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Wrong Brother, Right Man
Kat Cantrell
With a half billion dollars at stake, this playboy needs a plan.Hiring his brother’s ex is just the start.To earn his inheritance, Valentine LeBlanc must switch jobs with his twin, or so says his father’s will. Val vows to succeed at any cost – but to win, he needs the help of Sabrina Corbin – his brother’s beautiful ex!


With a half-billion dollars at stake, this playboy needs a plan.
Hiring his brother’s ex is just the start.
To earn his inheritance, Valentino LeBlanc must switch jobs with his twin, or so says his father’s will. Val vows to succeed at any cost, but to win, he needs Sabrina Corbin—his brother’s beautiful ex and consultant extraordinaire. Their chemistry is combustible and undeniable...and soon a pregnancy surprise may raise the stakes even higher...
USA TODAY bestselling author KAT CANTRELL read her irst Mills & Boon novel in third grade and has been scribbling in notebooks since she learned to spell. She’s a Harlequin So You Think You Can Write winner and a Romance Writers of America Golden Heart® Award inalist. Kat, her husband and their two boys live in north Texas.
Also by Kat Cantrell (#u689feac2-a21f-5dfa-b2d2-25a44475528d)
Marriage with Benefits
The Things She Says
The Baby Deal
The CEO’s Little Surprise
A Pregnancy Scandal
The Pregnancy Project
From Enemies to Expecting Best
Friend Bride
One Night Stand Bride
Contract Bride
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk).
Wrong Brother, Right Man
Kat Cantrell


www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-07643-2
Wrong Brother, Right Man
© 2018 Kat Cantrell
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
Cover (#u0c41c8a7-322a-58fb-bbbb-9ca0ae78b081)
Back Cover Text (#u6dfc2398-2bcb-52be-a1d6-2174663ca61f)
About the Author (#ua3aa0e70-68fe-51b5-b63c-63646591f126)
Booklist (#u046c4ad7-d863-5b05-b093-4bc987f76e81)
Title Page (#u2268b306-d192-5ea4-871f-171d1f7ae432)
Copyright (#u45b428ae-3b37-57b7-a186-cb691d9e2142)
One (#u56c284f8-94fe-5c48-8cd7-c29e67fed147)
Two (#ue87cceaa-7211-5c96-8db0-428e6de21763)
Three (#u3e9956aa-bbfd-5f44-af91-d1208fd22cb1)
Four (#uc51565fa-e6cc-50da-b015-f4e8947fa9a8)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#u689feac2-a21f-5dfa-b2d2-25a44475528d)
Soulless. The CEO’s office of LeBlanc Jewelers in Chicago’s Diamond District hadn’t changed since the last time Val had darkened the door. Despite sharing a last name with the man behind the desk, this was the last place he’d choose to be. Which was too bad considering it was going to be Val’s office for the next six months.
Val’s brother Xavier sat back in his chair and eyed him. “Ready to take over?”
“Not by my choice.” Val flopped into one of the seats ringing the desk, more than happy to let Xavier keep the chair on the other side. That was where his brother belonged. Val didn’t. “But yeah. The sooner we get this nightmare over with, the better.”
There were few things Val disliked more than the chain of jewelry stores that bore his name. His old man came in a close second, or would if he hadn’t died two months ago.
If there was any justice in the world—a concept Val lost faith in the moment he’d heard the terms of the will—the LeBlanc patriarch even now was being roasted over an open flame. Which wouldn’t be nearly punishment enough for forcing him to switch places with his twin brother.
LeBlanc peddled diamonds for God’s sake—the most useless of all possessions on the planet—hawking propaganda that coerced men into spending thousands of dollars on a rock for their lady that would eventually be worth a quarter of what they’d paid for the piece. Not that it would matter overmuch in the divorce settlement.
“The nightmare is all mine,” Xavier corrected.
“Please. You got the easy task.” Val ran a hand through his longish hair, as he willed a brewing headache into submission. “I have to increase the profits of a company I’ve scarcely set foot in. If pushing LeBlanc over the billion-dollar mark in revenue for the calendar year was simple, you’d have done it already.”
His brother’s near-identical features mirrored none of the indignation that Val felt. Of course not. Xavier had never met an emotion he could tolerate, showing the same arrogant, coldhearted behavior as their father. No mystery why Xavier had been the favorite.
“Definitely not simple.” Xavier steepled his fingers, every inch the corporate stooge he’d been groomed to be. “But doable. If I were the one doing it. Instead of being given that chance, I’ve been banished into the bowels of LBC.”
LBC was Val’s, which automatically gave it less importance in his brother’s eyes. LeBlanc Charities had a noble purpose, and Val had poured his heart and soul into it since the age of fourteen. That was when he’d followed his mother through the doors of the nonprofit organization she’d founded.
Val snorted and didn’t bother to cover the flash of annoyance. “You act like your test is a punishment. LBC is an amazing place, full of dedicated people who work as a team to change the world. You’ll emerge a better person from your stint there.”
Val, on the other hand, was being set up to fail. Deliberately.
The hot spurt of injustice wouldn’t ease. Death had only been another step in Edward LeBlanc’s diabolical need to ensure Val understood that he was not the favored son. If he and Xavier weren’t twins, he’d wonder if he had even a drop of LeBlanc blood running through his veins.
But he’d counted on his inheritance to bolster the flagging donations at LBC. People were starving on the streets of Chicago, and Val was doing his part to feed them, one meal at a time.
Having a basic need met allowed people to feel more secure in their future. Val would never abandon those he helped.
He needed that money. The people he served needed that money. The things he could do with half a billion dollars—it was mind-boggling. Val had already poured a lot of his own personal fortune into the coffers, but LBC was a large organization that required a dizzying amount of overhead. More than seemed appropriate most days, given that it took away from money being funneled into food supplies.
And Xavier was going to be the conquering hero as he did Val’s job.
“At least you have a shot at passing your test.” Xavier sneered. “Raising profits over the billion mark at LeBlanc within six months was already in my plan. I have those dominoes set up. All you have to do is push them over. But I have to become a fundraiser.”
He said the word with distaste. Likely because he had no clue what it meant to be selfless, to spend time in pursuit of something honorable as you sacrificed your time, day in and day out, to better someone else’s life.
“Should be a piece of cake for someone with your connections.” Val flicked his fingers. “Ten million in six months is essential. So it’s not a lark that you can do or not do if you don’t feel like it. The organization will collapse if you fail. It hardly matters if I pour more money into LeBlanc’s coffers, but people depend on LBC for survival.”
Val gave his money gladly. LBC didn’t depend on it to stay afloat, but he believed in his cause and in setting an example.
Glowering at Val’s casual dismissal of his responsibilities, Xavier tapped an expensive pen against his laptop. “If LBC is in such dire straits, Dad should have allowed me to write a check. But no. He specified in the will that I have to raise the money through donations as some kind of character building exercise. It’s ludicrous.”
On that, they agreed. But not much else.
Before Val could blast apart Xavier’s assessment of LBC’s current state—which was not dire—Mrs. Bryce stuck her head into the office, glancing between the two of them with eyebrows raised. “Your one o’clock is here, Mr. LeBlanc.”
“Thank you,” Val said at the same time as Xavier, who stared at him balefully as he processed that he’d already lost his admin to the new CEO.
