The CEO Buys in (Wager of Hearts #1) (3 page)

“Executive dining room,” the other woman said in her musical voice. “I’ll e-mail you the menu and phone number. Just tell them who the food is for and they’ll get it here fast.”

“Do you have any idea what he likes to eat?”

“Wish I could help, but Janice always handles that. He has cold beverages in his office refrigerator, so you don’t have to worry about those, at least.”

The promised e-mail appeared in her in-box. Scanning it, Chloe decided to go conservative and easy to prepare, although her mouth watered over lamb sausage on focaccia with chutney. However, she needed to be able to give him a choice of two. She would take the other one.

The executive dining room didn’t let her down. The sandwiches arrived in minutes and were accompanied by beautiful green, leafy salads, fresh fruit, and a bowl of multicolored chips that looked healthy. “Mr. Trainor likes the taro chips,” the young man who slid the tray onto her desk said. “And the chocolate chip cookies.” There was also a carafe of coffee that gave off a heavenly aroma.

She had no idea how to page the office Trainor had gone into, so she followed in his footsteps down the corridor and knocked on the open door. “Lunch is here,” she said, leaning in to see her boss with his hip propped on the low back of a chair as he scanned a piece of paper. A man wearing a boldly striped shirt and brilliant red tie watched him from behind a desk.

Trainor pushed away from the chair. “Phil, I’ll look this over after my meeting.”

Phil nodded. “It’s preliminary, but the numbers seem promising.”

“Agreed.” Trainor folded the paper in half and joined Chloe at the door, falling into step beside her as she walked back toward her desk. “Meetings and reports,” he muttered.

Chloe stopped by her desk. “Turkey and swiss, or roast beef and muenster?” she asked, gesturing toward the sandwiches.

He scooped the entire tray off the desk and headed into his office. “Join me.”

She stared after him. CEOs didn’t carry their own lunch trays or invite their temps to eat lunch with them. She realized that he’d disappeared from view so she jogged forward.

He set the tray on the conference table before pulling a chair out from the corner of the table and looking at her. She stopped again.

“Chloe,” he said, angling the chair with a touch of impatience.

“Oh, right.” She hurried across the expanse of plush carpeting and plunked ungracefully down into the oversize leather chair.

He lowered himself into the chair at right angles to hers and slid the tray so it was in front of him. “You believe in the classics,” he said, lifting the clear plastic lids off the plates.

The scent of balsamic vinaigrette wafting up from the salads made Chloe’s mouth water, but Nathan’s jaw seemed to tighten with distaste. She thought he looked a little queasy. “Do you mind if I have the turkey?” he asked.

“Of course not. I like red meat,” she said, taking the rejected roast beef. She glanced around the huge room, searching for the promised refrigerator. All she saw were bookcases and paneling. “I’ll get you something to drink if you tell me where you keep the beverages.”

“Ah, the hidden kitchenette,” he said, rising again. She started to protest when he held up his hand. “It’s easier to show you.” He walked to a section of paneling. “Third panel from the right. Press the side at about waist height and . . .” The paneling silently slid sideways to reveal the entrance to a small kitchen with dark-green granite countertops accenting elaborately grained wooden cabinets. “And the refrigerator is concealed behind this one,” he said, pressing the largest wooden door so it swung open to reveal neatly arranged cans and bottles. “Evidently, the fact that I might eat or drink in my office must be kept secret. What can I get you?”

“Water, please,” Chloe said, not sure how to react to his oddly whimsical mood. What she really wanted was the coffee, but she would wait until he had some.

He was sorting through the drinks. “Aha! They concealed it behind the Kauffman vodka. Who the hell stocks this thing, anyway?”

Chloe smiled tentatively when he returned to hand her the water. She waited until he was seated and had picked up his sandwich before grabbing her fork.

“Please,” he said, nodding for her to eat.

She plunged the fork into a perfect slice of tomato and brought it to her mouth. The flavor blossomed with a hearty, almost smoky, quality on her tongue. Not one of those vapid, store-bought atrocities. “Mmm,” she said involuntarily.

Trainor nodded, taking the first bite of his sandwich. He chewed slowly and swallowed without noticeable pleasure. Then he put the sandwich down and pushed the plate away.

“Is there something wrong with your food?” Chloe asked. “Should I order something else?”

“No.” He picked up the carafe of coffee. “Maybe this will help.”

He must have seen the longing in Chloe’s eyes, because he filled both mugs.

Chloe decided to get this strange interlude back on a business footing. “May I ask what sort of window dressing you need me to do?”

Trainor picked up his mug. “Your function is to be the guarantor of my integrity.”

“The what?” Chloe put down her fork.

