Tempting the CEO (a Sleeping With The Enemy novella) (Entangled Brazen) (3 page)

“You’re tense for a hand model, Suzy,” he remarked. If he was fishing for what I really did, I ignored it.

“It’s a tense business. Competitive. You’d be surprised. I’m a wreck half the time trying to make sure my cuticles are in tip-top condition.”

He bent to kiss the base of my spine. “If you say so.”

“And I don’t know if you’re still trying to make a go of it in the ad game, but if not, you could definitely make a good living as a masseur.”

“You think so?”

“Mmmm-hmmm.” Even to me, my voice sounded far away.

He switched off the lamp and I fought to keep my eyes open.

I wasn’t sure falling asleep was proper hookup etiquette. And really, I hadn’t even thought to ask Cassie that. Not to mention I had a meeting to get to in the morning, which I absolutely could not miss.

“Just relax,” he whispered in my ear.

More seductive words were never spoken.

I fell asleep in his bed. I admit it. Caffeine is pretty powerful when it comes to long, boring drafting sessions, but it’s nothing in the face of the exhaustion that comes from good sex combined with a back rub.

Fortunately, more good sex does tend to wake you right up again.

The room was dark, and I awoke to find him kissing his way down my body, having shoved all the covers down to the bottom of the bed. The slight chill was quickly overcome by the heat of his warm open mouth at the side of my neck, and then along my collarbone and the underside of one breast.

He was going lower still, dipping his tongue into my belly button, when he lifted his head and said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Were you trying to sleep?”

I could hear the laughter in his voice, but rather than playfully slap him, I put my hands into his thick hair and set him back to the task. This was no time for games. “Don’t mind me. Carry on.”

A feathery, openmouthed kiss along my inner thigh had me sighing quite loudly, but when he positioned himself with his head between my legs and got right to it, I was stone-cold silent, right up until the end when his incredibly clever mouth wrenched a heartfelt “Oh my God” right out of me. Wow. I didn’t actually know a girl could come from just that. I certainly never had.

This guy was quite an education.

He slid up my body and then inside me and, being the lifelong learner I am, I grasped his firm behind as he began a series of slow, deep thrusts.

I sat up in the total blackness. Shit. It was too dark to find my clothes. From memory, I felt my way over to the drawn drapes and opened them a crack, an inch or two of city light allowing me to gather up my things from the floor and creep out of the bedroom without tripping over something, closing the door behind me. I slipped my camisole on and zipped up my skirt, not bothering with the rest of it, underwear and bra in one hand.

Okay, so this was the part I hated about hooking up. The reason I hadn’t bothered for quite some time.

The morning after.

I hated that feeling of sneaking out or having the guy sneak out. The awkward acknowledgment that it was what it was. Luckily,
Fred
was the one who was conked out by the time I forced myself to go back to my room. The hallway was empty and my key card operational, thank God.

After taking a quick shower, I slept a few hours myself until it was time to get to my morning meeting. I only hoped he wouldn’t knock on my door or we wouldn’t run into each other in the hallway.

And I totally denied my disappointment when he didn’t and we didn’t.

The receptionist at the law firm where I planned to spend another day slugging it out gave me a smile and gestured that I should go right down to the conference room while she patiently assured whoever she was talking to on the phone that she could
not
give out the direct-dial office number of whatever bigwig she was trying to protect.

Taking a deep breath before I went in, I heard the indelicate tones of the lead lawyer on the other side right through the solid wood door. The guy was such a loudmouth. As if by saying it louder, he could make it true.

“I’m telling you this girl is a real bitch,” he shouted.

No need to guess who he was talking about here.

“She nitpicks everything. Wastes time. She knows nothing about the rules of the game.”

A low voice I couldn’t quite decipher responded to him and the lawyer, Bob, gave one of those hearty guffaws I had learned to detest in one short—well, long—negotiating session. “You’re telling me! I have half a mind to call her client and tell him to shove his fucking little company up his ass and take his smart-ass little lawyer with him.”

Bob was not above mixed metaphors.

Whoever he was talking to calmed Bob down a little. “I know. I know. It’s still at a great multiple, but this contract should’ve been signed in one hour and she’s dragging it out like it’s the deal of the century.”

