Люси Монро – Takeover In The Boardroom: An Heiress for His Empire (страница 13)

“Max was part of your father’s deal?” Romi demanded in a tone a couple of registers above her normal one.

All of Maddie’s humor fled. “You know Maxwell.”

Silence. “A little.”

“More than a little if you call him Max.”

“We went out a few times.”

“You never told me.”

“It’s no big deal.” But, threaded with vulnerability, Romi’s tone said otherwise.

Maddie warned, “I think he found Perry’s claims about our supposed sex life intriguing.”

“I know.”

“You what?” Maddie practically screeched, her own problems forgotten for the moment. “How do you know that?”

“Do you really need me to spell it out for you?”

“You’re still a virgin.”

Romi had said so and the woman might be a hyperactive, borderline political anarchist and more than a little eclectic in her dress style, but she never lied.

“Technically, that is true.”

“Technically?” Maddie drew the word out.

“Look, Maddie, I don’t want to talk about it.” Vulnerability now saturated Romi’s voice, defenselessness that Maddie could not ignore.

“Okay, sweetie. But I’m here for you. You know that, right?”

“Always. SBC.”

“SBC.” Sisters by choice.

Maddie’s mom had called them that the first time when she was explaining to the elementary school principal why the girls would do better with the same kindergarten teacher.

He’d refused to change their assignments and Helene Archer had called in the big guns.

It was the only time Maddie could remember her father stepping foot in her grade school. Mr. Grayson had come down, too, threatening to withdraw his company’s support from the prestigious private school.

Romi and Maddie had never been assigned different classrooms again.

They had shared everything, including their grief at the loss of the only mother either girl had ever known when Helene Archer’s speedboat had crashed into rocks invisible under the moonless sky.

Maddie hadn’t gotten her propensity for risky behavior from nowhere.

She understood now that her mother’s increasingly erratic behavior had been Helene’s way of crying out for help. Help neither Maddie, nor her father, realized Helene needed.

It was a failure Maddie was still coming to terms with.

* * *

Vik’s text came in at ten minutes to three.

He was on a conference call he could not reschedule, but two bodyguards would be at her door in a few minutes. They had AIH indigo-level security IDs and she was not to open the door unless she saw the familiar badges through her peephole.

Specially trained for protecting people rather than corporate property and secrets, the indigo team was her father’s personal security detail. It used to be hers, too. Wanting to live as normal a life as possible, Maddie had refused to be assigned bodyguards when she moved out of the family mansion.

Her father had argued, but ultimately given in.

She didn’t think Vik would be as easily swayed. If he thought Maddie needed a bodyguard for her security, she’d have one.

The same way the company’s on-site security system had been upgraded because Vik deemed it necessary. Her father had been all for it, though.

Nothing was too good for Archer International Holdings.

The limo was waiting in front of the elevator bank in the parking garage. Thankfully, no enterprising reporter had managed to keep vigil. Which probably had less to do with the parking garage guards than the two additional indigo-badge bodyguards standing at attention on either side of the elevator doors.

One of them stepped forward to open the door to the limo and she stepped inside, only then realizing that Vik had taken the conference call on his mobile.

Every dark hair perfectly in place, his designer suit immaculate, he nodded at her while carrying on a conversation in Japanese.

His words did not falter, his Japanese smooth and unhesitating, and yet she felt the weight of his full regard. Like his attention was fully on her.

Like she mattered.

Succumbing to the desire to sit beside him, Maddie settled onto the smooth leather seat across from AIH’s media fixer. Relieved that none of the bodyguards had instructions to join them in the back of the limo, she was still grateful the other occupant gave her an excuse to give in to the irresistible urge.

The need to be near Vik was verging on ungovernable, just like it had been six years ago.

Maddie wanted to chalk it up to the exceptional circumstances. She just wasn’t sure she could.

Which was not enough of a caution to move to the other seat. There was simply no comparison between Vik and Conrad, who until that morning she had found slightly annoying but now considered flat-out obnoxious.

The PR guru took a break from typing madly on his tablet to silently acknowledge her. If his smile looked more like a grimace, she wasn’t interested enough in interacting with him to call him on it.

Besides, Perry’s fake exposé had triggered an ugly media frenzy beyond anything Maddie had ever experienced for her far more innocent escapades.

There was even speculation now that some of her riskier endeavors had been the result of orders from her master. That wasn’t even the worst of it. Maddie did not know how a virgin could be labeled a sex addict with obvious intimacy issues, but she’d stopped reading her Google alerts after that headline.

The limo had exited the parking garage and pulled away from her building when Vik ended his phone call.

“Are you okay?” he asked Maddie.

Honesty would reveal a level of vulnerability she wasn’t comfortable sharing with Vik, much less Conrad. She had no idea how her life had spun out of control so fast.

And Perrygate was only part of it. Her father’s ultimatum and the realization their relationship would never be what she wanted had been followed too closely by the equally alarming, if for different reasons, acknowledgment that she was actually considering marrying her girlhood crush.

“I’m fine.”

“Good,” Conrad said, as if he’d asked the question. “Containing this media bloodbath is going to take serious effort and you need to be on your top game.”

He didn’t have to tell her. Maddie had spent the time since Vik had dropped her off earlier worrying about what would happen if she couldn’t reclaim her reputation.

The all too real prospect of losing her dreams of opening a small charter school tightened Maddie’s throat, so she just nodded.

Once the media started looking more closely at Maddie’s life, her alter ego was bound to come to light and the probability of losing her volunteer position was pretty much guaranteed.

While she enjoyed the anonymity of her Maddie Grace persona, she’d only taken rudimentary steps to keep her two lives separate. She wasn’t James Bond, after all, just a socialite who craved time contributing as a normal person.

The only reason no one had cottoned on to Maddie Grace and Madison Archer being the same person before was that the news simply wasn’t all that interesting. Or it hadn’t been.

Her notoriety as Madcap Madison had been of the innocent variety, good for filler pieces in the social columns, but not salacious enough to really impact circulation numbers. Therefore she had not been interesting enough to be targeted by any serious digging.

She’d no doubt reporters were getting out their sharpest spades now. Perrygate was all that and a bag of chips for the gossipmongers.

The most painful part of Maddie’s predicament was that it wasn’t just her dreams on the line here; Romi was equally invested in the charter school.

Vik sent a text and then pocketed his phone. “Our lack of an immediate response opened the door to other spurious claims from supposed former lovers.”

Vik gave Conrad a look that left no doubt exactly who the VP of Operations for AIH blamed for that mistake.

Maddie felt no smugness at the media fixer being so obviously in the doghouse with Vik. Her life was too out of control to harbor even a hint of that, but she couldn’t help the small thrill of pleasure at him taking her side.

From the moment he’d stepped in and ordered Conrad’s cooperation that morning, Maddie had known she wasn’t alone in facing the painful consequences of her onetime friend’s betrayal.