Everything You Need: Everything For You Trilogy Book 1 (4 page)

Jack folds his arms, leans back against the wall and watches our exchange with amused interest, quite unperturbed.

“Not unless they can climb outside walls, luv.”

Jack laughs until I roll my eyes at him. The workmen have already cleared up their mess and have only to take the broken door away with them.

“Good job, gentlemen.” Jack’s concise praise makes the workmen preen. He has an unruffled way of handling employees I’ll never acquire in a million years. I think of what I’m trying to do at CaidCo with a sinking heart.

I stomp to the kitchen as Jack sees them off the premises, help myself to a banana, peel it and take a bite. He follows me through and sits on the counter stool beside mine.

“I see you made yourself at home.” A sleeping laptop, coffee cups and papers are strewn across the counter. I wonder what he did with my missing bottle of vodka.

“I returned early from a trip to the Far East but still had a few calls to make to my offices in Singapore and South Korea.” He manages to make it sound like my fault as he gathers everything up and pushes it out of the way.

That would account for the oriental voices then. Not house-breaking triads but his global electronics business connections in the Far East. I suppose overindulgence in alcohol might have made me a bit paranoid. Under his perturbed gaze I push the banana self-consciously between my open lips again wondering why I didn’t have the fore-sight to choose a far less suggestive apple. While he studies my lips, I begin to feel as self-conscious as a gibbon in a zoo at feeding time.

“Help yourself,” I mumble, mouth full, indicating the fruit bowl.

I discover he has an agenda of his own. He reaches out his hand, cups the back of my head and pulls me in to him. His mouth descends over mine pausing inches from contact. “You really shouldn’t torment a man the way you do. I can see you’ve developed some unfortunate little habits in my absence.”

He quells my shocked comeback with a hard, fast kiss, licking a minute piece of banana from the corner of my lips, sending a thrill up my entire body. And all the way back down again. He renders me shocked and speechless.

Like it never even happened, he releases me, sits back in his stool and mashes his lips together to savour the fruity taste.

“It’s okay to have a good time, Tabitha. It’s okay to have a drink or three. I’m an Irishman, I understand. But locking yourself in your flat to drink yourself unconscious all weekend is dangerously stupid. I’m surprised an intelligent woman like you doesn’t know that. Two litres of vodka?”

I open my mouth to contradict his gross exaggeration – I hardly got one bottle down me – but he continues before I get a chance to speak. Not difficult when I’m reeling from that kiss.

“Not only could you have been poisoned but locking yourself in is highly irresponsible. What if no-one could get to you?” He sounds calmly irate.

I pull myself together and scoff. “That was the general idea.” Why should he care anyway?

He stands violently. “To kill yourself?” He grabs hold of my forearms and shakes me. I remember a similar tremor going through me only recently but can’t remember where or when. “God, you’ve no idea what I want to do to you right now.”

If the past is any predictor, it isn’t the same as I want to do to him.

I jiggle my arms loose but the only reason I get them free is when he releases me. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” I gasp. “I just like to forget for a while. I’m always back at work on Monday.” I huff suggesting he’s blowing things way out of proportion.

Jack scowls. “How many weekends have you been treating your body like this?”

Too many but I go on the defensive. “Oh don’t be so dramatic. I take it you never got legless when you were my age?”

“This is absolutely the last time this is ever going to happen.” He pauses. “If you were feeling the strain, you could have come to me.”

“Since when?” I’m stunned by his claim.

I can see him trying to get his temper under control but he can hardly pretend he’s been there for me.

“Since right now.”

That’s never going to happen. If life’s taught me one thing, it’s taught me I can’t trust Jack Keogh and I can’t trust my instincts around him either. Okay, that’s two things it’d be well worth remembering.

I pretend to be casual about the whole thing. “Oh get over yourself.”

It’s the wrong approach.

Jack takes my chin between his fingers. I don’t even think he knows how strong he is. He twists my face towards his and this time he’s not letting go. His expression disturbs me.

“We’ve both seen Harry Caid placed in a coffin and buried in the ground before his time and I’m not about to stand by and watch the same thing happen to you. I don’t care how many doors I have to kick in. You won’t be abusing yourself this way again. Got it?”

His Arctic blue eyes burn, his fingers are rigid on my skin but it’s the harshness of his words that shock me most. Most people tiptoe around my recent bereavement but Jack calls it like he sees it. I can no longer be flippant.

“Okay. I get it. Harry was your friend. You miss him too. I won’t do this to myself anymore. Happy?” I understand he feels he owes Harry. I wish he’d take his hands off me though. I’m beginning to want them to roam. I’m not anywhere near sober enough yet and my restraint isn’t as strong as it should be.

Jack’s chest rises and falls. He nods briefly, then relaxes his fingers as he finally realises he’s still holding my face inches from his.

I back out of his reach, my heart thudding, putting the counter between us. “But I’m not going to stop drinking.” Jack can’t have things entirely his own way, no matter what he’s used to. I’m twenty-two. I like to go out and have a good time and I’m not letting someone who ditched me years ago think he can come back when it suits him and try to control me.

“I’m not asking you to. Just not like this.” His voice gentles. “There’s much better ways to enjoy a drink. In moderation. In company.”

The air crackles between us and I have to stamp on my wild imagination to prevent it running amok. I squash it with a jibe designed to put us both in our places. “You don’t have to take Harry’s place, you know. I’m reasonably well raised and I don’t need a father-figure.”

I hear the air leave Jack’s lungs in a whoosh. He drags his fingers through his hair. “Another couple of years might have been better.”

The impression I get is he’s thinking out loud and I’m disturbed by what I don’t understand – his thoughts. I divert the tense mood. “How did you know where to find me?”

“I’ll always know where to find you.” It’s a cryptic response.

