Temptation In The Boardroom: Tempted by Her Billionaire Boss / Beware of the Boss / Promoted to Wife?

“Why?” she asked, with her newly granted ability to question. “Those are really smart, creative ideas that work for the target audience. Isn’t that key to growing a brand?”

He nodded, his dark lashes coming down to veil his gaze. “But I think it’s overkill in this case.”

They moved on to the next section of ideas the marketing team had grouped as “core must-haves.” The first point included ads in trade publications. “Take that out,” Harrison instructed. Now she really didn’t understand. When Josh had gone through the ideas with her he had told her advertising was key to creating mass awareness for a product. “If nobody in the North American market knows about Siberius’s cool products,” she asked, “how are you going to expand its base?”

He gave her a pained look. “Expanding Siberius’s base isn’t an important priority for us right now. It’s doing fine in the strength areas it currently occupies.”

This was hurting her brain. She put her laptop down and eyed him contemplatively. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we supposed to be selling Leonid on how Siberius will flourish within Grant International? Encouraging him we are the right way to go? He said he had innovative products no one else has. How do we promote those?”

“Every company says they have innovative products,” he bit out impatiently. “I am conscious of not setting unrealistic expectations when anything could happen when the board gets ahold of this deal.”

She frowned. “But of course they’ll support the plan if this is the only way you can get Leonid to sign. They’ll have no choice.”

“That’s an idealistic way to look at it, but the reality is they’ll do what makes business sense. I can only make suggestions. In scenarios like this when we’re acquiring similar resources, the board will likely force us to streamline the two companies into one. It’s doubtful Siberius will be left standing as its former entity.”

“So why are we spending all this time doing a plan?” The words were hardly out of her mouth before it hit her. Harrison had no intention of keeping Siberius intact. He was going to lure Leonid in with this plan and dismantle Siberius when it was done.

Every bone in her body hated the idea. The company had belonged to Leonid’s father. He wanted his legacy preserved. That had been his whole hesitation in signing.

She eyed him. “It’s a bait and switch.”

The impatience in his gaze devolved into a dark storm brewing. “No,” he rejected in a lethally quiet voice. “I made a promise to Leonid to do what I can to see Siberius preserved. It is beyond my or any other CEO’s control to promise him it will remain intact when business realities say it won’t.”

Yet he wasn’t even giving the company a fighting chance with this plan. She lifted her chin. “I see.”

“Francesca...”

She shook her head. This was the part where she needed to stop talking because it got her into trouble. “Let’s keep going,” she said quietly, looking down at her screen. “Where were we?”

“Francesca,” he growled. “This is business. Put the self-righteous look away and be a big girl. You have no idea of the stakes here.”

The “big girl” remark did it for her. She looked up at him, eyes spitting fire. “Dictate to me what you want in this plan and I will do it. But do not ask me to say that this is right.”

“It is right.” His ebony gaze sat on her with furious heat. “This is the law of the jungle. Only the fittest survive.”

“In your world,” she said evenly. “Not in mine.”

“And what would your world have me do? Allow some other predator to snap Siberius up because I’m the one stupid enough to tell Leonid the truth? Not happening.”

“I believe in karma,” Frankie said stubbornly. “I know what a good man Leonid is. He’s putting his trust in you.”

The fury in his eyes channeled into a livid black heat that was so focused, so intense, it scorched her skin. “I know all about karma, Francesca. I know more about it than you will ever want to know in your lifetime. Trust me on that.”

She watched with apprehensive eyes as he got up, paced to the railing and looked out at the fading light of New York. Having him ten feet away allowed her to pull in some air and compose herself. This job meant everything to her; she was proving she could make it on her own. But so did the principles upon which she’d been brought up.

“I’m not trying to be difficult,” she said quietly to his back. “But my father taught me to treasure my ethics at all costs. That if I was ever in a situation that would make it hard for me to sleep at night, maybe I shouldn’t be a part of it.”

He turned around, leaned back against the railing and rested his elbows on it. His anger had shifted into a cold, hard nothingness that was possibly even more disconcerting than the fury.

