The CEO Buys in (Wager of Hearts #1) (32 page)

Nathan stripped his jacket off and swung it around her shoulders like a cape. The smooth satin of the lining slid over her bare arms, enveloping her in the heat of his body and the exotic scent of his soap. Pulling the lapels together across her chest, she closed her eyes and inhaled.

“There’s a lounge this way,” he said, steering her toward a set of double doors, his arm around her waist.

At last she allowed herself to lean into him. It was heaven to be cocooned in his scent, supported by the strength of his arm, and warmed by the feel of his body against her side. She simply followed wherever he led her without thought or question. It was a relief to let go for a few moments.

“Sit,” he said, maneuvering them both onto a green vinyl sofa without letting go of her. Chloe sank onto the hard cushion and snuggled in closer to Nathan’s side.

“How was she?” he asked softly, his breath stirring the hair on top of her head.

Chloe’s breath caught on a swallowed sob. “Much better than I hoped. In fact, she seems fine. It was just at the beginning, when she was lying still with her eyes closed, that she looked so small and frail.” She sniffled, and Nathan fished in his pocket to offer her a small packet of tissues. It startled her to see the mundane little item in the long, elegant fingers of such a powerful man, but she took it gratefully. “I still want to see her as the loving but formidable grandmother of my youth, but she’s not anymore. As I’ve grown up, she’s grown old. I don’t want to face that truth.”

His arm tightened around her. “She’s still pretty tough, you know, at least on me.”

“Her mind and her spirit are,” Chloe said, smiling a little. “But her body is betraying her. She and I both need to deal with that fact.”

“Let’s find out what’s causing her falls before we worry about the long term.” He rubbed his hand up and down her arm over the fabric of his jacket. “When Ben has a better idea of the situation, he’ll refer Mrs. Russell to a top specialist. We’ll have her moved to the appropriate hospital.”

Chloe sat up straight as the implications of what he was saying sank in. It was so tempting to let him use his money and influence to get Grandmillie the best medical care available. She could almost justify it because it was for her grandmother, not herself. But she couldn’t allow it when she needed to break the bonds of their relationship, not add to them. Reluctantly, she shook her head. “That’s generous of both of you, but I can’t accept any more of your help.”

She felt him stiffen. “It’s for your grandmother’s benefit.”

She slid sideways on the cushion, forcing him to drop his arm from around her waist. “She’s
my
grandmother, not yours or Ben’s.”

He frowned and hesitated for a second, as though choosing his words carefully. “Your grandmother’s well-being is important to me because you are important to me.”

Chloe didn’t want to hear this. She stood up.

“What is it?” he asked. His eyes narrowed as he scanned her face, not liking whatever he saw there.

She took a few strides away before turning to look him in the eye. “I had hoped—” She took a deep breath. “I had hoped to do this in a different place, in a different mood.”

“Do what?” He rose from the sofa and took a step toward her. She halted him with a sharp gesture, but he still towered over her.

She could see suspicion building in the tightness of his jaw and the tense set of his shoulders. He could read her too well. She dropped her hand. “We can’t continue to see each other now that I’m going to work at Trainor Electronics. It’s not a good idea.”

There was a long silence as he simply looked at her. She watched his face, waiting for hurt or anger, but he held whatever he was feeling in check.

“You’re fired.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Problem solved.”

Tears burned in her eyes as she shook her head. “Don’t you see? Our relationship was going to end anyway. You’re so brilliant and rich, and I’m, well, I’m just a temp.”

“You don’t think much of me if you believe that matters.”

“Out in the real world it matters. I haven’t been living in that since I met you. I’ve been hanging out in penthouses, driving in Rolls-Royces, and flying around in jets and helicopters. It’s not who I am.”

“None of that changes who
I
am, so it shouldn’t impact who
you
are.”

Now she could hear the pain in his voice, and it tore at her. She wrapped her arms around her waist. “You’ve earned it.”

“I got lucky. People wanted what I created.”

“My father invented lots of things people wanted. He didn’t have a penthouse or a jet.” Chloe said something she never thought she would. “He didn’t have the drive or the discipline you do. He wouldn’t work hard enough to build what you’ve built. You give thousands of people the ability to pay their mortgages and send their children to college. It’s daunting.”

He closed the distance between them and took hold of her shoulders, his eyes scorching. “You’ve seen me hallucinating. You’ve seen me naked. I’m a man like anyone else.”

Chloe lifted her chin in an attempt to appear strong and certain, even as her heart was being slashed by every word. “No, you’re different. You live in the stratosphere, and that’s where you belong. Without me.”

