DANIEL'S GIRL: ROMANCING AN OLDER MAN

DANIEL’S GIRL

ROMANCING AN OLDER MAN

By

MALLORY MONROE

AND

KATHERINE CACHITORIE

Copyright©2013 Mallory Monroe/Katherine Cachitorie

All rights reserved.  Any use of
the materials contained in this book without the expressed written consent of the
authors and Teresa McClain-Watson, including scanning, uploading and
downloading at file sharing and other sites, and distribution of this book by
way of the Internet or any other means,
is illegal and strictly prohibited
.

AUSTIN BROOK PUBLISHING

This novel is a work of fiction. 
All characters are fictitious.  Any similarities to anyone living or dead
are completely accidental.  The specific mention of known places or venues
are not meant to be exact replicas of those places, but are purposely embellished
or imagined for the story’s sake.
 
This
novel is loosely based on Teresa McClain-Watson’s What We Did For Love and was
written with her full consent and participation.

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MORE INTERRACIAL ROMANCE

FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR

MALLORY MONROE:

THE PRESIDENT’S GIRLFRIEND

SERIES IN ORDER:

THE PRESIDENT’S GIRLFRIEND

THE PRESIDENT’S GIRLFRIEND 2:

HIS WOMEN AND HIS WIFE

DUTCH AND GINA:

A SCANDAL IS BORN

DUTCH AND GINA:

AFTER THE FALL

DUTCH AND GINA:

THE POWER OF LOVE

DUTCH AND GINA:

THE SINS OF THE FATHERS

DUTCH AND GINA:

WHAT HE DID FOR LOVE

THE MOB BOSS SERIES

IN ORDER:

ROMANCING THE MOB BOSS

MOB BOSS 2:

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

MOB BOSS 3:

LOVE AND RETRIBUTION

MOB BOSS 4:

ROMANCING TRINA GABRINI

A MOB BOSS CHRISTMAS:

THE PREGNANCY

(Mob Boss 5)

MOB BOSS 6:

THE HEART OF RENO GABRINI

RENO’S GIFT

BOOK 7

THE GABRINI MEN SERIES

IN ORDER:

ROMANCING TOMMY GABRINI

and

ROMANCING SAL GABRINI

ADDITIONAL BESTSELLING

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FROM MALLORY MONROE:

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IF YOU WANTED THE MOON

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:

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YVONNE THOMAS

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BACK TO HONOR:

A REGGIE REYNOLDS

ROMANTIC MYSTERY

JT WATSON

ROMANTIC FICTION

FROM

AWARD-WINNING

AND

BESTSELLING AUTHOR

TERESA MCCLAIN-WATSON:

DINO AND NIKKI:

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AND

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COMING SOON

FROM

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BOOK TWO

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THE PRESIDENT’S GIRLFRIEND SERIES

BOOK EIGHT

RENO AND TRINA

MOB BOSS SERIES

BOOK EIGHT

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CHAPTER ONE

FOUR YEARS EARLIER

When Nikki Graham stepped off of the
elevator on the top floor of the Dreeson Corporate Headquarters building in Wakefield,
Indiana, and the receptionist told her that Mr. Crane would see her now, she
believed there had been some mistake.
 
Especially since she wasn’t there to see a Mr. Crane.
 
But when that same receptionist pointed her
toward a suite of offices with
Office of
the Vice President
written in massive lettering above the double doors, she
no longer believed there was some mistake, she knew there was.

 
“Just so we’re clear,” she said as she stood in front of the reception
desk, her big brown eyes bright with concern.
 
“I’m with the Brannon University Press.
 
I’m with the school newspaper, I’m not with the Gazette.
 
I’m scheduled to meet with an assistant in
the PR department downstairs.”

This concerned the receptionist
too.
 
Why would they have brought her up
here then?
 
She looked down at her
manifest again.
 
“But you are Nikki
Graham, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m Nikki.”

“Then there’s no mistake,” the
receptionist said firmly, looking back up.
 
“Mr. Crane will see you now.
 
Just
go through those double doors and one of his assistants will direct you.”

Nikki didn’t know what to think.
 
She knew good and well no assistant would
have his office in the VP’s suite.
 
Unless, she thought hopefully as she began heading toward those double
doors, the assistant worked for somebody in the VP’s office.
 
He may even work for the VP himself!
 
But why would the assistant to the vice
president want to be interviewed by her, a reporter for a school
newspaper?
 