“You have a one o’clock?” his brother asked and shook his head with bemusement. “Would you like my suit too?”
That straitjacket? Not even if it came with a hot redhead inside it. “That’s okay. I’ll take your chair. I have an interview.”
No time like the present to get this crap-storm of a party started.
Xavier stood and then turned a shade of green that looked horrific. Which meant Sabrina had walked into his office. Excellent. Too bad Val had forgotten his popcorn.
Sabrina Corbin swept into the CEO’s office as if she owned it, her cool smile dropping the temperature faster than an arctic front. Holy hell. Tactical error. She was far more beautiful than Val remembered and far frostier. Xavier needed to go, stat.
“I believe you two know each other?” Val flipped a hand at Xavier’s ex as he skirted the desk to sink into the newly vacated seat. He locked eyes with the woman he’d only met once but desperately needed.
Sabrina had insight into the mind of LeBlanc’s CEO. Who better to assist Val into a checkmark for his task than an executive coach Xavier had dated?
Suddenly, he really wanted to know what had happened between them. And how he could do better than his brother. It was a complication he hadn’t seen coming, but there it was. He wanted Sabrina to choose him over Xavier, especially since Xavier had had her first.
“Sabrina.” Xavier’s expression smoothed out, magically eliminating a good bit of the tension. “Nice to see you. I was just leaving.”
With his brother’s exit, the rest of the tension should have gone with him. It didn’t. Sabrina turned in Val’s direction, and he resisted the urge to check under his seat for icicles.
“Shall I call you Valentino or Mr. LeBlanc?” she inquired as she slid gracefully into the spot Val had just vacated, crossing a mile of leg under the pencil skirt she wore like a second skin.
Even her stilettos looked like she kept them in the freezer. What would it take to warm her up? Instantly, his body got in on that action, every nerve poised to figure that out. Did she like slow and romantic? Fast and blistering hot? Both, spread out over a long weekend?
“You should definitely call me Valentino but not under these circumstances,” he told her with a lazy smile.
Sabrina lifted a brow. “Mr. LeBlanc then.”
Ouch. His grin widened. That had Interesting Challenge written all over it, and he did enjoy besting his brother or he wouldn’t have contacted Sabrina in the first place. “Thanks for coming by on short notice. You up for the job?”
“My last client succeeded in her goals three months before our deadline. If your check clears, I’m up for whatever you throw at me.”
Well, now. That perked Val up considerably. “Like I told you in the email, I have to run this joint for six months. I’m not corporate in the first place, but the terms of my father’s will say I have to move the needle from 921 million to a billion dollars in revenue by the end of the fourth quarter. I need you to be my ace in the hole.”
To her credit, she didn’t blink at the sums of money being thrown around. “You have to raise profits eight percent in six months?”
“You did that math in your head?”
Coolly, she took his measure, clearly amused. “Anyone can do that math in their head. It’s the easiest math problem in the world.”
He could do all sorts of things in his head, but math wasn’t one of them when the majority of his thoughts for the last five minutes had been more of the carnal variety. For example, he could imagine what Sabrina would look like spread out on his desk, cinnamon hair flowing as he pleasured her. And once he’d got that stuck in his head, there was no going back.
She’d be gorgeous as she came. Of course she would. Xavier didn’t do second class.
“You’re hired,” he said.
Smart did it for him in so many more ways than sexy. Combine the two, and he was going to have a very difficult time keeping his hands off Sabrina Corbin for the next six months.
Of course, no one said he had to.
“We haven’t even discussed the contract yet.” Her expression had that not-so-fast feel that raised his hackles. “You should know that I’m very difficult to work with if you don’t take this seriously. I don’t deal well with less than one-hundred-percent focus from my clients.”
As subtle digs went, that one was a doozy. She was essentially saying Don’t flirt with me.
“I can guarantee I will be focused,” he assured her, his smile slipping not at all, and it wasn’t even a lie. He was great at multitasking and, when Sabrina was the subject, focus wasn’t going to be a problem. “I can’t—I won’t—fail at this.”
And with that, his throat tightened, and he did not like the wave of vulnerability that washed over him. But this was so far out of the realm of what he’d expected from his father’s will. Prove you have what it takes, Val, his mother had insisted when he’d railed at her for accepting this insanity.
But why did he have to prove anything? Val had always spun gold out of straw when it came to feeding hungry people. Corporate politics bored him to tears, and Edward LeBlanc had never fully appreciated that Val had taken after his mother instead of him, which was at least half the problem.
“Oh, you will not fail. Not on my watch,” Sabrina promised, her hazel eyes glittering with something mesmerizing. A heat that Val would never have associated with her, if he hadn’t seen it personally. “I thrive when others give up. You might even say it becomes personal.”
A jab at Xavier? Now he had to know. “Because you have a score to settle with my brother?”
She didn’t so much as blink, but recrossed her legs, which was as telling a gesture as anything else she could have done. “Xavier is irrelevant to this discussion. I take my work seriously. I don’t have anyone else to rely on, and I like it that way. I’m a consulting firm of one, and that’s served me well.”
Oh, so she was one of those. Ms. Independent, with no need for a man. “So you dumped him.”
“Are you going to constantly read between the lines when I speak?”
“Only when you force me to.”
They stared at each other until she nodded once. “I can appreciate the need to clear this up prior to working together. For your information, I broke up with Xavier, if you can call it that. We didn’t date that long and were never serious.”
Long enough for Xavier to introduce her to his brother. Of course, thinking over it, Val had run into them at Harlow House, while he’d been on a date of his own, earlier in the summer. Or it might have been May-ish. He’d been seeing Miranda then, who had some wicked moves between the sheets, so Val could be forgiven for failing to precisely recall the circumstances of his first meeting with Sabrina.
“So, you’re in the market for a real man this go around, are you?”
That fell so flat he started looking for a spatula to scrape himself off the carpet.
“If you’re flirting with me, you can stop,” she informed him, and that did not help the temperature.
She didn’t like having to spell it out, that much was clear from her expression. What, she didn’t look in the mirror in the morning? Sabrina was a beautiful woman, dressed to the nines in mouthwatering nylons that begged to be peeled from her body by a man’s teeth. Val could no more stop being turned on by the challenges she threw down than he could stop the sun.
“If there’s a question about that, I’m doing something wrong,” he muttered. “But okay. I’ll reel back the charm. For now.”
She hiked an eyebrow nearly to her cinnamon-colored hairline. “This was charming?”
There was no way to hold back the laugh, so he didn’t bother. Sabrina was a piece of work all right, and he was starting to see why things hadn’t gone so well with Xavier. But Val wasn’t his brother, who bled dollar signs and slept with his bottom line. “Touché. I’ll work on my delivery.”
“You should work on your CEO costume first. You can try on your Romeo act on your own time. After we get you that inheritance.”
Ms. Corbin had a touch of pit bull, which Val appreciated in someone paid to help him succeed. And maybe in a woman he was planning to get naked eventually too. Jury was still out on that one.
All at once, a fair bit of curiosity surfaced about her goal for this gig. “Are you hoping I’ll share?”
“Not on my radar. Winning is.”
And that told him enough to know that he liked her on his side, not his brother’s. If winning was what turned her on, then he was game. He had something to prove to everyone, even if one of the people who most deserved to eat crow was dead. “Great. Where do we start?”
