In Bed with the Boss's Daughter

“Your father could have bought him ten times over.”

“If you want to be pedantic.” She shrugged with a nonchalance she didn’t feel.

“Is that why you came home? To play the heiress?”

“I don’t intend playing anything,” Paris said, her tone as sharp as the hurt in her chest. She’d never played the heiress; she’d never played poor little rich girl; she’d never played victim nor victor. “I came home because K.G. asked me to, because he has a job for me.”

Jack snorted. “Doing what?”

Paris didn’t know. She hadn’t allowed herself to dwell on what use she could be in her father’s corporation. It was enough that he’d asked her, that he wanted her help. But she wasn’t about to admit that to the man standing before her, dripping disdain. She lifted her chin. “Maybe there’s a suitable job in your department.”

Something flickered in his eyes. Well, well, well…

“Come to think of it, I’d rather enjoy working in your office. I shall have to speak to Daddy about it.” Paris knew she sounded snooty, but she considered it fair payback for his playing-the-heiress crack.

For a long moment he stared at her, his eyes dark and unreadable. Then he turned on his heel and strode away, only pausing when Paris called after him, “I guess I’ll be seeing you around, Jack. At the office.”

His hand flattened against the back of the door for no more than a second before he pushed through without a backward glance or a final word, leaving Paris itching with dissatisfaction. She wanted to stalk out the door after him, to hurl something at his retreating back, even if it was only a demand that he come back and finish their argument.

Not that she had a clue how to conclude an argument that had no point.

With an exasperated sigh she turned, and when she caught sight of her disheveled image in the full-length mirror she almost laughed out loud, although the laughter would have been harsh and humorless. She looked like an illustration of how her evening had gone.

She looked a mess.

So much for all her mother’s lessons in poise. So much for the slick, sophisticated image. So much for her expectations for tonight. Expectations based on adolescent dreams, she decided with a rueful shake of her head. For in her dreams Jack still had laughing eyes the color of milk chocolate and a quick grin that made her heart flip-flop and her throat squeeze tight.

Had she really expected that four years as K.G.’s righthand man wouldn’t have changed him? No. She had expected changes, and she had feared those changes…and the likelihood they would make no difference: that she would meet his eyes across the room and feel the same earth-shifting connection she’d felt at that party six years ago; that she would fall headlong in love with a man as work-focused as her father. Her worst nightmare.

She swung away from the mirror and lifted her chin. The man Jack Manning had become deserved neither her dreams nor her expectations. What he deserved was to walk into his office on Monday to find her working alongside him.

Nice fantasy, Paris.

The chances of K.G. giving her the job she requested were about on a par with her chances of finding a man who would love her for herself. Nada, zilch and zero.

Two

Jack answered his mobile phone on the first ring, then crooked it between shoulder and ear to pull on his second running shoe.

“Glad I caught you,” K.G. said without preamble. “Thought you’d be in that sweatbox of a gym by now.”

“I slept in.”

“That’ll be the day. You coming into the office this morning?”

“Briefly.”

“Good.” The word wasn’t much more than a grunt. “My office at ten.”

Jack scowled at the dead phone for a moment, then tossed it onto his bed.

No Can you fit in a meeting?

No Does ten o’clock suit you?

Jack shook his head in disgust, dragged on a sweatshirt and headed for the front door. By ten o’clock he should be midway through a meeting with Dan Lehmann, the electrical contractor on the Milson Landing Project. Rescheduling would muck up Lehmann’s day, and the day was Saturday, theoretically part of the weekend. And as he jogged down the driveway he asked himself, not for the first time, why he put up with his boss’s high-handedness.

The answer used to be simple. K.G. had given him all the breaks he deserved and then some. Where else could a kid who’d left school at the minimum age make it to a corner office on the eighteenth floor? Who else would put a tradesman without a fancy business degree in charge of multimillion-dollar projects?

He lived with K.G.’s peremptory attitude because the son of a b…knew the construction business like no one else, and ever since he’d taken Jack under his wing, he’d been free with that knowledge. In return he expected hard work and loyalty. Jack gave him both and then some…but not for much longer.

A matter of a few short months—less, if he was lucky—and he was gone. The leaving came two years later than he’d planned, and there would be no more K.G.-manipulated delays. It was time to get back to the blueprint for Jack Manning’s life.

At the end of his long driveway he turned left onto the deserted early-morning road and set off at a steady lope. He would rather be at his “sweatbox of a gym” pounding a punching bag instead of the tarmac, but this morning he’d slept through his internal alarm. He didn’t much enjoy running, but he owed his body the exercise, and he always fulfilled his obligations. He ran, and he thought about the satisfying thud of leather against leather and the even more satisfying release of frustrated energy.

Yeah, pounding a punching bag would feel real good this morning. Much more satisfying than pounding his pillow the way he’d done for the two nights since the Acacia bash, since Paris Grantham sashayed back into his life with her nose stuck in the air and her plastic smile and her cool eyes.

And her leg warming your hand through the smooth silk of her stocking, and her fingers gripping your jacket, and her lips soft and yielding under yours….

Jack swore and punched out at the crisp morning air with a left-right combination.

Why the hell had he kissed her? What had he been thinking?

Simple.

He hadn’t been thinking; he’d been reacting. To deep-seated disappointment, to long-term frustration, to an intense desire to wipe that synthetic smile from her lips.

He’d reacted to the futility of a memory he could no longer brick in behind that carefully constructed retaining wall in his mind, a memory that haunted his dreams and stole his sleep. A dream-memory where she danced on a table in a tiny skirt and knee-high boots, watching him through her wild tangle of hair with eyes not steel cool but smelter hot. And while the crowd yelled encouragement, she unbuttoned her shirt, her eyes fixed on his, daring him to stop her.

He did.

He dragged her from the table and felt her body mould itself to his, soft and pliant and accepting. Dream memories of her lips, wide and smiling, against his neck. Her soft laughter, warm and sweet against his skin. Her words, her honesty, his inability to absorb it all.

He’d been pinning some kind of loopy expectations on a six-year-old memory. What a fool!

He jabbed at the air again, but without much conviction. After all, she was a Grantham, and the more like her parents she turned out to be—cold like her mother, manipulative like her father—the easier it would be to remember she had no place in his life.

As he topped the long uphill rise and lengthened his stride toward the intersection, he tried not to think about her parting thrust and K.G.’s early-morning phone call, or the fact that the two might be related.

He told himself the queer feeling in his gut was hunger. K.G. wouldn’t do it. Milson Landing was too big a project, its success too important to the company’s bottom line to risk on a whim, even if that whim belonged to his precious only daughter.

Jack slowed to take the corner into Sycamore Road and automatically started scanning for the Ridleys’ deranged fox terrier.

There was no connection between K.G.’s summons and her threat to seek out a job in Jack’s office.

The foxy came out of the shrubs at the front of lot nine, but Jack dodged the open jaws with ease and sprinted out of range. The mutt didn’t even get close.

He kept up a punishing pace for another two Ks, until the sweat ran freely down his back and the breath rasped harsh in his throat. Only then did he slacken off.