Kat Cantrell – Wrong Brother, Right Man (страница 3)
They stared at each other until she nodded once. “I can appreciate the need to clear this up prior to working together. For your information, I broke up with Xavier, if you can call it that. We didn’t date that long and were never serious.”
Long enough for Xavier to introduce her to his brother. Of course, thinking over it, Val had run into them at Harlow House, while he’d been on a date of his own, earlier in the summer. Or it might have been May-ish. He’d been seeing Miranda then, who had some wicked moves between the sheets, so Val could be forgiven for failing to precisely recall the circumstances of his first meeting with Sabrina.
“So, you’re in the market for a real man this go around, are you?”
That fell so flat he started looking for a spatula to scrape himself off the carpet.
“If you’re flirting with me, you can stop,” she informed him, and that did not help the temperature.
She didn’t like having to spell it out, that much was clear from her expression. What, she didn’t look in the mirror in the morning? Sabrina was a beautiful woman, dressed to the nines in mouthwatering nylons that begged to be peeled from her body by a man’s teeth. Val could no more stop being turned on by the challenges she threw down than he could stop the sun.
“If there’s a question about that, I’m doing something wrong,” he muttered. “But okay. I’ll reel back the charm. For now.”
She hiked an eyebrow nearly to her cinnamon-colored hairline. “This was charming?”
There was no way to hold back the laugh, so he didn’t bother. Sabrina was a piece of work all right, and he was starting to see why things hadn’t gone so well with Xavier. But Val wasn’t his brother, who bled dollar signs and slept with his bottom line. “Touché. I’ll work on my delivery.”
“You should work on your CEO costume first. You can try on your Romeo act on your own time. After we get you that inheritance.”
Ms. Corbin had a touch of pit bull, which Val appreciated in someone paid to help him succeed. And maybe in a woman he was planning to get naked eventually too. Jury was still out on that one.
All at once, a fair bit of curiosity surfaced about her goal for this gig. “Are you hoping I’ll share?”
“Not on my radar. Winning is.”
And that told him enough to know that he liked her on his side, not his brother’s. If winning was what turned her on, then he was game. He had something to prove to everyone, even if one of the people who most deserved to eat crow was dead. “Great. Where do we start?”
The look she slid over the length of his torso put a little fire in his belly, a total paradox given the chill still weighing down the air. Even that was more of a turn-on than it should have been, and he was sorry the desk was in the way of her line of sight. He’d be happy to let her stare at him if she wanted to.
“For one, you need a makeover,” she announced with zero fanfare.
Speaking of things not being on the radar... He glanced at his untucked button-down, sleeves rolled up the forearms. Which was comfortable and necessary attire when transferring boxes of macaroni and cheese from the stock room to the kitchen. “What’s wrong with the current me?”
“Dress the part,” she advised, “and you’re halfway there. Act the part and you’re at ninety.”
That sounded suspiciously like business-school rhetoric, something he could do without. Val had never faked anything in his life. “What’s the other ten percent?”
“Show up.”
“Got that locked. I work hard.” He sat back in his chair—
There was something fundamentally wrong with Sabrina because a
She kept her face composed through sheer force of will and years of practice. Men of his ilk didn’t take a woman seriously unless she had an iron backbone and an immunity to all forms of flirting. Sabrina had both. Valentino LeBlanc had started testing out her weaknesses sooner than she’d expected, but she’d get through to him. Eventually.
Lazily, he spun his chair as he contemplated her, his dark blue eyes a startling warm contrast to Xavier’s. She only vaguely recalled meeting Val a few months ago, and before she’d walked into the CEO’s office, she’d have said he was the boring brother, the one everyone forgot about.
She’d have been wrong. Shocking, uncomfortable awareness of him had ambushed her from the first.
Because Val was now sitting behind the desk? It was no secret that she’d always been attracted to powerful men. Xavier had checked all her boxes. He was a good-looking man who commanded people’s respect by virtue of his presence alone. You could tell he helmed a vast corporation the moment you looked at him. Authoritative and decisive, he ate weaker people for breakfast, and he was perfect for someone who liked her men unemotional.
Emotions ruined everything, especially when they were hers.
Xavier was exactly her type: a man who could provide plus-one services, interesting conversation, and the occasional sleepover without either one getting the wrong idea. Though she hadn’t gotten that far with Xavier. Instead, she’d lost interest in him almost immediately. Case in point: the moment he’d walked out of the CEO’s office a few minutes ago, she’d forgotten about him.
Valentino LeBlanc checked none of her boxes. Sensuality wafted from him in a long wave that caught her in places it shouldn’t. His hair was too long, his lips too full and his eyes—they had a depth that she’d have never considered attractive. Vulnerability was for losers. But he carried himself in a way that promised there was more to him than the ability to feel things.
Val tilted his chin, and long, inky strands of hair fell against his cheeks. Her fingers itched to sweep it away.
“And you should get a haircut,” she told him decisively. Back on track. Finally.
“Eating is more than a basic need, by the way,” he said, deliberately not letting her change the subject. “I know a lot about food. How it can control you. How the lack of it can cause you to do things you’d never contemplate under normal circumstances. But, in the right scenario, it can become a form of expression. Art. Let me cook for you.”
That did not sound appealing in the slightest. It didn’t. Except for maybe the spaghetti sauce, the seduction and the part where a man would be between her legs. She sighed. It had been too long since she’d had a date. Clearly. But, even so, she’d never been a sex-on-the-counter type. It was too...passionate.
She worked hard not to inspire that kind of abandon in a man. Hell, she didn’t even know if that was in her own makeup, nor did she want to find out.
“I’m here to do a job, Mr. LeBlanc.”
She needed clients, not a man she’d have to shed sooner rather than later. They all cheated eventually, and she enjoyed men enough to date them but not to hang around for the eventual evisceration. Her father should have been enough of a warning, with his multiple affairs that had hurt her mother over and over. She scarcely spoke to her father anymore and she was still too mad at her mother for putting up with it to have much of a relationship with her either.
And then her ex, John...well, he was a man, wasn’t he? Suffice to say she wasn’t repeating
“Food is my job,” he told her and waved a hand to encompass the whole of the office. “This is temporary. A speed bump on the way to my inheritance.”
“Which you will not get if we don’t shift things into your favor,” she reminded him and stood. “Perhaps we should take a tour of the company. Learn some people’s names.”
He didn’t move. “I know where accounting is and how to find the bathroom. So I’m good. If we’re going to work together, I should probably know more things about
Fair enough. And she’d practiced her intro enough times to do it while half-asleep. “I’ve been an executive coach for five years, and I worked as a corporate trainer for a Fortune 500 company before that. I’ve worked with the CEO of Evermore and the CFO of DGM Enterprises. I like to knit, and my uncle collects antique cars, so sometimes I go to shows with him on weekends.”
“That’s funny. That’s exactly what the bio on your website says.” Val’s smile had a tinge of smirk in it. Too much of one. “Curious. Did you stick knitting in there because it’s in vogue?”