The CEO Buys in (Wager of Hearts #1)

by Nancy Herkness

  Her stomach rumbled as she remembered she’d eaten lunch early. “I think that’s a yes,” she said. She also hoped Ed might give her some insight into Trainor’s problems with his father. She had a feeling she was going to need help navigating that particular issue.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  They walked through what Chloe mentally labeled the showrooms—huge spaces meticulously decorated down to the last expensive paperweight—arriving in a more inviting room with a glass wall that looked out onto a terrace like the one upstairs. A round wooden table and four high-backed upholstered chairs stood on one side of the room. The other half held a big plush sectional sofa and large cushiony chairs arranged in front of a giant flat-screen television. The colors were sophisticated taupes and mossy greens, clearly chosen by some master decorator, but still the room felt lived-in, possibly because there were shelves of books that looked like they’d been read, not bought by the foot, and an array of magazines stacked on the embossed tray topping the padded leather coffee table. A sleek desk made of pale wood trimmed with aluminum jutted out into the room from one wall so the person occupying it could look directly outside.

  She could picture Trainor with his laptop open, frowning out at the Manhattan skyline. Then she’d come up behind him and slide her palms onto his shoulders and down his chest, feeling the solidity of his muscles and the heat of his body. She would lean down and whisper something in his ear that would make him smile and close the laptop with a snap.

  She pulled herself up short. She needed to stop these crazy daydreams before she started to think they might come true.

  “Make yourself comfortable, Ms. Russell,” Ed said. “I’ll have the chef bring out some hors d’oeuvres. Would you like wine or another beverage?”

  “Please call me Chloe, and just water, thank you. If I had wine, I’d be sleeping right along with Mr. Trainor.” That hadn’t come out right. She felt a blush scorching her cheeks. “I mean, not with him, but like him.”

  “I understood,” Ed said, poker-faced, as he swept his fingers across one of those pad thingies like the one in Trainor’s bedroom. He spoke a couple of orders and turned back to her. “Is there anything else you need?”

  She threw caution to the winds. “Information.”

  Surprise sent his eyebrows up toward his hairline. He looked at her without speaking.

  She strolled over to the couch and sat down, patting the cushion beside her. “Your boss is having an issue with the wedding invitation.”

  “An issue?” Ed was being cagey, but he sat down.

  She decided to use her only leverage to get the butler off balance so he’d talk. “He asked me to go with him to the wedding.” That much was true. She didn’t need to add that she’d refused the invitation.

  Ed gave her his polite but silent attention.

  “He told me that his father has never forgiven him for not going into the military. Something about a family sword.” That was to prove that Trainor had opened up to her. “But why haven’t they seen each other for two years?”

  “You’ll have to ask Nath—Mr. Trainor that.”

  Chloe gave him a pleading look. “I need some guidance here. I’m going into this situation blind, and I don’t want to embarrass Mr. Trainor.”

  Ed searched her face. “How long have you known Mr. Trainor?”

  “Since Tuesday. His illness has accelerated our relationship, I guess.”

  “Something certainly has.” He paused a moment. “I served under Mr. Trainor’s father and knew Nathan as a boy.”

  This was even better than she’d hoped. She leaned in as Ed kept talking.

  “General Trainor is the kind of commanding officer every Marine dreams of. He led by example and believed in the code and structure of the military. Nathan is brilliant in a completely different way. His mind works in great bounds of intuition.” Ed shook his head. “Nathan couldn’t please his father, so he went out of his way to provoke him. He grew his hair long; he wore sloppy clothes; he kept his room a mess. He even refused to polish the sword.” A ghost of a smile played over Ed’s lips. “He had a long list of page 11s.”

  “Page 11s?”

  Ed went back to being a butler. “My apologies. That’s military slang for negative comments on a Marine’s record.”

  “But he invented a computer battery that helps the military as well as civilians,” Chloe said.

  “General Trainor and Nathan don’t see it that way.”

  Chloe sighed. “It’s so hard to break the patterns of childhood, no matter how out-of-date they are.” She remembered the wedding. “Are Nathan, er, Mr. Trainor’s parents divorced?”

  Ed spoke as though he was weighing every word. “His mother died five years ago. It was hard on him and his father.”

  Chloe was puzzled by his carefulness. What he said was sad but not out of the ordinary. Her mother had died when Chloe was twelve, which had been very difficult for her and her father. That was when Grandmillie had stepped in to help. “But grief didn’t draw them closer together,” she said.

  He hesitated, his gaze flicking away and back. “It was a difficult time.” Again the strange precision.

  “Mr. Trainor told me why his father is getting married so quickly. The whole situation seems at odds with such a straight-arrow military type.”