The look she slid over the length of his torso put a little fire in his belly, a total paradox given the chill still weighing down the air. Even that was more of a turn-on than it should have been, and he was sorry the desk was in the way of her line of sight. He’d be happy to let her stare at him if she wanted to.
“For one, you need a makeover,” she announced with zero fanfare.
Speaking of things not being on the radar... He glanced at his untucked button-down, sleeves rolled up the forearms. Which was comfortable and necessary attire when transferring boxes of macaroni and cheese from the stock room to the kitchen. “What’s wrong with the current me?”
“Dress the part,” she advised, “and you’re halfway there. Act the part and you’re at ninety.”
That sounded suspiciously like business-school rhetoric, something he could do without. Val had never faked anything in his life. “What’s the other ten percent?”
“Show up.”
“Got that locked. I work hard.” He sat back in his chair—Xavier’s chair. LeBlanc Jewelers would never feel like home, and he didn’t intend for it to. “But I play harder. Have dinner with me tonight and find out which one I’m better at showing up for.”
Two (#u689feac2-a21f-5dfa-b2d2-25a44475528d)
There was something fundamentally wrong with Sabrina because a yes had formed on her tongue before she could catch it. Fortunately, she didn’t actually say it. “We’re working together, Mr. LeBlanc. We may eat within shouting distance of each other at some point during our association because food is a necessary part of survival, but it will not be a date, and there will be no playing.”
She kept her face composed through sheer force of will and years of practice. Men of his ilk didn’t take a woman seriously unless she had an iron backbone and an immunity to all forms of flirting. Sabrina had both. Valentino LeBlanc had started testing out her weaknesses sooner than she’d expected, but she’d get through to him. Eventually.
Lazily, he spun his chair as he contemplated her, his dark blue eyes a startling warm contrast to Xavier’s. She only vaguely recalled meeting Val a few months ago, and before she’d walked into the CEO’s office, she’d have said he was the boring brother, the one everyone forgot about.
She’d have been wrong. Shocking, uncomfortable awareness of him had ambushed her from the first.
Because Val was now sitting behind the desk? It was no secret that she’d always been attracted to powerful men. Xavier had checked all her boxes. He was a good-looking man who commanded people’s respect by virtue of his presence alone. You could tell he helmed a vast corporation the moment you looked at him. Authoritative and decisive, he ate weaker people for breakfast, and he was perfect for someone who liked her men unemotional.
Emotions ruined everything, especially when they were hers.
Xavier was exactly her type: a man who could provide plus-one services, interesting conversation, and the occasional sleepover without either one getting the wrong idea. Though she hadn’t gotten that far with Xavier. Instead, she’d lost interest in him almost immediately. Case in point: the moment he’d walked out of the CEO’s office a few minutes ago, she’d forgotten about him.
Valentino LeBlanc checked none of her boxes. Sensuality wafted from him in a long wave that caught her in places it shouldn’t. His hair was too long, his lips too full and his eyes—they had a depth that she’d have never considered attractive. Vulnerability was for losers. But he carried himself in a way that promised there was more to him than the ability to feel things.
Val tilted his chin, and long, inky strands of hair fell against his cheeks. Her fingers itched to sweep it away.
“And you should get a haircut,” she told him decisively. Back on track. Finally.
“Eating is more than a basic need, by the way,” he said, deliberately not letting her change the subject. “I know a lot about food. How it can control you. How the lack of it can cause you to do things you’d never contemplate under normal circumstances. But, in the right scenario, it can become a form of expression. Art. Let me cook for you.”
Oh, not a chance. He was likely a savant in the kitchen, turning spaghetti sauce into a seduction and, next thing she knew, he’d boost her to the counter, thighs spread and dinner forgotten as he made love to her.
That did not sound appealing in the slightest. It didn’t. Except for maybe the spaghetti sauce, the seduction and the part where a man would be between her legs. She sighed. It had been too long since she’d had a date. Clearly. But, even so, she’d never been a sex-on-the-counter type. It was too...passionate.
She worked hard not to inspire that kind of abandon in a man. Hell, she didn’t even know if that was in her own makeup, nor did she want to find out.
“I’m here to do a job, Mr. LeBlanc.”
She needed clients, not a man she’d have to shed sooner rather than later. They all cheated eventually, and she enjoyed men enough to date them but not to hang around for the eventual evisceration. Her father should have been enough of a warning, with his multiple affairs that had hurt her mother over and over. She scarcely spoke to her father anymore and she was still too mad at her mother for putting up with it to have much of a relationship with her either.
And then her ex, John...well, he was a man, wasn’t he? Suffice to say she wasn’t repeating that mistake.
“Food is my job,” he told her and waved a hand to encompass the whole of the office. “This is temporary. A speed bump on the way to my inheritance.”
“Which you will not get if we don’t shift things into your favor,” she reminded him and stood. “Perhaps we should take a tour of the company. Learn some people’s names.”
Get out of this office, where it’s far too easy to imagine non-work-related things happening.
He didn’t move. “I know where accounting is and how to find the bathroom. So I’m good. If we’re going to work together, I should probably know more things about you, not LeBlanc Jewelers. I can read a shareholder report later.”
Fair enough. And she’d practiced her intro enough times to do it while half-asleep. “I’ve been an executive coach for five years, and I worked as a corporate trainer for a Fortune 500 company before that. I’ve worked with the CEO of Evermore and the CFO of DGM Enterprises. I like to knit, and my uncle collects antique cars, so sometimes I go to shows with him on weekends.”
“That’s funny. That’s exactly what the bio on your website says.” Val’s smile had a tinge of smirk in it. Too much of one. “Curious. Did you stick knitting in there because it’s in vogue?”
What was he implying, that she only put that in her bio to make her seem like less of a workaholic? If so, how the hell had he figured that out so quickly? No one had ever questioned that before.
“I can knit. I like to knit.” When she remembered where she’d put her needles. And to buy yarn. Neither of which had happened in about five years.
“No one likes to knit. Knitting is something grandmas do because they can’t handle much excitement. I think you can. And you should.”
That was not a test she had any intention of passing. “I’m sensing that you are not in the frame of mind to start with our coaching sessions today. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
She spun to go find her sanity, but Val beat her to the door. Somehow. It had been a mistake to try to leave, obviously. He leaned on the door in front of her, holding it shut with his body. Forcing her to acknowledge that he had one. The scent of male permeated everything, digging into her marrow.
Suddenly, she could think of nothing but how close he was, how easily she could reach out and touch him. Her skin tingled as his gaze swept her with an almost physical weight, and the awareness she’d been fighting dropped over them both like a heavy cloak.
What was wrong with her that she couldn’t get her brain out of the gutter?
He was a sexy man, no doubt. But not so different from a hundred other men within a stone’s throw, right down to the womanizing bent of his rhetoric. Normally it was easy to keep her distance. Men got the message pretty fast when she froze them out, but she was having the hardest time making ice around a man with so much natural heat.
“Leaving so soon?” he drawled. “We’ve got six months. I’d like to make the most of them. Please stay.”
She crossed her arms over her racing heart, trying to pretend it was because he’d blocked the door and thus her exit. Not because he excited her. He didn’t. Or rather he shouldn’t, which wasn’t the same at all, sadly. “I’m willing to stay if you’ll start taking my skills seriously.”
“I take every inch of you seriously.”