The chill directed itself her way. “Although my grandfather built Grant Industries, it was my father who had the foresight and brilliance to modernize its methods and transform Grant from a successful but stagnant regional player in the American auto industry to a force to be reckoned with worldwide. He spent every minute of his life at the office, sacrificed everything for the company and eventually it paid off. When I was ten, my father came home one night with a big smile on his face and told us Grant Industries had made the list of the one hundred most profitable companies in America.” He lifted a brow. “Imagine. Coburn and I were only eight and ten—but we got that, we got what that meant.”

She nodded. Wondered why he was telling her this.

“As soon as we finished university, Coburn and I joined the business. It was in our blood just like it was in our father’s. We had the bug. But neither of us ever expected to take on the mantle so soon.”

Because his father had killed himself.

Her insides knotted, a cold, hard ball at the core of her. The skin on his face stretched taut across his aristocratic cheekbones, a blank expression filling his eyes. “One day my father’s usual superhuman working day stretched into two. Then three. He looked like a wreck. He would go into the office, put his engineering teams through crazy all-night sessions, then come home and sleep it off. At first we weren’t too concerned—it wasn’t unlike him to be tunnel-visioned when he was working on a project. But the pattern started getting more and more frequent. More dramatic. One particular night, he came home and he was talking so fast none of us could understand him. We couldn’t get him to rest so we called a doctor. He was diagnosed that night as a manic depressive.”

Her heart went into free fall. “How old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Oh, Harrison.” She went to get up but he held out a hand, staying her.

“His condition got progressively worse as the years went on. The stress of success and the accompanying pressure made the cycles more acute, sent him into longer bouts of mania. My mother had to focus entirely on keeping him well and ensuring his condition was kept under wraps so the press, the shareholders, didn’t catch on.”

To the detriment of her boys’ emotional well-being.

“We thought we had his condition under control after handling it for two decades. Then my father made a deal with Anton Markovic to buy one of his Russian-based companies.”

Anton Markovic? The sadistic oligarch Juliana didn’t like in her house?

For the first time since he’d starting speaking, a flare of emotion moved through his dark gaze. “My father saw the potential in a post-Communist era and knew it would only grow. Buying Markovic’s company was supposed to cement Grant as the most powerful auto parts manufacturer in the world. Except Markovic sold us a false-bottomed company that was on the verge of bankruptcy. Under normal circumstances, Grant would have easily absorbed the hit but we were overexposed at the time, in the midst of leveraging capital for an expansion. As a result, the debt from the deal almost crippled us.”

She tried to absorb all the information he was throwing at her. “Couldn’t you have gone to the courts?”

“We did. His holding company was bankrupt by then.”

She swallowed hard, not sure she wanted to know where the story went after this. The emotion in his eyes became hard to watch. “Coburn and I told him it’d be fine. We’d rebuild ourselves stronger than ever. But the miscue threw him into a depressive state he couldn’t pull himself out of. There was also the stress of his impending race for governor of New York.” His lashes swept down over his cheeks. “My mother left the house for a half hour one day, thinking he was asleep. I came home to find he’d shot himself.”

Oh, my God. Her heart broke into a million pieces. It was public knowledge that Clifford Grant had shot himself at the family residence. But to find your father like that, by yourself? This time she did get up and walked over to him, setting her hand on his bicep.

“I am so sorry, Harrison.”

He looked down at her hand as if it was an intrusive appendage that had crept into his lair and threatened his solitary confinement. She could feel the emotion he declared he didn’t have vibrating through him. Then his eyes hardened until they resembled an exotic, impenetrable rock, polished by the elements he’d endured until there were no cracks, no dents, just icy determination. “I’m not looking for your pity, Francesca. I told you this because I need you at my side with this deal. I need you to understand where I’m coming from. Acquiring Siberius is the final piece in my plan to cut Anton Markovic off at the knees for what he did to my father. The company is valuable to me only because it supplies Markovic with vital instruments.”

