Ballet Shoes and Engine Grease (5 page)

“
Very sensible,” Crimson replied, and
wondered what would happen to the morale when the employees
discovered that their new leader was a ballet dancer who knew
nothing about business and couldn’t even drive a car.

Peter Tomlinson gestured deeper into the
building.
“This way,
Miss Mills. I thought you might like a tour first. Afterward, I’ll
introduce you to Anna Symonds, your assistant. I’ll just tell her
that you’re a visitor using the CEO’s office.”

“
Please. It’s Crimson.”

“
Thanks. I’m Peter. We’re all on first
names here.”

She followed
him up the open tread staircase, then along a
corridor with glass walls that gave a view into offices on either
side. She saw a dozen people busy at computer screens, or talking
on the telephone, or studying documents. Most were casually
dressed, some in jeans, some in glamorous high fashion, one or two
in faded green overalls.

“
Constantine Motors has one hundred and
forty-seven employees...we produce around two hundred and fifty
cars a year...computer assisted design...fuel injection...titanium
alloy...” Peter Tomlinson’s words made no more sense to her than a
foreign language might have done.

By the time they finished
their tour of the manufacturing
plant, where she had seen cars at every stage of assembly—bare
frames, engines fitted, doors missing, wheels removed, seats
waiting to be installed, her brain was overflowing.

“
We have fourteen office staff in total,
excluding design and production, who sit in the factory,” Peter
went on as they returned to the glass building. “We have three
meeting rooms, and a boardroom that seats twenty, although we
currently only have seven board members.”

Proudly,
he flung the door open. Crimson’s gaze fell on the
long table, an endless expanse of green marble. Nick Constantine’s
words rattled through her mind.
There is nothing you can do to tempt me to
help you. I don’t care if you dance bare ass naked on the boardroom
table
.

It had become painfully clear
tha
t she knew nothing
about cars or business. Unless she had help, she could never in a
thousand lifetimes hope to achieve what was expected of her.
Tomorrow was Thursday. Her one day to prepare for the staff
meeting. Instead of using the time to study the accounts, she’d
make one more attempt to persuade Nick Constantine to help her. She
had no idea how to win him over, but she would start by trying to
appeal to his sense of humor.

****

Nick steered his Consta
ntine Panther through Longwood Main
Street, past the filling station and the parade of shops. It
surprised him how little the place had changed over the years. The
butcher’s shop still sported a life sized plastic pig above the
entrance, and a display of produce stood outside the fruit and
vegetable store, even on a day when drizzling rain soaked the
landscape and Nick had been forced to raise the top on the
car.

H
e left the town behind and parked outside Constantine
Motors. His last visit had been seventeen years ago, when he was
fifteen. He’d kept up with the news, though, had seen pictures of
the new offices, two stories of glass and steel, and studied the
blueprints for the factory expansion five years ago.

All his life, he
had believed that despite everything his father
loved him. That one day he’d have a chance to step in and prove the
old man his worth. Be a chip off the old block, the apple that
didn’t fall far from the tree.

But he’d been wrong.

In six months,
all this would all belong to David Ballard, his
worst enemy…unless he agreed to help Crimson Mills, and they pulled
off the feat of keeping the annual profit steady in the middle of a
recession. Then Constantine Motors would belong to a stripper, and
to his father’s two surviving spouses, Wife Number One and Wife
Number Three.

What a bloody joke.

The
security guard hurried to meet him at the door. “Nick. Good
to see you.” A squat, dark haired man in his fifties, he was
wearing a uniform in forest green and gold, the colors of
Constantine Racing, a division of the company that had been defunct
since the fifties.

“
Raymond.” Nick took the gnarled hand and
gave it a firm shake. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you
again. And I hear there are a couple of old timers left on the
factory floor.”

“
Matt Santini and Vinnie Holm. They know
you’re coming. If you have time, you might like to drop by the
cafeteria at the end of the day.”

“
Sure.”

“
It’s a damn shame about your racing
career. Boys used to get together at the Tortoise and Hare, listen
to the commentary on the radio. We expected you’d be picked up by a
Formula One team, and then we’d get to watch you on TV.”

“
Those days are long gone.” With a lazy
wave, Nick set off, through the lobby and up the open staircase.
Crimson Mills had left him a message, telling him that he was
welcome to collect any personal mementoes from the offices, such as
the portraits of his father and grandfather and great-grandfather,
but he needed to come and pick up the items in person at three
o’clock today.

Eager
to retain even a tiny portion of the family heritage, he’d
driven out to collect the paintings, and anything else he might
get. But, Nick admitted to himself, part of his reason for taking
the trip out was curiosity. He wanted to see how Crimson Mills was
settling into her new role as the head of Constantine
Motors.

He
spoke to a pretty, dark haired secretary called Anna and
got directions to the boardroom where Crimson was waiting for him.
He knocked on the solid wood door. No reply. He tried the handle.
Unlocked. He went inside. The blackout blinds were lowered. As the
door pulled shut on its own weight, he fumbled for the light
switch.

Something mus
t be wrong with the electrics, because only a
faint glow came on, twin beams that collided over the huge
marble-topped conference table. Music started playing and drifted
around the room, something classical. Perhaps Mozart. He was no
connoisseur.

A white shadow flickered in the
beams
of light that
pierced the darkness. What the hell? He could hardly believe his
eyes. On the table sat a woman, knees drawn up to her chest, arms
curled around her legs, head bent. She was dressed in something
that looked like a pale silk slip. A waterfall of silvery hair
flowed down her shoulders. Then she uncoiled, rising to her toes in
what seemed a single unbroken motion.

