Betrayed (3 page)

“Thank you,” Byron said, dismissing the man. “We’re finished here.”

And McKenzie was left alone with the enemy.

“I appreciate it that you came to us for your needs,” McKenzie said, and she held out a hand.

“You know why I came to you, McKenzie.” His tone had changed, and his eyes were burning into hers.

“Because I’m the best at my job.”

She refused to play any games with this man. She considered herself worldly and experienced, but he made her feel like… Like what? Like a kitten? A little kitten with claws she didn’t know how to use yet.

“Yes, and because I have unfinished business with you,” Byron said.

“What unfinished business are you talking about?”

He stepped up close to her, his lips a firm line. He didn’t touch her, but he didn’t need to. This man commanded a room no matter where he was or who he was with — just as he was commanding her feet to stay firmly planted right there where they were.

She didn’t like it one little bit.

“You messed with my family,” he said. “Now it’s my turn to figure you out and find out if you have an ulterior motive for screwing with Blake.”

McKenzie gasped, too stunned for several moments to say a word. When she was finally able to speak, the words came out barely above a whisper. “Is this job fake?” She was finally able to take a step back.

“Not at all. If you please me in your work, I’ll back off. But I want to know what makes you tick. I don’t believe in lying and I’m not the easiest person to work for. So, if you can’t take the heat…” He left the sentence unfinished. He moved a step closer to match every step she took back until she found herself against the windows.

“Why should I take this job? From what you’ve said, it’s a losing battle, at least for me.” She sounded angry, but she was angriest at the slightly breathless quality in her tone.

“If you’re who I think you are, then, yes, you’ll lose.”

At least he was straightforward. But so was she.

“Then I shouldn’t take the job,” she said.

“The choice is yours.”

She firmed her shoulders. “I don’t play games, Byron,” she told him. Managing to step around him and free herself from his gaze, she looked out at the picturesque view over the bay.

“Neither do I,” he said. His hand came up to her shoulder and he turned her around to face him again.

Her heart was in her throat. She had no doubt that she should walk away, but the pay was great, and the reality was that she had nothing to hide, so there was no way for this man to hurt her. So, he would be the one losing this battle here, not her. If she backed down now, he would think she was up to something. Why was it that when a person looked at you as if you were guilty, it made you shift on your feet, even when you hadn’t committed the crime? She’d probably never have the answer to that.

Looking him in the eye, her back straight, she made her decision.

“Then we have an understanding.” Her voice was firm.

“I guess we do. Let’s seal the deal.”

McKenzie knew exactly how he planned on sealing the deal, and she was damned if she was going to let that happen. Stepping sideways, she managed to get away from his grasp, and after putting an appropriate distance between them, she stuck out her hand.

Byron smiled, though that smile certainly didn’t show up in his eyes, and finally he reached out and took her fingers. But instead of offering a handshake like a normal person did, he held tightly to them and then he was raising her hand to his lips and placing a kiss on her palm.

“I look forward to Monday,” he said, still holding her hand close to his mouth.

“You can release me now,” she said, her face blank, though she refused to break eye contact.

“Are you sure you want me to?”

“You’re an arrogant bastard, aren’t you?” she asked sweetly, her lips turning up in a mocking smile.

His eyes widened just the slightest at her remark, and then a true smile flitted to his glorious lips, shocking her more than anything else he’d done. “That I am, Ms. Beaumont; that I am,” he said.

He released her at last, and she fled the restaurant before he could say or do anything else. When she felt she was far enough away to breathe, she stopped and leaned against a wall.

What in the world had she just gotten herself into?

Chapter Four

H
ad she ruined
the tile in her accounting firm’s foyer? McKenzie had definitely given it a beating when she walked inside. She blew past her secretary and was thinking about slamming her door shut. It took all her legendary self-control to keep from doing so. Still, she got a measure of satisfaction as she took out her foul mood on her purse by tossing it into one of the empty chairs with a little extra vigor.

She stormed around her desk and sank into her seat. She leaned forward and closed her eyes, resting her forehead on her hands and taking a deep breath. She was out of sorts, to put it mildly, and more than a little frustrated. She knew she should have turned down the job, but it was too good to be true.

Which meant that it probably was going to come back and bite her in the ass — hard!

“Meeting went well, I see.”

McKenzie growled before she looked up and tried to give a semblance of a smile to Zach as he perched on her desk. The guy had never even heard of knocking.

“I do have chairs, you know,” she told him, but it was something she had said many times before. He didn’t seem to like chairs, and that was just one of his many endearing quirks. “And how’s this for another hint, Zach? I don’t want to talk about the meeting.”

