by Ellen Lane
She didn’t even look like the same person.
She looked at herself first from the left, and then from the right before frowning and turning to Lila, who was eying her smugly from across the bed. “What do you think?”
Charlotte glanced in the mirror once more, taking in her carefully applied red lipstick and eyeliner. “I look like someone’s idea of a stripper gram.”
Lila snorted. “You look refined. Classy. Sexy without being obvious. You’re at the top of your game and Kensley will know it the moment he lays eyes on you.”
Charlotte managed to tear her gaze away from her image in the mirror long enough to smile at her roommate. “But I’m not seducing him.”
“Nope.” Lila replied, her grin growing even wider. “I forbid it. This is a strictly look-but-don’t touch situation.”
“You forbid it.” Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Like that’s ever stopped me.”
“Yeah, well, it’ll stop you this time.” Lila rebutted primly. “Besides, this isn’t about seduction - it’s about self-confidence, remember? Can you honestly not look in the mirror and feel sexy and confident right now?”
After assessing her reflection critically once more, Charlotte had to acquiesce that Lila had a point. In something like this, she was pretty sure she could take on anything - including Vladimir Kensley’s closest scrutinization.
An hour later, she was walking into one of the many high rises in downtown LA - this one, in particular, had served as an LA branch of Kensley enterprises for the last decade. Of course, now that they were designating the city the west coast hub, they needed to upgrade.
That was what she was here for.
When she told the receptionist that she had a nine am with Vladimir himself she was directed to the elevator bay and sent to the top floor. Though this building had been deemed too small to be the West Coast hub, the views were pretty breathtaking - even from the waiting room. As she was wearing heels, Charlotte felt prim enough to teeter her way over to the nearest armchair before sinking into it, her plans locked safely in the briefcase she hugged to her chest.
Lila was right. Her confidence had ratcheted upwards with her change in attire - but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still nervous just the same. Her heart hammered insistently against her ribs, and she had to remind herself that she was the best at what she did. She could handle this. If Jackson Kensley had chosen her, she could impress his son too.
Though she waited for about twenty minutes, to Charlotte, it could have been seconds. All at once, the secretary called her name and she was being gestured into Kensley’s office.
Her mouth so dry she could barely swallow, the young woman stood and made her way across the waiting room. Raising her hand, she took a deep breath before knocking briskly on the door.
**
“Come in.”
Vlad had just started to settle things to his liking in his temporary office when the secretary announced that his nine o’clock had arrived.
Charlotte Gardner.
The memory of all that red hair and those vivid eyes was enough to make his stomach twist. The dark-haired man wondered, briefly, if something he ate could have disagreed with him - but before he could come to a conclusion, she was answering his summons.
Vladimir looked up from where he sat at his desk and froze, staring at the woman who entered his office. She looked nothing like she had the previous day. Indeed, the female who stood before him was all at once demurer and more powerful than the woman who had stepped in at the airport. Her hair hung in a single, neat braid down her back, and the clothes she wore, while modest, left none of her curves to the imagination.
It was the first time in a long time that his body reacted to something without thinking, and Vlad found himself struggling against the heat that curled through his loins, even as she smiled jauntily at him.
“Mr. Kensley - wonderful to see you again.” She crossed the room in a few strides of long, slender legs to shake his hand, and Vladimir shot to his feet. He could smell her perfume - light and citrusy, floating across the distance between them and he had to force himself to hold out his hand for her.
The moment his fingers gripped hers, a bolt of awareness shot through him, making him swallow thickly. She had a grip as strong as any man he had ever met, and, instead of thinking it uncharacteristic, he was only further intrigued by her. “Miss Gardner,” he began, allowing himself the luxury of the same. “The pleasure is all mine.’
“Charlotte, please,” she reminded him, her smile becoming the mischievous one that he recognized from the previous day.
In that moment, Vlad remembered that he was supposed to be taking control of the situation. If he was too busy staring at her, he would be utterly useless in that regard. Luckily enough for him, he had no small amount of practice in tuning out the fantastical in favor of the numerical - and what they meant to discuss was certainly numerical.
He did his best to put from his mind how breathtaking Charlotte Gardner looked and how lovely she smelled. It took a little more work for him to ignore the fact that he couldn’t remember ever being so quickly drawn to a woman before, but somehow, he managed. “Charlotte, then.” He indicated a plush leather seat that had been positioned before his desk. “Please, sit.”
She did so, sinking into the chair before primly crossing one leg over the other. In the process, her skirt hiked high on her thighs, and Vlad grimaced at the bevy of Russian curses that rose to the forefront of his mind.
“So, I’m sure you know that we’re eager to start the building,” He said, focusing instead on her intense, honey-colored gaze. “I’ve just come to oversee the project at my father’s request, and to make sure that everything goes smoothly. As I haven’t seen the plans yet, this meeting was arranged so we might discuss your creation.” He indicated the blank swathe of his highly polished oaken desk top. “Let’s have a look.”