He took a sip of coffee and leaned back in his chair. “This meeting is a favor to a friend. He’s got an associate who’s developed some new software he thinks will change the world of computing. He wants me to bring out his associate’s product under the Trainor Electronics umbrella. You’re here to prove I’m not stealing his idea.”

“How am I going to do that?” She felt as though she’d wandered through the looking glass.

“This is a meeting among friends, so I can’t ask to record it. You’re going to make it clear you’re taking notes. I’ll send him a transcript of your notes for his approval. There will be no question of what products and ideas we discussed, just in case he wants to claim intellectual property theft.”

Stunned, Chloe sat back. This was the flip side of what had happened to her father. In his case he’d worked for a corporation that had laid claim to all his inventions and the enormous profits they’d made from them without compensating him as he deserved. Nathan Trainor was making sure he didn’t get accused of stealing someone else’s ideas. “Have you had a problem with that before?”

“On occasion.” He took another swallow of coffee. He must have seen something unflattering in her expression, because his lips thinned. “I don’t need to steal other people’s ideas. I have one of the best R and D departments in the business.”

How many of his employees’ ideas had he taken as his own, and rewarded them with not a cent above their salaries? She went back to her sandwich. She wasn’t here to right the wrongs of the corporate world. She was just here to tide herself and Grandmillie over until she got another permanent position.

When she glanced back up at Trainor, he was cradling the coffee mug in his hands and gazing out the wall of windows where the sharp verticals of the Manhattan skyline sparkled against the brilliant blue autumn sky like a postcard. With his face turned toward the light, she noticed half circles of fatigue under his eyes. His dark eyebrows were drawn down in a scowl, and his mouth was set in a hard line.

Wanting to soften the bad mood she’d provoked, she pointed to a flat rectangular object enshrined in a Lucite case on the wall. It had loops of wire sticking out at all angles, and rows of metallic boxes marching across its face. It reminded her of some of the odd gadgets her father put together in his home workshop. “Is that modern art?”

He started before turning to follow the direction of her finger. “Not art. Electronics. That is the first Trainor XL battery ever made.”

Chloe dug into her memory for the quick summary Judith had given her when she’d assigned her to work at Trainor Electronics. “Didn’t you make it yourself? When you were really young?”

Surprise was written in his lifted eyebrows. “You know more about the company than most temps. Yes, I created it for my own use in a friend’s garage when I was a teenager.”

“So that’s the battery Trainor Electronics was founded on.” She put down her sandwich and got up to examine the artifact.

“Don’t get too close or you’ll be arrested for industrial espionage.”

Chloe took a giant step away from the battery and tucked her hands behind her back.

“That was a joke. The design secret is inside the casing so you can’t see it,” he said. “Although the battery’s kept in here for security reasons as well as historical interest.”

“So someone could steal it and reverse-engineer it to develop their own superbattery.”

“They could if they wanted to deal with the battalion of patent lawyers we’d unleash on them.” He stood up and walked over to stand beside her, his eyes on the prototype battery. A self-mocking smile turned up the corners of his mouth and carved lines in his cheeks. “Its value is more sentimental than real. It changed the direction of my life.”

He turned his head so their gazes met as he said, “It’s unusual to be able to mark a turning point so clearly.”

Chloe was held in thrall by the emotions roiling in his gray eyes and by the fascinating tilt of his lips. She pivoted back toward the battery because she didn’t want to see the man inside the CEO.

Chloe was typing the meeting notes when a tall brunette in a belted raincoat tried to breeze past her desk.

“May I help you?” Chloe asked in her best you-may-not-bother-the-boss tone.

The woman halted and made an impatient gesture. “Where’s Janice? She knows who I am.”

“Not available,” Chloe said. “May I ask your name?”

“Teresa Fogarty.”

Chloe checked Trainor’s schedule. “I’m sorry. I don’t see your appointment with him.”

The brunette gave her a tight, fake smile. “That’s because it’s a personal visit. We’re having dinner.”

“I’ll let him know you’ve arrived,” Chloe said, pushing the phone’s intercom button as the brunette started to protest. “Mr. Trainor, Ms. Teresa Fogarty is here to see you.”

There was no response and Chloe tried again. “Mr. Trainor, Ms. Teresa Fo—”

“I heard.” Trainor’s voice snapped like a whip through the headset. Chloe actually drew back from the phone console before he continued. “She can come in.”

When Chloe nodded to her, Ms. Fogarty flashed Chloe a triumphant look and turned on her heel. Which was shod in exactly the sort of high-heeled pump Chloe planned to wear tomorrow. Except Teresa’s heels had the red sole that labeled them as coming from a very expensive designer. As the superior Ms. Fogarty stalked into Trainor’s inner sanctum, Chloe rolled back from the desk and contemplated her simple, functional ballet flats. She sighed. She did like beautiful shoes.