“You know, darling, that we’re going to banter back and forth for several minutes while you pretend you don’t need anyone, including me, and then you’ll finally cave in and tell me all about it. So why don’t we just skip the routine? It won’t kill you to come right to the point. Inquiring minds want to know.”

She growled again. She knew he was right, but knowing he was right didn’t make her want to share anything with him. But if she didn’t get this off her chest, she might just go out of her mind.

She reasoned with herself that he
was
her business partner and therefore had a right to the information. It wasn’t as if she were acting weak by telling him what was happening. Plus, she didn’t have to fill him in on the sexual-tension part of the story. Everyone in the business world knew that the Knight brothers had a reputation for being a pain in the ass to work with. Those men thought they were gods.

“Come on, McKenzie, how did the meeting go? Who was it? Please tell me that we are going to bring in more riches than we could ever possibly spend in our lifetime.”

“It was a horrible meeting,” she grumbled.

“Well, we’ve had failed meetings before. Just because we didn’t get this one client doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. My meeting went well, even though it was just a mom-and-pop place. We will make this work.”

Zach was ever the optimist.

“We did get the job.” Why she was fighting a panic attack she didn’t know. Byron was a dirtbag — a true kick-you-when-you-are-down sort of man — but he wasn’t going to force her into doing anything she didn’t want to do. Maybe that was the problem. She was worried that she would want to do lots of things with him. Things she most certainly would regret.

“All right, sugar britches. I’d never even try to decipher the female mind, but I have to ask you this: Why aren’t you a lot happier about obtaining another client? Until now, I thought it was just small-potatoes stuff that you considered a waste of our time.”

“He has demanded that I work there personally,” she groused, finally making eye contact with Zach.

His jaw dropped and he was for once silent, if only for a moment. “How in the world will this place run if you’re working at a job site?” he asked her. A bit of worry had crept into his usually bright eyes.

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m frustrated,” she said, her voice rising and her hands lifting into the air. She’d barely fought back the urge to yell.

“Um…do we need this client that badly? Who in the heck is it?” Zach asked, rapidly regaining his composure.

Good for him.

“Knight Construction.” She didn’t need to add more. The name was powerful in itself.

Her partner was quiet as he thought over the different options. She could practically see the wheels turning. If one of the Knight brothers wanted McKenzie to work there in person, that’s exactly what would happen. You just didn’t turn down clients like them.

And she and Zach both knew it.

“We do have very good employees, McKenzie. Did you point that out to him?”

“
Of course
I pointed it out to him, dammit.”

“I just had to ask,” Zach said in self-defense.

She had to tell him something or he was going to be spinning for a while. This wasn’t their typical situation. “I…uh…kind of have some personal business with him from a previous job. I guess he figures he’s killing two birds with one stone.” Was she giving anything away in her voice? She hoped not. She didn’t want Zach to go from point A to point Z in a matter of milliseconds with his own fantastic conclusions.

“Personal…or business?” he said slowly.

McKenzie Beaumont never shared anything personal with anyone. Okay, except for maybe little tiny snippets with Jewell, but even that was rare. Zach very much knew this, so she was a bit peeved with his pushing the personal and business words she’d hurriedly put together, but she had sort of opened up that jar.

“Does it really matter?” she said with a huff. “He thinks it’s personal. I don’t.”

“Okay, you’re going to play things close to your vest. That’s what you always do, but I think you should really think about this. Yes, we could use the boost we’d get from having a client as powerful as Knight Construction, but it could also kill us if this man has some private agenda against you. If he disses our business, we’ll be royally screwed.”

Zach was always the voice of reason, and McKenzie thought about his words for a moment before speaking. “Byron Knight is an ass of the highest order — or lowest order.”
Damn. She really didn’t want to be thinking about his ass.
“And though he’s gunning for me, I don’t think he’s unethical in business. If I do the job well, which of course I will, I seriously doubt he’ll slander us. My working there will bring us in a lot of money for the actual job, and then word of mouth will help our company immeasurably,” she said. And she tried not to think about Byron’s mouth.

“Well, then, I guess you are going to take the job,” Zach said, his smile back in place.

“And I’ll work nights on business here,” she promised him.

“I can handle things here. You already don’t sleep enough. I’ll bring in a temp employee to keep up with the crap work, and you just worry about securing us a good full-time position with Knight Construction,” he said, springing down from her desk.

“I can’t just walk away from the work here, Zach.” McKenzie felt pushed out, but that was absurd.

“You can take a break from here with daily and nightly emails and phone calls from me to assure yourself we aren’t going under. This will build our business,” he told her, looking more professional than she’d ever seen him. Gone was the carefree look that he wore so well.

