Sidney Sheldon's Mistress of the Game (28 page)

Max shrugged. “I only know a few phrases, but I’m working on it. I figured, you know, we’re going to be working together for a while, so I should probably make the effort.”

He seems genuine. But why is he being so nice and reasonable all of a sudden?

“So did he?”

“What?”

“Try to sleep with you?”

“No!
Well, kind of. Maybe a little bit.” Lexi found she was smiling despite herself. “Our friend Antonio evidently thinks of himself as quite the catch.”

“How old is he?”

“Sixty-five? Seventy maybe?”

“Dirty old goat.”

Lexi was surprised to find she was enjoying herself. Sitting in this divine, romantic spot with her lifelong enemy, the evening seemed to be flying by.

The wine arrived, along with two Tuscan bread salads. Before long, Lexi was happily tipsy. Max kept her amused with stories of doom and gloom in the Internet division.

“The only person who’s gonna get a bonus this year is whoever wins the Jim Bruton Divorce Case Sweepstakes. His wife’s finally leaving him, and the whole division’s put money on how much she’ll get.”

“That’s terrible! Poor man.” Lexi giggled.

“Poor man, my ass. He had two kids with another woman and never paid a cent for either of them. When you’re chairman, you should fire him.”

Lexi sobered up immediately. Had she read his lips correctly?

“What did you say?”

“I said when you’re chairman, you should can Jim Bruton. Come on.” Max stood up, gallantly offering her his hand. “Let’s go inside and talk. It’s getting cold out here.”

The hotel lounge and bar were both full, so they went back to Lexi’s junior suite. Opening onto the gardens, it had its own private terrace as well as a study and separate living room, complete with antique Italian furniture and roaring log fire. Max fixed them both a whiskey from the minibar and sat down on the couch next to Lexi.

“Look. Starfish wasn’t the real reason I came here. At least, it wasn’t the only reason.”

Watching his lips move, Lexi felt a powerful urge to lean forward and kiss them.

I must be drunker than I thought
. She put down her whiskey.

“Go on.”

“I want to call a truce.”

For almost a minute, Lexi was silent. The entire evening had been surreal. August’s no-show, Max turning up out of thin air, his uncharacteristic charm offensive. Now he was talking about truces? Finally, she said: “Why?”

Max smiled. “I’m not going to lie to you, Lexi. I want the chairmanship as badly as you do. I always have. But I recognize that’s now unlikely to happen.” When Lexi didn’t respond, he went on. “Kate Blackwell hated my mother. I don’t know why, but she did. And I hated her for that, even though she died before I was born.”

“Max.”

“Let me finish. Because Kate’s will tried to lock me out of Kruger-Brent, I felt I had something to prove. I didn’t see why I should roll over and let them hand the company to you on a plate.”

“Kate’s intention was to hand it to Robbie on a plate,” Lexi reminded him. “I’ve had to fight for a seat at the table, too, you know.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here.” Max took her hand in his. His palm was warm and dry. Lexi felt a pulse begin to throb between her legs. It was making it hard to concentrate. She swallowed hard.

Max said: “We’re not kids anymore, Lexi. It’s time we both stopped acting like kids. Kruger-Brent means everything to me. Everything.”
There were tears in his eyes. “If…
when
you take control at the company, you’re going to have some tough challenges ahead. You’re going to need people around you that you can trust.”

Trust
and
Max
were two words that, until this moment, Lexi had never had cause to put together in a sentence. Was it possible that he really
had
grown up? She wanted to believe it. And yet…

“I don’t know what to say. That’s—that’s very generous of you.”

“You know our market cap dropped almost twenty percent last year.” There was a flash of something that looked like anger in Max’s black eyes. “Tristram Harwood’s a dinosaur. He has no idea what he’s doing, no vision, no game plan.”

Lexi nodded quietly. “I know.”

“So what do you think? Do you want to try playing on the same team for a change?”

Max’s leg was touching hers. Lexi could see the outline of his thigh muscle beneath the thin cotton of his pants, lean and strong.

I think I want to see you naked.

I think I want you in my bed tonight.

