Filthy Rich Alpha

by Virna DePaul

  “We” again. The possessive little word grated on Cara’s ears. She avoided Branden’s gaze as the two of them got up to leave.

  “Yes, I think so,” he said. “Cara, thanks so much. I appreciate you taking the time to chat and I do apologize for interrupting you this morning.”

  “It’s your prerogative,” she said. “Stop by whenever you like.”

  “I will.” His voice was a dark promise, one that made her shiver.

  Chapter 4

  For the rest of the day, Cara immersed herself in her work, ruthlessly shoving away any thoughts she had of Branden Duke—which, she had to admit, were a ridiculous amount. If she wasn’t thinking about the complications that might come from working for him, she was thinking of their kiss, and how she’d ached for more. How she still did. Then she’d rebuke herself, and the whole cycle would start all over. By the time she exited the building to head home, the sun was fading and she was mentally and physically exhausted.

  Bundled in her scarf and parka, she went down a crooked old street that led to the waterfront park at the very end of Manhattan. This time of day, without the pressing need to get in early to work, she liked taking the alternate route home. Hopefully, the walk would clear her head, and tomorrow she’d get back to being her old self—work-focused, practical Cara, the Cara she’d been before she’d met Branden.

  She took several deep breaths. Even from where she was, she could see waves crashing against unseen pilings in the near distance, throwing sparkling spray up in the air under park lamps that had just come on. The wind was coming straight off the ocean, chopping the gray-green water of New York’s harbor into a million whitecaps.

  Elsewhere in the city, you could forget Manhattan was an island. Not down here.

  She walked along the waterfront, loving the smell of the ocean and the cries of the wheeling seagulls, slashes of white against the darkening sky. At the corner, a block away from the office, she noticed a low-slung car crawling through traffic.

  Its driver was Branden Duke.

  Instantly, any feeling of relaxation and well-being disappeared

  Heart pounding, Cara ducked out of view but unable to stop herself, watched him drive away, negotiating slowly over potholes and around construction barriers. The car was built for speed but down here, five miles an hour was about as fast as anyone could go. When he stopped at a red light up ahead, his flashing right blinker hypnotized her for a few seconds.

  The street he was about to turn into had no outlet. It ended at a new residential tower, the kind that had separate elevators for luxury cars so residents could actually park right on their very own floor.

  Unless he was visiting or picking up a friend to go somewhere else, it was possible that he lived in the tower. If he did, in addition to the mansion on Long Island Sound, he most likely ruled his world from one of the penthouses, complete with wraparound terrace and sweeping views. Too close for comfort.

  The light where he was waiting turned green and in seconds Branden was out of view.

  He had all the toys. Fantasy wheels. Awesome real estate. Limitless money to roll around in. He was a man anyone would envy, incredibly good-looking and exceptionally intelligent.

  And now, out of nowhere, he was her boss, give or take a few layers of managers, and he owned the company.

  He seemed to be trying to do the right thing—telling her that things would remain professional between them. But even so, he wasn’t denying that he wanted her in his bed.

  He was off-limits.

  But tempting. So very tempting.

  He was also a mystery to her, as was the lovely Deena who seemed to have no problem claiming him in front of Cara.

  She cursed softly. Because in that moment, she knew that despite working so hard to put him out of her mind and keep her attention on work, she was going to give in to at least one temptation.

  The temptation to know more about Branden Duke.

  “Did you have a good day, Miss Michal?”

  “Hi, Joe.” Cara gave the stout, brass-buttoned doorman of her apartment complex a frazzled smile and pushed her flyaway hair out of her face. “Yes I did, thank you.” She frowned when she looked across the street. “Where’d all that construction equipment come from?”

  The building across the street was surrounded by wooden barriers and warning signs. A scaffold had been erected during the hours she’d been away, rising no higher than the second floor.

  “They set it up this morning.”

  “Oh no. I hope the building isn’t going to be knocked down. The noise is going to be awful.”

