Twice the Temptation

by Francis Ray

  Charlotte, as the youngest of three sisters, had never taken being ignored very well. She took being judged unjustly worse. Combined, the two offenses hit her boiling point midway through her blackened catfish. The ladylike thing to do was to ignore the rude man. He was a Yankee and didn’t know any better. She, on the other hand, had been raised to be hospitable, ignore offenses, and never forget she was a Southern lady. But as the meal lengthened she recalled she had also been taught that if a woman were smart enough she could get her point across and remain a lady.

  “Vincent.” Charlotte drew out the first syllable of his name, then ended the second in a soft croon. She waited until he slowly turned to face her. She wondered briefly what that sensual mouth would look like relaxed, then dismissed the thought. “I certainly hope our hot Texas summers aren’t too brutal for you. Boston’s climate is so different.”

  Unyielding black eyes narrowed. “I was in Saudi for two years.”

  “Then you can take the heat. How nice,” she said drolly. Dismissing Vincent, she reached for the crystal salt shaker and brushed her bare arm against the fine cotton blend of his jacket. He stiffened as if something vile had touched him.

  “Excuse me, sugar,” she smiled into his taut face. He certainly hadn’t liked being called “sugar,” but then neither did she care for being treated as if she were something repugnant.

  Immediately she made up her mind—the challenge was on. For the next five minutes, she “accidentally” brushed against Vincent every chance she got and called him “sugar.” Her lips twitched. If he became any stiffer, he’d crack.

  A delightful prospect.

  With that thought in mind, Charlotte decided a two-pronged attack was in order. She leaned toward Vincent to ask him his party affiliation. The twin assaults would surely send him over the edge. Relishing the outcome, she grinned.

  Vincent chose that moment to reach for the bread basket near Charlotte’s plate. Instead of her brushing against his shoulder, his right forearm grazed her breast.

  Charlotte froze out of embarrassment and the unexpected thrill of pleasure that shot through her. Her sharp intake of breath hissed through her clenched teeth.

  Time stood still, then started again as she slowly faced him. The apology on her lips died under his accusing glare. Hot shame flooded her cheeks and made her speechless for one of the few times in her life.

  Vincent scooted over. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to crowd you.”

  She felt inexplicably worse by his unexpected gallantry. She opened her mouth to say it was her fault, then inwardly shrank from the anger boiling in his stormy black eyes. He thought she had done it on purpose.

  Charlotte realized she had no comeback. Her childish act of teasing him had gotten her into this predicament. Mutely, she turned to Brian and Emma and was relieved to see that they were too involved with each other to see what had happened.

  Vincent picked up the roll from the linen-draped silver basket with his left hand, broke the bread in half and placed it on his bread plate without taking a bite. Charlotte had the feeling he wished the crusty roll were her neck.

  “Brian, should I plan to go with you and Emma to see the pastor Saturday?” Vincent asked.

  Smiling, Brian shook his head. Apparently he didn’t notice Vincent’s strained voice. “It will be more like a counseling session to make sure we’re ready.”

  His jaw tight, Vincent nodded solemnly. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I have some paperwork that I have to get to tonight. The bill has been taken care of.”

  “You haven’t finished your meal,” Charlotte blurted.

  Cold eyes stabbed her. “I’ve lost my appetite.”

  Charlotte flinched.

  “Thanks, cuz, for dinner and for coming,” Brian said, then asked, “Do either of you ladies want any dessert?” At the negative shake of the women’s heads, he tossed a fifty on the table. “Then we’ll walk out with you. Emma was up late last night with PTA.”

  Emma leaned her head against his shoulder and stared worshipfully up at her fiancé. “Charlotte, I hope you find someone like Brian.”

  “One can always hope,” Charlotte said.

  A snorting sound came from the direction of Vincent, but when Charlotte looked around, his expression was bland. “Did you say something?”

  “Nothing you’d want to hear.”

  Realizing he was probably right, Charlotte stepped in front of him and headed out of the restaurant. Outside, as luck would have it, Vincent’s car arrived first from the valet. She had hoped she might get a chance to apologize. Curtly, he dipped his well-shaped head in Charlotte’s direction before warmly saying good-bye to Brian and Emma. Then he went around and got in the driver’s seat of his late-model Lincoln Town Car and drove off.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t make a very favorable impression on your cousin, Brian,” Charlotte said, staring at the taillights of the luxury sedan before they disappeared as Vincent turned onto Houston Street.

  Perpetually easygoing, Brian slung his free arm around Charlotte’s tense shoulders. “Don’t worry. I admit Vincent is the serious type, but he’s an all right kind of guy. The reason he hasn’t been able to meet you until now is that he’s reengineering his company’s entire financial organization. He’s got a lot on his mind. It’ll be different the next time you meet him.”

  “Brian’s right, Charlotte,” Emma said from beside Brian, who had his other arm around her trim waist. “Vincent just has a lot on his mind. He’s a great guy. Besides,” she said with a grin, “there’s not a man alive who’s immune to you.”

  Charlotte smiled as Emma had intended, but it was forced. All her friends thought she was some kind of femme fatale. But Charlotte knew all too well she wasn’t, just as she knew that men were immune to her. While her friends were getting married right and left, she was going home alone.

