out. I said I’m assuming you’re not clinging to the independence of your company for those reasons. I’m assuming you have some kind of sentimental attachment because your family founded the company.”
“I wouldn’t call it sentimental. I’d call it a sense of value, of purpose, that you, with all your voracious gobbling up of companies, could never understand.”
“Whatever. I wouldn’t want to interfere with that. What I’m trying to say here is that I�
��ve thought about how we could make this a win-win situation and I’m willing to have you stay on as CEO of BFD. That’s a concession I almost never make. And if you agree to the merger to make BFD a subsidiary of Winston Enterprises, I’d be willing to give you an ownership stake in Winston as well as a hefty cash payment. Maybe even an operating role in the bigger company if it works out.”
“My, my, be still, my heart.”
He didn’t know what he’d expected, but she hadn’t even thought about it. In his book, that intransigence made her less than the businesswoman he’d thought she was. He found himself feeling a little less warm toward her.
“Again, no thanks, Mr. Winston. I meant what I said. BFD is my family’s company. It’s the only one I’m interested in running and I’m not interested in running it with any interference from any parent company or from you. If I don’t want you as a stockholder, what makes you think I’d want you as a boss?”
“As long as you make your numbers, you wouldn’t have any interference from me.”
“It’s all about the bottom line with somebody like you, isn’t it, Mr. Winston? Not people, not heritage—”
This was rapidly getting more heated than he’d intended. He didn’t back down from the argument, though. He rarely did. He was glad a quick glance around confirmed the cafeteria was empty. “I don’t know what people you’re talking about, but if you mean stockholders, mine are damn happy, thank you. And no, I don’t have a heritage to worry about. I made what I have. I didn’t inherit it.”
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