Imperfect Love: Saint Sex (Kindle Worlds Novella)

by Alice Bello

  Text copyright ©2018 by the Author.

  This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Ryann Kerekes. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original Imperfect Love remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Ryann Kerekes, or their affiliates or licensors.

  For more information on Kindle Worlds: http://www.amazon.com/kindleworlds

  If you like this novella, try any of these Contemporary Romances by Alice Bello

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  Risen Bear, Book 2: Ferro Mountains

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  Growl for Me, More than Mated

  Imperfect Love: Saint Sex

  Alice Bello

  Kindle Version

  Copyright, 2017

  Edited by Stephanie T. Lott (aka BiblioEditor)

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  The Meeting

  Lucy

  Dante Saint James had the most beautiful penmanship. I stood at his side, looking over his shoulder as he struck at the contract, marking things out, adding words, slashing whole paragraphs of legalese that surely took the lawyers and MBAs sitting at the conference room table weeks to draft. I watched as his pen slaughtered sentences, circled numbers, and added question marks.

  He stopped; his pen poised over a line of text, and shook his head.

  As he continued to write he said, “And whoever typed up paragraph eight, section seven—” Slash. “You need to brush up on your grammar.”

  A thin, bookish type at the other end of the table turned a lovely shade of crimson. Mr. Worley: the owner of the company Dante is in the process of taking over.

  Do they still call them hostile takeovers?

  Dante does them so often, and so quietly, the only thing hostile about them is his pen… and, of course him.

  He looked absolutely enraged as he slashed at the document.

  I felt myself fall into a mesmerized state, watching his long, strong fingers grip the pen, and hold down the contract.

  Oh, those hands… I couldn’t imagine what those hands could do to me…

  I mean…

  What they could do to someone.

  Stop it!

  Stop it now!

  I’m working!

  I can’t be drooling over my goddamn boss!

  No matter how freaking sexy he is…

  Or how kissable his full, curvaceous lips look…

  Or how broad his muscular shoulders are, especially in that dark blue Burberry suit…

  Or how thick and black and silky looking his hair is…

  Oh no…

  Last page!

  He was on the last page. Two more slashes, and then his initials, and he gave the thing a disgusted growl.

  I backed up two steps, giving him room.

  He still had work to do.

  He stood, buttoned that gorgeous Burberry suit, picked up the contract and then threw it across the table, where it landed with a clap like thunder before the bookish looking owner of Worley Technologies.

  He waited for Mr. Worley to pry his eyes from the contract and to look him in the eye.

  “There are a hundred and fifteen language errors, fifty-seven numerical errors, a plethora of ambiguous passages, one typo…” Dante paused, glaring at the man. “And some ridiculous clauses that will need to be redacted to my liking by opening of business tomorrow, or I will terminate this takeover.”

  He glowered at the still sitting, and rather shocked looking, CEO.

  “Am I understood?” Dante said, acid in his voice.

  Mr. Worley stood and nodded emphatically. He was visibly shaking.

  “Yes, Mr. Saint James. I will make sure every change you have… that you have asked for, is carried out.”

  Dante smiled.

  It was his great white shark smile.

  A baring of perfectly straight, white teeth—with cold, dead eyes glinting at you from under his wickedly sculpted eyebrows.

  It was terrifying.

  I was glad he had business to work out the urges and hostilities of his dark side on… otherwise he’d probably be a serial killer, or an assassin.

  “Good,” he said, “I look forward to it.”

  And with that he turned, strode like—well, like the kind of man that always got exactly what he wanted, whenever he wanted it—to the front of the conference room and into his personal elevator.

  I moved with him, so used to the velocity at which he moved that speed walking in three inch heels was second nature.

  He was silent until the elevator door slid shut, and then he said, “Are the people from Sola here yet?”

  “Waiting in conference room twelve,” I said, flicking through my iPad mini. “As are Mr. Foster from Henderson International—conference room three—and the co-CEOs of Shore House Incorporated—conference room nine.”

  That’s four takeovers set up, proposed, or closed, and all before lunch.

  I had no idea how he did it. I needed my iPad, caffeine, and Monster Rojo Tea just to keep his schedule straight.

  “Lunch?” he inquired.

  “Harding from PR wants to talk to you—”

  He sighed. “He wants to talk to me about the interview slated for this evening.”

  I nodded. “He thinks it’s a mis—”

  He looked at me with those fathomless blue eyes. When he was angry, like now, they were light as frost.

  I liked the warmer blue they had when he was happy. Like a summer sky at dawn.

