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Chapter 1
Nero de Santis sometimes wondered what made a man a man instead of a beast. After all, men ate and slept and fought and fucked just like all animals did. For himself, he was as beastly as they came, his only humanity his interest in computers and his taste for fine art.
Not that he cared particularly about being human. It was overrated in his opinion.
Then again, today he was rather glad of his humanity, especially given what was standing on his doorstep right this very second.
Nero leaned back in his huge black-leather chair and stared at the vast array of screens in front of him. Some of them displayed feeds from the national news with stock tickers unreeling under them, while others displayed feeds from security cameras located at various strategic points in New York. At least two screens had the spreadsheets he’d been working on open, and another was dedicated to his email. A couple more were devoted to social media—Twitter for the most part, though he was fond of Instagram, as well—and at least one had a movie playing on it.
But it wasn’t any of those screens that had irrevocably grabbed his attention at this particular moment in time.
The screen he was most interested in now was the one that gave him the feed from the security camera on his front door.
And the woman standing in front of it.
She was neat as a pin in a plain charcoal skirt and crisp white shirt, her red hair pulled back in a tight bun. Very corporate looking, very secretary. Which was pretty much as expected considering she was here for a job interview.
As he watched, she smoothed her skirt and adjusted her matching charcoal jacket, glanced behind her once, then looked back at his front door.
She wasn’t beautiful. Fuck, she wasn’t even pretty, which wasn’t ideal since he liked something nice to look at. Then again, that wasn’t a deal-breaker—he’d stopped sleeping with his assistants after finding out their performances tended to drop once he’d taken them to bed. Her features were too sharp for beauty, but . . . on second look they weren’t all bad. She had a nicely full lower lip, a determined chin, and her eyes were pretty. Brown from what he could tell. Her skin was milky pale and even though her hair was red, she didn’t seem to have any freckles.
He tilted his head, examining the rest of her.
Well, she might not have been beautiful, but she definitely had the kind of body he liked on a woman. Full breasts and rounded hips, and lots of soft curves. He wasn’t a fan of muscles or skinniness, or any kind of hard edges—at least not physically. When it came to women, he liked softness, and she was definitely soft. Not unattractive in many ways.
Nero contemplated her a second longer, then hit a button, opening up another window alongside the image from the security feed, displaying her resume.
Phoebe Taylor. Twenty-eight. English. Currently residing in the East Village. Had worked as an assistant to various high-level executives in various Fortune 500 companies, and all positions accompanied by glowing references. Nice figure and she looked like she was competent. A good combination.
However, she’d left her last job two years ago, and there was nothing in the resume that indicated what she’d been doing for those two years.
He narrowed his gaze at the woman standing on his doorstep. Sometimes he didn’t let potential job applicants in. Sometimes he didn’t even open the door, depending on what he decided from the initial once-over he gave everyone who arrived at his house.
Then again, it wasn’t as if he had a lot of choice.
In the last six months alone he’d gone through at least ten assistants and it was now getting to the point where it was impossible to find anyone good who would actually work with him. Word had gotten out about how difficult he was, and even upping the basic salary to six figures hadn’t managed to tempt anyone decent to apply.
It was a problem. He preferred to hire the best, but when the best wouldn’t even apply, no matter how much money he offered, then his only alternative to the best was the not-quite-so-good.
Or Phoebe Taylor with the two-year gap in her resume.
Making a decision, Nero reached out and pushed the button on the intercom that sat on his desk. “Show her into the sitting room, James,” he ordered.
“Yes, Mr. de Santis,” James, his butler, responded in his usual lugubrious tones.
Nero switched feeds to the entrance hallway, watching as James opened the door and greeted Miss Taylor before taking her into the sitting room where Nero liked to receive all the guests that came to the house—at least those he actually let inside.
Switching feeds again, to the sitting-room cameras; Nero studied her as James showed her to one of the couches then left the room, closing the door behind him.
She clasped her hands in her lap, her attention darting over the room.
It was the most normal room in Nero’s vast house, and he’d purposefully had it decorated that way, making it as luxurious and as comfortable as possible so he could sit here in his control room and watch people’s guards go down.
Phoebe Taylor certainly seemed to like it, her posture relaxing slightly as she settled back on the comfortable white couch and looked around at the art on the walls, the fireplace with the cheerful spray of fresh flowers on the mantelpiece above it, the thick red-and-blue silk hand-knotted rug on the floor, and the shelves with the horrifically expensive little knickknacks on them.
Normally, if people thought they were alone they would get up from the couch and go and explore. Pull a book off the shelf or pick up one of the knickknacks. Sometimes they’d go toward the mirror above the fireplace and fiddle around with their appearance, or head toward the window that looked out over his Upper East Side street, not far from the Met.