And getting my client almost double what Bob’s client offered in the first round. Now I had to get the accompanying terms right. Just because Bob’s client was the high and mighty Worth Industries and my client was a lowly tech company from Michigan that Jed Worth wanted to swallow, I was supposed to lie down and play dead? I don’t think so.

I didn’t bother to knock and opened the door briskly, catching Bob in mid-blowhard sentence. “Oh,” he greeted me. “Here she is. Angelina O’Hare, meet Jed Worth.”

His client stood up and held out a hand to shake mine and we both gasped. Meet him? Christ, I’d been in bed with him all night.

Chapter Three

It was Gorgeous Guy, in yet another well-tailored suit, gray pinstripes this time, all red-power-tie and everything. He looked perfectly well rested, even though he’d been rocking my world all night, and I sported near-bruises beneath my eyes to show how I’d spent the time in his bed.

Bob, with his apparent insensitivity to the emotions of others, completely failed to notice the immediate current of recognition between us, sitting down at the head of the negotiating table as his usual flurry of associates and underlings came in to assume their positions.

Jed
—I knew he couldn’t be a Fred—recovered first. “Angelina, is it? Pleased to meet you.” He grinned and pulled a chair out for me and I sat, opening my briefcase and calmly gathering my drafts as he took the seat next to me.

“Jed, you’re over here, next to me,” Bob said, indicating a chair, and his client gave him a look that reminded him he
was
the client without having to say it. “Or you could stay right there. That’s fine.” Blowhard Bob backed down.

Jed Worth
. I scrambled to remember what my secretary had printed out for my background files about the CEO of Worth Industries. All I could recall, though, was that he was a little younger than thirty-five, a lot richer than any guy had a right to be, and
a hell of a lot
smarter than me or Bob or anybody else in this room for sure. He had taken a dwindling fortune inherited from his grandfather and turned it into a modern conglomerate, computers mostly, but what they liked to call adaptable these days. Jed Worth was one smart cookie.

But who knew he was so fucking sexy? Why the hell hadn’t that been in the bio information? Or maybe, like, a picture of him?

I organized my papers in the appropriate order, last drafts first, and took out a blank pad, resolutely determined to ignore the complete and total awkwardness of the situation. See, this was why I never did hookups. That morning-after thing, possibly exacerbated by the “he turns out to be the client on the other side” thing.

His breath against my cheek brought with it a kind of a stress flashback to him moving above me and inside me, but I realized he was only leaning forward to hand me a pencil. “This rolled off the table,” he said innocently.

I took the pencil without looking at him.

“So you do things the old-fashioned way, do you, Angelina? May I call you Angelina?”

I ignored the request to use my first name—the big faker—and concentrated on the old-fashioned comment. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Pencil and paper.”

I glanced at him.

“No typing your notes into a tablet?” he continued with a nod of his head toward the troop of young associates who were doing just that.

“No. And they’re probably just surfing the internet so they don’t have to listen to Bob.”

I said it loud enough that one of the associates across the table heard me, and he stifled a smile. Jed glared at him for some reason.

“Fine, so here we all are again,” Bob said in his “this meeting has just come to order” voice. “We’ve already wasted one whole day in negotiations when we should have been wrapping this up a long time ago. Angelina’s client couldn’t make it, but I asked Jed here today so that he could help us get out of the weeds a little and cut a deal, which is what we’re all here to do, right?”

“Certainly, Bob, but sometimes you seem to forget I’m on the other side and not one of the many, many”—I looked around the table at the lawyers outnumbering me by far—“
many
lawyers who work for you.”

Bob turned red-faced. “If you worked for me, Angie, I’d have fired you by now.”

“Nobody fires me but my client,
Bob.
So where were we yesterday?” I flipped open a contract. “Oh, here we are, clause six, page fifty-two.”

Bob made a show of flipping pages angrily, glaring at me. “I hope we’re not going to be traveling at the same glacial pace we did yesterday. Maybe that’s how you do things out in
De
troit.” He put the emphasis on the first syllable, whether to annoy me or give a vaguely racist connotation to it, I didn’t know. “But here in New York, we don’t haggle over this pissant stuff.”

“Good to hear. So can I assume you’ll limit the warranty period to a reasonable one, like I asked you to? Maybe eighteen months instead of ‘the end of all time and then some,’ as you have here?”