Understanding dawned. Suddenly all of it—Harrison, Coburn, the way they both were—it all made sense. Coburn spent his days running from the truth, Harrison pursuing vengeance.

He wanted her on board so he could land this deal and finish Markovic. Collateral damage in Leonid was inconsequential.

“So we finish the presentation, he signs and it’s done. What does this have to do with me?”

His expression was implacable. “I need you to be a part of this until he signs. Leonid likes you. Kaminski likes you. You will smooth out the rough edges.”

She turned to look out at the park. It was lit by the skyscrapers surrounding it, a beautiful oasis in a cutthroat city of deal makers. It wasn’t lost on her that Leonid was a cutthroat businessman himself who undoubtedly had his share of blood on his hands. No one in a position of power could avoid the gray areas. It was the gray that defined you.

But it was the emotion she’d just seen in Harrison’s eyes that clutched at her heart. A raw incomplete grief that was as present now as it had been when Anton Markovic had torn out his heart.

Dampness attacked the corners of her eyes. She blinked it back and did what her father had always taught her to do. She went with her gut. And perhaps a large slice of emotion. Because no human being should ever have to go through what Harrison had without making it right.

She turned to him and nodded. “Let’s get back to work, then.”

His gaze darkened. “I’m an honorable man, Francesca. I will keep my promise to Leonid if I can. But it will ultimately be up to the board.”

She hoped he could. But sometimes a need for vengeance could wreak havoc on such honor.

CHAPTER EIGHT

HARRISON WAS HAVING trouble sleeping. Dawn was breaking across Manhattan, a vibrant ribbon of burnt orange stretching low across the skyline, casting the base of the skyscrapers in a mist of shimmering fire. It mirrored the turmoil inside of him, the slow burn that threatened to engulf him.

He’d had maybe three, four restless hours of unconsciousness before he’d abandoned his bed and greeted the morning. There was too much on his brain, too much to accomplish, too many decisions that impacted too many people.

He watched the sun, a bright ball of fire, penetrate the mist and make its way into the sky. Today was the day Leonid Aristov would either cement or destroy his seven-year plan to wipe Anton Markovic’s empire from the face of the earth. To do that, he must stretch the truth, make a man believe something that was quite likely not possible.

It was eating at him. Plaguing him. He grimaced and set his elbows on the smooth limestone ledge that bounded the terrace. At thirty-three his conscience was making an unexpected appearance and he had little difficulty wondering why. Francesca. His personal moral compass who sat on his shoulder, reminding him that the world was not black and white. That one wrong did not right another.

Except in this case it did. Leonid would lose his legacy regardless of who bought Siberius. And he would never let Anton Markovic get away with what he’d done.

He frowned into the hazy pink, orange light. Francesca, on the other hand, was a gray area he couldn’t seem to control. A woman unafraid to call him on who he was. The woman whose kiss had woken up something inside of him he’d thought long ago dead...

He didn’t let himself think of Susanna, ever, because he’d done what he’d had to do in the months following his father’s death. He’d compartmentalized his emotions until there was only rebuilding his father’s legacy left, cutting out the rest, including his longtime girlfriend. It had been an act of survival for a twenty-five-year-old who’d lost his mentor and couldn’t afford to lose everything else.

Susanna, a smart, young financial broker, hadn’t been content to live her life with a shell of a man. And who could blame her? When he’d finally come to terms with his father’s death, she’d moved on, found someone who was more “emotionally available.” It hadn’t just been the last few months, she’d told him sadly, it had been her battle over their entire relationship to get him to open up. “It’s never going to happen, Harrison. I give and you take. I need more.”

His fingertips dug into the cool stone. He hadn’t told Susanna he’d been breaking apart inside, that he didn’t know how to let the pain out, because he was inherently flawed by his experiences. He was better off on his own. And his descent into the world of the unfeeling had worked just fine until Francesca Masseria had roared into his life and stamped her do-gooder presence all over his psyche.

He raked a hand through his spiky, disheveled hair and frowned. So that kiss had reminded him he knew how to feel. That he didn’t have the emotional IQ of zero his brother thought he had. She was his employee. She was too innocent for a jaded animal like him and she was messing with his head.

