Tempting the CEO (a Sleeping With The Enemy novella) (Entangled Brazen) Read online

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll get you next time. I will. Or you could come see me.”

  Like that was going to happen.

  “You sound down. Did something go wrong with your, er, whatever?”

  “No. Everything was fine. Very successful for my client. Fine,” I reiterated. “But I’ve checked out of my hotel.” Sort of. “And I’m about to leave for the airport.”

  “Well, can’t I come over there and we can have a quick breakfast?”

  Forget I’d been up for hours, although I actually hadn’t eaten anything. “No. I have to go, Mom, okay?”

  She was silent on the other end, an effective tactic for most mothers probably, but mine was a master at it.

  “I’m sorry. I am,” I said. “I wanted to see you.” It had been a few months. And since mother years were longer than dog years even, that was very long indeed.

  “I’m a five-minute cab ride away.” My luck, I had mentioned what hotel I was going to be in. “I can get dressed in five minutes—”

  I laughed. “As if!”

  She laughed too. “Well, I will. I promise. Just give me ten minutes and I’ll meet you there.”

  I relented. “Okay. But hurry! I’ll meet you in the lobby and we can have coffee at least. But I’m booking a flight for this afternoon.”

  We hung up with her promising to be quick, which was so not like her. I didn’t really want to stay put in the hotel, in case you-know-who came down, but I did want to get out of town fast and this was the best alternative for that, making allowances for daughterly duties and all. If I agreed to meet her somewhere, or God forbid go to her penthouse, that would just take more time.

  I camped out in the lobby in a comfortable chair as inconspicuously as I could, out of view of the elevator, behind a New York Times even, for safe measure. After a few minutes, you-know-who actually did come down, but he didn’t notice me on his way out of the hotel. I dropped my paper and got around to plugging in the airline site on my phone to change my ticket.

  Noticing the time on the cell, I was immediately irritated. Where the hell was my mother?

  I turned to see her entering the lobby, perfectly made up and looking as if I did have a sibling, namely her.

  And my heart dropped.

  Oh God. This just kept getting better. Jed was right next to her, and they were chatting as they approached me.

  I got up and Mom kissed me on the cheek. “Here’s my girl,” she said. “Ravishing as ever.”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Look who I met outside of the hotel, honey.”

  Mom must have taken in Jed’s shocking good looks and the quality of his suit, pricing it down to the cent, and been drawn to him like a magnet.

  Maybe I should remind her she was already married, although of course there was always room for trading up. But no need. It was clear whom she was scoping the corporate titan out for, and it wasn’t herself. Hard to believe even my mother, though, had actually accosted a perfect stranger and dragged him back in here to meet her daughter.

  Jed was smiling easily. “What a coincidence, eh? I thought you’d already gone, but when I saw your mom, my first thought was that it was you.”

  “Yes, he grabbed my arm and said ‘Angie?’ and of course I knew he meant you.”

  Too bad he hadn’t said “Suzy.” Maybe he wouldn’t be here right now.

  “He thought I was your sister! Can you imagine?” My mom laughed as if she hadn’t been through that routine a million times.

  He probably wasn’t even flattering her. That was the especially annoying part of this whole scenario. Well, one of the very many annoying parts of it. This was turning out to be the worst possible outcome I could have envisioned, other than Jed being at the meeting this morning in the first place, needless to say.

  “Oh, okay,” I said with all the enthusiasm I could muster, which wasn’t much.

  “Yes, and I didn’t even have a chance to introduce myself. Jed Worth.” He shook my mom’s hand.

  “Natalie,” she said, omitting her last name as she always did in order to prompt the man to insist she call him by his first name, which Jed predictably did.

  I stuck to Mr. Worth. “Mr. Worth’s company is purchasing my client’s company. We’re business associates.”

  My mother ignored the “associates” part of that and honed in on the fact that was of most interest to her. “You own a company? How nice. Have I heard of it?”

  “I doubt it,” I said, lying. “It’s very obscure.”