I heard a muffled laugh next to me, but I ignored Jed, concentrating on his lawyer.

“I’m sure you don’t realize this, Angie, but this clause is always written this way. Always. In every deal Worth Industries has ever done, and with companies a lot more prestigious than your client.”

“In all of them except for the last
ten
deals Worth Industries has done, you mean? I didn’t go back any further than that, I must admit.”

“What?” Bob snapped.

I reached for one of my precedent folders and handed him several slim sheets of paper, extracts from the corresponding clause in the last ten deals his client had done. “The warranty period ranges from six months to three years, more or less, and the three-year one was with a company where its track record was pretty shaky. My client has years of results on the records. I’m being generous offering eighteen months.”

Bob didn’t even look at the folder, handing it to one of his associates, who proceeded to scan it and nodded to Bob after a moment or two.

“We have access to the SEC website even out in Detroit.” I was meticulous with my pronunciation of our fair city’s name. “As you of all people know, as a public company, Worth’s acquisition contracts are, well, you know, kind of
public
. Your firm probably even does the filings.”

“Actually, we have a pretty good in-house securities team that does those,” Jed pointed out.

“So I can only assume you thought I wouldn’t do my homework, Bob, to try to make the claim you did about this clause.”

“Fine. Eighteen months. Move on,” Bob barked.

Jed’s cell rang and he glanced at the number, getting up and answering it as he walked out of the room. I could just hear, “Hey…did you check him into rehab…no, I’m going to be a little longer than I thought,” before he stepped into the hallway and shut the door behind him.

It seemed to inspire a teaching moment in Bob.

“Look, Angie, maybe you don’t have anything else to do. Maybe this is your only client for all I know, but I’m a busy man.
Jed
is a busy man. He has phone calls he has to take, meetings he has to get to, and instead he’s sitting here having to listen to you carp on about this little crap.”

“I’m fine if Mr. Worth doesn’t sit in on the negotiations.” More than fine. In fact, I wished he wouldn’t even come back. “You’re the one who invited him.”

“I wanted him to see how much trouble you’re causing your client! And if Jed walks away from this deal because of it, well, I’d call that malpractice and I don’t mind telling your client that.”

I shook my head in amazement. “Do you
ever
argue the merits of anything, Bob, or do you always substitute throwing your weight around for legal reasoning?”

Jed came back into the room, pocketing his cell, and sat right back next to me. So no luck on the not-coming-back thing.

“What was the last offer on the table?” he asked me.

When I told him, Bob smiled that crocodile smile of his, sensing that a take-it-or-leave-it was coming up. But Jed just nodded and said, “Keep going.”

With a scowl from Bob and a supreme effort on my part to keep my cool, we did. Jed stayed silent for a few more minutes or so of me and Bob fencing over provision after provision of the contract. Not that I could forget Gorgeous Guy’s, er,
Jed’s
presence next to me. He sat silent at first, stretching those long legs of his underneath the table, and then later turned to his phone, texting or emailing or maybe just playing
Angry Birds
to pass the time.

Mid-Bob-tirade over a perfectly reasonable point I had just made, Jed stood up and said, “I’ll give your client double.”

That silenced the room.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Double the last offer. Somebody type that into the purchase price and I’ll sign.” All of his lawyers, including Bob, were stunned silent. “If I do that, will you stop haggling over this and let me take you to lunch?” he asked me.

I allowed myself to meet his blue eyes. “It’s not even ten.”

“Brunch then. Whatever.”

Bob slammed down a file and stood up. “Jed. A word.”

“No Bob. Not a word. You there,” he directed the kid across the table. “Go on. Type that in and print it and I’ll sign it.” He took my elbow and urged me up, but I resisted, staying seated. “Then you can send it to your client and he’ll sign it.”

“I don’t believe this,” Bob muttered, shaking his head. “A pretty face, a whiff of
you-know-what
and you lose it.”

My mouth thinned. Par for the course for Bob. Every dirty trick in the book was our Bob. Of course it didn’t help that in this instance it was probably true. And for that, I blamed Jed for making it so blatant, as much as I did Bob for calling it out in a roomful of my fellow professionals.