How he managed to turn that into something that sounded like a promise of the carnal variety she’d never know. Probably it was a testament to her state of mind, not his. A guy like Val flirted without conscious thought, almost as a reflex. Woman equaled conquest in his world, so the better course of action would be to ignore his innuendos, get him on a professional footing with her and go on.
“Great,” she said smoothly and wiped her clammy hands as surreptitiously as she could on her skirt. “Then let’s get serious. If you don’t want to take a tour of the building, where would you like to start?”
His gaze drifted along her face to land on her lips, lingering there with such intensity that she felt it way down low in her core, the same way she might if he’d actually traced her mouth with his fingertip. It was ridiculous. Phantom caresses were not on the agenda.
“How do you usually start with clients?” he asked.
Good. Okay. He was in the realm of appropriate work-related conversation. She was the one veering off into things she had no business imagining, like what it would feel like to be kissed by a man who knew his way around a woman. Val did, she could tell.
Sabrina cleared her throat. “Where do you feel your deficiencies are?”
His brows raised. “Who says I have any?”
Ugh. That hadn’t been so smoothly done. Might as well announce that he’d thrown her off-kilter. “What I meant was...you hired me for a reason. You clearly think you have some areas needing improvement. What is the number one thing that you’d like to be different in one month?”
The wicked smile that tore through his expression did not bode well. “I’d like to say that you’d unbend enough to have dinner with me. But I assume you meant related to my position as temporary CEO of LeBlanc. Then I would say I’d like to have command of how the staff expects decisions to be made. In the nonprofit world, we do it as a team. I’m the tie breaker. Is that how it works here?”
“But that’s easy, Val,” she said without thinking. Without even consciously realizing that she’d switched to calling him Val in her head. She rushed on before he could comment or she could stumble over it. “You make the decisions, period, end of story. The rest of the staff doesn’t get a say. That’s the beauty of the corporate world.”
“That doesn’t sound beautiful at all,” Val muttered. “It sounds like a recipe for getting it wrong.”
Speechless, she stared at him, grappling for the right words to explain that, in the corporate world, it was expected that the CEO be domineering and opinionated. But maybe it didn’t have to be that way for Val, not in this case since he was only temporarily the CEO. Xavier was domineering enough for both of them, and he’d be back in the saddle throwing his weight around soon enough.
“I’m not sure how to advise you, then,” she said cautiously. “But we’ll get there.”
She’d only worked with a handful of CEOs, which was part of the reason she’d accepted Val as a client. More executive clients on her résumé could never be a bad thing and, as she’d told him, there was no backup income if she didn’t have a continual stream of customers.
“How will we get there?”
“Together,” she promised with only slightly more confidence than she felt. “I’ve never failed to deliver on a client’s expectations. I’ll work up a plan for the next few weeks, and we can go over that tomorrow.”
“So, essentially you’re saying that the one thing I’m unsure about is something you can’t advise me on. But you’ll have a plan put together tomorrow.” His gaze burned into her, scoring her insides with his particular brand. “Not today.”
Something inside snapped. “What are you implying? That I might not be good at what I do because I haven’t got a list of trite strategies to hand you? My coaching is personalized to each client. I have to evaluate where you are in relation to the corporate culture. That takes more than five minutes.”
“Then, I’m making your job harder by refusing to engage with the rest of the team,” he surmised quietly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
She blinked. Had he just apologized because he hadn’t taken her suggestion to tour the building? “You shouldn’t apologize. Ever.”
His brief smile shouldn’t have smacked her as hard as it did. She hadn’t expected to like Valentino LeBlanc. What was she supposed to do with that?
“Because you’re the forgiving sort?”
“No, because they’re going to eat you alive, Val.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose to cover the swirl that had started up in her stomach, a merry-go-round of confusion and awareness and sheer terror. What had she signed up for with this gig? LeBlanc was poised to become a billion-dollar-a-year company. It needed Xavier, not a man who seemed better suited to be drinking wine at an outdoor trattoria in Venice with a lush Italian film star.
Deep breath. He was paying her to fix that. Quite well.
Val needed her. More than she’d ever have assumed. Executive material he was not, and the odds were stacked against him almost unfairly. It dug under her skin in a wholly different way than the erotic promise that dripped from his pores. The sensual vibe that wound between them needed to go, or she was going to botch this. She couldn’t. Consulting was going to get her to the next level. Specifically, having a nameplate on the door with her name and the title CEO stamped on it. The more she gleaned from experiences with her clients, the easier that would be.
Except Val was watching her with those bedroom eyes that said he was imagining her naked and liked it a whole lot. Men generally weren’t allowed to look at her like that. She shouldn’t let him do it either but, just as she was about to say so, he tilted his head and she got distracted by the way his midnight-colored hair fell into his eyes.
“You don’t think I can do this, do you?” he murmured without a shred of guile. He was genuinely asking.
She nearly groaned. Boy, she had really inspired his confidence, hadn’t she? “I do. I have absolute faith in you. And myself. The problem is...”
Brain-dead all at once, she scouted around for a plausible reason why she’d bobbled their interaction thus far that didn’t sound like he’d come on to her inappropriately when, in reality, he’d mentioned dinner one time. She’d shot him down, he’d ruefully suggested it would be nice if she’d reconsider and they’d moved on. He’d moved on. She was the one stuck on how to haul the frosty distance back between them, an atmosphere that she usually created so easily.
“The problem is,” she repeated, “that I haven’t properly assessed your strengths.”
Yes. That was exactly it. Brain engaged! If they focused on his strengths first instead of the areas for improvement, there’d be less opportunity for her to stick her foot in her mouth again. And it would help her get a handle on him professionally.
“That’s not true.” A smile climbed across his face, and it was fascinating to watch it take over his whole body. What kind of man smiled with every fiber of his being? “You know I can cook.”
Okay. If that’s what he was giving her to work with, fine. “Then tell me how you can use that to succeed here.”
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me?”
She shook her head. “That’s not how coaching works. Does the coach pull the quarterback off the field and start throwing the passes himself? No. He guides the player according to his knowledge of strategy, honing it to the specific needs of that athlete. That’s what I do.”
“Sounds like I’m expected to do all the work,” he suggested with a wink that should have been smarmy. It wasn’t.
He was far more charming than she’d ever admit. “There’s absolutely no question about that, Mr. LeBlanc. You have a very long battle ahead of you, especially given that you’ve had no exposure to the corporate world. Most men in your position have had years to become...”
“Hard?” he supplied handily. “And I liked it better when you called me Val.”
Brittle was the word that had sprung to mind. But from where, she had no idea. CEOs were resilient, resourceful and, above all, in charge. “To become acclimated. It’s a different world than the one you’re probably used to.”
At that point, he crossed his arms, and it was as telling a gesture as anything he’d done thus far. “What do you think I’m used to?”
The defensive posture put her on edge. She was stumbling again, with few handrails to grasp. He wasn’t a typical client who wanted to leapfrog over the men ahead of him in line to the corner office and had hired her to give him an edge. Val was clearly sensitive, with land mines and trip wires in odd places. Things she had little experience with.
But she couldn’t tell him that.
“You’re used to an environment where people are working toward common good.” She assumed so anyway. All she knew about his charity was that it fed homeless people, an admirable cause, but likely had nothing in common with the corporate world. “LeBlanc is for-profit, and that makes it instantly more treacherous. If you want to succeed, you’re going to have to listen to me and do exactly as I say.”