  But she didn’t read the Wall Street Journal cover to cover as if it were the society pages for nothing. “It’s not that computer company, is it? Worth Industries?”

  “Actually, it is.” I preempted whatever phony self-deprecating response he would have made, since he knew his company had garnered a headline or two and was an up-and-coming stock to watch. “Thanks for bringing my mom to me, Mr. Worth.”

  “Jed, please,” he said, tongue in cheek.

  “But I know you have an important meeting to go to. We’ve taken up enough of his time, Mom.”

  She looked uncertainly between us.

  Of course my attempt to hurry Jed along had exactly opposite effect. “Don’t be silly. I have a few minutes. Natalie said you were meeting for coffee. I’d love to join you. I was going to try to take Angie to brunch myself,” he told my mother, “but she’s always in such a hurry.”

  “Really?” That one word conveyed an intense amount of interest on my mother’s part. She was nothing if not obvious. “Well, if you’ll help Angie with her bag, Jed, I’ll run in and get us a table.”

  She disappeared through the revolving door to the hotel’s restaurant before I could stop her.

  He tried to take my garment bag, but I yanked it back, glaring at him. “Next time I’m in Denver, I’m going to drop in on your mom. How’s that?”

  He laughed. “She’d love it. Believe me.”

  “Yeah, well, we’d see how much you’d love it,” I grumbled the empty threat. “What were you even doing out there?”

  He shrugged. “Hailing a cab?”

  I didn’t know if I believed him, but the alternative was that he had followed me downstairs. And I wasn’t quite full enough of myself to suggest that. And also there was that door-slamming-in-my-face thing.

  “Give me a break,” he said. “She looks just like you at first glance. I thought it was you.”

  “Well, you could have left it at that.”

  “She was really psyched about it. She insisted I come back in with her so she could tell you.”

  “It happens all the time,” I said.

  “I bet. Good genes.”

  “Oh, shut up. Just my luck. Great timing.”

  “I thought you liked my sense of timing, Suzy,” he said in an undertone.

  “You didn’t have to say you’d have coffee with us.”

  “I wanted to.” There was a quiet insistence in that.

  “Fine. But you better be leaving after a minute,” I said as we went into the restaurant. “I’m warning you.”

  “I’m shaking in my boots.”

  My mom was already at a table, and she waved to us.

  “I ordered us coffee,” she said as the waiter brought over a pot. Then she ordered a poached egg as well, explaining, “I just got up. I’m famished.”

  I tried not to make a face at the usual evidence of my mother’s birdlike appetite and restrained myself from ordering fried eggs and bacon to get a rise out of her. I didn’t want to drag this out any longer than I had to. Neither Jed nor I ordered anything.

  “So how long have you two known each other?” she asked when the waiter left.

  “We actually met only yesterday,” Jed said.

  “At work,” I fudged. “On the deal.”

  “Angelina is all work,” Mom confided to Jed in the backhanded-compliment way I had long ago forgiven her for. “Always has been. She studied all the time when she was in school.”

  “Yes, it was
a radical concept,” I volunteered. “Listen, it’s very polite of you to sit down with us, Mr. Worth, but it’s really not necessary and I insist we not keep you here any longer.” I turned to my mother. “We’re business associates, Mom, as we said, but the truth is Mr. Worth is on the other side. So we’re actually adversaries at this point.”

  Jed stared at me like alpha males everywhere who hate to be ordered around. “So now we can’t even have coffee together, Angie? That’s a pretty strict reading of your ethics rules, isn’t it? Do you want me to call Bob to sit in so it’s all kosher?”

  My mom hurriedly interceded. “Come on, honey, don’t get all lawyerly on us.” She laughed, patting my hand. “Relax.”

  “I was just saying that to your daughter, Natalie, as a matter of fact.”

  “I relax just fine,” I snapped at him.

  “I remember,” he said.

  My mother followed the exchange with her radar on high alert and when I noticed that—not that I was surprised by it, since fixing me up with someone on the Fortune 500 had always been her life’s ambition—I clamped my mouth shut.