If that wasn’t enough, he had her tied up in knots over her ethical quandaries. Plenty of reasons to stay away.

The sun rose higher between the buildings, insistently making its presence known to the Manhattan morning. His anxiety rose with it. The political bloodhounds chasing him had stepped up their campaign. Wanted a decision. It made his head want to blow off. To mount an independent run for the presidency meant walking away from Grant. It meant altering his life in a way he could never take back. How could he possibly make such a decision now when all he could see was a marker on Anton Markovic’s back?

A fatalistic curve twisted his lips. Some would see such ungratefulness at so much opportunity as foolish. Yet it had never been his idea to get into politics. His grandfather had been a congressman. His father had wanted to be governor. Yes, he saw a need for change, but was he the man to do it? Or was he too much of a rebel to make it work?

When his head got too heavy to sit on his shoulders, when he thought it might actually blow off, he headed for the gym. When he got into the office at six-thirty, Coburn was already there.

His brow lifted. “Time change got you?”

“Brutal. But the blondes were fantastic.”

He shook his head. His brother had been in Germany for the past week meeting with the manufacturers who built their automobiles with Grant parts. “Try being a little less predictable,” he taunted, setting his briefcase down on Coburn’s desk.

“I dunno,” Coburn came back thoughtfully, tossing his pen on the desk. “I think you’re holding your end of the stick surprisingly well lately. You have the political pundits on the edge of their seat.”

“Because they have nothing interesting to talk about.”

Coburn leaned back in his chair. “Are you going to do it?”

“You’ll know when I do.”

“Right.” His brother’s gaze narrowed. “And then there were the photos of you on the red carpet with Frankie in London. When did you start taking your PA to social events?”

“Since she spoke Russian.”

“That was quite the dress she had on.”

He recognized his brother’s predatory look. “She looked beautiful.”

“She was a goddamned knockout. But you, H?” His brother lifted a brow. “Haven’t seen that sparkle in your eyes in years. Sure you haven’t caught the Frankie bug?”

“She was useful, Coburn. That’s all.”

“I think,” his brother ventured thoughtfully, his magnetic blue eyes lighting up, “we should invite her to the Long Island party. She can wear that dress.”

“Francesca? I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?” Coburn challenged. “She’s good enough to take to a million-dollar Aristov party, but not good enough to mingle with your Yale friends?”

His brows came together. “This has nothing to do with class. Frankie is an employee.”

“You invited Tessa last year.”

“Because she’d worked with me for two years.”

Because he hadn’t wanted to put his hands all over his married assistant...

“I’m going to invite her,” Coburn announced definitively. “She’s my employee and she deserves to come.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Don’t you think she’s going to feel out of place with all those people she doesn’t know?”

His brother shrugged. “She can come with me.”

A discomforting feeling speared his insides. “You don’t have a date?”

Coburn spread his hands wide. “Dry. Completely dry. I can make sure Frankie has a good time.”

He didn’t like that idea at all. “You said you were going to stay away from her.”

“I intend to. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve to come.” Coburn pursed his lips, his gaze moving over his brother. “Unless you want to take her. Or are you escorting the poor, neglected Cecily?”

“I haven’t seen Cecily in months.”

“Like I said—” Coburn winced “—poor Cecily. Anyway, Mother would like to know if you’re bringing a date.”

He was sure she would. It was only then that he realized the party was next week. “I’ll invite Francesca,” he rasped. “You inviting her would give her the wrong idea. I can position it as a job well done.”

“Fine. Aristov sign?”

“Today’s the day.” He borrowed a page from Francesca’s book of optimism. He needed it. Badly.

* * *

Frankie took one look at a beautiful, Tom Ford–suited Harrison as he walked into the office and knew she’d never seen him wound so tight.

“Good morning,” she said carefully. “Coffee?”

He gave her a distracted look. “Sorry?”

“Did you want some coffee?”

“Oh...yes. Stronger the better, thanks.”

