“Stop this car.” She pounded on the glass that separated them from the driver.
“All right, calm down.” He pulled her hands back from their pounding. “You don’t have to cause a scene.”
The condescendingly placating words seemed to calm Virginia instantly. Undoubtedly, she had never in her life been cast as the hysterical female.
“Fine,” she said quietly. “I kissed you and let you, ah, you know.”
You know? Christ, what were they? In high school?
“I guess in your book that involves some promise to sleep with you.”
“Well, what was the point of it otherwise, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Maybe I was softening you up because I thought it would help me get my stock back.”
Now that was an interesting idea. Aaron watched the beautiful blonde with fresh skepticism.
So maybe she wasn’t shy or caught unawares or otherwise committed. Maybe she had her own agenda. Maybe she was just a hell of an actress trying to extract her business end by any means. It struck him as laughable that she had gone so quickly from accusing him of trying to seduce her for his own sordid business plans to evidently trying the same thing on him. Well he had never let a woman get the best of him in the boardroom or manipulate him in the bedroom. And he wasn’t going to break both rules in one fell swoop. Still, he appreciated being treated to that masterful performance, her arching her hips and moaning under him as she came. Maybe she wasn’t so much of a girl scout after all. If that was her game, though, she would certainly have to come through with more than a make-out session, however much it whet his appetite.
“You miscalculated, then, honey. Foreplay, no matter how good, doesn’t do much for me. Now an actual fuck, if it’s done very skillfully, would go a lot further. So just let me know when you’re willing to fuck me for the stock and maybe we can talk.” He leaned over to instruct his driver through the intercom to stop the car.
An abrupt slam on the brakes brought Virginia tumbling toward him again. He caught her, but then pushed her away. “I’m going to start thinking you mean it by the third or fourth time you do that.”
“Please! You probably tell your driver to slam on the brakes as some kind of sleazy trick to pitch women in your lap.”
“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t.” He pressed on the intercom again. “Jesus, Ralph, what’s the problem up there? We’d like to get there in one piece.”
“Sorry, Aaron,” Ralph responded. “Some clown keeps getting in my way.”
“Just slow down, then. We’re not in a hurry.”
“Speak for yourself,” she muttered.
The slam on the brakes this time didn’t hurl Virginia, who was in the process of fastening her seat belt, into him. With shock, he saw it was hurling her into the shatter-proof glass separating them from Ralph. And he couldn’t stop it.
Virginia thrust her hands out in self-defense at the last minute, lessening, but not quite preventing, the blow her head took from the gray glass, which thankfully did not break at the impact. The glass, that is. Her head felt as if it might have. She wasn’t sure if the crash she heard came from the Manhattan streets beyond their doors or from her own banged skull. She sucked in her breath and held one palm up to what was most certainly going to be a nasty lump, falling back against the seat.
She heard Winston swear, felt the car still swerving, and then they were at a dead stop, horns blaring all around them.
“Christ, I’m sorry about that, Virginia.” He leaned over her, gently tugging her hand away to lightly probe her head. “Let me feel. That’s going to hurt,” he observed.
“It does already.”
His long fingers moved to her chin, lifting her face up toward him, again with a surprising gentleness. “Let me see your pupils. No, don’t close your eyes or look away. I need to see if they’re dilated.”
Apparently satisfied that they weren’t, he released her chin, at the last second running the tips of his fingers along her cheek. She shivered, interpreting it as comfort, however he meant it. With horror, she realized she was on the verge of tears. Her head was pounding and she had never been very brave about pain. Forget about that “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” crap. Pain—not that in her pampered existence she’d ever had that much of it—always made her just want her mama, who was long dead. Ridiculous for a grown woman. She felt inexplicably alone. And scared for some reason. Maybe car crashes did that to a person. She’d never been in one.
She looked at Winston tentatively, her hand going back up to the bump on her head, her lower lip quivering.
“Poor baby,” he murmured, looking down at her.
It was just the right thing to say. Not because it was sympathetic, which it undoubtedly was. If someone else—one of her sisters, for example—had been the one to offer those words at this moment, the sympathy of it would’ve made her burst out in tears. But with this corporate raider, it brought her back to herself. Or to her hard-as-nails CEO self anyway.
Yes, just the right thing to say, though probably not for the reason he thought.
She dropped her hand and sat up straight, ignoring the flash of pain that shot through her temple.
“I’m fine,” she said briskly.
He looked at her tentatively and then nodded. “Okay. You should still get yourself checked out by a doctor.”
Even the soundproof limousine couldn’t keep out the uproar of the crowd surrounding the car. She wondered what damage the accident had done other than to her own too-soft head.
Winston must have been thinking the same thing, as he surveyed the scene of onlookers outside the window.
“Listen, about what we were…ah,” he sounded uncharacteristically hesitant, “discussing before all this.”
At least the throbbing in her head muted her embarrassment a little. So there was that. Besides, he wasn’t even looking at her, still gazing at the turmoil outside the window.
“I was just pissed off. I wasn’t thinking with my head. Not my big one anyway.”
