Engaging the Boss (Heirs of Damon)

by Noelle Adams

  Engaging the Boss

  Noelle Adams

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Noelle Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

  Content Editing: Kristin Anders, The Romantic Editor.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Teaser Excerpt from Missing

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Sarah Stratford had learned eavesdropping was dangerous when she overheard a neighbor say she was an unattractive child.

  At age eleven, she’d been a little chubby with bushy red hair and dead white skin. Instead of resenting her neighbor for the unkind words, Sarah had cried because she’d known they were true.

  Seventeen years later, she knew she shouldn’t eavesdrop on her boss’s phone conversation. He hadn’t closed the door to his office, however, and the only way not to hear was to cover her ears or leave the laboratory.

  Sarah did neither. She tried to focus the DNA sequence projected on one of the lab’s high-end monitors, but she couldn’t help but listen.

  Her boss, Jonathan Damon, was on the phone with his corporate mogul uncle, and she could hear a tense note in his voice. He’d never said a word to her about his notorious family, but she knew he wasn’t close to them. She also knew this conversation wasn’t a good one.

  “I understand the Damon name is important to you. I know you want us to settle down and have kids. But I have plenty of time for that. I’m only thirty-five.” Jonathan’s tone was overly patient, as if he were reining in his temper. In the three years she’d worked for him, she’d never seen Jonathan express anger. That patient tone was as close as he came.

  Sarah didn’t like to think of herself as a nosy person, at least not in general. With Jonathan, however, it was different.

  If she were ever in the position to give advice to other women, the first thing she would tell them was never fall in love with your boss. It was a hopeless, never-ending form of torture—to have the object of your affection always right there in front of you but never actually be able to claim him.

  It also made you want to eavesdrop on his private conversations.

  “That was ages ago. I dated her in grad school,” Jonathan was saying now. “We haven’t talked in years, and there was never any future in that relationship.”

  Her curiosity piqued again, Sarah glanced toward the office door, but it was half-closed and Jonathan was out of sight.

  One of the problems with loving her boss was that even the possibility of a relationship would jeopardize her position. She was proud of the career she’d built for herself so far. She’d completed a PhD in genetics at Stanford and gotten an enviable position in Jonathan’s private lab in Iceland, researching the genetics behind Multiple Sclerosis. She could honestly say she had her dream job, rather than dealing with the commercialization and politics of a pharmaceutical company, which is probably what she’d be doing if she wasn’t doing this.

  And she could lose this dream job if she ever acted on her feelings for Jonathan. His work was everything to him—his entire world—and he wouldn’t put up with anything that threatened it, including an assistant who was too distracted by feelings to do her job well.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Jonathan said in that same patient tone. “We’re doing really important work here. You can’t be threatening to cut us off just because—”

  His uncle obviously interrupted him, since he stopped mid-sentence. Then, “Okay. I understand. I understand. To tell you the truth, there is someone. I’ve been trying to keep it private, but, well, we’re actually engaged.”

  Another pause. “Yes, engaged to be married.”

  Another pause. “Probably in a few months. We haven’t set a date.”

  During the longer silence as Cyrus Damon responded on the other end of the line, Sarah felt like she’d been crushed under a falling weight. The shocked pain at what she’d heard was so powerful she literally couldn’t stand up. She found a stool and lowered herself onto it, trying to force her feelings back down where she could control them.

  After all, she had no legitimate cause to be upset, even though she’d never known Jonathan was even in a relationship. She’d always known she could never have him for herself. He was her boss, and he was off-limits in every way.

  Plus, even if she hadn’t worked for him, he would never want her.

  When she could move again, she opened the top drawer in her desk and grabbed a peppermint ball. She’d always had a sweet-tooth, one that wouldn’t go away. When she started working for Jonathan, she’d actually lost ten pounds—not because he was a health-nut but because most of the time he forgot about eating. But she couldn’t give up all her sweets.

  She liked the round, soft, puffed kind of peppermint balls. A couple of years ago, she’d asked her then-boyfriend Matt to pick her up a bag when he was in Reykjavik. He’d mistakenly gotten her the hard, saucer-shaped kind. She’d just smiled and thanked him, since she hadn’t wanted him to know she was disappointed. But she hated the hard kind.

  The following day, the hard ones had disappeared from her drawer and the good ones had taken their place. Now, every time they were getting low, a new bag would miraculously appear.

  Just one of the reasons she loved the man she worked for.

  Jonathan was still talking on the phone, mostly murmuring, “Yes” and “Of course.”

  Then he finally said, “Fine. I’ll see if she can come.” He hung up a few seconds later.

  Sarah picked up the silver travel mug Jonathan drank from—inscribed with the words “Lab Rat”—and carried it over to the kitchenette area on the far side of the lab. She dumped out the lukewarm remains of his coffee, rinsed out the mug, and refilled it with fresh coffee from the pot. Jonathan liked his coffee so strong she could barely tolerate it, and he drank it all day long.

