Raven's Bride (29 page)

His secretary was uncharacteristically silent.

“
Is there blood all over the floor?” he barked, without looking up.

“
No.” The voice sounded puzzled, and not particularly like his middle-aged secretary, Iris, but he didn’t bother to look up. It had to be Iris. No one else would dare to interrupt him when he had expressly asked for peace and quiet.

The answer to his problem was on the tip of his tongue now. He was sure of it. “Has world civilization collapsed?” he asked, his head still buried deep in his papers.

“
No.”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Then go away. I don’t want a cup of coffee. I don’t want visitors. I just want five minutes of peace. Is that too much to ask for?”

“
Yes. It is.”

The voice, a sultry mixture of coffee and cream, definitely did not belong to Iris. He raised his head, his train of thought broken now. The figure didn’t belong to Iris, either. This woman was twenty years younger to start with, and she had a very nice pair of legs in sheer, sheer pantyhose.

He dragged his eyes away from her legs and up to her face, creasing his forehead at how familiar she looked. He ought to know who she was, he knew he had seen her before, but he couldn’t think where. Whoever she was, she had interrupted him in a critical moment and he was less than pleased. “What do you want?”

“
Are you Alex Gatting?” she asked.

He twiddled his pencil between his fingers. Pretty though she was, he was in the middle of complex calculations here. Now that she was in his office he could hardly order her out again, but maybe if he acted busy, she would get the hint and go away. “Yes.”

She looked as if she didn’t quite believe him. “The CEO of Gatting Engineering?”

“
Yes.”

She shrugged. “You’re not what I was expecting.”

He didn’t care if she’d been expecting an alien with three heads and eyeballs on stalks. He just wanted her out of his office so he could solve that problem that was still bugging him. He had work to do and a company to run. “What do you want?” He deliberately made his voice abrupt and unwelcoming.

She didn’t seem to notice his rudeness. She sat down on one of the armchairs in front of his desk that he kept for visitors and crossed her legs. She looked almost edible in that short skirt of hers. He raised his eyes to her face with some reluctance as she started speaking. “I’m Kate Moore. I’m your cousin. Or rather, my mother was your cousin. I suppose that makes me your second cousin, or first cousin once removed or something.”

He raised his eyebrows. This was the first he had heard of such a cousin. “You are?”

“
I suppose you’re wondering why I’m contacting you after all these years. I know you and my mother haven’t spoken to each other in years and years...”

That was an understatement if ever he heard one. As far as he knew, he had never spoken to Kate Moore’s mother in his life.

“
...but the truth of the matter is that I’m pretty desperate.” She swallowed hard and her voice was a little quavery when she continued. “I need to borrow some money. Quite a bit of money, in fact. Twenty thousand dollars.”

Ah, that was where he had seen her before. Just that very morning he’d passed by her on his way to a meeting in the Sky Tower block. She’d been sitting in the casino, her face in her hands, weeping.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what her game was. She’s racked up a bunch of debt–a compulsive gambler no doubt–and she was trying her ‘long lost cousin’ con on every man in town who might be worth inveigling into lending her money.

He shook his head. She had a fair amount of cheek, sashaying into his office and asking to borrow money from him. She wasn’t after peanuts, either. Hadn’t she just asked for twenty thousand dollars? Unbelievable.

She evidently took the shake of his head as a refusal. “I’ll pay you interest–the going rate, of course–and I’ll get official papers drawn up and signed. I’m not asking for a handout–just a loan. I’ve done the sums and I’ll be able to pay it all back in five years.”

She was a damn good actress, he had to hand it to her. If he hadn’t seen her sitting in the casino that morning crying her eyes out, he would have been tempted to believe her. Or at least to believe her enough to check out her story before he refused. “What do you need the money for?”

Her face brightened at this sign of interest and she went into a long story about her son who was sick and desperately needed some operation or other or he was in danger of dying.

As sob stories went, it was quite a good one, he thought as he listened with some amusement. She evidently had a creative imagination and real flair for storytelling, to boot. She ought to quit gambling and take up storytelling for a living. She’d do very well.

Of course, she probably did very well with the little con game she was trying on him. She looked and sounded so incredibly sincere. It was her bad luck that he wasn’t gullible enough to fall for it. He steepled his fingers together and gazed at her over the top of them, curious to see how far she would take her little play. “Why me?”

“
No one else will lend me the money. You’re my last hope.”

“
But why me?”

She blinked up at him as if his question was slightly odd. “Because you’re my cousin – the only family I have left since my mother died last year. I hoped...”

First a sick son, now a dead mother. What would be next? A father in jail? A disabled husband in a wheelchair? He screwed his face up in annoyance at the increasingly maudlin turn her tale was taking. He didn’t have the time to go through this ridiculous charade. He had a design to finish.

At the expression on his face she fell silent and tears formed at the corner of her eyes. “You don’t have any intention of lending me the money, do you?” she asked baldly.

He shook his head. She’d got it in one. “No.”

“
Is there anything I could say or do that would change your mind?”

“
No.”

She rose to her feet with more dignity than he would have suspected. “I’m sorry for bothering you, cousin,” she said, imbuing the last word with a healthy tinge of sarcasm. “Thank you for seeing me and at least hearing me out before your refusal. I won’t keep you from your work any longer.”

There was no mistaking the desolation on her face as she turned to walk out the door. She may be a con artist and a cheap scammer, but he doubted she was faking this bone-deep despair. She was in serious trouble and needed that money very badly. The loan sharks she owed money to must be giving her a rough time.

“
Come on, sit down,” he said. He couldn’t let her walk out of his office now. Judging by the look on her face, she was headed right to the harbor bridge to jump off it into the water far below, and he would be saddled with pangs of guilt for the rest of his life. He wasn’t going to give her that kind of hold over him.

“
Why?” she asked, turning the questions on him for a change.

He’d expected eagerness to try once more to convince him–not this aggressive posture. “Didn’t your mother, when she was alive of course, ever teach you that you caught more flies with honey than with vinegar?” he teased.

She tucked a loose strand of light-brown hair behind one ear. “I asked you for a loan. You said no. I said thank you for hearing me out and goodbye. What else do we have to talk about?”

“
Why do you need the money?”

“
I told you already. My son, Ben...”

He cut her off with the wave of a hand. He wanted the truth, not the same sob story over again. “No, really. Why?”

She looked at him straight in the eye. “I told you already.”

She didn’t so much as blush or blink at this barefaced lie. He sighed. She was not going to confess to her gambling problem, he could tell, not if he asked her questions from now until Doomsday. What was twenty thousand dollars after all? Not much to him, but obviously a lot to her. He could write her out a cheque that same day and hardly miss it. He was tempted to do just that, if only to see the sparkle of hope spring back into her gray green eyes. If her eyes were pretty now when they were filled with tears, they’d be quite stunning when she was smiling. How he wished she would tell him the truth though. He hated any con artist thinking she could fool him with such a story.

“
I won’t loan you the money,” he said at last.

She shrugged and turned to go, as if this was no more than she had been expecting.

“
But you can earn it, if you want to.” He hardly knew where that thought had come from. It would take an unskilled worker as he suspected she was nearly a year to earn that sort of money. What could she do to earn such an amount in a short time?

She stared at him with suspicion lurking in her eyes, evidently thinking the same thing. “Doing what?”

His answer came out of nowhere, shocking him to the core even as he heard the words come out of his mouth. He hadn’t meant to say them. They were more the expression of a wish than anything more serious. “Come to bed with m
e tonight, and I’ll show you."