  Hugging Emma, Charlotte went to her Lexus, tipping the attendant as she got in her car. Traffic was light in downtown Dallas and soon she was on Central Expressway heading north and home. It might have been her imagination, but every car she saw seemed to have a couple snuggled together inside.

  Pulling into the garage located in the rear of her house, she went straight to her office off the kitchen and checked messages. There were seven since she had retrieved the last one before she went into the restaurant. That was light, but it wouldn’t remain that way.

  Her party needed money to ensure that when the time came their presidential candidate won the White House, and when he did he’d need the votes of senators and congressmen and women he could count on. Her job, her passion, was to ensure that that happened. And that meant money, and lots of it.

  By law, fund-raising could only be conducted while the Senate was in session, from January to June first. It was May twenty-fifth. And although fund-raising didn’t usually get into full swing until late fall, things were already happening.

  Cutting off the light, Charlotte stopped by the bright kitchen done in celery green with creamy oyster accents, pulled a bottle of water from the refrigerator, then continued to her bedroom, yawning as she went. She’d been up since six working on a volunteer project for Brian’s House, a home for children with AIDS. But it would be worth it. The budget would be met for the following year and then some.

  Fighting back another yawn, Charlotte reached for a padded hanger in her mirrored walk-in closet. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the rose silk taffeta maid of honor gown for Emma’s wedding hanging in a thick plastic bag emblazoned with the name Yvonne’s Wedding Gowns.

  Melancholy hit Charlotte without warning. She had a beautiful, tastefully furnished, brick four-bedroom home, a nice car, a closet full of clothes for each season of the year, and a job that allowed her to work out of her home and set her own hours. And no one special to share her life with.

  As a political fund-raiser, she not only helped in a small way to shape the policies of the country, but met influential and often famous people in the process. In Dallas, there was
something going on every weekend and almost every night. Her social calendar was full, but her personal life was empty.

  Only her immediate family was aware of how much it hurt when people continued to ask when she was going to walk down the aisle as the bride. She wished she knew.

  Most of the men she met were either out for what they could get, already in a relationship, or thought she was too outspoken and aggressive. They wanted a woman who stayed in the background, who was nonthreatening and demure. She’d never be that.

  She sighed. Those attributes, some would say faults, she admitted to herself, were what had gotten her into her present predicament. But you couldn’t get political donations by being timid. Especially since she was only five-feet-two in her stocking feet. She’d learned to walk gracefully in stiletto heels because she’d been taught that a lady always wore heels, but they also added inches to her height.

  To those who said she had a Napoleonic complex, she said bull. She’d just learned early to speak up for herself in a house full of women who all wanted to be heard. She often wondered how her daddy, a loving, soft-spoken man, had stood it. But he had, and he’d appeared to relish being around so many women.

  Charlotte was the only one of her sisters still single. She’d absolutely refused another blind date or to be hooked up. If Mr. Right was out there, she’d wait until God placed him in her path. But patience had never been Charlotte’s strong suit.

  At the last wedding she’d attended as maid of honor—number eight—Ira Hadnot, a reporter for the “Lifestyle” section of the Dallas Morning News, had asked Charlotte about doing a story on the number of times she had been down the aisle and not married. Thankfully, Ira had been joking and why shouldn’t she? Ira had a wonderful husband who adored her. She had someone to go home to; someone to wake up with.

  Tossing the hanger on the king-sized bed, Charlotte unzipped her dress. She, on the other hand, woke up to the sound of an alarm clock. She was twenty-nine with no prospects. But that wasn’t her biggest concern at the moment. Her biggest concern was facing Vincent Maxwell and apologizing.

  She strongly believed a person should take responsibility for their own actions, even if it meant getting their head chopped off. Vincent looked as if he could chop with the best of them.

  TWO

  Vincent stepped into the chrome-and-glass elevator on the third floor of Ore-Tech Petroleum Company, nodded absently to two men he recognized from marketing, and punched nine. Vincent’s mind was on the thick stack of fan-folded paper he’d just picked up from accounting.

  The data he held was just another piece of the larger puzzle that was needed to complete the financial reorganization of Ore-Tech. After working sixteen-, sometimes twenty-hour days for more weeks than he cared to remember, the financial plan was finally coming together. When he and his team were finished, they’d save the company millions.

  People not in the corporate world tended to think that all executives did was play golf and have five-martini lunches. If that were true, the company they worked for would go bankrupt. Truth was, they worked their butts off. They saw little of their families. The trade-off for the family was a higher standard of living.

  When he wasn’t traveling, there wasn’t a night that he didn’t take work home. However, he was well compensated for his hard work and diligence.

  The high six-figure salary he earned easily went to seven figures with bonuses and profit sharing. If things went as planned he could retire in twenty more years at fifty-five, if he wanted. He didn’t see that happening. He liked what he did, and if he did say so himself, he was very good at it.

  The elevator door opened on the fifth floor and the men got out. Vincent’s destination was the top executive floor and his corner office that looked out onto picturesque Lake Carolyn that meandered through Las Colinas, an upscale office and residential complex. As the elevator door closed, Vincent’s thoughts went to Brian.