His brows lifted. “Now that’s the best proposition I’ve had all day. By all means, Ms. Corbin, I’m at your complete command. Tell me what you’d like me to do.”
Her brain automatically added to you to the end of the sentence, and she flushed. He hadn’t meant that. Had he? “Call in your c-suite, and let’s get the lay of the land.”
With a nod, he levered his hips away from the door, grazing her in all the right places—wrong places—as he reached behind him to open the door. Scrambling backward, she landed in the center of his spacious office. Her pulse raced as if she’d recently lapped the building, but why she couldn’t fathom. He was just a man.
He called out through the open door to his admin, asked her to gather together the staff that reported to him and swung the door wide. The cloak of awareness eased a bit, and she dragged air into her lungs. Val strode past her to take a seat at the desk again.
As people began to file into the room, his expression hardened into something more suited to a CEO. Where had that come from? Fascinated, she edged toward the back wall as LeBlanc’s vice-presidents ringed the desk.
“Thanks for joining me on short notice,” Val told the eight men and women who had answered the summons, meeting each one’s gaze in exactly the same manner that she would have advised him to if he’d asked. “We’re in for an interesting ride over the next few months. I’m not Xavier, nor do I pretend to be, but I will keep this company afloat. I hope you’ll all stick around to see how it plays out. If not, there’s the door.”
As Val jerked his head toward it, Sabrina’s pulse faltered for an entirely different reason. Val had morphed before her eyes into a force to be reckoned with.
He’d been toying with her. Throat tight, she watched him lay down his authority with the people he needed most to have his back, struggling to rearrange everything she’d learned about him today.
Valentino LeBlanc’s middle name might well be chameleon. Which made him dangerous in more ways than one. She could not trust him, that much was clear and, come hell or high water, she had to stop letting him blindside her.
Three (#u689feac2-a21f-5dfa-b2d2-25a44475528d)
The next morning, Val arrived at LeBlanc shortly after six. No one else had arrived yet, which had been his goal. Gave him time to acclimate, which had been the number one necessity he’d gleaned from Sabrina yesterday.
As he settled into the CEO’s chair with a cup of coffee—which he’d bet half his inheritance was not Fair Trade or even very good—from the executive suite’s breakroom, he had to hand it to Ms. Corbin. Acclimation was indeed a great first step.
Now, if only she could keep up a string of next steps, he’d be golden.
The office was still soulless, which he’d long attributed to the fact that his father didn’t have one, but Xavier seemed to have followed in Edward LeBlanc’s footsteps in more ways than one. Now that Val was firmly in the CEO’s chair, he’d started to wonder if it wasn’t the other way around: the corporation had sucked the heart from both father and brother, as opposed to the corporation being a reflection of the men.
That wasn’t going to happen to Val. He still felt like crap for his dictatorial throwdown to the executive staff yesterday. It had been easier to channel his father than he’d liked to admit. All he’d had to do was envision the hundreds of times he’d been called to appear before Edward LeBlanc to explain whatever debacle his father had caught wind of and been disappointed by this time.
So that was the trick? Just act like a conscienceless jerk and profits flowed? Totally not worth the gutting. It weighed on him that he’d conformed, falling into the mold that seemed to be what everyone expected from him, including Sabrina. That wasn’t how he wanted to do things nor the kind of man he was. But what if that was the point of the will—to show Val once and for all that he didn’t belong in the LeBlanc family?
If so, Val hoped his father had a front-row seat in hell for the fireworks.
He’d brought in a sweet potato plant from home that he’d grown himself, and the green spade-shaped leaves made him smile. The potato had rolled from a bulk bag at LBC and, by the time he’d found it behind a pallet of dried fruit, it had already sprouted. It was a crime to waste food in Val’s book, so now it had new life as his one and only office decoration.
For about an hour, Val fought with his laptop, eventually managing to figure out how to log in and set up email without breaking anything, all while resisting the urge to check in on LBC. Then Xavier blew through the door.
He stopped short when he spied Val ensconced in his chair. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here so early.”
“Surprise,” Val said mildly. “I could say the same, only with an at all at the end. Don’t you have a food bank to run?”
His brother’s expression left little doubt as to his opinion about the switch. “I left in a rush yesterday and forgot some paperwork.”
Xavier stood inside the door of his office, running a hand over his unshaven jaw, halfway between his old world and the portal to his new one. It was the first time in Val’s recent memory that his brother had let his appearance go. They didn’t see each other all that often—by design—but Val would bet that Xavier always shaved before coming to LeBlanc. What did it say that he’d change his habits to take Val’s place?
“I’ll take care of any paperwork that has to do with LeBlanc,” Val advised him. “Just point it out. My job now.”
Xavier frowned. “Temporarily. Besides, the will didn’t say it was against the rules to check in.”
Check in equaled checking up on Val, no doubt.
“No. And I’m not arguing that point.” Easing back in his chair, Val tamped down his rising temper. “But this is mine, for better or worse, for the next six months. If you have an issue, why not let me handle it?”
Thank you, Sabrina. She was going to be far more valuable than he’d dreamed and, as his first act toward conquering the task laid out in the will, hiring her had been a good one.
“Fine.” Xavier strode to the bookcase along the south wall and pulled open the glass door, extracted a binder that was a good four inches thick and dropped it onto the desk with a thud. “These are printed copies of contracts we’re—you’re—negotiating with the government of Botswana to purchase interests in diamond exploration. Good luck.”
Val’s head immediately began to swim. “You purchase interests in exploration?”
“You do,” Xavier emphasized, heavy on the sarcasm. “Baptism by fire, my brother.”
“Wait.” Val quelled the urge to massage his temples as he sorted through how helpless it would sound if he admitted that he couldn’t handle this. “Can you tell me who’s the best person on your staff to advise me about negotiating with an African government?”
“That would be me.” Xavier’s gaze glittered as he crossed his arms and stared at Val. “I always handle the African government because it requires delicacy. And experience. The politics there are beyond anything I’ve seen anywhere else in the world, especially if you want to keep LeBlanc far away from the blood-diamond regions. Hint—you do.”
Great. So Val’s initial thought about being set up for failure had been dead-on. Not only did it extend from beyond the grave but his brother was planning to perpetuate what their old man had started. “No problem. I’m not above a little research. Are there other contracts of a similar nature in that bookcase?”
Xavier nodded once, a curt move that said he didn’t like giving up information but liked the idea of Val taking LeBlanc down even less. “Anything I need to know about LBC before I go?”
“Just that you can’t treat my people like you do the ones here,” Val said easily, not that he was worried about anyone on his staff getting bent out of shape. He’d debriefed them all a few days ago, begged them to give Xavier a chance and told them if it seemed like he wasn’t getting it to carry on in Val’s stead until he could return to the fold.
LBC had stellar, committed people on board, who cared about making life better for those who needed help. They’d keep on doing that whether or not they had the necessary donations to fund the operation, albeit on a much smaller scale if Xavier failed to complete his task. The tenure of the CEO of LeBlanc Jewelers there would be but a blip.
But Val couldn’t resist the opportunity to make things a little more difficult for his brother. “Remember, a lot of the people involved with LBC are volunteers.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Xavier’s scowl could have peeled paint from the walls if there’d been any. Instead, they were covered with this odd wood-grain paneling that always reminded Val of his father’s lawyer’s office. “Are you implying that I might drive them off?”
