Corner-Office Courtship

by Victoria Pade

  But the warmth of his lips pressed to her skin registered enough to set off even more glittery feelings that cascaded all through her.

  She didn’t know what to do, though. It seemed as if she should tell him to back off because, along with even bigger issues, he was a client, and their families had bad blood between them.

  But at the same time it had only been a little kiss on the forehead. And she could well be reading too much into it.

  So she didn’t say anything at all and instead stood there wondering if she looked as stunned as she felt.

  “See you,” he said then, giving her arm another light squeeze before he let go of it.

  “See you,” Nati echoed dimly.

  Then she turned to unlock her shop door as he headed to the parking lot.

  But as her shaky fingers mishandled the lock, Nati watched him go without seeming to, taking in that rear view that was almost as good as the front. And all she could think was that he had kissed her.

  And even if it was only on the forehead, she’d seen him kiss his grandmother and the housekeeper, and there was something different about the kiss he’d just given her. Something that wasn’t perfunctory or schoolboyish or merely friendly.

  It had been enough of a kiss to set her aglow.

  Enough of a kiss to leave her at odds with herself when a voice in her head shrieked, “No!”

  And the rest of her whispered, “More....”

  Chapter Five

  “I have Caesar salad, ravioli, pasta puttanesca, some kind of weird little crackers with a bunch of seeds on them, crusty bread and rum-drenched tiramisu—I couldn’t make up my mind and got it all, so say you’ll stay for dinner.”

  Those were the words Nati heard immediately following the sound of Cade’s front door opening and closing as she was cleaning up her work things for the day.

  As promised, she’d spent Tuesday morning watching her shop and Holly’s, then come to Cade’s house for the afternoon.

  “Hi,” he greeted her once he arrived in the dining room, bearing a large brown bag.

  “Hi,” Nati responded with eyebrows raised.

  “Did you hear me?” Cade asked, a hopeful and mischievous smile on his divine face.

  “You have takeout,” Nati said.

  “Not just takeout—food from this great little mom-and-pop Italian place near here. Enough for two—or three or four,” he said. “Interested?”

  Much, much too interested.

  In the man himself, dressed in a charcoal-colored suit, white shirt and a paisley tie that he’d loosened to accommodate an open collar button.

  And in the chance to have dinner with him. Again.

  Dinner last night and tonight? What was up with that? Surely the gorgeous Cade Camden was not some lonely guy desperate for female company. And yet she had the chance at two nights in a row with him.

  “Did you get stood up?”

  He laughed. “No. I actually cut a meeting short so I could pick up the food and get here before you left. I wanted you to have a little dinner before you make the drive back to the ’burbs.”

  But still, why? Nati wondered.

  Was this just the way the Camdens liked to treat the help?

  They had made his grandmother’s house staff part of the family, she reasoned. Maybe it was merely a bonus they threw in for working for them.

  Nati had worked for other people who had offered similar perks. One lady had baked her cookies every day she’d worked on her nursery mural. Some people were just nice that way. She wouldn’t have guessed that the almighty Camdens would be among them, but she supposed it was possible.

  Just as it was possible that kiss on the temple last night hadn’t meant anything, either.

  “What do you say? Will you stay and eat or is there somewhere else you have to be?” Cade asked when she was lost in thought for longer than she probably should have been over such a simple offer.

  “There’s nowhere else I have to be.” And because there was nowhere else she wanted to be, she knew she should say no and leave right that minute, so she held up her plaster-spattered hands and said, “But I’m kind of grungy from work.”

  “Come on, I’ll show you the guest bathroom upstairs and you can wash up while I get out of these work clothes. Then I’ll meet you in the kitchen—we’ll do it casual, sitting on the stools at the island. What do you say?”

  It struck her as odd for him to seem so eager for her to say yes.

  But rather than speak her mind, Nati said, “Okay, if you don’t have anything better to do tonight.”

  “The governor’s ball wouldn’t be better,” he assured her as he led her from the dining room.

  Nati snatched her purse to take with her on the way out.

  Despite her curiosity about the rest of the house and how Cade lived, Nati had refrained from snooping. She hadn’t been upstairs at all.

  The master bedroom was on the second floor, directly across from the top of the stairs, and since the door was open she could see into it. She couldn’t help noticing the clothes on the floor and the unmade bed.

  From beside her Cade stretched an arm across her shoulders and pivoted her sharply to the right.

  “Okay, yeah, I’m not always good about picking up after myself or making the bed. The lady who cleans for me changes the sheets every week and I usually make it on the weekends, but workdays are another story.”

  He ushered her into the guest room. A room that was perfectly neat and clean, with its queen-size bed nicely made.

  “Make yourself at home and I’ll see you downstairs.”

  Nati went into the room, closed the door and found a full-length mirror on the back of it.

  She’d worn a smock over her clothes while she’d applied the first layer of decorative plaster to the wall so her jeans and black crewneck sweater were clean. She rolled down the sleeves of the sweater and the white blouse she had on underneath it, then turned the French cuffs of the blouse back over the cuffs of the sweater sleeves.