He held her as they stared at each other. His grip was hard but not punishing. She tried to memorize what this last touch felt like.

He dropped his hands and walked away to stare out the window, combing one hand through his hair. When he turned back to her, anger made his jaw hard and his eyes opaque. “I can’t tar you with the same brush as Teresa. You couldn’t have engineered my bout with the flu. But you are a damned skillful opportunist.”

Chloe had expected this, even deserved it, but she still felt as though he’d drawn back his fist and socked her in the stomach. “When someone you love depends on you, you can’t always make the decisions you want to,” she said evenly. “You offered me the job without any prompting from me.”

“I offered you the job so I could screw you in my office whenever I wanted to.”

Even though she knew he was lashing out because she’d hurt him, his crudeness made her angry. “And you wanted to win your bet, didn’t you?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he said, but she caught the flash of guilt in his eyes.

“I heard you talking to Gavin and Luke about using me to win. That’s why you took me to the charity dinner. Was screwing me in your office part of the wager?”

He gave her a long, level look. “You are so far wrong about that.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“It wasn’t relevant.”

“It involved me, so I think it was relevant.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He looked away, his lips pressed into a thin line.

“How can I, when you won’t tell me?” His refusal to explain made her angry. With jerky movements she unhooked the earrings from her earlobes and removed the bracelet from her wrist, holding them out to him.

He yanked his gaze back to her before he reached out and scooped the jewelry off her palm. The anger that had fueled him seemed to evaporate as he closed his fingers on the sparkling baubles. His voice was hollow as he said, “I hoped you would keep them.”

“You know I can’t.”

When he lifted his eyes to hers, she nearly cried out at the desolation in them. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe he’d felt more for her than she believed. But it didn’t matter now. She had made her decision.

Without thinking she reached out to him, but his expression made her pull back her hand as though she’d gotten too near a bonfire. Except this bonfire burned with the cold of a glacier.

“I’ll need my jacket,” he said, nodding toward her.

“Of course.” She’d forgotten she was still wearing it. Shrugging the warm garment off, she held it out. He took it in a way that avoided even brushing her fingertips. When a shiver ran through her, she wasn’t sure if it was from the air-conditioning or from the icy contempt radiating from Nathan.

“Tell Ben and Ed I’ll be in the Rolls,” he said as he settled the jacket over his broad shoulders.

She opened her mouth to say good-bye, but he’d already pivoted toward the door. All she could do was watch him stride away from her.

She wanted to throw herself facedown on the plastic of the sofa and wail, but she had to keep herself together for Grandmillie.

Looking down, she realized she still had Nathan’s tissues clutched in her hand. She opened her fingers and smoothed the crumpled packet back into its neat, rectangular shape. This would be the memento she treasured as the last thing he ever gave her.

Nathan strode along the sidewalk with his shoulders hunched and his hands shoved in his pockets. He’d left Ben and Ed at his apartment. He didn’t feel good about that. But he didn’t feel good about anything right now, which was why he was headed for the R and D lab on a Saturday night.

He hoped no one else was pathetic enough to be there, because he was damned lousy company.

As he walked, he felt another wave of disbelief and anger roll through him, and cursed under his breath. He hadn’t known Chloe long enough for it to hit him so hard.

This was Gavin Miller’s fault, with all his tripe about finding a woman who didn’t care about the money and the power. Nathan yanked his cell phone out of his jeans pocket and scrolled to the writer’s number.

“You are a prize ass,” he growled when Miller answered.

“So I’ve been told, but what’s my specific crime tonight?”

Nathan was pissed off to hear amusement in the other man’s tone. “Your moronic wager.”

“More trouble with the opposite sex. I shouldn’t be surprised. Meet me at the Bellwether Club. I’m buying.”

He didn’t want to be at his home. He didn’t want to be at Trainor Electronics. He might as well go to the club and get drunk.

He pivoted in the direction of the club. “Be there in twenty.”

“You look like hell,” Gavin said as he slouched into the leather chair across from Nathan. He wore jeans, like Nathan, but with a black turtleneck and tweed jacket.

“You look like someone pretending to be a writer.” Nathan had already tossed back one scotch and was sipping his second.

The waiter slid an empty crystal tumbler onto the table in front of Gavin. “Will you be sharing the scotch, sir,” he asked, nodding to the bottle on the table, “or would you prefer bourbon?”

“I’ll be comradely and drink with my friend, despite his foul mood,” the writer said, picking up the scotch and pouring it before the waiter could. “Now tell me your tale of woe, Trainor.”