  Ed evidently decided to trust her with some extra information. “Mr. Trainor felt that his father’s, er, wife-to-be caught the general at a vulnerable time after Mrs. Trainor’s death. He had some concerns about the sincerity of her affection.”

  “Did he also feel his father was somehow being unfaithful to his mother’s memory? Is that why he wouldn’t even visit him?”

  “He is not fond of the general’s intended, so he prefers to avoid her.”

  “Yet his father invited him to the wedding, and Mr. Trainor is planning to go.” Chloe thought about the level of tension there would be at the wedding. “Wow.”

  Ed kept his gaze on Chloe. “Mr. Trainor will need an ally beside him.”

  “Aren’t you going?”

  The butler looked down. “If Mr. Trainor plans to attend, I will.”

  Ed’s loyalty warmed Chloe. He wasn’t going to desert his boss in favor of his former commanding officer. “Then he’ll have you as an ally,” she said, smiling her appreciation.

  “Two of us against an entire Marine expeditionary force? You’re a brave woman, Ms. Russell.”

  She felt guilty that she’d misled him into believing she would be there too.

  Luckily, a door opened and a young woman in a cream shirt and black trousers walked into the room balancing a large tray, so Chloe’s conscience didn’t get the better of her and force her to confess.

  Ed turned. “Susan, please serve the hors d’oeuvres here on the coffee table.”

  She strode to where they were seated, gave Chloe a smile, and arranged the dishes on the table. The aroma of warm, buttery pastry cupping tiny quiches and miniature bowls of hot carrot-ginger soup set Chloe’s stomach grumbling again.

  “Not a moment too soon, it seems,” Ed said with a lift of his eyebrow. He stood. “Enjoy, Ms. Russell.”

  “Chloe,” she corrected automatically. She felt another jab of remorse about tricking Ed into thinking that she’d agreed to go with Trainor. Of course, their boss hadn’t yet admitted defeat on that front.

  Ed nodded but didn’t use her first name. He and Susan went out the door together, leaving Chloe to her thoughts and her feast. She picked up the empty plate and placed a sample of each of the bite-size offerings on it. That way she would know which to have seconds and thirds of.

  Her appetite was slightly dampened by Ed’s revelations. He’d painted too vivid a picture of the young Nathan battling with a powerful and rigid father for enough room to let his unorthodox brilliance shine.

  Did either one of them recognize that Trainor had ultimately followed in his father’s footsteps? He dressed in neat, well-tailored suits that weren’t all that different
from a uniform. He was responsible for the well-being of hundreds of people, if not for their actual lives. He was a leader, both in his own company and in his industry.

  She had the unsettling idea that her boss didn’t want this role, but it was the model he’d grown up with, so he’d followed it.

  CHAPTER 9

  At eleven o’clock, Nathan watched Chloe hit “Delete” on the last e-mail in his in-box. Except for a brief break for dinner, eaten in his bedroom, they’d worked steadily with nary a complaint from her since he’d awakened five hours before.

  She flexed her fingers and arched her back in a subtle stretch, drawing his gaze to the way her blouse draped over the swell of her breasts. He’d been noticing little things like that all day: the elegant whorl of her ear as she tucked her hair behind it, the supple arch of her foot when she slipped off her shoes under the desk, the tautness of her skirt’s fabric over her thighs as she shifted in the chair.

  It must be some residual effect of his illness. He’d never noticed those things about Janice.

  Chloe’s chair creaked, drawing his gaze back to her face as she said, “You know, you’re really good at this.”

  He felt a wash of pleasure. Another sign of weakness. “A high compliment from Ms. Chloe Russell,” he said, injecting a sardonic edge into his voice so she wouldn’t suspect how much her comment gratified him.

  “I shouldn’t have said that.” She fiddled with the mouse. “Of course you’re good at it. You’re the CEO.”

  “An elevated title doesn’t guarantee competence. In fact, there’s a law about that.”

  She let go of the mouse and lifted her gaze to his with a slight smile. “The Peter Principle. You’re promoted to the level of your incompetence. That doesn’t apply to you.”

  “Because I founded the company?”

  She nodded. “You didn’t have to rise through the ranks. You got pushed upward as the ranks grew beneath you.”

  He wasn’t sure whether that was a compliment or a subtle insult. “You’re not afraid of me at all, are you?”

  She waved her hand toward him. “There’s something about seeing my boss in his pajamas that makes me forget I’m a mere temp.”

  “There is nothing mere about you.”

  She gave him a sideways look of skepticism before raising her hand to massage the back of her neck. He imagined replacing her hand with his. He could almost feel the soft, vulnerable skin at her nape. Sliding sideways on the bed, he said, “You’ve been sitting on that chair staring at a computer screen all day. You deserve to relax and enjoy the view.” He gestured toward the space he’d left open beside him.

  She sucked in a quick breath before she gave him a look as sharp as a razor blade. “I’ll just turn my chair around.”