  As she tugged at the blouse collar to make it neater, she noted that the outfit looked a little puritanical but that was probably all the better. An outward appearance of stiffness and standoffishness seemed like a good cover for the fact that underneath it all she was thrilled with the prospect of another evening with Cade.

  Clothes under control, she took her hairbrush from her purse, leaned forward and gave her hair a good brushing before she straightened up and let the gold-streaked brown locks fall naturally around her face. Then she pinched her cheeks to add some color, ran her index fingers under her eyelashes to give them a bit of upsweep, and applied fresh lip gloss.

  That was about all she could do with what she had in her purse but she judged herself presentable and poked her head back out the bedroom door.

  Cade was nowhere in sight and his bedroom door was closed, but she could hear a shower running. He’d told her to meet him downstairs, so that was where she went.

  While she waited, she finished packing up her work things and returned them to her car trunk. Cade was just coming down the stairs when she came back inside.

  He was freshly showered, and shaved, and smelled of that cologne she liked so well. He was dressed in a pair of well-aged jeans and a plain white V-neck T-shirt with the long sleeves pushed to his elbows, leaving him looking appealingly casual and relaxed and as if he were ready to settle in for an evening at home. An evening that he’d made sure included her.

  But Nati couldn’t let that go to her head.

  “You weren’t trying to sneak away, were you?” Cade asked.

  “No, I just put my buckets in the trunk.”

  “Then work really is done for the day and we can eat!” he said, ushering her toward the kitchen.

  “What would you like to
drink?” he asked, pointing to one of the tall leather-and-chrome bar stools on the side of the granite-countered island where they were going to eat. “I have wine, soda, iced tea, water—sparkling and otherwise—and orange juice.”

  Nati made a face. “Not orange juice. Or wine since I have to drive home. Maybe sparkling water?”

  “Sparkling water it is,” he said, taking two bottles from the fridge and bringing them back to the island along with ice-filled glasses.

  Sitting on the bar stool adjacent to Nati’s, Cade opened the bottles, poured Nati’s drink and handed it to her, then poured his own, too. Then he unloaded the food from the sack, assuring her she was going to be astounded by the deliciousness of it all.

  Nati could only smile at his enthusiasm as she served herself a little of everything, tasted it and agreed that it was every bit as wonderful as he thought.

  Once they’d settled into eating, Nati made small talk by saying, “How was your day?”

  “Crazy busy,” he said. “We’re opening three new stores in three states and we hit glitches with them all today.”

  “And you had to take care of the problems because you’re... What exactly are you in the family business?”

  “CEO.”

  “You’re the head of the whole thing?” she asked, marveling at the fact that he was as young and as down to earth as he was and still held such a lofty position.

  He shrugged off her astonishment as he finished a bite of puttanesca before he said, “That’s my title but it isn’t a big deal—”

  Nati couldn’t help laughing at that notion. “You’re the CEO of a company that could probably rule the world and it isn’t a big deal?” she said.

  “Camden Incorporated is owned equally and jointly by the family—”

  “But you are at the helm.”

  He shook his head. “My brothers and sister, my cousins and I form the board of directors, and we all have one vote on everything. The titles are really just formalities. Truthfully, I got mine by default.”

  Nati laughed. “You’re the CEO of Camden Incorporated by default?”

  “My older brother, Seth—who is the oldest grandchild—could have had the title because he was the first of us to graduate college and enter the workforce. But he wanted to live in Northbridge, to run the ranch there—he’s cowboy through and through. What he didn’t want was to live in Denver and wear a suit and sit behind a desk. So he opted to oversee the agricultural side of things—”

  “And, since you were next up in the batting order you became CEO?”

  “Yeah. But if my interests had been, say, in food—” he held a forkful of salad in the air, ate it, then continued “—I could have said all I want to deal with is the grocery end of things, and I could have done that. It just so happened that my degrees—undergrad and graduate—are in business, so I became CEO.”

  “That easy?” Nati asked.

  “We all do whatever interests us or falls under our own special areas of expertise or education. Bottom line—what we’re good at, what we enjoy doing, that’s what we do.”

  “That seems like an unstructured way to run a major corporation,” Nati observed.

  “Maybe. But so far it’s worked out. We’re a ten-person team that gets along—maybe because no one carries more weight than anyone else. Regardless of the title, I’m still just one-tenth of the driving force behind the Camden enterprise. If I tried to pull some kind of rank or boss my siblings or cousins around, they’d just laugh, remind me that the last time I tried to do that was when I was twelve and they stranded me in the tree house, went on about their business and pretended not to know where I was until GiGi was ready to call the police.”

  The smile on his handsome face told her that he bore no resentments, either for that long-ago incident or for the fact that he wielded no power over his siblings and cousins in the business.

  Humility was also not something Nati expected of him and she couldn’t help being impressed by it.