“I don’t know how I would do this without you, Zach,” she said in a rare moment of open affection.

“Of course you don’t, sweetie. You wouldn’t survive a day without me,” he told her, then surprised her when he moved around her desk, knelt in front of her, and grabbed one of her hands. “Don’t let this upset you. You’re McKenzie Freaking Beaumont, badass businesswoman.”

She couldn’t help but smile at the combination of serious tone and almost flippant words. “I really do appreciate you, Zach,” she said while tugging against his hold. She didn’t do well with casual touching.

Zach knew exactly what she was thinking. He threw her a brilliant smile, and then stood up and walked from the room.

McKenzie didn’t allow herself to dwell any further on Byron Knight. She had a lot of work to do before Monday, and there was no time like the present. She would prove to herself and to Byron that she knew her stuff.

And, more importantly, she would survive the challenge Byron was throwing at her. Not only survive it, but excel at it.

Chapter Five

W
hat in the
hell are you up to now?”

“Excuse me?”

Byron had known he’d get this reaction from Blake. That’s what big brothers did. But he hadn’t been expecting the guy to come barging into his office at the crack of dawn to yell at him. He’d been hoping Blake wouldn’t notice for quite a while that McKenzie had been there working in their Seattle offices.

Because Byron had her working in the office adjoining his own, his brother had been bound to see her, but since Blake had gotten married, he’d been working more and more from home — when he wasn’t at a construction site, at any rate, or at one of the other headquarters.

Blake was a strange one, and he still loved to get his hands dirty and work up a sweat. All of the brothers did, actually, but Blake seemed to like it more than either he or Tyler did.

“You have McKenzie working here. Don’t play stupid with me, Byron.”

“Stupid?”

“Yep. You got it in one. In our last conversation, you told me that you despised the woman, and that you thought she’d screwed up my life,” Blake said, hands on his hips as he glared at Byron.

It was only Wednesday, and McKenzie had been working there for three days now. Byron’s luck at not being found out by his brothers was bound to have ended sooner or later, but he’d have been far happier if it had been a lot later.

“She opened up an accounting company,” Byron told him. “We were in need of a head accountant.”

He’d said that calmly. If only it were really that simple. Since she’d stepped into his office on Monday and the two of them had discussed his expectations of her, all he could imagine was stripping her down and throwing her across his desk. It was nothing too personal, he assured himself. It was only because he wanted to take ownership of her, mess with her in the same way she’d messed with his older brother. She would learn that a person didn’t get away with messing with any of the Knight brothers without suffering the consequences. Infatuation, or whatever the romance writers of the world wanted to call it, had nothing to do with it.

Then again, the woman was good at screwing with people’s lives. Maybe she had somehow cast some sort of spell over him. She was a…witch. That would make a lot more sense than all of these fantasies springing up of their own accord in his brain and points south.

Were the fates with him or against him? It was hard to tell. Before Blake could say, “That’s utter BS,” McKenzie stepped through the doorway, looking down at the papers in her hands, not noticing that Byron was in a deadlock with his brother.

The outfit she was wearing was appropriate to the office — she always played it that way — but he seemed to be finding something wrong with everything she was doing. His eyes were drawn to the top two buttons of her modest blouse. They were undone, and though not even a hint of her cleavage was showing, Byron was captivated, tantalized. He was hot to undo the next couple of buttons to see what she was hiding.

Subtle pink lipstick filled out her lips, making them appear more than kissable, and his pulse sped up as she moved closer. And her scent… He couldn’t figure out what it was doing to him, but his hormones were running amok.

She looked up, and then a genuine smile appeared on those lush lips. “Hi, Blake. I’ve been hoping to see you, but I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had a chance yet to seek you out.”

She walked up and gave Blake a
very
unprofessional hug, in Byron’s humble opinion. It had Byron grinding his teeth. Yes, he knew she wasn’t after his older brother, but it still got to him. Still, how did he know that for sure? His head was spinning because he really didn’t know this woman at all when it came down to it.

“Did you figure out the problem?” Byron snapped, making both Blake and McKenzie turn his way.

McKenzie’s eyes narrowed at his tone, and Blake looked as if he wanted to punch him.

“Unfortunately, I think the problem runs deeper than a numbers issue. You have someone at the Boise office who is…shall we say, skimming a bit off the top. I’ve been over this and over this, and there’s no other explanation. If I were you, I would have an internal audit done. It’s going to take quite some time to figure out exactly who, but from what I’ve been seeing, I’ve narrowed it down to three possible people. If you know your employees well, then you might be able to narrow it down further.” Her tone was professional in the extreme, and it was putting Byron on edge.