I think I definitely had too much wine at dinner.

“Sure.” She smiled back at him. “Why not?”

That night in bed, Lexi lay awake, staring at the ceiling. Was Max for real? If anyone had asked her that question twenty-four hours ago, she’d probably have laughed in his face. Her and Max Webster, a team? And yet he did seem sincere. She cast her mind back over the last few months at Kruger-Brent. Max had supported her in that crucial board vote over the new share issue. And he hadn’t said a word about her new, larger office space. Was it possible she’d misjudged him? Or was sexual frustration clouding her judgment now?

She’d thought that the roar of her libido would fade once the effects of the alcohol wore off. But now, hours later, her leg still burned from where Max’s thigh had brushed against it, and the lemon scent of his cologne lingered deliciously on her skin.
Goddamn him. Why did he have to come here?

Lexi had had scores of lovers in her life. Perhaps even hundreds. But she realized tonight that none of them meant anything to her.
I never wanted any of them. Not really. Deep down, it’s always been Max.

Closing her eyes, she slowly moved her hands down her warm, naked body. She cupped her breasts, then let her fingertips graze the soft,
flat expanse of her belly. Finally, tentatively, she began to stroke the hot, silky wetness between her legs.

She pictured Max’s lips moving:

Kruger-Brent means everything to me…I want the chairmanship…but it’s not going to happen.

Her fingers worked faster, more rhythmically.

I’ve beaten him.

I’ve won.

She imagined Max on top of her, inside her. She imagined them as one.

Kruger-Brent is mine.

She gasped, her body racked by a series of shudders as the orgasm ripped through her.

Oh God, Max. I want you.

From a pay phone at Taoyuan International Airport in Taiwan, August Sandford bellowed at his secretary.

“It’s not good enough, Karen! I flew halfway across the world for this damn meeting, only to have Mr. Li tell me that the stupid hotel is no longer for sale.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Sandford. I don’t understand how the wires could have gotten crossed. His secretary confirmed the meeting to me only yesterday. She said they had another bidder and it was vital that you fly out right away.”

August slammed down the receiver, too angry to speak. Thanks to this wild-goose chase, he’d had to cancel two important client meetings in Europe, not to mention his rendezvous with Lexi.

Then a strange thought struck him.

His secretary confirmed the meeting…she said they had another bidder.

August met with Mr. Li’s secretary less than an hour ago.

Mr. Li’s secretary was a man.

Eve called Max while he was driving.

“Did you see her?”

“Yes, Mother. I saw her.”

“You played it the way we discussed?”

“Yes.”

“And? Do you think she trusts you?”

Max thought about this for a moment. He remembered the way that Lexi’s pupils had dilated when he took her hand; the heat when their legs had touched. There was something new between them, all right. But he wouldn’t necessarily call it trust.

“I think she’s starting to.”

Eve sensed the hesitation in his voice. She asked him sharply: “You didn’t sleep with her, did you?”

“No, Mother. Of course not.”

“Good.” Eve sounded mollified. “You’ll have to eventually, of course. But not yet. It’s too soon.”

Max hung up feeling uneasy. He pictured his mother pacing their New York apartment in her silk robe, a caged tigress waiting for him to return from the hunt. Things had gone better than he’d expected with Lexi this evening. But still. His discussion with Eve last week was vividly branded in his memory. The tension in her voice, the pent-up rage coiled inside her body, ready to burst through the skin.

It’s your last chance, Max. Our last chance! That bitch is going to take Kruger-Brent from us. You have to
do
something!

I will Mother. Don’t worry. I will.

But would he?
Could
he?

What if he failed?

Swerving to the side of the road, he stopped the car and fumbled in the glove box. Pulling out a clear plastic pillbox and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, he swallowed four Xanax, washing them down with the raw, scorching liquor.

I won’t fail you, Mother.

I promise.

T
WENTY
-O
NE

IT SEEMED TO LEXI THAT THE NEXT YEAR WENT BY IN A blink.