She decided that might not be a good idea. She made the cup half strength and carried it into him.

He took a sip. Frowned. “It doesn’t taste strong.”

“It’s strong.” She gave the bags under his eyes a critical look. The man didn’t sleep. But she was not his mother.

“Tom Dennison called a few minutes ago. He says you haven’t responded about the fund-raiser.”

Harrison scowled, fatigue creasing the lines of his face. “Tell him I’m in China.”

She gave him an even look. Tom Dennison was one of the most powerful businessmen in America, the CEO of a consumer packaged-goods company as well as a highly political animal who liked to shake things up.

“I’ll tell him you’re occupied with the shareholder meetings,” she suggested instead. “And ask him to please send over the details again so you can get back to him tomorrow.”

“Brilliant.” Sarcasm dripped from his voice.

Leonid better sign tonight. It was her only hope. She took a deep breath. “Have you eaten breakfast?”

“No, thanks.”

“I’ll get you some granola and yogurt at the deli.”

“Francesca,” he growled but she was already out the door.

Things went from bad to worse. Leonid’s meeting with the penthouse developers was delayed by three hours while he waited to get the paperwork done to buy. Harrison fumed that the Russian clearly didn’t have his priorities in order if a penthouse was more important than a forty-million-dollar deal. “Everything is always more important than a forty-million-dollar deal.”

Now Aristov and Kaminski weren’t going to be available until after six and Leonid had suggested they meet at the vodka club he frequented for drinks instead.

“How are we supposed to finalize a deal at a vodka club?” Harrison snapped.

“Sealing a deal over a meal or drinks is becoming more commonplace in Russian culture,” Frankie soothed. “Take a deep breath.”

He glared at her from across the desk. “I am not six, Francesca.”

Right now you are. Her eyes must have said what her lips wouldn’t because his stare turned positively lethal. I would prove it to you, he threw back, if we didn’t have a moratorium in place. But since we do, you are out of luck.

The electricity simmered and crackled between them. Francesca sucked in a deep breath of her own before it exploded. “I will print copies of the plan to take with us. Anything else we need?”

Closure, his gaze fizzled.

She turned and walked out of his office, heart slamming in her chest.

* * *

Leonid’s vodka bar was in the heart of Manhattan at Broadway and West Fifty-Second Street. The VIP room the owner directed them to was one of the most unique spaces Frankie had ever seen. A huge cathedral-shaped stained-glass window glowing with a rainbow array of colors that graduated from blue to pink to yellow was the focal point of the room. Green-and-gold wainscoted walls were accented by a vibrant patterned wallpaper in the same colors that climbed up and over the ceiling. A rich, ornate carpet in complementary tones claimed the floor while two stunning chandeliers bookended the room.

She couldn’t decide if she loved it or if it was just much too much. “Certainly more interesting than a conference room,” she told Leonid as he gave her a kiss on both cheeks.

“I thought so.”

Having obtained two of the penthouses he’d had his eye on under fierce competition, Leonid insisted they begin with a celebratory drink. They toasted the deal with vodka that surprisingly didn’t taste like rubbing alcohol, but like absolutely nothing instead. Thus the potency, she warned herself.

After a few minutes of real-estate chatter, Harrison went through the plan, his jaw set, expression intent. Leonid stalled at the piece about an operational study of Siberius determining its internal and external positioning within Grant Industries. “You told me Siberius will remain a distinct brand. This makes it sound like it’s up in the air.”

Harrison regarded him evenly. “I cannot promise you the board will allow me to preserve Siberius’s separate identity, Leonid. You know as well as I do these decisions are made with the numbers in mind. I will, however, influence the process as much as I can. But I cannot lead you on and say it’s a given.”

The room went so silent, so fast, Frankie could hear the ultraquiet fans in the ceiling whirling. Harrison’s face was utterly expressionless. Leonid sat watching him, his shrewd eyes assessing. The Russian’s fingers ceased their tapping on the table. Frankie’s heart stopped in her chest as he placed both palms on the edge. Was he going to leave?