  Ugh!

  I was thinking in flowery prose: I so needed to pound out some chapters on my lunch hour.

  I gulped and took a breath.

  Say it!

  It’s not just what Harding thinks… it’s what you think!

  “He thinks the woman interviewing you is biased, that her track record is riddled with sensational exposés, and that she’s trying to get you to…”

  Dante closed his eyes and I could see his lips twitch.

  Damn it!

  “He thinks she’s trying to fuck you.” There, I said it. I can say the f-word. “In bed and in her editorial.”

  The breath he let out through his nose could have been a laugh.

  “If she plays her cards right, she very well may get to fuck me…” He turned and smiled at me. “In my bed… and in her editorial.”

  I took a breath, ready to try and get hi
m to change his mind.

  “It’s not my first time being interviewed, Lucy,” he cut me off, softer than he usually spoke—to anyone. “Or for being seduced by a reporter.”

  “But—”

  “No matter what Ms. Rampling has planned, she will not get anything out of me that I don’t want her to.”

  Charlotte Rampling was a columnist for Commons Magazine. She was sneaky, vicious and—from the many photos I’d found online—a knockout. Long, silky blonde hair, even longer legs, a model level face, a stunning smile, and breasts that were not only huge, but seemed to defy gravity.

  I hated her, and I hadn’t even met her.

  Part of that may have been because she was—most assuredly—going to get to… to sleep with my boss. But more than anything, I just had this feeling—call it intuition—that somehow this woman was going to cause Dante a hell of a lot of trouble.

  I took another breath, ready to plead with Dante not to go to dinner—or fuck… jeez, where did that come from?—that woman. But just then the elevator chimed its soft, melodic chord, and the elevator doors opened to conference room twelve: the Sola people.

  Chapter 2

  Hijacked

  Lucy

  I was once again in the elevator with Dante, headed up. He’d bulldozed right over his last meeting, a pharmaceutical company out of Marlboro, Connecticut. They made a pill that stopped heart attacks, but had priced the drug so high that no insurance company would approve it, so the company was near bankruptcy.

  I didn’t like companies that did that, and I knew Dante didn’t either.

  When he took over the company, he would slash at their prices even more than he had the contract he’d just laid waste to.

  We were headed up to his personal office on the fiftieth floor.

  His penthouse bachelor pad was, well… I’d never seen the inside of his penthouse.

  No one had.

  Except those women lucky enough to have been wined and dined, and then… pleasured by him…

  All.

  Night.

  Long.

  And maybe his bodyguards: Taz and Lance Holstrom; twin former German spies/turned private security. They also had Olympic gold medals in the biathlon: an event that mixed cross country skiing with rifle shooting.

  Dante hadn’t said anything after the last meeting. I could tell he was thinking about something, though.

  He was tonguing the inside of one of his left molars.

  Sure giveaway.

  Don’t look at me like that.

  It’s not creepy or anything that I know when my boss is thinking.

  The elevator chimed and he stood there for a moment, still feeling the inside of his molar with his tongue.

  Oh, to be that molar…

  “You verified the reservation?”

  As if I needed to. The second I called Bello they would’ve packed up the kitchen and taken it anywhere Dante wanted. It wasn’t that he was that powerful… which he was. It was that when he went there, he enjoyed himself, and they made sure that his experience, and that of those dining with him, were out of this world.

  “They’re expecting you in forty-five minutes.”

  There, business was concluded for the day.

  There would be no more talk of the company.

  Only what was slated for tonight.

  My workday was almost over.

  You’d think that that would make me happy.

  But for some reason it didn’t.

  I lived for when he’d text or call me late at night, needing my assistance with something.

  He took off his tie, rolled it up and tucked it into his pocket. He pulled off his Burberry suit jacket and laid it over a chair, and then started unbuttoning his shirt.

  My heart thrummed in my chest.

  You would think after watching him take his shirt off six hundred and thirty-two times—I said not to look at me like that!—that I would be immune…

  Immune to the way that Italian silk dress shirt clung to his lightly tanned skin as if it would rather die than be parted from him, to the way that shirt would then finally slide off over his shoulders, revealing the beauty of his naked torso, and the rippling muscles moving and bunching under that skin.

  “Lucy?” he said, looking right at me.

  Shiiit…

  He’d been talking to me while I was ogling him.

  I stopped time—in my head… I don’t have magic or mutant powers—and rewound the tape of my mind.

  There!

  “Did you arrange for what I asked for earlier?”