That made no sense. He wanted a professional, didn’t he? So why was it that no matter what she did, he still found himself irritated? Why did he still find himself wanting to punish her? Hell, he didn’t even know which direction was up anymore.

“I’ll look this over as soon as Blake leaves,” he said briskly, hoping his brother would take the hint and go away.

“Maybe I should help you with that,” Blake said, his expression changing as he looked between Byron and McKenzie.

Byron fumed. He in no way wanted his brother getting any ideas in his head about him and McKenzie. Hell, there was no him and McKenzie.

“Also, I thought I would have a couple of our employees come over for interviews later today or tomorrow if you’re up for it, Byron. I know you’re wary about trusting anyone else, but you’ll see that I have a more than competent staff.”

Byron’s temper escalated even further.

With Blake standing right there, though, he couldn’t refuse McKenzie’s request, which appeared to be what she already knew. She was smart. He would have to give her credit for that. A person didn’t get to where she was in life at such a young age without having some decent brains. But still, it didn’t take a lot of brains to run a whorehouse, did it? No, it just took a lot of conniving. He would do best to remember that.

“I’m very picky, as you know,” Byron said. “But go ahead and bring them in.” He thought that sounded gracious enough.

“Of course.” Her tone hadn’t changed, but the expression in her eyes told him that she wasn’t fooled — he wasn’t going to give any of the employees a chance. He wanted her, and only her, working here. And they both knew it.

“That will be all for now, McKenzie. I’ll call you in when I’m finished speaking with my brother.”

It was more than obvious that Byron’s dismissal rankled her, but she gave a slight nod of her head, turned on her heels, and walked stiffly from the office.

During those few seconds, the tension could have been cut up and deep-fried, and Byron almost smiled at knowing he was getting under her skin. She got beneath his thick hide so easily that it was more than fitting that he got to her as well. Turnabout was fair play.

“Did you forget that we own this company together?” Blake asked, clearly irked at Byron’s attempt to shut him out.

“Of course not, but I’m the one who’s over the accounting department,” Byron said, hoping that would be enough to get his brother to back the hell off.

“Since when did we ever say something like that?” Blake asked, though he didn’t look angry — he seemed more curious. That was worse.

“I’ve just been under a lot of stress,” Byron told him. “I spent too much time away from the offices and now it’s catching up to me.”

“Hmm.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Byron fumed.

“You seem awfully upset,” Blake said, and gave him an assessing look.

“I’m not some damn specimen for you to place underneath a microscope, Blake!”

“I’m not the one getting upset over nothing, Byron.”

“Don’t you have work to do?” Byron practically yelled.

Blake was quiet for several moments, and for the first time he could remember, Byron felt like squirming in his seat. What was wrong with him? But Blake’s next words absolutely infuriated him.

“So, I’ll ask you this question again; Why is McKenzie working here?”

“I already told you that we needed to have the position filled.”

“She runs her accounting company. She doesn’t fill in personally,” Blake pointed out.

“Well, the job called for her and only her,” Byron said. He was getting sick of defending himself.

“You’re playing with fire, Byron. You
will
get burned,” Blake said, a knowing smirk now on his face. “Badly burned.”

“She’s just filling in for a job, Blake. Why don’t you stop trying to look any further than that and stop trying to play the shrink with me? We promised years ago that we wouldn’t pull that crap with each other.” Byron was fuming.

“Just don’t play games with her, Byron. She might put on an act that she’s strong and independent, and she certainly isn’t weak, but she has some wounds, some deep wounds, and you do have the power to break her,” Blake told him.

“Why don’t you stop worrying about her? Just worry about your own life, you’re your own woman,” Byron snapped, very done with this ridiculous conversation. He didn’t even realize that the way he’d worded that would suggest that McKenzie was
his
woman.

“I understand now. I can see that you’re struggling with the way you’re feeling, so I won’t take offense over what you just said. But be warned, brother, that she’s a friend of my wife’s, and if you put her through hell, I’ll be forced to step in and knock you down a peg or two.”

“I would love to see you try, Blake. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good brawl.”

“All right, then. We’ll talk about this later.”

Before Byron could reply, Blake walked out into the hallway, and then Byron found himself grinding his teeth together when McKenzie’s sweet laughter drifted in through his open office door. She never laughed around him, but maybe that was because he never tried to make her laugh. Making her happy wasn’t on his agenda.

He waited a while to be sure his brother had returned to his own side of the building. Then he decided to make the woman — that
maddening
woman — wait even longer. He wasn’t in the proper mood to work with her right now. So he tried to push McKenzie from his mind by digging into other projects on his computer.

It was much easier thought than done.