An Executive Decision (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-one

Back at the hotel, Dee dropped her computer in the suite and then went down to the lounge, where she was to meet Ellis. Still reeling from her meeting with Marston, she settled in at the bar for a much-needed glass of wine. A small band played a Latin set designed to pick up drooping after-work spirits, and she definitely needed all the help she could get. She knew Tally Barnes was a troublemaker, but she never dreamed the woman would be so devious. The problem was; Dee didn’t know what to do about it. She couldn’t bring this information to Marston. He’d only think she was doing exactly what Tally had done, stepping on other people’s backs to get what she wanted. No doubt Tally knew that.

She’d have to tell Ellis about the situation. Certainly, she didn’t want him hearing it from Marston. It bothered her less that Tally was getting credit for her work than it did that Marston was accusing her of stealing that credit. Her faced burned with shame just thinking about it. She was contemplating the crap day she’d had and how best to prove her innocence when someone elbowed in next to her at the bar.

‘Dee? Dee Henning?’

With a start, she found herself looking at a man who could have almost, but not quite, passed as Ellis’s twin.

‘I’ve heard so much about you. I’ve been dying to meet you in person.’ He offered her a slight bow, which caused his dark hair to fall rakishly over one eye. ‘Forgive my interruption, but I’m Garrett, Garrett Thorne.’

‘You’re Ellis’s brother?’

‘In the flesh.’ He bent over her hand and laid a warm kiss across her knuckles, all the while holding her in a quicksilver gaze. ‘Rumour has it you’re rapidly becoming indispensable.’ Before she could do more than gape, he continued. ‘Are you all right? You look like you could use some cheering up.’

Dee forced a smile. ‘It’s not really been a stellar day.’

He patted her hand sympathetically. ‘Well, there you go, then. Just consider me a fast-acting happy pill you don’t have to swallow.’

‘Fast-acting and extra strength, I hope.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. Unlike Ellis, Garrett needed a haircut, yet he had that look about him that Dee knew other men would imitate, and women would pant after. Never having being much of a panter herself, she was unimpressed. But, when he smiled, the lines of his face echoed those of his brother, and that softened her considerably toward him.

Garrett ordered a glass of wine for himself and another for her, then leaned closer. ‘So tell me, do you really enjoy working with that twit? I hear you’re as much of a workaholic as he is.’

She looked into eyes that seemed to be searching for the punchline to the universal joke that was existence. ‘He said that?’

‘Who knows, maybe it’s like math.’ Garrett shrugged. ‘Two workaholics cancel each other out and become carefree and fun-loving.’

‘It’s a plausible theory, I suppose.’

The bartender brought their drinks, and Garrett studied her unabashedly over the top of his glass. ‘I know my brother well enough to be certain he’d never hire anyone who wasn’t the best, so I can only say he got an incredible bonus when he hired someone who’s also witty and beautiful.’ He heaved a sigh, then dazzled her with a thousand-watt smile. ‘The providence of the universe is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?’

Her own smile felt a bit forced. ‘I’m curious, Garrett, how did you know I was Dee Henning and not some other witty, beautiful woman who just dropped in for a drink after work?’

‘I’m psychic.’

‘Of course you are. And does the Thorne charm run in the family?’

‘Only the younger son. It skipped Ellis completely.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yep. Genetic defect, I’m afraid. Sad, really.’

‘Yes, very sad.’

‘Good evening, Dee. I see you’ve already met my little brother.’ Ellis slipped between them, took her hand, and pulled her up from the stool. Then he turned his attention to his brother. ‘You’ve monopolised the poor woman long enough, Garrett. Make yourself useful. Order us a bottle of wine or something.’

Before Dee realised what was happening, she was on the dance floor with Ellis. Her pulse went into overdrive, and nerves jangled down through her chest and into the pit of her stomach. This was her boss, this was the man who, only last night … Her knees suddenly felt like water, and there were little tingles down low in her abdomen. ‘I don’t dance, Ellis. Really, I don’t.’

‘I’m surprised Garrett didn’t already have you on the dance floor. Normally I wouldn’t trust him with any respectable woman, but the man’s in love at the moment – a ballerina – so he’s fairly harmless, if a bit annoying. Besides, you’re doing fine.’

‘No, really. I had a single dance lesson back when I was in college. There weren’t enough guys, so I had to learn the men’s part.’

He offered her a wicked smile. ‘Oh? Would you like to lead?’

She shook her head stiffly. ‘I kept stepping on my partner’s toes.’

‘I’m not worried about my toes, Dee.’

‘You’re a brave man.’