“It happened very fast,” she muttered, knowing it was a lame excuse.
“I aim to please,” he said with a wry little glance her way.
When she would’ve taken offense again—assuming she could through the ache in her head—he held up a hand to ward it off. “No, I know what you mean. It was, ah, pretty explosive. It took me off-guard too. And when we didn’t, ah, you didn’t want to, ah—”
“I know what you mean.”
“Well, again, I was just pissed. But if there’s one thing I abide by, it’s that no means no. In sex, not business,” he hastened to add. “It’s no, right?”
“No,” she repeated, to be clear.
He nodded and leaned over her to open the door on her side.
“You’ve had enough trouble from me for one night, Virginia. There’s no reason why you should be caught up in this. I’m sure the police have been called and this’ll take some time. You can just slip out and catch a cab. I’ll deal with this.”
She slammed her door shut again.
“I can’t do that. That would be leaving the scene of an accident. That’s illegal.”
He smiled, shaking his head. “Don’t you break any rules, sweetheart?”
“Not if I can help it. And don’t call me sweetheart.”
“Okay. What should I call you? Hard-ass?”
“It’s probably better than what you’re thinking.”
“You really want to know what I’m thinking? Because it’ll bring that pretty blush I saw in the restaurant back there when I mentioned wet dreams.”
“God!” The comment drove her hand back up to her aching head.
“There it is again.”
Aaron opened the door and slid out, holding his hand out to assist her in following him.
Out on the chilly sidewalk, lit so bright by street lights and storefronts that it could have been the middle of the afternoon rather than early evening, the crowd was being held bac
k by one uniformed policeman while another was speaking to a hulking brute incongruously dressed in a suit. When the brute caught sight of them, he held out one beefy hand.
“No need to get out, Aaron. You and Miss Beckett can get back in the car. I’ll take care of this.”
Presumably the hulk was the limousine driver. She hadn’t seen him before as Winston had been the one to usher her into the car initially and the evil gray glass responsible for her massive headache had separated them from him for the duration of the drive.
“That’s okay, Ralph, although Miss Beckett should probably see a doctor fairly soon.” Winston patted the other man on the back. “You all right?”
“Fine, but pissed as hell.”
The policeman asked, “You were in the back seat?”
“Yes. Aaron Winston.” He held out his hand to shake the cop’s hand and the cop, looking surprised, complied. “This is Virginia Beckett.”
Virginia nodded.
“But I’m afraid other than a bad bump on the head by Miss Beckett, we don’t really know what happened. We didn’t see anything.”
Ralph spoke up, a testimony to his relationship with his boss apparently that he gave just the facts, no defensiveness in his narrative. “About a minute or two after we left the restaurant, I noticed this black SUV tailing us. I didn’t think anything of it at first, except that he was hanging too close, when the guy swerves out from behind and then cuts in front of me. I jammed on the brakes. That was the first time.” He directed that comment to Virginia and Aaron. “Then he does it again. So I slowed down to keep some distance between us, figuring he was the kind of jerk who liked to play games with limousines to prove what a big man he was. But out of nowhere, the guy slams on his brakes, a dead stop, so I had to slam on mine, which of course caused this pile-up here.”
He gestured behind them and Virginia noticed for the first time the smoking remains of several smashed bumpers.
“He sped away after that.”
“Was anyone hurt?” she asked.
“No, it doesn’t look like it,” the cop answered. “Just a lot of pissed-off drivers. And frankly, once they find out who you are, Mr. Winston, I think you might have some lawsuits on your hands.”
Ralph swore, but Aaron said easily, “No problem. If that’s the worst of it, then I’m happy to settle. I’m glad nobody’s hurt.”
Virginia got the disquieting feeling that he did not mean he was glad only in the financial sense. Aaron Winston with half a heart? An actual human being? She shuddered at the thought, half smiling.
He took her arm. “Do you think we could make whatever statement you need quickly and Ralph can get you the insurance information and whatever else you need? Miss Beckett took a pretty bad bump on the head. I’d like to see she gets a doctor as soon as possible.”
“Paramedics are on their way.”
The cop’s pronouncement was born true with the usual siren fanfare a moment later.
Virginia found herself in capable medical hands soon thereafter. A paramedic asked her questions, flashed a penlight in her eyes and felt around the nasty bump. All the while, she tried to listen to the conversation with the cop going on without her.
“You sure it wasn’t an accident?” she could hear the cop asking.
“Yes,” Ralph responded without hesitation. “This guy was definitely trying to cause this.”
“A guy like your boss has got to have a few enemies.”
At that, she noticed Winston smiled, hands in his pockets in a casual stance, and glanced her way as his driver answered.
“Maybe, but the windows were tinted and I didn’t get a license. It happened too fast.”
By the time everything was wrapped up and Virginia confirmed to the solicitous paramedic that she would consult her own doctor in the morning, she insisted on waving down a cab. “Not that I didn’t enjoy the ride last time.” She softened her comment with a smile, which was pretty genuine. She didn’t hold any of this against Winston. Accidents happened. As to the embarrassing episode before the head bumping—well, she’d rather just forget about that and she hoped he would too.