  The waiter was back to pour us more coffee and give mom her egg, and I busied myself with the familiar exercise of ingesting caffeine. On an empty stomach already in knots from all this tension, the brew went down like day-old Dunkin’ Donuts instead of the quality blend it undoubtedly was.

  The two of them carried on the conversation quite nicely without me, which, when there was a good-looking rich guy in the vicinity of my mother, consisted of her talking him up.

  What was his permanent place of residence, she inquired politely. Well, I knew that one. Denver.

  Vacation homes? She got around to that with just the right note of admiration for his answer. I listened with half an ear to talk of a villa in Italy and a condo in Hawaii.

  And since rich guys always want to talk about this one, she worked in alma mater just to make it well rounded. MIT. Big surprise there for a computer company guy.

  She finished with what was always the most important. Marital status?

  Chapter Five

  I perked up for that one, aware I’d forgotten to ask, God help me. He smiled. “I’m single.”

  My mother was through with her poached egg and pushed her plate away, pleased with the whole endeavor.

  “It’d be so great if you’d come up with us sometime to our house in the Hamptons, Jed. I can never coax Angelina to visit, but maybe if you join us she won’t be so bored.”

  I huffed out a breath, not quite sure why I had let this go on so long. Not sure why he had either. Probably just to bug me. But it was getting ridiculous.

  And I don’t know what my mom thought, but I was going to dash her hopes right now, no matter how much it embarrassed all three of us. I tossed my napkin down. “Nobody’s going up to anybody’s house in the Hamptons, Mother.”

  She threw me a wounded look at the use of “mother,” but I didn’t let it stop me. I told Jed, “She has extrasensory perception when it comes to trying to set me up, or maybe it’s just with rich guys, but she’s obviously detected there wasn’t only work between us. Fine.”

  Jed’s face was unreadable, but he was looking at me, not my mother. Probably thought I was acting like a spoiled brat. Which is a step down from bitch, so I guess I was falling even further in his estimation.

  I turned to her. “You’re right, Mom. Happy now? But it was just a hookup. I hooked up with him. Okay? That’s what’s going on. That was all there was to it.”

  Mom colored, a pleasant shade of pink that made her look even younger. “Ah, okay. A little too much information, Ang, but ah…”

  Jed stood up. “I’ll get going.”

  He shook my mother’s hand. “Nice to meet you, Natalie.” And then he nodded at me.

  “See you at the closing,” I said, lips pressed together and trying not to think about how his felt against mine.

  His gaze drifted down to my mouth. “You can count on it.”

  When he walked away, Mom let out a huge, “Angie!”

  “What?”

  But I knew. God, I knew.

  …

  By the time I made it back to my apartment in Royal Oak I was bummed. I live in a cool, young city on the outskirts of Detroit with the kind of sidewalks to stroll on and outdoor cafés to sit in that New York probably had when it was first invented, before it got teeming with money-grubbing graspers.

  I love my apartment, looking down on the shops and bars, and I love my life there, with friends from the firm and a few left over from high school. Like Cassie. Cassie is my oldest friend and my most annoying. She’d sent me about twenty texts in the day since I told her I was walking eyes wide open into a hookup with a gorgeous guy. Most of them I just ignored, but it wasn’t until I was on the plane back that I saw the one she had sent after I sent her the picture. It was short and sweet. That’s Jed Worth.

  Might have been nice if I’d seen that one before I climbed into bed with him. Because once I had, I was having trouble imagining not climbing right back in. Whenever he wanted me. Poring over his file on the plane hadn’t helped on that score, either. I started to notice a lot of details that didn’t fit in with the rich-guy stereotype. Sure there were the usual puff pieces about him donating to this cause or that—standard rich-guy fare, since money was easy to spread around when you had a lot of it and often meant nothing more than a payment for good publicity—but Jed volunteered his time for these causes as well, which said a lot more in my book. He’d been a Big Brother long before he could afford to build the Boys & Girls Club a new activity center. He served up Thanksgiving dinner in a homeless shelter year after year and didn’t just pay for the turkeys. He was worried about some kid who was hooked on drugs. Somebody else’s kid. He seemed like…a good guy.