Was it his imagination, or did she hesitate slightly before pulling the plans from her bag? Vlad decided that it had been in his mind as her nimble fingers worked on opening the clasp on her briefcase. Two seconds later, she was laying a stack of plans on the desk before him and unrolling them for his perusal.
When he looked down at the images set before him, Vladimir’s brows raced towards his hairline.
For a moment, he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing.
In his time as operating manager of the firm, he’d looked over many sets of building plans. They all tended to have a pretty common theme - strong, solid lines, clear partitions between departments and spaces, and a spread into vertical space rather than horizontal. As many of their buildings were in enormous cities, it made sense to build upward and now outward, for the benefit of all parties involved.
The building he looked over now was the absolute antithesis of anything he’d ever seen constructed for the firm. True, the lot of land they’d purchased in LA was large, but this design would mean taking advantage of every square yard of it.
It was twenty stories tall, but each floor was almost as wide as a football field - and there seemed to be no discernable, concrete walls that he could see, besides the ones that closed off the staircases and encircled the structure proper.
There were windows - lots of windows, slanted lines, and almost absurd angles that he found himself observing more and more closely, wondering if it was even possible to construct a building this way. Though he wasn’t an architect himself, he found that his thought process worked quickly enough that he could understand why a great deal of them made the choices he did.
This was the first time Vladimir had looked upon a set of plans that he didn’t understand at all.
For a good ten minutes he stared at the parchment without saying a word. He flipped through all seven sheets of blueprints before him, each seemingly more convoluted than the last. This wasn’t so much architecture, he mused, as it was avant-garde artistry made into building form - was much flashier and far less grounded than anything the company had been assoc
iated with before.
He wondered, briefly, if these were even the same plans Charlotte had shown his father. While the older man had told him that her design was a bit unconventional, this was something else entirely. This building barely grappled with the edges of convention - so much so that he found himself voicing his questions aloud.
“These are the plans you showed my father, yes?”
Charlotte merely stared at him, unblinking, before nodding curtly. She seemed to be waiting for something - though exactly what was uncertain. Vladimir looked from her to the plans and then back again. It would be easier for him to believe that she had created them the way he’d seen her the previous day. It looked to him as if these plans had come from the mind of someone wild and untethered - the antithesis of the way he liked to do business.
If he was honest with himself, Vlad had no idea why his father had picked these particular plans. The design was unorthodox...it was like nothing they had ever employed before...and, to say the least, it made Vladimir slightly unsure as to what direction his father meant to take the company in. Something like this...it would surely change their public image somewhat.
“I assume you’ve seen what construction looks like on a number of other buildings our firm has commissioned from the ground up?” He looked up at Charlotte again and found her expression unreadable.
“I have.” When she replied, her tone was crisp, with an edge of defensiveness. “And they’re not the way I work, Mr. Kensley. I don’t favor cookie-cutter designs.”
Well, there it was. She’d laid her cards out on the table - and quite brashly at that. “Perhaps not cookie cutter…” He replied smoothly, “But something more within the lines of conventionalism?”
Two bright spots of color appeared on the young woman’s cheeks. “Jackson Kensley seemed rather fond of these plans when I sent them to him. Are you suggesting that I redo the entire process?”
Vlad mused quietly for a moment before answering. “Of course not...perhaps merely alter these somewhat so that they’re not so…” He searched for a word to describe what he meant to say.
“Outlandish?” At her flat tone, he looked up to find her all but glaring at him. “Outside-the-box? Unique?”
Vlad wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. Truthfully, he words echoed precisely what he’d been thinking. However, hard as it might be for him to emote when it came to most people, he’d be a fool to ignore the fact that Charlotte seemed quite perturbed.
No, that wasn’t the right word for it.
She was angry. “You’re upset with my assessment?”
The young woman took a deep breath, visibly steadying herself before she replied slowly. “I suppose I shouldn’t be, should I? You wouldn’t be the first to think my work strange.”
Vlad leaned over the table, his eyes roving over the plans once more. The design was strange, but he supposed that if he looked hard enough, there was a peculiar kind of beauty to the way it flowed. Certainly not his style - or anything he’s seen the within the company’s repertoire - but something unique and new.
“It is unique…” He ventured, moving his fingertips over the wide, arched atrium where it spread out into the lobby of the first floor, “Perhaps more suited to a museum or a personal residence-”
“Who on earth needs a personal residence this big?” Charlotte’s tone was sharp, and Vlad reacted automatically, his head snapping up to gaze at her in thinly veiled warning. Charlotte, however, wasn’t cowed. “Your father cited that he wanted the design for his newest company building, not for his own use, sir.” The hard edge she placed on the title made him frown. “Do you mean to argue with his decision?”
She was challenging him.
Despite his rather mild demeanor, he did not like to be challenged when his business was involved. Vladimir knew very well that his father had chosen this design, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t discuss why he had done so. Especially if it meant making sure that the company didn’t spend millions on a structure that wouldn’t serve their needs as well as something more...contemporary.