Ellis pulled her closer. His voice was a pleasant vibration as he deliberately brushed his lips against her earlobe. ‘Just relax and let me worry about the rest. It’ll be OK. I promise.’ His breath made gooseflesh along the nape of her neck and down over the tops of her breasts beneath the linen suit.

‘What if your brother’s watching? What will he think?’ she whispered, making a futile attempt to pull away.

‘He’s not watching. His ballerina just arrived. Trust me, my brother’s full attention is now on her.’ He offered her a wicked chuckle. ‘You could fuck me right here on the dance floor and he wouldn’t even notice. Not a bad idea, really.’

‘He might not notice, but other people would.’ Again she tried to put a little more respectable distance between them, but he was unyielding.

‘Just relax, Dee. It’ll be all right.’ And, really, how could she do otherwise. How could she doubt him? She was with Ellison Thorne, and his full attention was on her, and it was way too easy to forget that she worked for him, that he was her boss. Ellis moved with the same grace with which he did everything else, and Dee let the experience settled around her like a gossamer fog seeping into muscle and marrow as she gave herself to the ebb and flow of his lead.

‘You see. It’s not so hard.’ He pulled her still closer. The music stopped, and another tune started. They kept dancing. ‘It’s good to get out once in a while, and do something that doesn’t involve Pneuma Inc. You’ve been under a tremendous amount of pressure these past few weeks, Dee. I’m sorry for that, but I’m afraid there’s not much to be done about it.’

The gossamer fog dissipated with the mention of work, and a cold knot tightened in her stomach as she recalled the disaster at Scribal. ‘I didn’t expect it to be any other way, Ellis. It’s just that with Scribal … Well, Marston seems to think that I –’

‘I don’t care what Marston thinks, at least not tonight.’

She pulled away enough to look into his eyes. ‘But, Ellis, I –’

‘Don’t worry about Marston. He may be a lot of things but he’s not stupid. He’ll come around.’

‘It’s just that he thinks I –’

It came as a complete shock when, right there in front of everyone, he stopped her words with a brush of his mouth, lips parted just enough for her to taste his breath and sense a feather flick of his tongue. But it was enough to shut down the speech centre of her brain and speed her pulse rate to a drum-roll.

‘Dee, I don’t want to talk business. I want to dance. There’ll be plenty of time for business tomorrow.’

Three songs later, Garrett joined them on the dance floor with a willowy brunette, who Dee later learned was his ballerina, Amy.

It was one of those evenings when it was more of an effort to go out than it was to stay put, so the four danced, shared wine and dinner, and never left the comfort of the hotel. It was nearly midnight when Garrett and Amy left for her place, and Dee and Ellis took the elevator to the 19th floor.

In the suite, Ellis switched on the lamp next to the sofa. Dee kicked off her shoes and threw her jacket across the back of a chair. ‘I suppose it’ll make for a long day tomorrow, but it was fun tonight.’ She wriggled her toes in the thick carpet and stretched, aware he was watching her, surprised by how much she liked it when he did.

‘We both needed a break,’ he said. ‘You definitely deserved the chance to get your mind off Marston for a while.’

And it had worked. She’d actually been able to forget about Marston’s accusations for a few hours. But the problem wasn’t going away. The press of the small pool of light in which they stood suddenly felt claustrophobic. She forced her voice around the tension in her throat. ‘Ellis, we need to talk about Marston. He’s got this idea that I –’

‘Not tonight, Dee.’ He took her hand and pulled her to him. ‘You’re already grossly negligent of your need for rest, something you’ve been reprimanded for more than once, and something that, shame-facedly, I’ve enabled the last two nights.’ With his free hand, he switched off the lamp, and the room dissolved back into the monochrome hues of night. Then he lifted her into his arms, causing her to gasp and throw her arms around his neck as he carried her to his room.

The bed was turned down, and he deposited her gently onto the crisp white sheets. ‘We’ve done this before, Dee, though you probably don’t remember much of it.’ Both hands went to work carefully, deliberately unbuttoning her blouse. Then he lifted her to him just enough to ease the blouse off over her shoulders, unhook her bra, and toss both onto the chair by the bed. ‘After all, you were unconscious with exhaustion.’ He eased her back onto the pillow and settled a kiss onto her sternum, between her breasts. ‘I’ve always been the good Thorne brother, but seeing you there in your bed, so vulnerable, helping you out of your jacket and your shoes while you slept and dreamed secret things I couldn’t see, made me rethink my strategy.’ He cupped each of her breasts in turn, tracing a finger around the tight puckering of her areolas, running a thumb over pearled nipples, causing her to arch up into his touch. Then he lowered a kiss onto each nipple, pursing his lips enough for her to feel the pressure of his nursing before he crushed their straining peaks with the hard lavings of his tongue, making her whimper.