Yet Phoebe Taylor did none of these things.
She remained where she was, her hands lightly clasped. Occasionally her head would turn as she looked around her, but that was the only movement she made. She sat there, very, very still.
He frowned at the screen, caught despite himself.
There was something about her, maybe that stillness or the way she had her hands clasped together, or maybe it was simply the aura of reserve and containment she projected. Whatever it was, it intrigued him.
Pressing a couple of buttons on his keyboard, he zoomed the camera in on her so he could get a better look. Her attention had dropped to her hands, and she was now staring at them as if fascinated. Now that he looked closer, he could see the faint impression of freckles across her nose, hidden by her makeup, and that her lashes were long and thick. Her pretty mouth was moving ever so slightly, as if she was saying a prayer under her breath.
Nero leaned back in his chair and glanced at her resume once again.
On paper, she looked good, and certainly his first impression of her was that she seemed acceptable at least. A bit young maybe. Certainly, he’d had better luck with older assistants who didn’t melt into a puddle of tears at the first hint of criticism or get incensed by his apparently “outrageous” needs. He’d had one woman
—she’d been in her late fifties—who’d managed to stay with him a whole three months without complaint, eventually leaving because he’d asked her to order him a selection of women for the night and she’d refused, saying she hadn’t been hired to be the “madam of a brothel.”
Nero had fired her on the spot.
He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it, and if his assistants either couldn’t or wouldn’t do their jobs and assist him, then he got rid of them. No second chances.
Be interesting to see what Miss Phoebe Taylor would do with a request like that. Or, in fact, any of the other requests he made of his assistants, some of which had caused a number of them to leave within hours of being hired. Many only lasted a week; rarely did they last a month.
Hiring new people was starting to get old.
Of course, there was the option of being a nicer employer, as one of his earlier assistants had tried to tell him, but he really didn’t understand what she meant by that. He suspected it had something to do with changing his behavior. Fuck, like that was ever going to happen. He was the way he was, and he wasn’t about to change.
Getting rid of Phoebe’s resume from the screen, Nero brought up another document—the list of other candidates for the position.
It was short.
He scowled at it, irritated. His options were getting narrower and narrower and he didn’t like it one bit. Even the temping agencies wouldn’t take him on as a client these days, not since he’d blown through five temps in one month, reducing every single one to tears within hours of being hired.
Christ. People were so weak and fragile these days, it was a constant annoyance to him. Still, if the worst came to the worst and this girl ended up only lasting hours or—if he was lucky—a week, he could up the salary again. Money tended to solve most problems in his experience, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t have plenty of it. Being the illegitimate son of Cesare de Santis, the owner of DS Corp, one of America’s biggest and richest defense and protection companies, wasn’t without its perks. Even if his father was one of the biggest pricks on the planet.
Up on the screen, Phoebe Taylor raised her head from her hands and took another look around the room. A small crease had appeared between her brows.
She was probably wondering how long he was going to keep her waiting.
The answer was as long as he fucking well felt like it.
Then again, maybe he should get this interview over and done with as soon as possible. Might as well see if she was as good in person as she looked on paper.
Nero pushed the button on the intercom again. “Take her into my office, James.”
“Very good, Mr. de Santis.”
Nero lounged back in his chair, watching as James entered the sitting room, going over to where Phoebe Taylor sat. She gave him a pleasant smile, betraying no sign of impatience, all calm self-possession, as if she could have quite happily sat there for another couple of hours.
Fuck. Maybe he should let her. Maybe he should have tested her further, the way he did sometimes with people who intrigued him.
Ah, but there was plenty of time for that.
In the privacy of his control room, Nero bared his teeth as Phoebe disappeared through the sitting-room doorway, on her way to his office.
Looked like his day was just about to get interesting.
* * *
There were two chairs in Nero de Santis’s office. A huge black-leather executive chair that sat behind the dark oak monolith of his desk, and a much smaller, much more uncomfortable-looking one that sat in front of it.
Phoebe didn’t need to guess which one was meant for her. She walked straight toward the uncomfortable-looking one as soon as de Santis’s butler showed her into his office.
And, indeed, as she sat down, it was as uncomfortable as it looked.
Then again, she’d spent much of the last two years sitting around in many different sorts of uncomfortable chairs, so it wasn’t anything she wasn’t used to.
She was used to waiting, too.
The office was deathly silent, not even the noise from the city penetrating from outside.
Phoebe folded her hands in her lap, resolutely ignoring the flutter of nervousness in her stomach. Just like she resolutely ignored the doubt that was also sitting there.
Before she’d gotten the interview for the job, she’d asked around the few job contacts she had left, trying to get what information she could about New York’s most reclusive billionaire and the position she’d seen advertised on an online job site. A position with a salary that seemed almost . . . obscene.