To her relief, he made no final mention of it.
But as Aaron handed her into a cab, he cracked, “Don’t say I don’t know how to show a girl a good time.”
She laughed. “I just bet you do.”
For the first time, she was thinking that it was too bad after all that she couldn’t be one of them.
* * * * *
Marilou Carstairs tapped her perfectly pedicured toes in her new stilettos impatiently against the hard wood floor of their foyer, ignoring the scuff marks she was making in the process. Lucita would buff them out in the morning anyway.
Damn that Phil. They were going to be late for the ballet, all because he was too selfish to get home from work on time. Then he had to go and compound it by jabbering away on his cell phone right when she had finally managed to get him in his tux and almost out the door.
She didn’t care who he was talking to. It could be the president of his company for all she cared. She didn’t want to have to wait until intermission to get into the theater.
He was probably talking to that horrid mistress of his who he thought he was so smart to hide from her. A waitress, for God’s sake. The filthy girl. She was no better than a hooker in Marilou’s book, and she didn’t care one whit what her husband did with her. In fact, she had quite a nice cabana boy in Bermuda and a personal trainer at her gym here in New York who saw to her own needs on that score very nicely, thank you very much. Sometimes even together when she could manage it, though that usually set her back a few Rolexes, for sure.
“No,” she heard her husband whine into his cell phone from the other room. “That’s it. That’s all. The only picture I got. What do you think I am, a goddamn paparazzi or something?”
They really were going to be late.
“No, I didn’t get a picture of them making out. Why would they make out at the scene of a car accident?” A pause. “No, she didn’t have her shirt off. They were treating a head injury. You don’t take your shirt off to have somebody look at your head. Christ, what is wrong with you people? Print it or don’t print it. I couldn’t give a shit.”
Phil was suddenly next to her, reaching for his overcoat. “Let’s go.”
“What was that all about, darling?”
The doors to the private elevator to their apartment opened and they stepped in.
“It was about paying for those god-awful expensive shoes of yours by earning chump change being at the beck and call of a lunatic.”
She didn’t even want to ask.
Chapter Three
“Mrs. Fields, I just could not be in this building and fail to pay my respects to you.” Rye Kinsey parked his fat black briefcase on the immaculate surface of her desk and leered at her, as if she was a “hot ticket” instead of the conservatively dressed, gray-haired woman she knew she was. She laughed on cue. “I’m flattered, Mr. Kinsey. But I don’t suppose that you may also want to say hi to my boss, would you?”
“Oh, him. He’s just an excuse so I can get over here to see you,” Rye confided conspiratorially. “But I guess since I’m already here.”
She leaned over, about to buzz Mr. Winston when Rye said, “Wait, is he in a good mood yet?”
Mrs. Fields kept her face carefully blank.
In fact, Mr. Winston had been a bear almost all week. He’d seemed fine on Monday, but from Tuesday until today—Friday—he had been testy with everyone, from his vice presidents to the man who brought him a sandwich for lunch to her. Of course he had been in that car accident on Monday night, but he’d brushed that off as a fender bender when she asked about it. The pictures in the tabloids the next day, those ones of him hovering over a shaken Virginia Beckett—she knew from long-past experience not to ask about that kind of thing. If he hadn’t seen a tabloid picture of himself, he didn’t want to. But even if he had, it usually didn’t put him out of sorts like this.
Heavens, she had never so looked forward to the weekend in all her ten years working for Mr. Winston. She supposed he must have talked to Rye during this week as well for him to pose the question he just did. But a man, especially one as usually fair and good-natured as Mr. Winston, was entitled to a bad-tempered week now and again. So she loyally pretended not to understand Mr. Kinsey. “I’m not sure I know what you mean. Would you like me to let him know that you’re here?”
Rye smiled in appreciation at her discretion. “Just remember that you can leave Aaron and come to work for me any time and I’ll pay you…well, almost as much as he does!”
Mrs. Fields laughed.
“Okay, throw me to the wolves. Go ahead and buzz him.”
Aaron didn’t seem especially pleased to see him when Rye was ushered in. Shirt-sleeves rolled up, his tie nowhere in evidence, he looked as though he might have been interrupted completing an especially arduous task. But the desk was clear except for a slim manila file that Aaron closed as Rye entered. He looked up expectantly, without bothering to get up. “What can I do for you, Rye?”
Ignoring Aaron’s coldness with an aplomb that had gotten Rye through many a sticky situation, he flopped himself down on one of the luxurious navy-blue Barclay loungers that faced the desk and nonchalantly scanned the huge office, pushing his glasses up farther on his nose. “Oh, nothing. I was just here with some of your financial guys for an auditors’ meeting and thought I’d stop by to remind myself how the other half live.” Rye casually continued to scan the lavishly done office, from the original impressionist paintings on the wall to the elaborate seventy-two-inch plasma television in the adjoining suite. “You know, I would really like an office like this.”
Aaron cut him off. “Was there something you needed to see me about, Rye? I’m kind of busy at the moment.”
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