And she began to dance.

He knew nothing about ballet, but what she
did stole his breath. She seemed to float on air. Bending from side
to side, feet flashing in tiny steps, she made her way along the
length of the table. At the end she reversed direction, picked up
her pace and leaped up in the air, legs kicking perfectly
horizontal, one pointing forward, the other back. Small thuds of
her slippers accompanied each movement—pirouettes, leaps, spins.
Flying, defying gravity, on and on she danced, her body agile and
graceful, and all the while she restricted her movements to the
confines of the long boardroom table.

Finally, the music faded. She
san
k to the tabletop in
a wilting pose. The ceiling lights came on, bathing the room in a
bright glow. The dancer stirred, unfolded into to a sitting
position over the edge of the table, her legs dangling down,
kicking lazily in the air.

“
So,” she said. “Not quite bare ass naked,
but close. Will that do?”

Still in a daze, he stared at her.
“I thought you were a
stripper.”

He wasn’t trying
to shock her, or insult her. The words just
slipped out of his mouth. To his surprise, instead of acting
offended, she gave him a mischievous grin. “Nope,” she told him. “I
auditioned once, as a teenager, when I was desperately broke. Not
enough on top, I was told.” She made a bouncing gesture with both
hands in front of her chest.

Yesterday, w
hen she’d burst uninvited into his condo, he
hadn’t looked at her closely enough to form a proper idea of what
she looked like. Not after those first few heady seconds, when his
drink-addled brain had screamed at him
you bloody fool, look what you turned
down
.

Now he
took the opportunity to study her, from the top of her
head, to the tips of her ballet slippers. She made him think of
titanium. Slender, but with every indication of strength.
Ballerinas were like that, he supposed. A contradiction. Fragile
steel. Her face fitted the image, too. Delicate features. Hair so
blond it was almost white, and a complexion so fine he could see
the trace of blue veins beneath. Level brows, almost as pale as the
hair. The eyes were a surprise. Deep, rich brown, with a sweep of
dark lashes.

“
Do you know anything about ballet?” she
asked.

“
No.”

“
That was Ophelia.”

“
I thought you were a dying
mermaid.”

“
Very good.”

He gave a little me
aningless smirk. The anger he’d managed to
keep at bay while he drove over from his condo on Manhattan began
to stir again. He knew what she was up to. She’d lured him over in
an attempt to make him change his mind. There was a promise, a
temptation in her dance, and in the scanty costume that draped
along the slender curves of her body, adding to the allure of her
frail beauty. He knew exactly what she was offering him.

“
No sale,” he told her quietly.

She shot him a glance. “I don’t know what
you’re talking about.”

“
I’m sure you do.”

A blush crept up her skin,
rising all the way from her
chest to her hairline. “Hear me out,” she said, and the soft brown
eyes captured his. “I don’t know why Uncle Stephan—”

“
Uncle
Stephan?” he drawled, one brow inching up
mockingly.

“
You father insisted on it,” she explained.
“Calling him Dad would have been absurd, and he thought that if I
just called him Stephan, strangers might get the wrong idea of our
relationship. Uncle Stephan was a compromise, indicating a family
connection.”

Nick
gave a silent nod. He really must be a scumbag, for he was
enjoying her discomfort. Seeing her sitting there, on the edge of
the table, dressed in her flimsy slip, getting ready to beg for his
help, gave him a sense of power that stirred the darkest corners of
his mind.

“
I’m offering you a deal,” she told him,
her manner earnest. “If you help me, and we pull it off, I’ll give
you half of my shares. Thirty percent. Once the year is over, you
can run the business. I won’t interfere, except for cashing my
dividend checks.”

He considered
it a moment. “Forty percent,” he said in the
end.

“
What?” She frowned at him. “That’s getting
greedy.”

“
If you have thirty, and your mother has
twenty, and I have thirty, and my mother has twenty, you’ll have
two families with fifty percent each. That will mean a tied vote
every time we disagree. Someone has to have a clear
majority.”

“
All right.” She made a sour pout. “Forty
percent it is, then.”

Nick
tried to shut his mind to the temptation, but his thoughts
were already turning over ideas for how to make the business
thrive. Short term fixes, to start with. He could do it. But would
his pride allow him to step in? Could he tolerate being manipulated
by a dead man? His gaze drew back to her, the weapon in his
father’s crazy scheme of destruction.

He knew it made no sense, but past hurts
welled up inside him. He’d been cast aside when Wife Number Two
trotted out her cute little boy. He’d been a moody teenager then,
enmeshed in his own troubles. And now history was repeating itself.
Miss Ballerina takes centre stage, and the biological son can go to
hell.

A b
lind burst of anger seized him, and his bitterness found a
handy target in her. He wanted to humiliate her. He knew that she
remained ignorant of the marriage clause in the will. For a moment,
he considered spelling it out to her, haughtily informing her that
could own everything, provided he sank low enough to marry her, but
something kept the words unsaid. Perhaps he feared that she might
persuade him to change his mind and agree to a hasty marriage after
all, and then his father would have won, even from the
grave.

“
I need more than that,” he told
her.

She stared up at him, a notch between her
pale brows. “Fifty percent?”

“
No. Something that compensates me if we
fail, and it’s zero percent all around.”

“
What else can I offer you?”

Nick
let his eyes drift over her in a bold, suggestive
assessment. Hot color washed up to her face, for once making her
worthy of her name. Crimson.

“
No,” she breathed. “
No-oh
.”