  Her back was to the office door, and she pretended to be focused intently on screwing on the lid to his mug.

  She swallowed the last of her peppermint. She felt breathless, and her eyes blurred slightly.

  She couldn’t believe Jonathan was engaged. How was she going to stand working for him every day when he was married, knowing she wasn’t even allowed to dream about him?

  His fiancée was undoubtedly beautiful—slender, elegant, and stylish. Everything Sarah was not.

  “What’s wrong?” Jonathan asked from behind her. He’d evidently walked out of his office and taken his normal position at the lab table.

  She turned around, her eyes widening. “Nothing. Why?”

  Jonathan didn’t look anything like a stereotypical research scientist. He was built like a football player, but it must be just good genes because she never saw him working out. He had a strong, handsome face with brown hair and brown eyes, and his clothes and lab coat were perpetually wrinkled.

  He gave a half-shrug at her question. “You seemed to be having a hard time screwing on the lid.”

  “Oh. No. I just wasn’t paying attention.” She smiled at him, as brightly as she could, as she brought his coffee back over. “Is your uncle doing all right?”

  His u
ncle, Cyrus Damon, had founded a multi-billion dollar conglomerate of hotels and restaurants, and his four nephews were the heirs to his fortune. The other nephews were more in the spotlight than Jonathan. He’d buried himself for years at school in MIT and in the lab here, which he’d opened seven years ago with funding that came primarily from his uncle.

  “You heard, huh?” He shook his head as he took a swallow of coffee. “He never changes. He’s unhappy with me, as usual.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she murmured, looking back at the DNA sequence blindly. “I didn’t know you were engaged. Congratulations.” She couldn’t help but wonder how he’d found the time to date and get engaged to someone. The one long-term relationship she’d had was with Matt Turner, who’d been hired at the lab at the same time she was. Their relationship had dissolved after a year, in part because they just hadn’t had time for each other.

  She’d thought Jonathan had nothing in his life but work. Evidently, she was wrong.

  There was silence beside her, stretching out so long she finally turned. She caught the strangest expression on Jonathan’s face.

  Half-reluctant and half-guilty.

  “What is it?” she prompted. He usually didn’t express any emotion at all, his face always relaxed, even when focused deeply on the most minuscule of genetic details.

  “I’m not really engaged.”

  “What?”

  “I lied.”

  Her belly clenched with a weird combination of relief and excitement. “But he’ll have to find out eventually, won’t he?”

  “I know,” he admitted, rubbing his chin in a habitual gesture. She could hear the faint sound of his bristles against his hand. He shaved every day, but he was always bristly again by lunchtime. “It wasn’t the smartest of lies. Now he wants me to bring my fictional fiancée to my cousin’s wedding.”

  “I guess you could make up an excuse about why she couldn’t come.” She tried to sound normal, but she almost felt giddy.

  She indulged in daydreams all the time about Jonathan, but she didn’t have any realistic hopes about a future with him. He was brilliant, handsome, and would be a billionaire when his uncle died. He commanded attention everywhere he went—so compelling was the force of his intellectual confidence and the depth of his commitment to his goals. It wasn’t arrogance or intimidation, and it was completely unconscious on his part. But she’d seen him at conferences and symposiums, and she’d seen the most skeptical of stodgy academics look at him with respect, despite his youth and despite the fact that he wasn’t affiliated with a university.

  Jonathan Damon could have any woman he wanted. Sarah was smart and was good at her job, but otherwise she was nothing special. She could be content with what she had—a career she’d always dreamed of and working daily with a man as brilliant and amazing as him.

  Anything more was a Cinderella-dream, and she’d always known that could never happen to her.

  “Yeah,” Jonathan replied, sitting down on a stool and turning back and forth on it restlessly. “Hopefully, he’ll accept the excuse. He threatened to pull our funding because I was too focused on research to settle down and get married.”

  “I heard,” she said, surprised he’d told her something so personal. They talked all the time, but it was almost always about work. “It’s probably just a passing whim,” she added, “brought on by your cousin getting married. You can just make up an excuse for her now and then later claim that she broke the engagement. You don’t really think he’ll stop funding us, do you?”

  He didn’t answer immediately, just looked away, which was answer enough.

  “Is he really so…so old-fashioned?” She chose her words carefully, since she didn’t want to offend him. “I mean, to insist that you not stay single.”

  “Old-fashioned doesn’t even begin to describe him. He wants to be an eighteenth-century lord of the manor.” There was a slight bitterness in his brown eyes as he said the words—something she’d never seen there before. He was usually such an even-tempered man.

  Since she was feeling jittery, she reached into her drawer for another peppermint, fidgeting with the plastic wrapper after she popped it into her mouth. Jonathan stocked the peppermint balls for her, but neither ever mentioned it. When she first started working for him, she’d tried to thank him for the nice little things he did, but any sort of thanks would make him grumpy for the rest of the day, which for him meant withdrawn and quiet.