  But she reminded herself that when she’d first met her former husband, he’d also seemed like any other college boy, albeit with more money. That even after they were married, Doug had been a master at giving the right impression. And as far as she knew, what Cade was allowing her to see and what was behind the curtain could very well be two different things.

  He is a Camden, after all, she told herself. His family had a reputation for doing things with subterfuge, so she shouldn’t be too taken in by what she was seeing.

  She decided to do a little probing.

  “What exactly do you do as CEO?”

  “Well... I guess it’s like being the head of a committee. I do a lot of overseeing. And, in some ways, I’m a glorified middleman—for instance, when it comes to the agricultural part of things, Seth is in complete charge. But once he’s made a decision that affects, say, supply, delivery, marketing or what-have-you, it’s up to me to pass that along to the departments handling supply, delivery, marketing and what-have-you, and to deal with what happens as a result. Glorified middleman,” he repeated.

  Again Nati thought he was being humble, and decided to dig deeper still.

  “Where did you go to college?”

  His grin was pure bad boy. “I thought I should try out the beach so I did undergrad at Cal State Long Beach, and got my MBA at UCLA.”

  “And partied hardy?”

  He laughed. “The first year. Endless rounds of fraternity and sorority parties, beach parties—you name it, there was a party attached to it. And there was the ocean and hanging out there. Pretending I was a surfer—”

  “You weren’t?”

  “I could never stay up on those dumb boards. Mostly I laid on the sand, got a tan, drank beer and more beer and more beer, ogled girls in barely there bikinis, and generally slacked off—”

  “Along with...let me guess...rich-boy-gone-wild things like professionally catered picnics that you hired limousines to take your guests to? Hot-air balloon rides to impress the girls? Taking a private plane for impromptu trips to wherever your heart desired when the urge struck? Oh, and you were near water...so what? Yachts? Racing them? Throwing gala yacht parties? And of course you rented out entire nightclubs for yourself and your friends...”

  “No, none of that! I had an emergency credit card with a moderate limit, and GiGi monitored every charge on it. I may be a Camden but I didn’t have access to the kind of bucks all that would take. Lazing around on the beach, drinking, partying, yeah, but what you’re talking about? Maybe I should have gone to your college. As it was, I nearly flunked out just doing what I was doing.”

  “I don’t believe that any school would flunk out a Camden,” Nati said skeptically. She knew for a fact that, given his grades, her ex-husband would never have graduated but had remained in college semester after semester thanks to the generous donations from his father. And Doug did do most of the things she’d just enumerated for Cade.

  “I will grant you that the hesitancy to flunk out a Camden was how I got caught,” Cade admitted. “Someone from administration contacted GiGi with regrets for my poor academic performance and hinted that special concessions could be granted to me if only the college had some incentive.”

  “And your grandmother wrote a check?”

  Cade laughed again. “GiGi was not going to buy anybody a degree—that’s what she said. And she doesn’t put up with the kind of messing around I was doing—let alone catered picnics or limos or chartered planes or yachts or hot-air balloons or any of that other stuff you were talking about. GiGi had Louie work me like a dog when I came home for summer break. She set an hourly wage, I couldn’t do less than forty hours a week and she kept every penny of the money to pay back what I’d wasted in tuition.”

  “But she let you go back the next year?”

  “She wasn’t going to but I pers
uaded her to give me one semester to prove I’d get serious about my education. She said if I didn’t she wouldn’t put another penny into it and she’d see to it that the only position I ever held with Camden Inc. was doing the worst job she could muster up. And I knew she’d do it.”

  “Tough lady.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “And that straightened you up?”

  “It had an impact. But like everything else, it wasn’t only GiGi. I’d also spent a lot of years under my great-grandfather’s influence, too. His goal during those years after the plane crash was to instill in all of us kids the need to carry on the family business, to build on what he’d started, and I actually did want to do that—”

  “After you cut loose a little,” Nati interjected.

  “Sure. I was a kid,” Cade admitted. “Plus I came home that summer after the first year to Margaret’s disappointment in me—that was hard to take. And to some stern talks from Louie about what it means to be a decent, honorable, responsible man, one he didn’t have to be embarrassed to know. That wasn’t easy to hear, either—”

  “So they shamed you and guilted you into shaping up?” Nati said.

  “In spades,” he confirmed. “From then on it was nose to the grindstone. I didn’t even join a fraternity so I wouldn’t be tempted to do too much partying. I became a studious, very dull boy.”

  “Who never learned to surf?”

  “Never did,” he said with a laugh.

  They’d finished the main course. Cade pushed the take-out containers away, making room for them to share the dessert just as they had the night before. They ate from opposite ends of a stack of rum-soaked ladyfingers interlayered with cocoa-dusted Bavarian cream, both of them leaning forward as cozily as if this was something old hat to them.

  “So,” Cade said then, “all that catered-picnic, hot-air-balloon, private-plane stuff—what college did you go to?”

  “The University of Colorado in Boulder. But it wasn’t as if any of that stuff was officially sponsored by the college—”