  “Don’t let it get in the way,” Joe said.

  “Of what?”

  “Fun, of course. You work hard and need more of it,” he said randomly before he went out to whistle up a taxi for a waiting resident. Cara sighed. First Iris, now Joe. Clearly she was a walking advertisement for a workaholic.

  A half hour later, she had everything she needed at the ready. Laptop. Pen and paper. Novelty pajamas from Victoria’s Secret for comfort. A pint of Ben & Jerry’s Americone Dream to keep her from getting depressed if she found too many photos of Branden with different women.

  She jabbed a spoon in the caramel swirl and left it there.

  Then she began Googling Branden Duke.

  As she’d expected, there were tons of pictures of him with beautiful women. Models. Actresses. Even a member of the royal family. Each of his dates were gorgeous, and she couldn’t help but feel jealous. Ever since that kiss they shared, some part of Cara, as ridiculous as it was, couldn’t help but feel some part of him was hers.

  Ruthlessly, she stopped looking at the pictures and focused on more substantive articles, starting with those that discussed his professional journey.

  He was a self-made man, like so many Wall Street moguls. He got respect, according to what little she could dig up on him. Insider comments on business blogs tagged him as a street fighter and someone who’d been ruthless throughout his meteoric career. From the boiler room, he’d gone on to routine deals for a tiny trading firm to founding his own investment company only a few years later. He had done it all, starting with municipal-bond funds that penny-pinching grandmas trusted and moving on to billion-dollar deals with shady Russian oligarchs.

  She tried searching for information about his early years, before he’d earned himself the nickname the Duke, but she was coming up empty until she found it—a picture of him at around seventeen or eighteen. Still mesmerizingly handsome, just much younger.

  She rested her hands on the laptop briefly before visiting the page, staying in the images black box to study Branden’s senior yearbook picture. The big caption over the photo said it all: his classmates had voted him Most Likely to Exceed the Speed Limits of Life.

  She squinted at the fine print under the picture, puzzled for a second.

  “Holy shit.” Cara sat bolt upright, dragging the laptop onto a pillow to bring it closer. She enlarged the image just to make sure she’d read it right. She had.

  It said Davies, not Duke.

  The name Davies sent a shiver up her spine, and a memory of her father, shoulders hunched and defeat drawn all over his face, slid unwanted into her mind. Carl Davies was the name of the man who’d taken the money Cara’s father had been accused of stealing and built his own fortune before serving a meager handful of years in a clubhouse prison.

  Granted, Davies was a common enough name, but was it possible Carl Davies and Branden were related?

  More likely Branden had simply wanted to change his name to something more stately, right? Or maybe he was hiding from some kind of scandal? If so, he wouldn’t be the only one.

  Cara herself had changed her name from Finch to Michal, her mother’s maiden name, before leaving for college. As much as she’d loved her father and hated what had so unfairly happened to him, she’d also needed to separate herself from the scandal that had followed his death as much as possible, if only for professional reasons.

  Cara
started Googling again, trying to come up with a connection between Branden and Carl Davies, but again and again she came up empty. She was just about to enter another search when her phone rang. Her mother’s number flashed on the caller ID and Cara answered. She greeted her mother, then could tell by the sound of her mother’s shaky response there was a problem. “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh nothing. Well, my property taxes. I just found the form under a lot of junk. It’s more than I can pay right now,” her mother said shakily. “You know how it is, end of the month.”

  Which was when her mother was most likely to call. Janine Michal Finch had never gotten her life together after her husband’s death. It was as if her broken heart had broken her spirit, too. She tried to make ends meet, but her health was bad and inevitably she’d miss too many days at work and get fired. Money management was a foreign concept for her—Cara’s dad had been the breadwinner and the one in charge of the budget and finances before he’d died. Her mother had accepted her financial dependency then, and now, too.