  His cousin wanted the high salary, the corner office, but Vincent wasn’t sure the easygoing man was cut out for the stressful, hectic pace that could crush a man and his marriage. Vincent had been raised to believe that a man took care of his family. The man worked and the wife stayed home. That’s what the men in Vincent’s family did—until Brian.

  Emma planned to continue teaching. According to Brian, she liked to cook for him, and enjoyed going to the movies. If Brian continued his climb in the marketing department of the telecommunications company he worked for, she’d be cooking for one, and the only movies they’d see would be the ones rented from a video store. Vincent couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a new release, with or without a woman.

  Although he had no thoughts of getting married, when he did decide to take the plunge, he planned to follow tradition. His wife would stay at home.

  Vincent liked Emma and while she seemed practical, he wondered if she could handle the pressure of being married to a man gone more than he was home. Vincent shifted the papers and wondered about something else: how a nice, sweet woman like Emma had a friend like Charlotte.

  Charlotte. She was completely unacceptable, but that hadn’t kept him from thinking about her. She’d been on his mind when he finally drifted off to sleep last night, then in his dreams.

  His hand closed over the spot on his arm where her breast had touched. The soft imprint had burned into his flesh and left him wanting to remove the cloth barrier and place his mouth there. He scowled. He’d known she was trouble the moment he’d laid eyes on her.

  His scowl deepening, Vincent bumped the closing elevator door with his shoulder and stepped off. It wasn’t like him to let a woman distract him. Not even Sybil had managed to do that.

  Determined steps carried him down the wide hallway filled with contemporary art and lush tropical plants. Six offices were located on the floor. His was at the far end. Opening the heavy mahogany door to his outer office, he took two steps, then stopped abruptly. The last person he expected to see perched on the edge of his secretary’s desk was Charlotte Duvall.

  Her hazel eyes widened. Mulberry-painted lips parted in surprise, then she seemed to glide off the desk and onto her feet. Multiple layers of white swirled around her, then settled, but not before he’d seen those shapely legs that had helped deny him his sleep. He closed the door with a crisp snap.

  “Vincent, I know we don’t have an appointment and that you’re a busy man, but if you’d give me five minutes I’d like to explain about last night,” she said in a rush, eyeing him warily.

  “You have fifteen minutes before your next appointment,” Millicent informed him. “I could get you and Ms. Duvall some coffee, if you’d like.”

  Charlotte glanced back at the older woman and smiled. “Please, call me Charlotte.”

  Millicent smiled back, a real smile full of warmth and pleasure.

  Vincent’s gaze went from one to the other. He felt as if he was in the Twilight Zone. His secretary, Millicent Howard, was cool, crisp, and a bit remote. But obviously not with Charlotte. He’d inherited her from the previous vice-president and since his secretary in Boston hadn’t wanted to relocate, he’d agreed to keep Millicent.

  The first time he’d met Millicent, the diminutive sixty-year-old had politely informed him that she was a secretary, not a waitress or an errand girl. She typed 120 words per minute, spoke five languages, had an in with all the departments needed to get his reports done quickly and correctly, knew all the word processing programs, and didn’t mind working late.

  Aware of what his schedule was going to be like, Vincent figured he could get a housekeeper to shop and do errands for him, so he’d kept Millicent on. In the months since, not once had she ever offered to bring him coffee.

  “Vincent?” his secretary questioned, peering at him from behind her tortoise-frame glasses, none of the gray hair that she wore scraped back in a tight bun out of place.

  “No, thank you, Millicent.” Another thing about Dallas was that all the employees seemed to be on a first-name basis. B
alancing the papers in his arm, he opened the door to his office. “You have five minutes.”

  “Thank you.” Charlotte passed him in a flutter of white, the exotic scent of jasmine trailing softly behind her.

  Need nipped him in a place he didn’t want to think about. He’d let her have her say and then she was out of there.

  Closing his door, he nodded his head in the direction of one of the matching navy blue leather seats in front of his massive desk. Then he rounded the desk and placed the papers on the corner. His hand settled on the back of his executive swivel chair and pulled it back. He glanced up before taking his seat and discovered Charlotte, her posture rigid, still standing.

  He folded his arms, uncaring that the posture was confrontational and rude. She deserved no less. “You have five minutes,” he reminded her.

  Her chin came up. “My behavior last night was reprehensible. There is no excuse for it and I apologize. I set out to provoke you initially, but the last incident was totally unplanned and embarrassing for both of us. I hope we can put the incident behind us for Emma and Brian’s sake.”

  He studied her a long time. The stunning face and clenched fists. She didn’t want to be here. They were even. He didn’t want her here either. He’d rather keep his very low opinion of her. It was easier and safer.

  He didn’t have to think back to remember the hot stab of lust that touching her breast had caused or her wide-eyed stare of embarrassment. Faked, of course. But one thing he was sure of was that the imprint of her nipple pressing against her dress afterward hadn’t been there before. The last thing he wanted to be aware of was that she was aware of him.

  “Why would you want to provoke me?” His voice gave no quarter and usually sent those under him scurrying to get out of his way.