  I had managed to make my grand exit and kick him to the curb, twice in fact, but for what? I could have been rolling around in the sack with a master who probably would have been nice to get to know when all the sweaty antics were over. Instead I was back home with my pride and my professional ethics. Alone.

  I flopped down on my bed, facedown, turning to the side only as my kitty jumped up beside me, meowing to welcome me home. “Hi sweets.” I petted her silky black-and-white fur. “You missed me, didn’t you?”

  Oh God, I was becoming a cat lady. Years shy of thirty and I was a cat lady already. It didn’t bode well.

  I figured I should probably check my messages, and sure enough when I switched on my cell, it rang right away. I saw it was my assistant. “Hi,” I answered. A good offense always being the best defense, I said right away, “I just got in. It’s too late to come in.”

  You never knew what partner might have been looking around for a free associate.

  “Well, you should at least check in, Angie. I’ve gotten about a dozen calls on this Worth deal you were on. That obnoxious guy from New York keeps calling.”

  For a minute, I thought she might mean Jed.

  “You know, Bob,” she clarified.

  “Oh. Great. All I need. What the hell does he want?”

  “He says it’s urgent, but I wouldn’t give him your cell.”

  “Bless you, my dear.” We never did get around to compiling a working group list. “Fine, just plug him in.”

  When she did, Bob got right to the point. “Jed talked to your client directly. I couldn’t stop him.”

  “What? That’s not cool!” Especially if he was getting me in trouble on that sleeping-with-him thing.

  “For once, Angie, I agree with you. Clients talking directly to each other…well, I don’t have to tell you what an extremely dangerous precedent that is.”

  Dangerous to his fees, he meant, but I sort of saw his point.

  “Anyway, they want to do a European-style closing.”

  “What?”

  “Simultaneous signing and closing.”

  “What?” I was losing a little of my eloquence after the day I’d had, especially since I was feeli
ng like a cat lady. So I elaborated, “I mean, we just signed. There are closing conditions to be met. Stuff like that.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Jed wired the purchase price to your client and, against my advice I might add, a signed cross receipt in which he waived all closing conditions. If your client will sign, and frankly, Angie, he probably already has, we’re closed.”

  The doorbell rang, which in itself was a surprise. Even Cassie didn’t drop by without texting or phoning first. Maybe it was some other cat lady in the apartment building, seeing I’d made it home safely and willing to share her Tupperware dinner with me.

  “Yep, check out your email,” Bob added. “The fully executed cross receipt, signed by your client and mine, just came across. Jesus, I hope to God this kind of thing doesn’t catch on. It’ll put us out of business.”

  I opened the door without even looking through the peephole and said into the phone, “What was the rush, anyway?”

  “Hey,” a deep voice greeted me when I did.

  And there he was, totally out of context. Gorgeous Guy, right on the steps to my humble abode. No power tie or fancy suit this time. Just well-worn jeans, like last night, and that same sexy smile. My mouth fell open.

  “I don’t know what the rush was, Angie,” Bob responded in a voice I hadn’t so far heard in his repertoire, reserved for private conversations instead of conference rooms, apparently. “But I’m guessing you do. And by the way, no hard feelings. If you’re ever in New York again, I’d like to, ah, take you to brunch sometime.”

  “Fuck you, Bob.” I hung up and held the cell to my chest.

  “Bob give you the news that we’re on the same side now?”

  I nodded.

  “So does that mean I can come in?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, sure.” I stepped aside and he brushed past me. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was looking for a girl named Suzy. Great hands. Somebody said she lives around here.”

  I shut the door behind him. “Okay, so what’s Fred doing here?”

  “Stalking you. But in a cool, totally non-Fred way.”

  “In that case, I’m sorry I was such a bitch before I left.”

  “Actually you were pretty sweet before you left, all that hot sex and everything. It was while you were leaving that you were a bitch.”