  How different her mom was from the vibrant, cheerful woman Cara remembered from her youth. A woman who’d put on disco music and dance in the kitchen with her kids. A woman who once convinced her husband to drive them in an old Chevy across the country just to see the sunrise over the Grand Canyon. A woman who could make cannolis like nobody’s business.

  Cara couldn’t remember the last time her mother had made cannolis. But it had to be before her father died.

  Cara bit her lip and blinked back the sudden rush of moisture in her eyes. Life was what it was now. Her mom was who she was. They were alive. They had each other. That had to be enough. “I’ll take care of it, Mom.”

  “I’m sorry I let it slide. I can pay you back.”

  “No. Just get caught up. I can cover it.”

  There was no use in offering financial advice or suggesting a course in money management. Cara had supplemented her mom’s fixed income as soon as she’d started making real money.

  “How soon can you make the payment?” Her mother’s pleading voice sounded faded and weary.

  “I’ll overnight a check.”

  “Okay then.” There was a brief pause. “Have you—have you talked to Glenn lately?”

  “I talked to him a couple of days ago.”

  “And how’s my sweet boy?”

  Cara closed her eyes. Glenn was her mother’s sweet boy. He was Cara’s sweet brother. But that sweetness was often trapped now in the body and mind of a man plagued by intermittent psychotic events, something their mother had a very hard time dealing with. Which is why Cara handled all matters concerning Glenn’s care, including the cost of the expensive live-in facility with the staff that was the best they’d found. Windorne Care Home was good to Glenn, and she willingly paid through the nose for excellent treatment of her brother.

  “He’s good, Mom,” she said.

  “Oh good. Would you like to pick him up and come to Brooklyn for dinner?”

  A sense of longing swept over her—longing to see her mother, not necessarily a longing to come to Brooklyn. Visiting the small row house where she’d spent her teenage years was depressing—the furniture was the same, only even more shabby, and the interior and exterior walls needed painting. Her former bedroom was now used to store a jumble of miscellaneous items in crushed cardboard boxes. Somewhere underneath them was her old mattress and box spring and maybe even the desk she’d built out of a door and plastic crates. The neighborhood was sunk between two elevated freeways on the distant frontier of Brooklyn and would probably never be hip. Or gentrified, either, which meant the mortgage wasn’t a monster.

  Cara tried to help her mother with the house, but it was all she could do to keep up with the missed mortgage payments and property tax payments.

  What would her father say if he saw how her mother lived now? Cara could still remember how he’d come home from work each evening and go straight to her mom, kissing her full on the mouth and hugging her, telling her he loved her.

  No wonder her mother’s heart had broken beyond repair.

  “We’ll do that soon. I miss you, Mom,” she said, her throat suddenly constricting. “And I love you. More than you know.”

  After hearing her mother’s soft and loving response back, she ended the call then stared at the laptop with the searches for Branden Duke. Resolutely she shut down the computer and headed into the kitchen.

  Her life was complicated enough as it was. The last thing she needed was to add something else to the mix, so she was going to leave Branden Duke where he belonged. In his office at work, only relevant when Cara had to talk to him about her job.

  Friday dawned with the rumble of garbage trucks far below. Cara jolted straight up in bed and shot a quick glance at her ringing alarm clock. Yikes! After a restless night, she’d slept through the alarm.

  After a quick shower, Cara grabbed the nearest outfit out of her closet—a black suit—and didn’t realize until she exited her building that the tights she’d pulled up her legs were dark blue, not black. She was just about to run back up to change when her phone rang—a call from her brother Glenn’s assisted living facility.

  Her brother was having an episode. As the sound of her voice, even on the phone, was often able to calm him down, they’d called to see if she could help. An hour later, after speaking with Glenn on the phone, most of that time listening to him speak rapidly about a governmental conspiracy and how his phone was tapped, she’d managed to talk him into taking his fast-acting antipsychotic. The meds had quickly kicked in, and the last ten minutes of the call were blessedly calm.

