Training Her Curves - Geneva (A BBW Billionaire Domination and Submission Romance) (2 page)

"In case you didn't notice," Dylan snarked once we were alone. "There are no cameras here."

He had returned to studying the printout, his attention glued to the paper as he shot his barb at me. My blood started to boil. A lot had happened in the month since he returned to Chicago. Alexa had ended her contract as the spokesmodel and come over to the creative side. It was great to see her flourishing like that, excited by the work and less visible to the public, but it also meant the catalog and print ads had to shift their focus.

Riona wasn't about to back down from running with a "luscious" lead across all advertising. She came up with a "Night and Day" angle, extending her wicked sense of fashion into corporate couture with a campaign that had me as Day and Riona as Night, although we both appeared in both sections of the catalog and commercials.

Too much money had been invested for Jake and Riona to treat Dylan's threat to cancel the entire project seriously if I appeared in the ads, but I had been reluctant to commit. I didn't want the attention from the public that would follow any more than I needed Dylan's approval.

To bring me fully on board, Jake and Riona had offered a large sum and, far more importantly, signed over a part of their interest in the clothing line while naming me as Vice President of Development.

But Dylan had apparently decided that I was of no more utility than a Barbie doll.

Jerking a chair away from the table, I stuffed my oversized bottom into the seat and grabbed a pen from the pack in front of him. Stretching forward, I dragged a stack of folders labeled "guests" and flipped the cover on the top one open.

"We can always have cameras brought in," I offered, my tone dripping acid.

"You're intent on being a distraction," he shot back.

The desire to grab the thickest folder I could find and whack him upside the head had me squirming in my seat. I counted to ten, pretending to read the paper in front of me, but didn't feel any calmer.

"I'm intent," I countered, "on not paying more for King's European operations than necessary."

"King will get all that's coming to him and nothing more."

I looked up from the folder in time to catch Dylan's hard gaze on me. I had no smart ass retort, no reply at all. His gray eyes glittered darkly, his entire expression fierce. My thoughts flashed back to Riona's comment outside the elevator about how Dylan wanted to crush King like an insect.

I already knew I didn't have the full story, but the amount of fury burning in Dylan's eyes made me wonder just how big a chunk I was missing.

I blinked, uncertain whether my pending tears were angry or something else.

His mouth flattened, the brows furrowing even deeper. His right hand released its grip on the printout to briefly cross over his chest and brush his fingertips against the left breast pocket of his jacket. His expression went blank the instant his hand moved back to the paper.

I knew that face -- conversation over.

The conference room door burst inward. Riona stomped across the threshold then slammed it shut. She jabbed her finger in Dylan's direction.

"I hope we're not about to make the same mistake with King as you made with St. Simon!"

"There was no mistake with St. Simon," Dylan responded blandly before sweeping up his notepad and the folder he had been reading through. "You would understand that if you weren't such a bratty prima donna."

Riona stopped cold, the angry glare instantly misting as a hurt pout spread across her lips. His words had issued unadorned, like a professor reciting facts established a long time ago. I think that was what made them so effective. If he had shouted, pointed, slapped his palm against the desk, or done something similar, she could have brushed them off as a bad tempered reply, just as he could have easily brushed off her accusation as arising from her frustration with St. Simon's changes to her design plans for the London location.

The fire in her eyes returned as Dylan strode past her with a seemingly casual indifference. She waited until the door closed quietly behind him before plopping down in the chair he had just vacated and burying her face against her arms.

"Was he just as horrible to you before I came in?"

Her arms and the desk beneath them muffled her question, but I could just make the words out. I thought through my potential answers. I wanted to say he was worse because I hadn't started anything with him. My mere presence had insulted Dylan, as had my agreement to model for the fashion line and serve as one of its two primary spokesmodels. Then there was the whole thing about how he'd broken my heart, halved my self-confidence and generally made me feel like a fool who had spent the last two years of her life crushing on a completely unobtainable man.

What he had said to Riona had been provoked and, as much as I cherished her friendship, had a layer of truth. Her very real talent had combined with her wealth to produce a bit of a diva. While she had been correct on all other points, such as swapping photographers for the shoots and such, St. Simon was his own force and talent. He didn't create things, he perfected them, in part because of his meticulous attention to detail and unfailing sense of balance.

His "tweaks" didn't infuriate Riona because he was wrong -- quite the opposite.

She lifted her head, the question I hadn't yet answered still alive in her gaze.

Sighing, I lifted one hand and brushed at the air. "He is what he is and will always be."

"Yeah, horrible," she agreed with a little sniff. "Find anything yet?"

I barked out a laugh. "Honestly, I haven't started looking."

Rolling my lips, I hesitated with something I wanted to say. I knew my search was poorly informed. I was looking at the business end, but everything pointed to this being a personal issue -- no matter how much money or property or staff were on the line.

"It would help if I understood what this search is really about," I said at last. "The attorneys and accountants have spent two months going over the financials. If something like a debt isn't recorded, it won't be enforceable against us. There's no real diversification in the holdings, so complexity isn't going to trip us up."

Riona didn't answer, just worried her plump bottom lip with her teeth. She also failed to meet my gaze, something that was unusual for someone so frank and confident. Other than her behavior after returning from New York, I'd never known her to be evasive or secretive.

"Fine, I'll start," I said. "When I was in Boston, King told me that Dylan killed his daughter."

She snorted and rolled her eyes.