“Yeah, that’s not even a remote possibility, is it?” The sarcasm might have been a little thick, but come on. Xavier had to realize how he came across. “We do a lot of compromising at LBC. Some months are leaner than others. We try to maintain an even influx of capital but, when you’re dependent on donations, you can’t plan as well. Remember that flexibility is your friend.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Try not to make more of a mess than I can conceivably clean up, all right?”
“Well, there go all my plans to flush my inheritance down the toilet.” Val shrugged as if he didn’t care, which was how he’d long played it with those in his family who saw him as nothing but a dreamer, who couldn’t cut it in the corporate world. Which might be less of a stretch than he’d have credited before today. “Hey, if I screw up, you’re still good. Just do your thing, and you’ll have half a billion dollars to play with.”
“Yeah, that’s comforting.” Xavier pulled a pen from the holder at the corner of the desk and pocketed it. “That was a gift from the daughter of a Russian ambassador. I wouldn’t want to lose track of it.”
Val snorted. As if stealing pens from LeBlanc was one of his top priorities. “Sabrina’s due any minute, FYI. Make yourself scarce unless you want to say hello.”
“You think it bothers me if you sleep with her?”
“I didn’t until now,” Val lied. “Do tell.”
“She’s frigid, man. You’ll have better luck with the president of Botswana than you will with her.”
“Wanna bet?” Val asked pleasantly because, while Sabrina dripped ice cubes as a matter of course, the glimpses of heat between them had kept him awake far longer last night than it probably should have.
And the stakes had gone up. Xavier was still pissed about Sabrina dumping him, which meant Val was doubly interested in rubbing it in his brother’s face when he did score.
His brother shook his head. “We’ve got enough on the line already, don’t you think? Besides, if you do bag her, it can only help you.”
“And perhaps you should consider that the reason she dumped you is because you’re an ass. I’m not,” Val shot back, a little more hotly than he’d intended, but the sentiment was warranted. Sabrina was a lot of things but not a faceless notch on the bed post. No woman in Val’s rearview was. He loved being with all the women he’d slept with, loved learning their bodies, their laughs. Quantity did not preclude quality. The more the merrier.
“Which is going to bite you,” Xavier informed him. “Bleeding hearts aren’t her type. They don’t increase profits eight percent, even in six years, let alone six months.”
“We’ll see about that.” Val’s confidence might be a little misplaced, given that his one foray into The Buck Stops Here mentality had made him sick to his stomach. “Maybe some heart is what this company needs.”
“And maybe a solid hand is what LBC needs.” Xavier smirked.
Val’s stomach turned over again. His staff would be fine. They knew not to fold under his brother’s dictatorial style. Somehow, reminding himself of that didn’t make him feel any better. “You’d do well to leave your Tom Ford suits at home and dig into LBC’s mission statement with an open mind.”
His brother flipped him a smartass salute and strode out of the office without a backward glance. Good riddance. Val scrubbed at his face with his hands and trashed the unpalatable coffee without taking a second sip. Maybe he could duck out for twenty minutes and make it to Fuel for Humans Coffee near LBC’s main facility before anyone else showed up.
“Ahh, I see we’re taking our CEO position seriously today.”
Sabrina strolled through the door Xavier had vacated mere minutes before, looking far too fresh and untouchable given the hour. A temperature drop accompanied her as if she’d tucked the Snow Queen into her clutch in order to unleash winter upon the hapless souls in her wake.
Of course, the logical explanation lay with the pronounced hum of the air conditioner. But he liked his version better. What fun was life if you couldn’t see the fanciful in the everyday?
Speaking of his overactive imagination, if she’d been in Val’s bed last night—which he’d envisioned more times than he could count—they’d still be there, and her hair would be tousled from his fingers instead of wound up in that severe bun thing. Seeing her in the flesh doubled his resolve to get to that point. Soon.
“Good morning to you too,” he greeted her gallantly. “I was about to go get some coffee around the corner. Come with me.”
“We can’t leave.”
She crossed her arms over the kelly-green knit top she wore under a classy white suit, the skirt of which hit just above her knees. It shouldn’t have been as sexy as it was, but Sabrina was one of those rare women who had such an arresting vibe that you scarcely noticed what she was wearing. Her appeal came from somewhere beneath, and his mouth wanted to uncover her secrets.
After Xavier’s welcome to LeBlanc, Sabrina’s frost needed to go.
“On the contrary, I’m the CEO. I can do whatever I want. Right?”
“Have coffee delivered, then,” she said with raised eyebrows. “We have a four-week plan to go over.”
Lazily, he spun his chair as he contemplated her, the coaching plan suddenly very far down his list of things to do today. “Only four weeks?”
“We have to start somewhere. At the end of four weeks, I can make some assessments about where we are in your progress, then make adjustments. I have no idea how well you’re going to take suggestions or what you’ll do with my feedback. It will do me no good to have spent time on a six-month plan if you ignore everything I say.”
“So far, you haven’t said much,” he countered. “And if you truly wanted to know how well I respond to suggestion, you should have had dinner with me last night.”
Her expression didn’t change, but her gaze flicked over his face. “Because you expect me to spit out commands of a sexual variety on a first date?”
Oh, man. She was far more charmed by him than she knew what to do with. Excellent. He grinned. “Because I had planned to ask you what you wanted me to cook for you. But I like the direction of your thoughts so much better. Now that we’ve opened that Pandora’s box, what commands would you give?”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head, the hard cross of her arms tightening over her midsection. She must not have realized that action had pulled her blouse down a half inch, displaying a very lovely section of her breasts. “We’re not going there today, Val.”
“You started it, not me.” He held up his hands in mock surrender to distract from the sharp little number this whole exchange was doing on his lower half. Didn’t work. But, then, he was starting to think nothing would, except the obvious.
“We have a professional relationship. If we can’t stick to that, then you can find another executive coach.”
Her expression had none of the heat from yesterday. He was failing with her today, for some unknown reason.
With that warning ringing in his ears, Val sobered. Those contacts with the Botswana government still lay prominently in the center of his desk and, as reminders went of how he’d go down in flames without her, that was a stark one. “I take this very seriously. Please forgive me. Let’s go over your plan.”
She rolled her eyes. “And stop being so conciliatory. Men in the corporate world take no prisoners. Don’t ask for forgiveness, and do not look at me with those puppy-dog eyes.”
He had to laugh. “Is that what I was doing?”
“We’re going to have a problem if you don’t take accountability for the changes you need to make. That’s why you hired me, right?”
No, he’d hired her because she liked to win. And because he had a score to settle with his father but, in lieu of being able to do that, he’d settle for taking a few chunks out of Xavier’s hide. Sabrina was his ticket to that. “I hired you because I need my inheritance. You have a proven track record working with executives to better their ability to lead. Nowhere did I agree to change.”
Sabrina blinked. “Then you’ve already decided that we’ve lost.”
No. That was not happening. If nothing else, he needed that money to undo all the damage Xavier would likely do to LBC without Val there to fix it.
“Sit,” he told her with a head jerk at one of the chairs as his temper started simmering again. Or maybe it hadn’t fully cooled from Xavier’s drive-by earlier.
To her credit, she didn’t argue and just did as he said, which wasn’t going to work either. He wanted a partner, not a lackey. “I’m a team player. Always. I don’t boss people around for the sake of getting my way. If your four-week plan includes strategies to turn me into a corporate shark, you can trash it. I need you on my side. To work with me to use my strengths and gloss over what you perceive to be my weaknesses. Can you do that?”