  Unfortunately, the phone call and the fact she was tardy to work hadn’t exactly left her in a calm state.

  By the time she made it into the office, she was forty-five minutes late. Greg came up to her as soon as she got off the elevator and stepped onto their floor. They hadn’t spoken since the night of Branden’s party, and now he had the nerve to say, “Buzz buzz. All the worker bees are in their cells. Why aren’t you?”

  “Blow off, Greg, I had an important call. Not that it’s any of your business.”

  The tart comment didn’t seem to ruffle him. “Didn’t you get the text about coming in bright and early?”

  “No.” She paused for a few seconds to survey the main office area. It was a lot quieter than usual, and there were no traders hanging around talking shop or commenting on an online poker game in progress on someone else’s monitor. Greg seemed to be right about that. “Who sent it? What’s going on?”

  A thickset man with a close, bristling haircut came out of a trader’s office, smoothing a tie that was simultaneously too wide and too short. Like him.

  Greg looked pointedly in the man’s direction, then back at Cara.

  “Who’s he?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Mike Gaunt. The new office manager. He’s going around and he’s taking notes.”

  At least he wasn’t looking at her. She sized him up in a glance. Ice blue eyes. No visible lips. Expressionless face. Over forty, not yet fifty. Never had any fun because he couldn’t possibly have a sense of humor.

  Great. What a day for her to be the Forty-Five-Minutes-Late Girl.

  Gaunt stopped at a cluster of financial-news terminals and took a seat next to Chip, the intern. Chip smiled nervously at the unsmiling man beside him and pointed to one of the monitors.

  “Poor kid,” Greg said. “But at least you can get into your office without Gaunt seeing you.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up.” She strode away and turned the corner. Most likely Branden Duke had cleared out and left the actual running of his new acquisition to Gaunt.

  It was for the best, Cara told herself, despite her deep sense of disappointment that she actually might not be seeing Branden Duke again. God, she was pathetic.

  Disgruntled, she went into her office and had barely sat down when her phone rang. Another familiar Brooklyn number. She picked up, cradling the receiver on her shoulder while he
r fingers moved over the keyboard as she greeted Iris.

  “Hello there. Did you look at Deets today?”

  Cara had no interest in gossip sites. Iris was a devotee. When the famous gossip site Gawker had been taken down, several new sites had popped up in its place, Deets being one of them.

  She stopped typing. “Why?”

  “I’ll stay on the line,” Iris said.

  Cara took out her smartphone and pulled it up. She glanced at the headlines as she scrolled through them until one stopped her cold:

  “Hot Mystery Babe Flees Decadent Slumber Party at Money Mogul’s Mansion!”

  There was a photo of her outside the grand front doors of Branden Duke’s Long Island mansion. She looked disheveled. Wantonly so. The blurb was even worse:

  This pouty blonde with honey-dipped hair was spotted in the wee hours trying to escape the pleasure palace of money mogul Branden Duke. Don’t ask us who she is. Just tell us if you know. Bonus question: why has Duke muscled in on the exclusive brokerage firm of Dubois & Mellan? Their richest clients want to know if their investments are safe. So do we. Lock up your stocks and bonds and your daughters, New York. The man is too sexy and too smart.

  “Holy hell,” she breathed. “What is this? Who took that picture?”

  “You tell me,” Iris said. “Although you look great.”

  “I look like a hot mess,” Cara countered. “That’s the work party I attended. All I was doing was waiting for the…car.”

  “Car?”

  “Branden Duke’s limo. He owned the house. And he’s…erm…my new boss. I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to catch you up on things.” That wasn’t quite true. She’d had the time. She’d just been struggling with her feeling about Branden so much, wanting to work them out before she filled Iris in on everything that had been going on. “He…um…arranged for his driver to take me home.”

  “Really? Funny what did you do to earn that favor?” Iris asked.

  “He…um…well, nothing. Although we might have kissed before I left. And before I knew he was my boss,” she said quickly.