  So his stocking her peppermint balls went uncommented. Not unnoticed, though.

  “Maybe you could ask a friend to pose as your fiancée,” she suggested. “Just for the wedding. That way, you can extend the engagement as long as possible before you say it’s called off. By then, maybe he’d feel so sorry for you about the broken engagement that the funding would be safe.”

  Jonathan arched his eyebrows. “Who would agree to do something so crazy as pretend to be my fiancée?”

  “I’d do it,” she volunteered without thinking. Mostly, she was trying to make him feel better, and she didn’t think through the implications until the words were spoken.

  Her cheeks grew hot, and she lowered her eyes to the peppermint wrapper she still held. “I mean, if you decided you wanted to do it.”

  “You would? Really?”

  When she snuck a glance at him, she saw with relief that his expression was speculative rather than disgusted or shocked.

  “You’d be willing to do that for me?” he asked after staring at her for a long moment.

  “Sure,” she said, trying for casual. “Why not? My job is on the line too. It wouldn’t be that hard. What would it be? Just a few days?”

  “A week,” he said, rubbing his chin as if he were already thinking through a to-do list. “My uncle has in mind a prolonged house party.”

  “Well, that’s okay.” She made sure she sounded more confident than she felt, since the idea of posing as his fiancée for a whole week was absolutely terrifying. How would someone as plain and no-nonsense as her ever pull it off? “If you want to do it, I’m in.”

  “I’d need to arrive at his place this Friday.”

  She swallowed hard. She hadn’t expected it to be so soon. She was thinking she’d have weeks to prepare or for some kind of natural disaster to occur that would prevent her from going through with it. “No problem. It would just mean putting this project on hold.” She nodded toward the microscope they’d been working with before his uncle had called.

  He sighed with a very faint twist of his lips. If she hadn’t known him so well, she wouldn’t have recognized the expression as reluctance. “Yeah. But, if we lose our funding, it won’t matter. Better to delay now.” He hesitated, obviously trying to make the decision.

  “I really don’t mind. It might be fun. I’ve never been to England, you know.”

  “I don’t know how fun it will be. You don’t know my family. They’re a little…high-maintenance. Are you sure you’d be comfortable with this? I don’t want to put you in an awkward position.”

  “Why would it be awkward? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  She wasn’t sure where she got the courage to be so daring, to say something so presumptuous. She thought of him as a friend, but they’d never done friend-type things. They’d traveled around Iceland together over the last couple of years, but that was to collect genealogical and genetic information, so it was always under the context of work.

  Otherwise, both of them spent all of their days and most of their evenings working in this lab.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, making up his mind at last. “Thanks. I really appreciate this.”

  She shrugged again, pleased that her casual act was convincing. Maybe she was a better actress than she thought. “Not a problem. I’d hate for you to lose your funding and for me to lose my job. I actually kind of like it, you know.”

  He smiled at her—a real smile, the one she only saw rarely. For a moment, he was so attractive she almost lost her breath. “Good. Me too.”
>
  He took another long gulp of coffee, and they went back to work. Neither mentioned the fake engagement again, and Sarah was quite sure that it had completely slipped out of Jonathan’s mind. When he was absorbed in work, he thought about nothing else.

  She’d never met anyone who could focus so intently for so long as him.

  They worked late, since they were making good progress, and it was almost ten in the evening when Sarah realized she was famished and so tired she couldn’t see straight. Having a peppermint ball every half-hour wasn’t cutting it. She hated to call it quits before Jonathan, but sometimes she just had to.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at last, rolling her chair back over to her desk to set down her tablet. The wheel on her chair had been acting up, and it steered her off course so she almost ran into the corner of a table. “What did you say?” He’d been talking, but she hadn’t tracked with any of his words. Her head ached and her stomach churned, and her damned chair wasn’t working right.

  Jonathan glanced at his watch, as if he just realized it was late. “You’re exhausted,” he said. “Go on home. We’ll pick up again tomorrow.”

  She let out a relieved breath, but still felt a bit guilty. “I can hold out a little longer if you—”

  “No, no. It’s late. Sorry I kept you so long.”

  She got up to leave, since he’d already gotten distracted again, jotting down notes on his pad of paper as he studied the monitor. But she’d been thinking a lot for the last several hours and, before she left, she had to clear up a few things.

  “This wedding, it’s going to be really fancy, isn’t it?”

  He blinked, as if he’d just remembered they’d talked about that earlier today. “Yeah.”

  “I’ll need to do some shopping. Is it all right if I have a day off sometime this week to go into Reykjavik?”

  “Why do you need to go shopping?”

  Her lips parted slightly as she stared at him. “Are you serious? I don’t dress up around here. I don’t have anything close to appropriate to wear.”

  “Oh.” He wrinkled his forehead, as if shopping were something foreign to his experience. “I guess so. Sure, take whatever day you want. Or, better yet, we can leave a day early and you can shop in London. I’ll be happy to pay—”