Sabrina let her spine relax against the back of the chair and shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“You promised me yesterday that we’d do this together. You moved me with that speech. Figure out a way,” he said. “And that’s as tyrannical as I’m going to get.”
There was no way in hell he’d let this job-switch mandate turn him into his father. Or, worse, into Xavier. But he was going to use his stint at LeBlanc to show everyone that, while his brother might have been their father’s favorite, Val could and would pass whatever test the old man posthumously threw down in his path—as long as he had Sabrina to help him avoid becoming the soulless corporate type his father had likely hoped this task would shape him into.
Four (#u689feac2-a21f-5dfa-b2d2-25a44475528d)
Together.
That was not a coaching strategy, not the way Val meant it. He was essentially asking her to get into the game with him, to be his Cyrano de Bergerac behind the scenes as he took the spotlight. Be in lockstep next to him, figuring out how to guide him on the fly.
Sabrina didn’t work that way. She needed to analyze. Study. Contemplate. Caution was her default for more reasons than one, and having a well-thought-out plan helped. Together in her mind meant supporting him as he followed the plan. Not that she’d be part of a team.
Sabrina was and always had been a team of one. She’d never disappointed herself, never cheated on herself, never broken her own heart. The only way to avoid all that was to stay far away from anyone who could possibly wield that type of power.
She glanced at the printed pages in her hand, the ones she’d worked on until midnight because she’d needed the distraction first and foremost, but also because she’d said she’d deliver her initial four-week plan today. None of which she could actually use if Val was serious about trashing anything that resembled either change or modeling him into a corporate executive.
Instead, he wanted her to storm the gates of the CEO office alongside him. The concept scared the bejesus out of her. But, at the same time, it felt like an unparalleled opportunity. What better way for her to glean the skills she needed to remake herself into a CEO? She’d been on the sidelines for many, many long years, parroting strategy to her clients in clinical one-off sessions that were more personal growth than nitty-gritty.
She couldn’t tell him no. Neither did she think yes made a lick of sense.
“Watching the gears turn in your head is fascinating.”
Sabrina made the mistake of glancing at Val. He hadn’t moved from his chair, but it didn’t matter. His presence filled the room, winnowing into corners with ease, and not all of those corners were in the room. He’d found plenty of her nooks and crannies too, even the ones that she’d have said were quite hidden beneath her layer of frost.
She hadn’t slept well last night, that was the problem. Too busy trying to banish Val’s sensual edge from her consciousness to sleep, but she’d finally given up, realizing far too late that she’d have had better luck willing her skin to change color.
“Really?” she commented mildly. “You should get out more if watching me think is the slightest bit interesting.”
“If you were just thinking, I might agree.” He tipped the chair a bit, peering at her from behind strands of his ridiculously long dark hair. The tips grazed his cheekbones for crying out loud. “You were doing far more than that. Come on. Spill. I want to know what you were so furiously working out in your head.”
She stared at him while scrambling to put parameters around a rapidly shifting dynamic. What was she supposed to do, admit that he was pushing her out of her comfort zone? Worse than that, he was pushing her, and she wasn’t pushing back. “Nowhere in our agreement does it say I have to share my thought process with you.”
The grin that flashed across his face shouldn’t have been so affecting. “That’s the whole basis of our agreement, Sabrina.”
And he should stop saying her name like that, as if they were intimate and he had a right to color his tone so richly when he spoke to her. Val at full throttle was throwing her off. They had to get out of this private office before he pushed her beyond what she could handle.
“Fine. I was thinking that I have to start from square one with you. That none of the strategies in this plan are going to work, since you’re being so stubborn.”
His chair swiveled as he contemplated her. “Good. Then that means I’m getting through to you. Dump that whole thing in the trash, and let’s start over. Figure out step one together.”
There was that word again. Together. As a team. She had the wildest urge to see what that felt like.
Blinking her eyes for a beat, strictly for fortification that did not come, she did as he suggested, sliding the entire file into the trash. Oh, God. She’d thrown away her game plan, her link to sanity. What was she doing? Without structure, she’d crumple. Wouldn’t she?
“You’re much braver than I was expecting,” Val told her quietly, and her gaze flew to his. He caught it easily and held on, letting so many nonverbal things tumble between them that she almost couldn’t breathe.
The compliment shouldn’t mean so much, but it did. It was bar none the most affecting thing anyone had ever said to her, and the greedy part of her soul that craved recognition gathered it up tight before it slipped away.
But Val wasn’t done slicing her open.
“What did you see in Xavier, anyway?”
She flushed, heat climbing across her cheeks. “That’s not relevant.”
She’d seen a powerful man who came with guarantees: she’d never trust him, never fall for him and never allow him to hurt her. None of which she’d admit to anyone, let alone her client. Why was Val so fixated on her relationship with Xavier? This wasn’t the first time he’d brought it up, and she had a sneaking suspicion it wouldn’t be the last.
Val shrugged. “It’s relevant to me because I don’t see you two together. You’re far too deep for him.”
That was a new one on her.
Most men called her icy or, at least, that’s what they said to her face. She didn’t have any illusions about what they called her behind her back, and that bothered her not at all since she purposefully cultivated a reputation for being remote and frigid.
Never had she been called deep. It intrigued her against her will.
“Deep?” she repeated with just the right amount of nonchalance that she could play it off as lack of interest if he went a direction she didn’t like.
“You have these layers,” he explained, shaping the air with his fingers as he mimed filtering through them. “They’re fascinating. One minute I think I have you pegged, and then you do something so shocking that I can’t get a handle on it. Have dinner with me. I can’t wait to see what happens on a date.”
She had to laugh at his one-track mind. “You say that as if a woman who veers between extremes is a draw. After you painted such a flattering picture of me as a crazy person, I hope you won’t find this next part shocking. No.”
He watched her with this fine edge, his gaze digging into her layers right here and now, and his slight smile clearly conveyed his anticipation of finding something juicy. What he’d do with it she had no idea, nor did she want to find out. Her frost barrier stayed firmly in place to prevent exactly that. Or, at least, it did with everyone else on the planet. Val acted like it didn’t exist, and she had no idea how to get him on the right page—she didn’t do his brand of passion. Sabrina had tasteful, quiet affairs with even-keeled men who could help her achieve personal goals. That was it.
“The no wasn’t the shocking part.”
“Do tell,” she suggested blandly.
“It’s that you seem to think you’re one-dimensional and that veering between extremes is a bad thing. Life is extreme. We experience so many highs and lows as humans. Why try to stuff that into a box? Let it out, and really feel what’s happening to you.”
What was this conversation they were having? Willingly open yourself up to feel things, like pain and betrayal and suffering? No, thanks. “Um, why would I want to do that, again?”
His dark blue eyes danced. “Because that’s when you get to the amazing part.”
There was no doubt in her mind they’d veered firmly into intimate territory and that Val unleashed would be amazing. Amazingly dangerous, sensual, driving her to extremes, as promised. That sounded like the worst idea in history. She concentrated on avoiding those types of emotions, and any man who spent that much energy indulging in hedonism did not stick with one woman. The signs were all there, in neon. He practically bled erotic suggestion, even in the way his full lips formed words. She’d never believe he’d be satisfied with monogamy.