Especially since she was
there to ask hard questions regarding the allegations made by a human rights
commission about widespread abuse inside their China plant.
 
It didn’t make sense.
 
But she did as the receptionist had instructed
her and headed for the double doors all the same.
 
If there was a mistake, it was on their part,
she thought as she walked.

There was a suite of offices behind
those double doors, many of them sizeable, including what appeared to be one
massive office, itself with double doors, at the very back of the room.

She walked up to the only desk in the
outer sanctum of the suite.
 
It was
positioned against the wall, undoubtedly so that the small, white woman who sat
behind it could see all and hear all.
 
Her desk plate had
Whitney
Ginsburg
written on it.
 
Nikki
assumed her to be the secretary, although there was no indication of what her
title really was.

But it didn’t matter.
 
She spoke first.
 
“Miss Graham?” she asked.

“Yes,” Nikki said, and moved closer
toward her desk.

“Good morning,” Whitney said.

“Good morning,” Nikki replied, attempting
to smile but was far too nervous.

“Mr. Crane is expecting you,
ma’am.
 
You can go on back.”

Nikki was about to ask which office to
go back to, since there were many in the suite, until she looked straight back
and answered her own question.
 
Daniel Crane, Senior Vice President
, was
written on the double doors of the office in the far back.
 
The largest one in the entire suite.

As soon as Nikki saw his title, as
soon as she realized just who this Mr. Crane really was, she went from nervous
excitement to a sense of dread.
 
Because
she was nobody’s fool.
 
This thing was
orchestrated.
 
Why else would the senior
vice president consent to some interview with a school reporter?
 
Especially about something as controversial
as his own company’s human rights violations?
 
She knew she had to be on guard.
 
She knew she couldn’t let his position cause her to become intimidated,
which may be the very reason why they had her meeting with him, rather than
some assistant, in the first place.

She tightened her grip on her
reporter’s notebook, placed her oversized shoulder bag more securely on her
small shoulder, and made her way toward the office in the back of the room.
  

Inside that office, Daniel Crane sat
behind his desk fuming.
 
He was in the
midst of a heated telephone conversation and was animated with anger.
 
He leaned forward in his executive chair and
made clear to the Portland plant manager how perilously close he was to
authorizing the entire plant closure if they didn’t get their act
together.
 
His suit coat was off and over
his chair, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up, revealing powerful arms, as he
pointed and yelled and settled himself back down before he blew a gasket over
that manager’s intransigency.
 
The
manager, however, was equally upset and was taking issue with Daniel’s
characterization of the problems.
 
A
series of heated exchanges ensued by the time Nikki walked in.

Daniel didn’t see her when she first
entered his office.
 
He was too busy making
himself crystal clear about his displeasure with his manager and how he would
fire his ass in a heartbeat if he kept minimizing the problems.
 
It wasn’t until he leaned back, and once
again listened to the manager’s laundry list of excuses, did he see her at
all.
 

She was standing there, looking around
his office as if she’d never seen anything so opulent.
 
She was a pretty black girl, and was small,
but what caught his attention were her eyes.
 
They appeared so large, even from across the room, that had they been a
half a centimeter larger, he believed, they might have overwhelmed her
face.
 
But as they were now, as they
looked around the room unable to conceal her awe, they were stunning.

Nikki couldn’t help herself. She was a
little taken aback by the breathtaking office she had just entered.
 
It was an office so enormous that it seemed
to swallow her.
 
It felt to her as if
she’d just walked into another world, where everything was marbled and ivory
and so luxurious that she felt intimidated already.
 
There was a full-sized bar, a huge sitting
area with a high-end sofa and arch top chairs that resembled the living room of
a gorgeous home, and there was a conference table as big as a boardroom’s.
 
And, of course, there was the man she assumed
was Daniel Crane.

That was when she caught herself.
 
When she saw Daniel Crane seated behind that
desk, talking on the telephone, but staring at her.
 
If the plan was to intimidate her with the power
of his office alone, it was working like a charm.
 
Nikki realized that, and decided to forget
about that office.
 
She was there to do a
job.
 
She, instead, made eye contact with
the man, and began walking toward his desk.

Daniel was inwardly amused by the way
she seemed so determined to prove her mettle.
 
She was a young thing, probably no more than nineteen or twenty, and
despite her attempts at sophistication she looked exactly like the college kid
she was.
 
She sat down in front of his
desk, without a seat being offered, and sat her shoulder bag on the floor.
 