“Not argue,” he returned, his voice equally as hard as hers, “Discuss, perhaps. I believe that my father always puts the wellbeing of the firm first. There must be some explanation for this.” If he had been dancing the thin line between courtesy and insult before, now Vlad overtook it before he noticed.
“This,” Charlotte hissed, clearly incensed, “Is my work. It’s what your father chose. If it’s not to your liking, feel free to discuss with him however long you like.” With that, she leaned over the desk and gathered her plans quickly before placing them back into her briefcase. The clasps snapped closed with a finality that echoed around the room. “Just let me know when we’ll be breaking ground. Have a wonderful day, Mr. Kensley.” With that cool dismissal, she turned on her heel and marched out of his office.
That’s right, she had been in his domain - so why did he feel like the one who had lost?
For a long moment, Vlad stared after her, completely and totally flummoxed. He wasn’t one inclined to obscenities, but he found himself wondering what the almighty fuck had just happened.
He expected the meeting to go somewhat smoother than this - that he would look over the plans, maybe suggest a few tweaks here and there, and that would be that - but what Charlotte had shown him challenged the boundaries of what he was willing to support. If what he had seen was a measure of her caliber of work then she was a singular artist, that was to be certain.
He supposed that it made sense that an artist would be sensitive about her work.
Very sensitive.
Sinking back down in his chair, Vladimir drew his hands heavily over his face as he replayed the meeting again and again in his mind. Charlotte had, no doubt, come here hoping to receive approval from the man set to be the building manager for the project - and he, in his honesty, had given her anything but.
Was he really to be faulted for that? Over his years working at Kensley Enterprises, Vladimir had always been taught to follow his instincts - that one should only take risks if the rewards were potentially greater than the loss. When he looked at the plans Charlotte set before him, he saw a huge risk and little reward to be had. Surely she could understand that?
The mere notion made him frown.
Could she even begin to see things the same way he did? This woman who had saved him from a horde of media like he was some kind of damsel in distress? Whose beauty was wild and untamed one moment and just as alluringly subdued the next?
Charlotte Gardner was an enigma that kept him guessing - the first he’d ever been this interested in. And despite the fact that Vlad thought he’d made the right decision to talk to his father concerning the plans she’d made, he felt guilty about the way he’d spoken to her.
He considered himself a thick-skinned person - there were few outside his family that could elicit a genuine emotional response from him. He’d known Charlotte Gardner for all of forty-eight hours and, somehow, he knew that he’d offended her on a personal level.
And he didn’t like it.
Reaching into the top drawer of his desk, he extracted a number of documents that he meant to sign off on before his next appointment - but, somehow, switching gears wasn’t as easy as it normally was for him. He could barely read a single sentence before Charlotte’s outraged expression wormed its way back to the forefront of his mind.
He supposed that he should call his father sooner than later - just to be sure that the older man’s decision was concrete.
When he reached for the phone, however, Vlad found himself dialing his youngest brother’s number instead. He felt as if he hadn’t spoken to Lucas in ages, even though he was at their building in Manhattan almost constantly. While Vladimir had always had a relatively clear vision of what he meant to do in life - even if he questioned its validity - Lucas had spent a lifetime searching for his calling. He had shadowed each of his older brothers in an attempt to find if their positions appealed to him - and
if, indeed, he desired a place in the firm at all. Their mother always told him that it would be no hardship if he didn’t end up at Kensley Enterprises, and Lucas seemed to take it personally.
Though he, more than anyone else, wanted to be of use to the firm, he seemed the least fit for it. The company didn’t bring fulfillment to him like it did to his brothers.
But, perhaps that was because Lucas had never been a man of facts and figures. He was a people person - and dealing with those around him in the most surprisingly astute ways had always been his forte.
When he answered the phone, he sounded no less surprised than Vlad was to be calling him in the first place. “Vlad? Wow...aren’t you supposed to be in LA? How are you?” Vladimir could picture him - not yet in his thirties, every bit as pale and fair-haired as you might imagine someone of English origin to be. Like his brothers, he still had traces of an accent. The more emotional he was, the more obtrusive his speech pattern.
“Alright, Lucas. How’ve you been getting on?”
There was a slight pause before the younger man answered him. “I get the feeling you wouldn’t be calling me if there was nothing wrong.”
Christ almighty. It didn’t matter how long it had been since he had last talked to one of his brothers, they tended to be able to read him instantly. Was he that predictable? “I... I’m sorry, Lucas. I know I should call more.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’re supposed to be our fearless leader,” Lucas chuckled, obviously amused at his embarrassment. “I don’t expect you to check on me every bloody day.”
“Yes, but-”
“Just tell me what you need, Vlad. You can play big brother later.” That made the dark-haired man smile - at least until he remembered why he was calling in the first place. Slowly, his smile faded as he wondered what was the best way to go about posing his question.