“I came to drink, not talk.”

Gavin took a swallow of his drink. “You could have done that alone.”

“You said it was on you.” Nathan wasn’t ready to admit what was bothering him.

Gavin spun the bottle around so he could read the label. “You should have ordered more expensive scotch.” He waved the waiter over. “Take this away and bring a bottle of the Macallan, 1989. Unless Bill Gates has drunk it all already.”

“Are we celebrating the end of your writer’s block?” Nathan asked, having a rough idea of the price of the bottle Gavin had just ordered.

The writer threw him a sardonic glance. “If you’re going to drown your sorrows, you should do it with something worth the hangover.”

Nathan remembered how depressed he’d felt about work until he got back into the R and D lab. Being unable to write must feel something like that to Gavin. “Sorry.”

The other man shrugged. “I can live on my backlist royalties for the rest of my life, but other people are counting on this book.”

“You’re miserable without your creative outlet.”

“Aren’t we the sensitive psychoanalyst?” Gavin grimaced. “In order to need an outlet, I’d have to have some creativity left in me.”

“You think it’s not there, but it’s building up. If you don’t use it, you’ll have a core meltdown.” Nathan tossed back the last of his scotch as the waiter approached with a tray holding two tulip-shaped glasses, wide at the bottom and tapering to the top, and a simple clear bottle of dark-amber liquid with the year 1989 prominent on its label.

As the waiter reverently poured the single malt, Gavin said, “I appreciate the image of nuclear disaster, but I’m just a commercial hack. At worst, it would be a cherry bomb going off.”

The waiter placed the bottle on the table and stepped back. “I hope you’ll enjoy the Macallan, sirs.” Clearly he felt they weren’t paying such a rare beverage the attention it deserved.

Nathan picked up the glass and inhaled the heavy, complex scent. “Nice.” He took a sip and let it sit on his tongue, savoring the flavors of spice, nuts, and wood.

“You get a little bit of fruit at the finish,” Gavin said after swallowing his first taste.

Nathan drank the rest of the scotch in one gulp, just to be a bastard. He poured another and stared down into the dark-brown liquid glowing with red highlights. He could feel Gavin’s gaze on him.

“Quit stalling,” the other man said. “What’s got you abusing one of the world’s finest single malts?”

“My own stupidity.”

“That goes without saying.”

Nathan waited for more, but Gavin just took another sip of scotch. The whiskey burned through Nathan’s veins, loosening all the controls he’d put on his emotions. “Damn it, she chose the job over me.”

The writer sat up. “Chloe dumped you? Start at the beginning. This should be a good story.”

Nathan told him about the flu epidemic and Chloe’s abrupt promotion to executive assistant. “Ben basically forced her into coming to my apartment,” Nathan said. “She tried to say no every step of the way. She’s the strangest combination of ruthless determination and soft heart. The determination is all for her grandmother, so she kept negotiating more and more money every time I asked her to stay, but I think she only agreed to do it because she felt sorry for me in my sickly condition.”

“Sorry for you? Sure, I believe that,” Gavin said.

“You’ve met her. She wasn’t at all intimidated by me.” It had been the apartment and the cars and the jet that had bothered Chloe. Nathan, she’d treated as an equal. Until now.

“Well, she would have to be a criminal mastermind to have engineered a flu epidemic and then maneuvered her way into becoming your temporary assistant, so I’ll give you that. It sounds like she took full advantage of the situation, though.”

Nathan had accused her of opportunism too, but he shook his head. “She wouldn’t take anything of significance from me until I offered her the job.”

“We’re back to the job.”

Nathan drank a slug of single malt, letting it scorch down his throat. “I made sure she got a job at Trainor Electronics.”

“You
are
an idiot.”

The truth of that had smacked Nathan in the head a few hours earlier. “I hated having to snatch an hour here and there with her. I thought we could spend more time together if she worked in the same building.”

Gavin gave a long, low whistle. “You have swallowed the hook, line, and sinker, my friend.”

“She needed the job,” Nathan said. “She supports her grandmother, who’s having health issues.” He’d spoken with Ben earlier. His friend was nearly certain that Millie Russell’s problem was a simple and treatable heart arrhythmia. Relief had surged through Nathan at the news. He did have it bad.

“So you got on your white horse and rode to her rescue.”

“Trainor Electronics employs thousands of people. What difference does it make if HR offers a position to someone who has both the skills and the need for it?”

“The difference is you’re sleeping with this someone. People would have found out, and Chloe, if she has the integrity you claim she does, would have felt like crap.”