  I nodded. “I called Mrs. Roark and she said she’d make sure everything was in place before she turned in for the night.”

  Which was about eight o’clock for the seventy-year-old housekeeper.

  She had a staff of twelve to keep the penthouse spotless and in perfect condition. But she was the only staff that lived there.

  Mrs. Roark had been with Dante since he was a child.

  They were close.

  So close you could never get him to talk about it.

  Which meant she meant more to him than I would ever know.

  I only knew her by her voice, since she almost never left the penthouse.

  The penthouse I have never been in...

  And never would…

  Sigh…

  Dante’s brows furrowed as he stared at me. “Sometimes I wonder what’s going on in that head of yours.”

  And I would die if you ever knew.

  I pulled on my brightest smile, trying to look excited and ready for anything.

  But my feet hurt, I’d barely gotten five hundred words pounded out on my lunch—my usual three thousand eluding me—and…

  And…

  I’m in love with my boss.

  I closed my eyes as that thought echoed through me like a death knell.

  Somehow I always had that same thought, once a day, every day.

  And usually right when he took his shirt off.

  God… I’m pathetic.

  I strained to keep my smile in place.

  Dante turned, tossed that silk shirt on the chair with his suit jacket, and then sauntered off to his private bathroom.

  Well, it was more of a suite, with a walk in, clear glass encased shower that was bigger than my apartment, that had more water fixtures than any fountain in Rome—

  Rome…

  Another place I would never go.

  I had an ever growing list of places I wanted to travel to before I died.

  London, Paris, Rome… Las Vegas.

  I had a passport and all my shots.

  But I’d gone absolutely nowhere.

  Though he had business concerns all over the world, Dante never traveled.

  Business came to him.

  But I knew—since I had to come up with a contingency plan—that if he did have to leave town, one of my assistants would be sent in my stead.

  I was too important to the day to day running of Saint James Ltd. I needed to be here to keep things running.

  That’s what Dante had said when he had me make up the contingency plan.

  I have three assistants, by the way: Maggie, Sidney and Jenifer.

  Great young women with good educations and perfect spelling and grammar.

  I heard the water come on and knew Dante was naked.

  I felt the giant butterflies start flapping their wings in my stomach.

  I so wanted to see him naked.

  I’d dreamt of it so many times.

  Walking in there, watching him soap and lather himself…

  And then walking into the shower with him where he’d…

  And then I’d wake up.

  Every.

  Single.

  Time.

  I shook my head.

  I would never do anything like that.

  Ever.

  I walked over and picked up his suit jacket—taking it to the hidden closet where all his clothes went when they needed to be sent to the clean
er—and hung it up. I walked back to the chair and picked up that soft, silky dress shirt.

  It was a light sky blue, not as light as his angry eyes… but nothing like his eyes when he was happy.

  It was still warm from where it had been against his skin.

  My fingers worried the fabric. My mind started to whirl.

  I could smell his shirt.

  Jesus!

  I turned and practically ran to the closet, trying to hang the shirt on a hanger before I went total perv and actually…

  Actually smelled my boss’ shirt…

  Like a freaking pervert, stalker, sicko!

  Psycho…

  I finally got the thing to hang.

  I closed the door and leaned against it, panting.

  “Okay… that was a low point,” I said to myself.

  “That I doubt.”

  I spun around and there was Dante, freshly showered, a chocolate silk shirt clinging to him, his pants…

  No, don’t think about his pants.

  “So what’s the ‘low point’?”

  Ah…

  Ah…

  Ah…

  Christ!

  “I, ah…” In my head I was throwing papers off my desk, rifling through drawers, searching everywhere for the answer I needed. And then my iPhone pinged… well, the one in my head, in my imaginary office. It said that Grisham-Harris had lost over half its stock price this afternoon.

  I hadn’t invested in it… but any low point in a storm.

  “I invested some money in Grisham-Harris… and, well…”

  He shook his head mournfully. “Yes, I heard. But I wouldn’t sell just yet. Give it time to rebound.” His brows knitted together again. “How much did you invest?”

  “Just over a grand.” Which was a lie. I would never invest more than five hundred dollars in anything.

  I live in the same little apartment I started out in two years ago. I have an iPhone, a newish laptop and my work iPad. My apartment has a queen sized bed, a comfy couch, and a coffee maker (a regular old Mr. Coffee). I’m as frugal as is legal—I don’t even own a car.

  I mean, it’s New York City. It would cost an arm and a leg to park a car, and then there’d be all the wasted time trying to find parking and negotiating cross town traffic.