“What difference does it make?” Jed asked calmly. “At the rate I’m paying the twenty lawyers in this room, by the time she got through with you it’d come to about the same by my rough calculations. How many Ivy League degrees does it take to handle a ‘pretty face’ from— What firm are you from?” he asked me.

The kid across the table outright laughed, but the rest of them were frozen, afraid they’d never make partner just for even witnessing this.

I named my firm, which I’m sure the Jed Worths of this world had never heard of, and added, “And for your information, I went to Yale.”

“That makes it a little better, Bob, doesn’t it? But you’re a Harvard man, so I don’t know what that says about you.” Jed was very congenial about it all, but I had the feeling Bob’s brain was going to explode.

In any case, if Worth Industries was going to pay my client double, who was I to argue? I stood up. “My client accepts that offer.”

“If you want your bill paid, Bob, I’d get that figure typed in then. You have about ten seconds before I take my business elsewhere.”

Bob nodded at one of his associates, not the one who had laughed and who would never make partner now, and she scurried out. The room was totally quiet as I gathered up my papers.

“What’s a good brunch place, Bob?” Jed asked casually.

There was a long silence. Then, “Valerie’s in Midtown.”

“Great.” Jed signed the contract as soon as it was brought in a second later and I jotted down a cover note to my client as it was scanned and sent to me so I could forward it on.

Jed’s hand was at my elbow as we left the conference room, and he nodded at the still-hassled receptionist on the way out, but it wasn’t until we were in the elevator, alone, that he pulled me to him with a laugh. I pushed him away.

“What?” he protested. “I just saved you a boring day negotiating a mind-numbing boring contract.”

“That happens to be my job.”

“I thought your job was getting your client the best deal you could. You did that.”

“By sleeping with you? Thanks. That says a lot for my legal abilities.”

“Oh, don’t be such a tight-ass. Two seconds of you against Bob and it was clear who was the better lawyer.”

I was slightly placated by his compliment, but there was still the little matter of conflict of interest. We were at the lobby now, and it was time to put it on the table. “I can’t go to brunch with you.”

“Good, because I didn’t really want to go to brunch anyway. I only said that for the room. I want to take you back to bed.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t share that with the room.”

He laughed, and when we were out on the busy Manhattan sidewalk, I looked around for the hulking black town car every rich guy or rich-guy-wannabe had waiting for him after a meeting. But I didn’t see one, and he started walking me back in the direction of the hotel.

“You walked here?”

“Sure. It was only a few blocks.”

Long New York blocks. I was impressed.

But I walked beside him not because I was going back to
his
hotel room but because I was going back to mine. I had to check out now that the deal was done.

“What were you doing in a hotel anyway?” I gave in to my curiosity. “Don’t you live in New York?”

“Here? Hell no. I hate this town. I come here to do business and that’s it.”

That was an unusual sentiment among the very rich. From what I could tell, they seemed to congregate on this packed island as if it were some huge watering hole, or maybe pig’s trough. I didn’t much like New York either, but of course I was poor, relatively speaking. And okay, I admit it. My stepfather lives in New York, and though I love my mother, I can’t stand him and his whole fucking city. I even call it the devil city sometimes for fun. So I’m a bit prejudiced.

It was easier to walk through the stifling crowds with Jed Worth by my side, though. They seemed to part for his tall, expensively tailored figure.

“I’m from Colorado,” he offered, instantly reminding me that I had read that Worth Industries was located in Denver. There had been a picture of the headquarters in the file my assistant made up. The photo showed a sprawling campus on the outskirts of the city with funky modern buildings and granola-eating happy-camper employees strolling about, looking as if they could take off at any minute to ski in the majestic mountains behind them. But there was no CEO in a thousand-dollar suit hanging around in that picture.

“I can’t quite see you out West.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You’re only a hard-charging executive on your off-hours.”

“Actually, I’m Fred in my off-hours,” he quipped. “Remember?”

But I so wasn’t going there, my feet firmly planted in reality on the dirty sidewalks of New York. And speaking of dirty sidewalks, “I’m from Detroit.”

“Yeah. I heard.” His tone was neutral enough that I didn’t judge it necessary to immediately leap to the defense of my hometown. “I understand it’s getting very cool there,” he added, clinching it.