"That, of course, conflicts with the news reports," I prodded.

"Because it conflicts with reality," she snorted again. "First, Dylan never left the party she was at before she died. Even his enemies at the party don't contradict that fact."

I nodded. I had first read through the old clippings about six months after joining the executive support staff. I knew Jake had been driving the car that crashed with Linsey in it. She had died en route to the hospital, never regaining consciousness.

"I hate to say it..." Pausing, Riona traced the grain of the wooden conference table with one long, pink fingernail. "I wish Linsey never existed..."

Her eyes teared up. I stretched my arm across the table to cover her hand and give a little squeeze.

"Why?"

"She was crazy about Dylan, had been since her early teens. He was more charming back then..."

A tear splashed down her cheek. She freed her hand from mine to swipe away the moisture.

"When she moved to Chicago and started fawning over him, he took her out to high end functions, things he couldn't take his call girls to. The party wasn't one of those things."

Leaning back in her seat, her fingers began toying with the edge of the table. Her gaze went blank but she resumed talking. "He had gone there with someone else and disappeared into a playroom."

A dry chuckle crawled its way up her throat. "A former senator's house, everything respectable in the common areas but many of the guests knew there were other diversions to be had behind certain doors. Knowing only that Dylan had disappeared somewhere in the house with a very attractive and overtly sexual woman, Linsey started slamming back drinks -- hard liquor drinks."

"Oh," I interrupted. "That wasn't mentioned in the papers."

I was talking about the alcohol but could have been referring to almost the entire story -- Dylan's presence, his call girl, the playroom, the senator.

"Of course not. There were a lot of powerful people there." She gave up torturing the edge of the table and rolled her head back against the chair to stare up at the ceiling. "Eventually, she was drunk enough to hunt Dylan down and find him balls deep in the woman, who happened to be tied up, gagged, nipple clamped. All voluntarily and well recompensed, naturally."

"Naturally," I agreed wryly. "So Jake offered to take her home?"

She laughed. "If only that were the case. She drove off wild and drunk, Jake managed to jump in the car before she could leave the grounds."

I nodded, remembering that the vehicle was a convertible. "So he talked her into pulling over--"

The angry shake of her head cut my question off.

"Jake wasn't driving when the car flipped."

The new information pushed me back in my seat and held me there like an elephant sitting on my chest. "But...he said--"

Another angry shake. "He lied. He was in and out of consciousness when the ambulance arrived. Linsey was still alive before he passed out completely. He knew his blood was clean and hers wasn't. He didn't have time to learn she was dead before talking to the cops and saying he had been driving at the time of the accident."

"That's stupid!" I burst out.

"That is Jake," Riona answered flatly. "Protector-hero complex if you haven't realized that already."

Slumping in my chair, I nodded. "But once he knew the girl was dead?"

"Then the press would have had to dig for a more interesting angle to the story, such as what possessed him to lie. It would have exposed Dylan's lifestyle, the events at the party and so much more. Can you imagine what that would have done to the business while it was still weak from my father's mishandlings? Jake was under the Kehoe radar, still known publicly under his mother's name, not our father's. There was no visible connection between him and the company."

I sank a little lower in my seat, my eyes misting over the self-sacrificing actions of my pseudo-big brother. "Damn, I love that idiot," I whispered.

Riona nodded vigorously, fat tears streaming down her cheeks. "But Dylan can be every bit as wonderful when he isn't being...well..."

"A dickweed?" I offered.

She burped up a laugh then wiped at her face.

"Seriously, though," she added once all the evidence of her tears were gone.

"I know." I dipped my head as I answered, hoping to hide how well I knew. I hadn't started crushing on Dylan just because of his looks, although they certainly helped. He might presently be rich as any king, but I had access to decades of company ledgers.

Truth was, he should have had more than a third interest in the company, but his siblings were treated as equal owners. Before he had come to them with the proposal to pool their money and resuscitate the company after their father's death, he had injected a huge amount of cash -- equal to the one-third investment he would later make -- all to keep the company's pension and family "welfare" funds running. The welfare fund was extraordinary for a company, covering everything from medical care and family leave for terminal illnesses or life saving operations and treatment to scholarships and low interest first home loans. I had looked hard to find a similar fund at another business and couldn't. And pensions were usually the first obligation shed by the CEO of a troubled enterprise. Even those companies that didn't conveniently break their agreements certainly didn't have the head of the company parting with half his personal fortune to keep them funded.

I slammed down on the brakes in an attempt to stop my internal train of thoughts and memories of Dylan. I couldn't. Keeping the funds running was just the tip of the iceberg for all the selfless and genuine things I had discovered about the man in my two years working in the executive suite. I knew and had witnessed things that I didn't think his own brother and sister were aware of.

When I thought about it too hard, which was more often than I cared to admit, even recently, I felt like the extreme difference between how giving and open he could be with complete strangers versus those closest to him, including me based on our forty plus hours a week around one another, exerted a twisted reverse psychology that had made me love him. Look at Dylan one way and he was a generous, nurturing, loving man -- but most of what I received from him was indifference.

"Hey..." Riona reached across the table and seized both my hands. I didn't realize until she did so that I had fresh tears streaming down my face. She let go of me, circled the long conference table and sat down next to me, her arms draped around my shoulders.

"You can't hide how badly you are still soft on him," she whispered in my ear. "You don't have to be hurting like this. But one of you has to make the next move. I promise, Dylan is crazy about you."