She glided back in to finish the notes. Once that was done, she glanced at her watch and blew out a breath. If they were going to dinner, she wished they’d go, so she could get home to Grandmillie.

Courtesy brought Nathan to his feet as Teresa stormed through the doors into his office, her raincoat flapping open to show a deep red dress that clung to her body. That would have tempted him to run his hands down over her hips and up under her skirt until yesterday. Now he just wanted her out of his office.

“Nathan, you canceled our dinner date,” she said, shedding her coat and tossing it on a chair. She perched on the chair’s arm, crossing one long leg over the other so the narrow skirt rode up her thighs. The display had no effect on him. “Why?”

Her directness was one of the things he’d liked about her. Except now that he knew it wasn’t real, it seemed more abrasive than refreshing.

The hangover headache he’d been battling all day jabbed at his temples. He and his two new drinking buddies at the Bellwether Club had consumed more alcohol than he cared to remember. He considered blaming his hangover on Teresa, but he knew it was his own fault. As was the ridiculous wager he’d made with Luke Archer and Gavin Miller. He had fully expected one or the other to contact him today to call the whole thing off.

Now that he thought about it, he
could
blame the bet on Teresa. He walked around the desk to face her. “Since you’re here, we might as well—”

Her face lit up and she started to gather up her coat.

“—talk about the end of our relationship,” he finished.

Her expression hardened and her eyes sparked with temper. “I can’t believe you’re making such an issue out of the little joke I played when we met.”

“Maybe if you’d told me yourself,” he said, but he wasn’t sure that was true anymore. For a brief, gratifying moment, he’d believed that a beautiful, desirable woman had wanted him just as a man. Not as a billionaire. Not as a CEO. Not even as a supposed genius. “I value honesty.”

She stood up, her arms stretched out toward him. “I’m being deeply honest when I say that I am crazy in love with you.”

The curve of her arms was pure grace, the tilt of her head was pleading without groveling, and the timbre of her voice vibrated with emotion. Every nuance was so perfect that he realized he was seeing a very skillful act. If Chloe Russell were in the grip of an emotion as powerful as Teresa claimed to be, the feisty little temp would probably hurl herself at him and pound on his chest to make her point.

He wondered where that image had come from, even as he dismissed it.

“Was it money or a job you wanted?” he asked.

“I wanted
you
,” Teresa said in a throaty voice as she let her arms fall to her sides in an elegant arc.

“The company’s legal business?” He was angry at himself for being fooled by this woman.

“Why can you not believe I love you for yourself?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Teresa, you’re just digging a deeper hole.”

“I read an interview with you in a business magazine,” she said, dropping the mask of being insulted. “You said the rich don’t have the luxury of falling in love like normal human beings.”

“I don’t remember having a philosophical discussion about love with a journalist.”

“The article was dated about ten years ago. I was doing some research recently and found it.”

He cast back in his memory and came up blank. Evidently he’d been smarter about women but dumber about the press back then. “What were you researching?”

“Trainor Electronics. I was going to court your business.” She shook her hair back from her shoulders. “Only I found I wanted to court
you
instead. So I tried to create the illusion of falling in love like normal people. I thought you’d enjoy it.”

The problem was that he had enjoyed it. Far too much. “I don’t like illusions,” he said. “They’re just lies dressed up in fancy clothes.”

“So, that’s it?” she said. “You’re just cutting me out of your life after five months of intimacy?”

“I’ll send you a diamond bracelet as a parting gift,” he said.

She couldn’t hide the flare of greed in her eyes, even as she made a show of affronted virtue. “Keep your gift,” she said, swiping up her coat and stalking to the door before she looked over her shoulder. “If you handed it to me now, I’d throw it in your face.”

She slammed the door behind her.

He leaned back against his desk and rubbed his burning eyelids. The hangover and lack of sleep had probably made him harsher than he should have been. He’d send her the bracelet to salve his conscience. It would be interesting to see if she kept it.

His office door swung open a crack, and Chloe’s head with its prim bun appeared in it. “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Trainor, but do you want me to stay?”

He glanced at his watch, surprised to find that it was after six. The poor temp wasn’t used to working the longer hours of an executive assistant. “I’m sorry. You may go home. I assume they pay you extra for overtime.”

She nodded. “Flexitemps is very good to its employees. Good night.” Her head disappeared and the door closed softly.

The temp was a funny little thing. Her manners were flawlessly professional, but he got the feeling she disapproved of him. He didn’t mind as long as she continued to manage his phone calls and calendar as competently as she had today. He’d hold all the high-level work until Janice got back.