And then her friends had told her why the money was obscene. Because Nero de Santis was the biggest bastard to walk the earth and no one wanted to work with him. “Run and run far, far away” had been the opinion of her contacts
Unfortunately, though, Phoebe was not in a position to run far, far away.
She needed money, and she needed obscene amounts of it. Fast. And the position of Nero de Santis’s personal assistant seemed the best and easiest way of getting it. Certainly, much easier than stripping, which had been one brief thought that had occurred to her at 2 A.M. the previous night.
No, she didn’t really want to do that, nor did she want to do any of the other seedy-sounding jobs that had also been on that same job website, offering the same kind of money and making Nero de Santis’s job offer look like a ticket to paradise.
Phoebe gave a small inward sigh, resisting the urge to check her phone just in case there had been any updates on Charles. He’d contracted an infection recently, which was worrying since the immune systems of coma patients weren’t exactly robust. Then again, the doctors had told her they’d contact her if there was any change in his condition, and they hadn’t, so presumably everything was fine.
Didn’t stop the worry though, which was not what she needed right now.
Ruthlessly pushing aside her anxiety, Phoebe looked around the room instead, trying to distract herself.
She’d tried to do some research on Nero de Santis, but surprisingly hadn’t managed to find much. He was some kind of computer genius and managed the tech arm of DS Corp, one of the U.S.’s biggest weapons companies. He was also reputed to be a recluse, never leaving his Upper East Side mansion, and was infamous for treating his staff very, very poorly indeed.
He’d also clearly designed his office to intimidate anyone sitting in it.
The walls were dark green, half paneled in dark oak, and lined with heavy oak bookshelves, all stuffed full of officious looking leather bound tomes. There was a huge stag’s head hung on the wall behind the desk, the antlers gleaming lethally in the dim light coming through the windows, the animal’s glass eyes directed on the chair she was currently sitting in, which was unnerving.
The desk itself was massive, looking like it had been carved out of a single tree, the chair behind it as imposing as a throne. There was nothing on desk itself but a slim, black computer screen.
Phoebe frowned at the room in general. It definitely wasn’t comfortable, like the sitting room she’d just left. There was a chill in the air and a dark heaviness to the atmosphere that was . . . oppressive. And it might have gotten to her if she hadn’t spent the last two years in different hospital waiting rooms, dealing with officious and self-important medical staff.
But she had. So she didn’t feel either oppressed by the atmosphere or intimidated. She only felt irritated at being kept waiting. Though she was starting to think that might be intentional, too, and given what she’d already heard about Nero de Santis, she wouldn’t be at all surprised.
To pass the time, she hummed under her breath, a song from Evita, one of her favorite musicals, and went over the last meeting she’d had with the manager of the private hospital Charles was currently staying in. The woman had given Phoebe a new fee schedule, which was pretty much going to bankrupt her if she wasn’t careful. In order to pay for his care, she’d already used up the money she and Charles had saved to buy their own home, an
d if she wanted to keep him where he was, getting the best treatment he could, she was going to have to find another way to pay for it.
This job in other words.
At that moment, a door behind the desk opened, and she nearly jumped because it had been half-hidden by one of those enormous bookcases, and she hadn’t noticed it before.
A man walked through it.
Phoebe blinked.
She hadn’t been able to find any images of Nero de Santis, so she had no preconceived ideas of what he looked like. But in some dim region of her brain, she’d constructed the impression of a small, nasty little man, because in her experience the most difficult men were always small and nasty.
Apparently, Nero was neither.
Her first impression was that he was big. Actually, no, not just big, he was giant. He towered over that monolithic desk like Godzilla over a tiny Japanese skyscraper, and she hadn’t missed the fact that his head had almost brushed the top of the doorframe as he’d walked through it.
And he wore a suit, which she found confusing since he wasn’t built like any businessman she’d ever worked with. In fact, he was built more like a pro-wrestler or heavyweight boxer than some tech genius, the dark gray suit jacket pulling tight over massive shoulders, insanely muscled arms, and a hard, broad chest.
She swallowed, her gaze roving helplessly over his impressive physique, trying to reconcile her hazy idea of small nastiness with the massive, muscled reality, before finally settling on his face.
She felt something kick hard inside her.
His features were rough, but there was a brutal sort of masculine charisma to them that she found almost mesmerizing. A hard blade of a nose, strong jawline, and broad, carved cheekbones. His eyes were as black as his shaggy hair, his gaze holding hers with an intensity that stole the breath from her lungs.
He stood there only a minute, staring at her, and then he was moving with the easy, loping stride of a wolf or a panther, coming straight toward her. And she found herself tensing up in her chair, bracing herself as if she was standing in the path of an avalanche and there was nowhere for her to run.
The Billionaire Beast Page 1