Which mattered not at all since she wasn’t asking him to apply for the nonexistent position of her lover. They had a professional relationship, and that was the full extent of it.
Speaking of which...there was very little coaching going on thus far this morning, and she needed to get it together. Step in and guide him toward the end goal since he’d made it clear he either couldn’t or wouldn’t rein himself in.
“Val.” She held up a finger as he cocked a brow. “No. Back to business. I threw away the plan because it’s useless at this point. But you’re still my client, and I promised you that we’d get your inheritance. We’re going to concentrate on that. There’s nothing else between us.”
“Right now, yes,” he agreed readily. “But not forever.”
So sure, are you? She shook her head. “We need to focus here, Val. I’m treading on some shaky ground without the proven strategies that I just abandoned. I need you to be on my side if I’m going to be on yours.”
He let another indulgent smile spill onto his face. “Are you admitting you have vulnerabilities? And here I thought you weren’t embracing your highs and lows.”
“I’m not admitting anything of the sort,” she shot back primly. “I’m saying this is uncharted water. If I’m not reshaping you into a CEO, what am I doing?”
“Winning,” he said succinctly. “Just as soon as you figure out if we’re on shaky ground or in uncharted water.”
The man was going to unglue her. “Are you deliberately trying to sabotage this?”
He abruptly extricated himself from behind his desk and sidled around it to end up on her side of it, leaning against the edge as he towered over her. This close, his masculine scent couldn’t be ignored, and her needy, treacherous insides sniffed it out instantly, inhaling him in one gulp.
Mayday! Val was not for her. She had rules about dating clients, rules about men like him, rules about her rules. Why was all of that so hard to remember when he pursed his perfect lips and watched her with undisguised wickedness sparking in his expression?
“I’m deliberately trying to get you out from behind your walls so we can work together. You’ve got more land mines ringing you than a military outpost in Iraq. I get that I’m asking you to do this gig differently than you’re used to, and that there’s no tried and true formula that fits me. I trust that we’re going to figure it out. Together,” he stressed.
Trust. That was a word that didn’t get thrown around in her world very often. But if she’d engendered his, great. That was a fantastic first step. Unfortunately, it was the first in a long line of them.
“Then you have to trust me when I say that the first step is that makeover.” Please, God, get him the hell out of this office, and make him go somewhere else. “You need a wardrobe that tells people that you’re the one who makes the decisions. Then you don’t have be a shark because people already recognize your power even before you open your mouth.”
He nodded once and extended his hand. “You have to come with me. That’s part of the deal.”
“What? No. I’m not going with you.” She needed decompression time, best done miles and miles away from Val.
“Yes,” he said simply and wiggled his fingers. “We’re a team. I need your critical eye. What if the suits I get give people the wrong message? Come on. We can talk about next steps at the same time.”
Yeah, no, that was not happening. She did not take men shopping for suits. Or anything else. That was entirely too intimate an activity. “That’s what the tailor is for. You explain what you’re looking for, and he creates it. When you’re spending five grand on a suit, they tend to be a little better than average at customer service.”
“This is why you have to come,” he returned without blinking an eye and pushed his hand further into her space. “Because there is no way I can actually hand someone my credit card to purchase suits that cost five thousand dollars. You’re going to have to do it for me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Seriously?”
Judging by the mulish glint in his gaze, she had two choices. She could test out which one of them could hold out the longest or give up now since he didn’t intend to concede. He’d spent the better part of fifteen minutes laying out how this coaching assignment needed to work differently than her other ones, and either she could climb on board his crazy train now or keep fighting him—and losing.
“Fine,” she spit out for the second time this morning, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. “But I can stand on my own.”
He didn’t move his hand. “The offer to help you out of your chair has nothing to do with your abilities and everything to do with my character. The faster you learn that, the easier this is going to go.”
That sank in much more quickly than she would have credited and, for God knew what reason, she believed him. Or, rather, she accepted that he thought it was true. She’d expended an enormous amount of energy trying to be accepted into a man’s world, and letting one treat her like a woman didn’t get her anywhere but frustrated. Val was in a class by himself and probably really didn’t get the dynamic, nor would he if she explained it. So she opted to skip the lecture about sexual politics in the c-suite and clasped his hand.
The shock of it swept over them, and he didn’t even bother to hide the result. Awareness swamped her, heightened by the decidedly carnal edge to his smile as he pulled her to her feet, which didn’t diminish the snap, crackle and pop in the least. He still leaned on the desk, only now she had him boxed in against it, and the delicious position put her in a reckless frame of mind.
How else could she explain the sudden urge to step into his space and pin him to the desk as she kissed him?
She didn’t do either. Yanking her hand free through an enormous burst of will that she hoped never to have to muster again, she stepped away.
The tension should have been severed instantly. But no. Her skin prickled with a strange, shivery sort of heat that made her restless. She could not stop her muscles from flexing. Rationally she recognized it as a fight-or-flight adrenaline response pumping through her body, but that didn’t make the experience any easier.
Nor did she believe for a moment that, if Val closed that distance, fighting him would be her first instinct.
“If we’re going shopping, we should leave,” she told him hoarsely and cleared her throat. “The faster we get that done, the faster we can move on.”
“I’ll drive,” he offered, and it was so not fair that he had the capacity to sound normal when her insides were a quivering mess. Over a touch of their hands that lasted less than a half a second, no less.
She had to pretend everything was kosher. “Whatever. That’s fine.”
It turned out that being wedged into Val’s SUV gave her none of the reprieve she’d been hoping for. The vehicle was roomy enough, but he drove with his elbow on the center console and, when he turned corners, his arm drifted over into her space. She spent the entire drive trying to make herself smaller so he didn’t accidentally graze her, which was enough of an indicator that she should have been adamant about not going on this shopping trip.
The exclusive shopping center he’d selected near Grant Park had the right qualifications for the type of look she’d envisioned for him. They walked into the suit shop, which had maybe five of its wares on display, and her brain had just enough functional cells left to figure out that he’d brought her to a place that custom-made suits, as opposed to selling ready-to-wear. Of course, that was what a man built like Val needed. He was tall, with a wiry frame that matched his brother’s pretty well, and that was literally the last thing she needed to focus on at this inopportune moment.
The sales clerk or tailor or whatever title people held in a place she had no business being in rushed over to start working his magic on Val. Sabrina hung back, seriously thinking about slinking to the car. What value would she have at this point, anyway? Her job was to ensure he crossed the finish line, which was way off in the distance.
That’s when Val motioned her forward to introduce her to the clerk. “This is my companion. She’s going to make sure I’m dressed appropriately.”
So that was it then. She’d been dragged into the entire process, bless him. “I thought I was just here to pay.”
A giggle almost burst free of its own free will. How was that for a nice reversal? The clerk probably thought he was the gold digger and she’d brought him here to get him clothed for her world. In that scenario, he’d definitely be trading sexual favors for the privilege.
“You’re also here for moral support,” he told her, and the clerk whisked him away to a fitting area to take his measurements, which no one seemed to expect her to participate in, thank God.
She took the reprieve and sank into one of the plush couches near the bay windows, phone in hand so she could read the slew of emails that had stormed her inbox in the hour since she’d last checked it. The joys of being a team of one. There was no assistant to take care of the minutiae, which normally she enjoyed since it meant she was the only person accountable for ensuring her success.

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