He unzipped her skirt and she lifted her bottom so he could slip it off, hooking his thumbs in her panties and dragging them down too, so that she lay exposed, with only the stockings sheathing her legs, held in place by a pale blue garter belt. ‘I wanted to share your bed so badly that night.’ With careful deliberateness, he undid the garter belt from her stockings and rolled them down one at a time, lifting each leg in turn so that she was open, so that she was vulnerable and tender, so that, if he chose to, he could see the rise and fall of her, every plane, every fold, every moist crevice of her inner landscape. ‘I wanted to be inside you, not just your body, but inside your dreams too.’ He sighed, kissing the curve of her ankle. ‘Though I can’t imagine your dreams of me would have been very pleasant ones after what I’d put you through that day.’

‘Ellis, I –’

He bit the inside of her thigh just above her knee and she gasped and squirmed down into the soft bedding. ‘Shhh!’ She felt the hiss of his breath against her splayed sex, and she moaned. ‘Don’t talk, Dee. This is on my calendar. Remember, the calendar with all the important meetings I never forget? This is what I want you to feel before you fall asleep.’ He rose and unhooked the garter belt from behind her waist and tossed it aside, and when she reached to unbutton his shirt, he slapped her hands away. ‘Tonight I want your dreams of me to be good ones.’

‘Ellis,’ she protested, ‘don’t you want to …? Shouldn’t you let me –’

He stopped her words with a kiss. ‘Shh! Dee, don’t talk. Just feel.’ He kissed his way down over her belly, lingering to nibble and lap at her navel while his fingers stroked and caressed her pubic curls. Then he scooted down, lifted her butt into his palms, and spread her swollen landscape with his thumbs, making her feel as though he really could look right up inside her, as though he really might be able to see her dreams, her hopes, her fears. But before she unnerved herself with thoughts of her vulnerability, his mouth filled the void, warm and humid, way stronger than she would have thought lips and tongue could be, supple and dextrous, intuitive and relentless. He probed and laved and nibbled until he found the secret places, the tight, wet, tender places that were swollen and waiting to burst like soft fruit beneath the press of his lips and the nip of his teeth. And she came, kicking and writhing and clawing to get him closer to her.

She mumbled something about wanting to satisfy him, but she was asleep by the time he pulled the comforter up. Later – it could have been hours, it could have been minutes – he slid under the covers next to her and pulled her against him. She remembered he was naked. She remembered he was hard, but when she reached for him in some strange state somewhere between dreaming and waking, he pushed her hand away. ‘When you’re rested, Dee, then you can take care of me.’ He kissed her ear. ‘And then I plan to be very, very demanding.’ 

Chapter Twenty-two

‘You’ve been a very sneaky girl, Tally Barnes.’

Tally jumped and slopped her Moët and Chandon onto the bar as Terrance Jamison slid onto the stool next to her. ‘Mr Jamison, I wasn’t expecting you.’ She dabbed at the spill with a cocktail napkin.

He ordered his usual Glenfiddich from the bartender, then turned his attention back to her. He gave her a once-over that was disconcerting but not sexual, maybe more disconcerting because it wasn’t sexual. ‘New suit?’

She straightened her jacket and opened her arms so he could see. ‘Christian Dior. Do you like it?’

‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘And it goes really well with the necklace. Is that new too?’

‘It is, yes. They were just too perfect together for me not to have both.’

He scooted closer, too close for comfort. He hooked a well-manicured finger beneath the braid of gold chain around her neck and pulled her so close that she would have thought he might kiss her, except the curl of his lips had nothing to do with passion, and his eyes were cold, icy cold. ‘You have exquisite taste, Tally. Expensive, but exquisite.’

He held her there, heart hammering, cheeks burning as he lowered his eyes and examined the chain. Then the bartender brought his drink, and he released her. For a long moment he said nothing, only swirled the whiskey absently around his glass without tasting it, studying her as if she were something he had never seen before. Then he heaved a sigh and sat the glass down untouched. ‘As I said, you’re a sneaky girl, Tally Barnes.’

‘How am I sneaky?’ she asked when she could manage to find her voice and make sure it wasn’t trembling.

‘I talked to Alan Marston yesterday, teleconference. Made him a counter-offer to the Pneuma Trouvères offer. Seems for some reason, he’s refusing to meet with Dee Henning.’

‘Oh?’

He lifted his drink again and looked down into the whirlpool he created. ‘He doesn’t like the woman. He thinks she’s a bumbling idiot with a penchant for stepping on other people’s backs to get what she wants. ’

‘Well, Alan’s a good judge of character.’