“Where were you?” It’s the question I’ve been wanting to ask him for the last four years.

“My flight landed at City Airport so I made an impromptu visit to CaidCo last thing Friday afternoon.”

Immediately I’m in business mode. “Didn’t Mason see you?” Even the team manager handling Jack’s account is beginning to go over to the dark side, courtesy of my nemesis and supposed second-in-command, Brent Tapper. I can’t ignore that fact any longer. What have they done now? Although I’ve made it my business to stay out of Jack’s, I now have to accept ultimate responsibility for CaidCo’s most important client.

“He saw me. We spoke at length.”

My heart sinks. “So what’s the problem?” Please don’t let me lose Jack’s account as well. I wonder about the fate of the second vodka bottle. I could do with a hair of the dog.

“The problem is I wanted to speak to the company’s new CEO but she wasn’t available.” He steeples his fingers under his chin, elbows on the counter and waits for my response.

“Why after all this time would you want to speak to me?”

“Not to you, Tabitha. To the new CEO of CaidCo.” He suggests the personal and professional distinction between us.

I could kick myself for feeling so deflated. “I went home early.” I shrug. “It’d been a long week.”

“I understand you’ve been … going home early for several weeks now.”

I bristle. “What else did you learn about me?” No doubt from Brent Tapper himself. I’m beginning to hate that man.

“Enough to insist they try to phone you but you weren’t picking up calls either.”

It sounds like my office probably weren’t the only ones trying. Jack clearly has my private number by now.

“So it wasn’t just you I was ignoring, right?” I can’t help the blasé dig. I’m humiliated that Jack knows what a useless wreck I am, both professionally and personally.

“It was enough to make me come straight round. The rest you know.”

“Right.” I stand and start stuffing papers into his laptop case. I’m so embarrassed by this whole thing and beyond uncomfortable about the way things ended between us long ago, I have to get him out of my apartment and back out of my life as quickly as possible. Before things get completely out of hand.

I snap the lid shut and walk to the door, praying he’ll follow me. To my surprise he picks up his jacket and tie where they hang over the back of a kitchen chair and does. “Now you know everything about me and I’ve agreed not to drink myself to death. Your job is done.”

I hold his case out to him. He takes it calmly and slowly, his fingers deliberately grazing mine, I swear, yet I still detect his attitude of intolerance for my failures. He must be a scary boss at times. Unlike me.

“It’s only just beginning, Tabitha.”

“What do you mean?”

“You want my help.”

“I don’t want anything from you.” I have some pride.

He remains unyielding. “Let me rephrase that. You need my help and I’m going to give you all the help you need.”

Are we talking business here? “What I need is nothing to do with you. If you were the last person on Earth, Jack Keogh, I wouldn’t come to you for help.” I block horrible memories of the heartless way he left me.

“I’m not offering you a choice in the matter.”

“We’ll see.” I hope that doesn’t sound like a challenge. I don’t ever want to be in a position where Jack makes me some kind of mission to fulfil.

“We will.” He opens the door, lingering, staring at me intently. “When I decide to accomplish something, I employ whatever strategy gets me what I desire in the end.”

My knees melt. I’ve seen his brutal strategy first hand, in two splintered wooden bits. “At least I know you won’t be kicking this door down.” I pat the new one mock-affectionately, like the workman before me.

His lips curve slightly at my attempt to be super-cool. “No need, Tabitha.” He digs in his pocket and hands me a new set of keys then steps outside.

“Wait. Where’s the other set? They always provide two sets of keys with a new lock.”

When Jack smiles fully it’s a dazzling challenge all of its own. He pats his pocket and I can hear the tinny sound of metal touching metal. He strides off down the hall. “We’ll talk when you’re sober enough to listen to reason and I’m not so angry with you. Stay indoors, rest and enjoy what’s left of your weekend, Tabitha. Things are about to change around here.”

He makes it sound like the last meal of a dying man.

“Thanks for all your unwanted help,” I call after him, slamming my solid new front door savagely when he halts, in case he changes his mind about leaving. I go in search of the second bottle and find it.

Empty.

Fuming, I change into scruffy jeans and an old t-shirt, eat a mammoth bowl of puffed wheat and go back to bed to sleep off the fog in my brain. I only rise to accept an unexpected, pre-paid, delivery of food from a good local restaurant. I don’t want to eat it on principle but I’m too starving and it smells too delicious to ignore. The nutritious food keeps arriving spontaneously, with bottles and bottles of mineral water and cloudy apple juice, at regular intervals the entire weekend.

* * *

“Want to talk about it?”

I whirl round, gut churning, adrenaline coursing through my veins, and it’s only Monday afternoon. When I see Libby’s sympathetic face peering at me through the crack in my office door I relax my tense shoulders. I beckon her in and she slips inside, shutting the door for privacy.

“You over-heard us then?” I ask.

“Tabitha, half the CaidCo building over-heard you. Brent Tapper isn’t exactly subtle.”

I exhale, long and slow and collapse into my chair. “He’s bloody-minded and impossible.”

Libby helps herself to the chair on the opposite side of my desk. “Anyone would think he was your boss, not the other way around.”

My eyes meet hers but are irresistibly lured to the faded desk-plaque I inherited along with everything else in this building. Chief Executive Officer. It taunts me. “It’s been some reversal of fortune. Must be hard for Brent to swallow. He more or less built this company with Harry.”

“You’re far too generous to that old goat, Tabitha. Brent Tapper may have been your uncle’s first manager but it was Harry Caid’s money and Harry Caid’s business through and through. And now it’s yours.”

“I’ll always be the pretender to the throne, in Brent’s eyes.”

“You’ll sort things out.”

I give Libby a weak smile of gratitude. She has more faith in me than I deserve. “How long have you known me?”