That reminded him of the notes she’d taken at the meeting. She said she’d e-mail them to him when they were finished. He’d better doctor them up while the meeting was still fresh in his mind. The technical jargon had been flying, and he was sure she hadn’t been able to keep up despite her mad scribbling.

Returning to his desk chair and finding the e-mail on his screen, he began to read. And read. And read. When he was done, he sat back, staring at the document in front of him in disbelief.

“Well, well, it looks like Flexitemps sent in a ringer.”

“Sorry I’m so late, Grandmillie.” Chloe bent to kiss her grandmother’s soft, wrinkled cheek. “I got promoted to executive assistant by the flu epidemic and had to work late.”

“I’m perfectly capable of fixing myself a bowl of soup, you know,” Grandmillie said.

“But I like to have someone to cook for,” Chloe said. She laughed as she put the takeout Thai food on the counter. “Or in this case, to buy for. When I walked past Boonsong, it smelled so good, I couldn’t resist.”

Grandmillie loved Thai food, but splurging on takeout was something they couldn’t often do. Since Chloe was getting a higher wage for the executive assistant position, she’d decided on the treat. And she was too tired to cook after her stressful day.

Her grandmother stood up and followed Chloe to the dining area, using her brightly decorated cane for balance. The oak table was already set with Grandmillie’s exquisite gold-rimmed wedding china. She said she couldn’t take it to the afterlife so they might as well use it here.

Once the food was served, Grandmillie said, “What executive are you working for?”

“The big cheese. Mr. Trainor himself,” Chloe said. “Mmm, this
pad see ew
is fantastic.”

“Is he pleasant to work for?”

Chloe took another bite and chewed as she thought about that. “He’s not
un
pleasant. I think he doesn’t believe I can do much since I’m just a temp, so he kept it pretty simple today.”

“That’s considerate of him.”

“I guess you could call it that.” Chloe put down her fork. “It got very interesting this evening, though. Right as I was finishing up some notes from a meeting, this tall brunette wearing the most gorgeous Louboutin heels waltzed in. She claimed she had a dinner date with him. When I got him on the intercom, he was clearly not happy about her arrival, but he told her to come in anyway.” She took a sip of water and leaned forward. “When she came out not long after, her face looked like a thundercloud. She stomped by my desk so hard I was afraid she was going to break the heels on those beautiful shoes.”

“Sounds like he canceled the date,” Grandmillie said, her blue eyes twinkling.

“She muttered something about a bracelet, but she wasn’t wearing one that I could see.”

“Don’t rich men give their mistresses jewelry when they end the relationship?” Grandmillie asked.

“I’m shocked. How do you know such a thing?” Chloe teased.

“I wasn’t born yesterday, dear. And I read Regency romances.”

In fact, Grandmillie was one shrewd cookie. She’d owned a bar with her ex-husband, even when he was ex. So she’d seen more of the gritty side of life than Chloe had.

“I don’t think she was his mistress, though,” Chloe said. “I’m pretty sure mistresses don’t come to their sugar daddy’s office during the workday. Unless they want to be ex-mistresses really fast.”

“Maybe that’s why he tossed her out,” Grandmillie said, pulling chicken satay off the skewer with her fork. “She broke the rules.”

“Technically speaking, wouldn’t he have to be married to have a mistress?”

“He’s not married?” Grandmillie’s attention became very focused. “How old is the man?”

“Pretty young for a CEO.” And pretty hot too. “He may be married, but I didn’t see a ring.”

“Google him on your phone,” her grandmother ordered.

Chloe kept eating. “He’s a billionaire. He’s not interested in a temporary assistant.”

“Not yet.” Grandmillie put down her fork and looked at Chloe.

“Fine.” Chloe got up and grabbed her handbag, digging her phone out of it and typing in Nathan Trainor’s name. She chose a basic bio that appeared up-to-date. “Not married. Never has been. That’s kind of weird.”

“Why, dear?” Her grandmother resumed her consumption of the satay.

“Because he’s so—” She’d been about to say “good looking” but decided she didn’t want to give her grandmother any additional ammunition. “—rich.”

“He just hasn’t met the right woman.” Grandmillie looked up. “Until now.”

Chloe smiled at the woman who believed the king of England would be lucky to marry her granddaughter. “You are so sweet.”

“Ha! The fellows trying to wheedle another drink out of me at closing time called me things that weren’t anywhere near ‘sweet.’ ”

“Well, I’ll do my best to persuade Nathan Trainor to ask me out to dinner and see if I like him well enough for a second date,” Chloe said, giving up.

“Just be yourself, dear, and he’ll figure it out.”

Chloe wondered how many dates you had to go on to get an expensive bracelet when you broke up. She could sell it and sock the money away in the bank.