He turned on her so quickly that she nearly fell off the stool, but he hooked his finger in the gold chain again and held her in his poisonous gaze. ‘I know Dee Henning. I don’t like the bitch. But that’s personal and, I assure you, it doesn’t cloud my mind to the fact that she is neither bumbling nor an idiot, and she’s way too bright to need to step on anyone to get where she wants to go.’ He tugged the chain until it bit into the back of Tally’s neck, until her forehead was almost pressed to his. ‘So I can only assume his opinion is coloured by his interaction with you.’ He twisted his finger in the chain until it tightened around her neck just enough to feel threatening. ‘What did you do, Tally?’

‘I only sent him a letter,’ she breathed. ‘It was nothing, really.’ She tried to shake her head but thought better of it as the chain bit into her nape. ‘It’s just that I’ve done so much work on the project, work I’m not getting credit for. I just mentioned how I wished I could be on the team to be presenting our project, Pneuma’s project, to him. I only thought it would help,’ she said, her voice little more than a scratch at the back of her throat.

‘And tell me, Tally, just what do you know about the Pneuma Trouvères project? I assume you’ve been in on it from the beginning? Hmmm? I sincerely wish you’d told me that up front. Why, you wouldn’t have had to bother with copying Dee Henning’s presentation, would you? You could have explained it to me personally.’ He twisted the chain once more, and it bit into her throat. ‘Well?’

She fought back panic, wishing like hell she hadn’t been too drunk to study Dee’s presentation when she’d gotten home the other night. In fact, she had only barely looked at it, just enough to find a few key words to draft her letter to Marston. She meant to read it. She really did. In fact, she was planning to read it this evening.

The look in Jamison’s eyes was cold and unreadable. What was most frightening was that he didn’t really seem upset sitting there at a bar in public, choking a woman with her own necklace. For all the emotional cues he gave, they could have been talking about the weather. Then, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he released the necklace and smoothed it gently against her collarbone. ‘Tally, Tally, Tally, you’re thinking small. Dee Henning’s in the inner circle now, and she’s bright and good-looking and everyone loves her. Don’t you understand that Marston will only believe you until he talks to Thorne or Crittenden or even Dee’s secretary? What do you hope to gain but to make yourself look bad, to possibly lose your job?’

With a shaky hand, she downed the champagne she now really needed. The other hand rested protectively at her throat. ‘Do you really think that bitch will talk to Marston?’

He grunted a laugh that left little doubt as to his thought of her idea. ‘Dee isn’t your problem, Tally, don’t you get it? Dee is way too ethical to play the tattle-tale, so you’d better hope that things blow over with Marston.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said, watching him order her another glass of champagne.

‘It’s simple, really.’ He returned to swirling his glass. ‘Dee is as good as people say she is, Tally. Maybe better.’

‘But you said –’

He raised a hand to stop her protest. ‘What I said is that she lacked experience. Technically, I could see the logic behind hiring you to the position as a safe option. But hiring Dee Henning was typical of Neumann and Thorne. They hired her because the woman has potential off the scale.’ He sounded like he admired the bitch!

He continued. ‘If you want Beverly’s job, proving Dee Henning’s incompetence isn’t going to happen. Keep pulling stunts like this and eventually you’ll get caught, and Thorne will fire you without batting an eye. You can’t do this alone. You have to let me help. I have the power.’ He stroked the necklace against her collar bone with cool fingers. ‘And the money to make things happen, to make sure we both get what we want, and that can only happen if we work together against Thorne. Trust me, Tally; I’ve locked horns with the man before. I know his weaknesses, I know how to get to him, and thanks to you and the projections you got for me, I’ve made Marston a counter-offer that will cost Pneuma Inc. one of their biggest, most loyal customers. I couldn’t have done it without you, Ms Barnes. Believe me, I’m very aware of that fact, and very grateful for all of your hard work.’ He lifted his glass in a toast, and she released a tight breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.

‘What about Marston? What about the letter?’

‘Don’t worry, Tally. It’ll all blow over. At this point it doesn’t matter anyway. Marston would be a fool not to take my offer. And Marston is no fool. So you taking credit for a deal that isn’t going to happen is a moot point. But in the future,’ he said, smoothing the collar of her jacket and running a hand over the expensive fabric, ‘I would suggest you keep your head low, and your eyes open, and don’t act without discussing it with me first. Are we clear?’

‘Very,’ she said.

‘Good.’ He looked down at his watch. ‘Now I have to go. I have a meeting across Portland in an hour.’ He leaned forward and brushed cool lips against her cheek. ‘Oh, one more thing, Tally. If you check your account this evening, you’ll find a little something, a token of my appreciation for all you’ve done, and all I hope you will do in the future. And don’t worry. You’ll get Beverly Neumann’s office soon enough. Just trust me, and do as I say.’ He left without touching his drink.