She had a natural flair for real estate. Kate Blackwell always believed that an instinctive feel for a market was worth a hundred MBAs. Lexi agreed. It wasn’t Harvard that had given her a nose for business. Business was in her blood. She lived for the high of clinching deals, thriving on stress and tension the way that other people thrived on eight hours’ sleep and regular meals. Kruger-Brent’s real-estate holdings were enormous and growing all the time. It was such an exciting sector, it was easy to forget that it was just one of hundreds of industries that the company was involved in.

As Max’s and Lexi’s twenty-fifth birthdays moved ever closer, Kruger-Brent’s ten-man board of directors decided that they should both spend some time learning the ropes of
all
of the company’s myriad business areas.

“It’s important that you feel intimately familiar with every aspect of the firm.” Tristram Harwood addressed his remarks to the two of them, but by this point, both Lexi and Max knew that “you” meant Lexi.

“I daresay you feel you’ve grown up here and that you know the business inside out. But you might be surprised by just how vast your empire really is.”

“Patronizing old fossil,” said Max as they left the office.

“He’s pathetic,” agreed Lexi. “Our
empire
indeed.”

But Tristram Harwood was right. Kruger-Brent
was
an empire. And Lexi
was
surprised. Flying back and forth across the globe like a deranged bat, visiting the company offices in India and Russia, Prague and Hong Kong, Dublin and Dubai, it dawned on her that to run Kruger-Brent she must be more than just a brilliant businesswoman. Much more. She must be a stateswoman. A diplomat. A general. She must lead, of course, but she must also delegate. Kruger-Brent was infinitely too huge to be managed by one human being. For the first time, she saw for herself just how important it would be to have a team of people around her whom she trusted implicitly.

August Sandford. He’s a pain in the ass, but I trust August.

And Max, of course.

Since Lexi’s return from Italy, there had been a sea change in Max. At work, he was helpful, respectful and relaxed. Where once Lexi would have gone to August Sandford with her problems, she now used Max as a sounding board. When she visited a microchip-manufacturing subsidiary in India and found that the managers there could not understand her when she spoke, despite their fluent English, she was mortified.

They looked at me like I had just landed from Mars.
Lexi poured her heart out in a late-night e-mail to Max.
I felt like such a fool. All these years people have been telling me my speaking voice is fine. But it’s bullshit. I obviously sounded like a deaf, slurring freak to these guys.

Max responded calmly. Indian English and American English were not the same thing. They’d probably have looked at him the same way. Lexi should travel with a signing interpreter as well as a regular language interpreter, just in case. No big deal.

It was exactly what Lexi needed to hear.

The sexual tension between them grew daily. Max infuriated Lexi by blowing hot and cold. It was the one element of his character that continued to perplex her. One minute she felt sure he was about to make a move. The next he switched, and started acting all brotherly toward her. Used to men dropping at her feet like flies, Lexi had no idea how to handle Max’s hard-to-get routine. She dated other guys—discreetly; now was not the time to reignite the party-girl rumors—but found the sex to be utterly unsatisfying. The thought crossed her mind that she might be in love with her cousin, but she quickly pushed it aside.

I don’t have time for love. There’s too much to do at Kruger-Brent.

Lexi’s world tour opened her eyes to the grievous problems the
company was facing. Unquestionably, the biggest issue was size. Kruger-Brent was too big. Under Kate Blackwell’s leadership, the firm had swallowed every competitor it came across like Pac-Man, regardless of its fit with the rest of the group’s businesses. In the two years before Kate Blackwell’s death, Kruger-Brent became the proud owner of a diamond mine in Zaire, a children’s book publisher in Scotland, a biotech research firm in Connecticut and a swath of Brazilian rain forest approximately the size of Pennsylvania, to name only four of Kate’s scores of acquisitions.

Lexi’s great-grandmother had been master of the game of business. But the game had changed.

When I’m chairman, I’ll be playing by new rules. We need to be leaner. Fitter. Faster. Or we won’t survive.

Lexi knew she wanted to grow the real-estate business. Oil and gas would also be crucial. Her most recent trip to Africa had strengthened her growing belief that the continent, with its wealth of land and natural resources, might well hold the key to Kruger-Brent’s future. Just as it had once held the key to its past.