“Maybe Chloe was right.” Nathan stared at the outrageously expensive bottle of scotch. “Maybe I’ve become insulated from the real world.”

“The plot thickens.”

“Today she wouldn’t let me get a specialist for her grandmother, who fainted and fell. When I pushed, she told me she was ending the relationship because it was wrong for her to be involved with her boss.”

“She works for you?”

“No.” Nathan glared at Gavin. “I may be besotted, but I’m not brain-dead. She works about three levels below me in the organization chart, in an entirely different department.”

“
Besotted.
Nice word,” Gavin said. “Is that what you are?”

Nathan ignored him. He didn’t know the answer to that. “She told me our relationship wouldn’t have lasted anyway because it was too unequal.”

Gavin held his glass up to the light, tilting it this way and that. “She has a point.”

Nathan slammed his glass down on the table so hard some of the precious whiskey sloshed out. “I was a military brat. I grew up on bases in run-down housing with an alcoholic mother and a father who tried to force me into the Marines. All this”—he swept his hand around the opulent room—“doesn’t change who I am.”

“Sure, sure.” Gavin looked unconvinced.

“And then she threw the bet in my face.”

“You told her about the bet?”

“No, she heard us talking at the charity dinner, so thanks to you for adding to the problem.” Nathan glared at Gavin.

“She must have been flattered when you explained it to her.”

“I didn’t. I was too pissed off.”

“I can see you handled it well, so let’s cut to the chase.” Gavin leaned forward. “Do you love her?”

“No one can fall in love in two weeks.” But he wasn’t sure about that. Facing the prospect of life without Chloe made him feel bleak at best, despairing at worst. “I’m just pissed off.” He knew he was repeating himself.

“I’m the last person who should give advice to the lovelorn . . . or the pissed off,” Gavin said, “but I want you to think about this. If Chloe walked through that door right now and said she’d made a terrible mistake, how would you feel? You don’t have to tell me. Just think about it.”

Nathan turned his head toward the heavy mahogany door that led into the bar and imagined Chloe pushing it open and looking around the room until she spotted him. Her face would light up the way it did when she walked out of that accounting firm and saw him leaning against the Rolls. She would head toward him, swaying on those high heels she loved so much.

His heart squeezed hard in his chest, and he closed his eyes with a grimace.

“Yup, you’ve fallen hard,” Gavin said.

A blast of light jerked Nathan awake. He opened his eyes and slammed them shut again as the sunlight jabbed into his eyeballs like a set of possessed screwdrivers.

“You have a visitor.” Ed’s voice sent the same screwdrivers plunging into his eardrums.

“Isn’t it Sunday?”

“Yes.” Something clinked on the bedside table, and Nathan slitted an eye to see a steaming mug. His stomach heaved as the usually welcome aroma of coffee hit his nostrils.

“I don’t have visitors on Sundays.” He rolled away from Ed and the light until a stupidly hopeful thought whispered that it might be Chloe. He lifted his head enough to look over his shoulder and then laid it back down with a groan. “Who is it?” he managed to growl.

“You should find that out for yourself.”

The chipper little voice got louder. Nathan knew he shouldn’t ask, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Is it Chloe?”

“No.” Ed’s tone was flat and disapproving. Nathan couldn’t tell if the disapproval was aimed at him or Chloe. Or both.

“Then tell whoever it is to go to hell.” The misery that Chloe’s name had temporarily banished flooded back through him.

“That wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, son, but I don’t have a lot of time.” This had to be a nightmare, because the new voice sounded like his father.

Nathan pushed himself up onto his elbow even though the shift in elevation tightened the vise currently clamped around his head. He squinted at the two shapes silhouetted against the windows, trying to distinguish faces. “Sir?”

One shape stepped forward. “I have to catch a flight out of JFK at fifteen hundred hours. Angel and I are headed for Vienna.”

It
was
his father. Long years of training made Nathan straighten and then wince at the new crash of pain. “Sir, if you’ll give me a minute,” he said. He wasn’t going to stagger around the room clutching his head in front of the general.

“I’ll wait in your study,” his father said. “Ed, this young man could use a batch of your patented hangover killer.”

Nathan searched for condemnation in the general’s voice but found none.

“I’ll get right on it, sir,” Ed said as he accompanied the general out of the room.

Nathan crawled out from under the covers and hoisted himself off the bed, stumbling into the bathroom to fill the sink with cold water and dunk his head in it. It didn’t stop the pain, but it cleared away some of the cobwebs.