Then she opened her spiral notebook, clicked
her pen, and crossed her legs.
 
She was
ready to get to it.
 
He wasn’t about to
intimidate her, her face seemed to say.

But when the voice on the other end of
the phone made yet another outrageous excuse for his employees’ lack of
productivity, basically blaming it on the product itself, Daniel forgot about
the young reporter and lit into that manager once again.

Nikki was surprised by his anger,
especially since he could have kept her in the waiting area until he finished
such a heated conversation.
 
But she
wasn’t going to let that bother her either.
 
She was here to get a story, a story that would be the biggest get of
her college journalism career.
 
So she
turned the table, and started staring at him.

He was rubbing his hand across his
thick hair, as if it was a calming technique, but she could see the strain in
his hazel eyes.
 
She stared at those
eyes, because they seemed to be the wrong color.
 
His hair was a dark brown, and his skin was
tanned, but those eyes were of such a bright, greenish-gray tint that they
stood out even on a face that she guessed many would already have viewed as
remarkable.
 
His eyes were so
interesting, in fact, that she decided to make a note of them.
 

She began jotting down other things
about his appearance too; small notables that she could use in the article she
would ultimately write.
 
She jotted down
one word descriptors, such as
white,
biggish, thirtyish, stern
, in her notebook.
 
Then
eyes-hazel
separately, as
if to remind herself when she did write that article that his eyes gave unique
definition to his looks.

Although most women would undoubtedly
consider him to be an extremely handsome man, Nikki didn’t think of him as
particularly attractive at all when she first met him.
 
Probably because he was a white guy pushing
forty, and she was a black girl who just turned twenty.
 
It was hard for her to see anything but an
authority figure in an office bigger than her apartment, when she looked at him.

Finally, after more back and forth and
settling down, he eventually hung up the phone.
 
He smiled, as if heated conversations were nothing new to him, and stood
to his feet.
 
“So sorry about that,” he
said as he stood.
 

Nikki clutched her notebook and
attempted to stand too.
 
He walked from
around his desk, watching her as she stood, because as soon as she did, loose
papers in her notebook began to drop out and sail to the floor.
 
She was about to reach down for them, but he
beat her to it.
 
He knelt down and picked
up every sheet.
 

Nikki was surprised that he would have
bothered, but she appreciated it anyway.
 
“Thanks,” she said, as he handed the papers to her.

“You’re quite welcome,” he said, as
she began placing those sheets haphazardly back inside her notebook.
 
Up close, her brown skin was flawless, he
thought, and when she looked those big brown eyes up at him, in gratitude still
for his assistance, his heart squeezed.
 
What in the world was that
, he wondered,
as he invited her to sit back down.

“I’m Daniel Crane,” by the way,” he
said as he leaned against the front of his desk and crossed his legs at the
ankles.

“Nikki Graham,” she said, looking up
at him.
 
“Nice to meet you, sir.”

“Nice to meet you, Nikki,” he
said.
 
His eyes automatically trailed
down the length of her.
 
She wore a pair
of form-fitting jeans and a Brannon University T-shirt. Like her eyes above,
her breasts below were the biggest thing on her, and they stood out like two
ripe melons in front of her.
 
He was a
breast man and an ass man, had been that way as long as he could remember it,
and she had hit a homerun in the boobs department.
 
But he couldn’t see that ass.
 
He couldn’t imagine it being flat, but still.
 
He wanted to see it.

Nikki, however, was ready to go.
 
“I want to thank you for agreeing to this
interview, sir,” she said.
 
“I definitely
didn’t think the vice president would feel a need to address these
allegations.”

“I didn’t think a school newspaper
would be writing about these allegations,” he shot back.
  
“I would have thought school newspapers
would have been more concerned about, I don’t know, school matters?”

He said this with a very charming
smile, an extremely charming smile, but Nikki didn’t fall for it.
 
It was his job to disarm her, she felt, so
that she wouldn’t ask the tough questions.
 
“We’re very concerned with school-related issues,” she responded.
 
“But when the human rights commission blasted
the largest employer in town as a major human rights violator, we felt we had
an obligation to our fellow students to get your company’s side of the story.
 
Dreeson is among the leading manufacturers of
technical graphics and custom software in the country and, as I’m sure you
know, many of our graduates work for Dreeson.
 
And many of our soon-to-be graduates want to work for Dreeson.
 
They’re entitled to know the full story.”