  Her first reaction was enough to encourage him, but he decided to back off for the moment. He gave a nonchalant shrug. “The bed is more comfortable.” When he touched the control panel, the lights dimmed so he could see stars glowing against a translucent sky of dark blue above the horizon of New Jersey.

  Throwing a dubious glance at the darkened overhead light fixture, she swiveled her seat around to face the wall of glass. “Wow! I didn’t know New Jersey could look so good.”

  He watched her as she drank in the landscape of the river and its opposite bank. Her dark eyes picked up little glints of the surrounding illumination, and her sun-streaked hair showed the luster of satin. She wasn’t a knockout. She had the kind of looks that grew on you. Or maybe it was what was beneath the surface that was a knockout. Now that he knew her better, he could see the woman hidden inside, and he wanted her with a surprising intensity.

  “Come to my father’s wedding with me,” he said without thinking.

  Her gaze swung around to him, and he caught the indecision on her face. She hadn’t said no, so he just needed to find the right leverage. Evidently, money wasn’t enough of an incentive. “It will be a military wedding. Men in uniforms, crossed swords, pomp and circumstance.” Didn’t women love that?

  She started to shake her head, so he tried a different tack. “We’ll take my jet to North Carolina. No long drive. No security lines. You can even change clothes on the plane.”

  “It wouldn’t—”

  He cut her off. “I could use a buffer between my father and me. You’d be doing me a favor.”

  “Oh.” She looked away toward the window, then down at her hands clasped in her lap. “There must be another woman who’d go with you, one who would be more at ease in that social situation than I would.”

  He couldn’t think of a single woman other than Chloe he’d want by his side. “I’ve seen you handle everything from a jargon-laden technical development meeting to a grown man in the grip of hallucinations. You’ll be perfectly at ease with my father.”

  “What about his bride?”

  “Angel?” Why would she ask about the interloper? “Her opinions are irrelevant.”

  “Sometimes you sound like a typical CEO.”

  That clearly wasn’t a compliment. “Maybe you should meet Angel before you judge my attitude toward her.” He saw Chloe’s spine stiffen and knew he’d made a tactical error. Driven to the wall, he switched to flattery. “My father doesn’t approve of my usual dates, but he’ll like you.”

  “Because I’m not a supermodel or an actress?”

  Somehow he was digging a deeper hole. Exasperated, he spoke the truth. Or some of it. “Look, I don’t want to walk into a tense situation with some high-maintenance type on my arm. I’ll have enough to deal with.”

  That had probably blown his chances. He cast a quick look at Chloe. Her expression had gone from pissed off to sympathetic.

  He’d found his leverage. He just wasn’t sure it was the kind of leverage he wanted to use.

  Chloe was getting whipsawed between insult and gratification. Every time Trainor opened his mouth, he surprised her. But his last statement undercut all her resolve. He probably hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but implying she wasn’t high maintenance pleased her. Ed had said Trainor would need an ally. Now Trainor himself was telling her the same thing in his own way. And they both saw her as the right person for the job.

  How could she refuse? “I’ll go on two conditions.”

  “Done,” Trainor said.

  “You haven’t even heard them.” She caught the gleam of triumph in his eyes and wished she hadn’t given in so quickly.

  “It’s a sign of my desperation,” he said.

  “Thanks. I love being someone’s last resort.”

  “Not last resort. Best resort.”

  He was smiling into her eyes in a way that made her insides turn molten. That just added to the flare of heat he’d provoked by inviting her to sit beside him on the bed. She’d tried to interpret the invitation as an unspoken apology for making her work for so long without a break, but this smile wasn’t as easy to explain away.

  She needed to go on the offensive to put this whole encounter on a more businesslike footing. “The first condition is that you pay for whatever I have to wear to the wedding. All of it: shoes, purse, wrap, whatever.” She couldn’t afford the kind of dress and accessories she’d need, and she wasn’t going to embarrass herself—or him—with the wrong clothes.

  “What about the lingerie?” he asked.

  She swallowed hard, trying to decide if he was merely wondering how much he would have to spend or if he was being deliberately provocative. “If it’s necessary,” she said, trying to sound cool and sophisticated when she could feel the blush scalding her cheeks.

  “Maybe I’ll go along for that part of the shopping trip.”

  Surprise made her stiffen as she realized she wasn’t imagining things. He was flirting with her. Why would Nathan Trainor flirt with a temp? He must be so bored with being confined to his bed he would do anything for entertainment.

  “This is a business arrangement,” she reminded him . . . and herself. “You’re paying me to go to your father’s wedding with you.”
>
  “That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it.” He lounged back against the pillows with a bland look that undercut the provocation of his comment.

  Her heart was dancing in a confused rhythm, but she skewered him with a hard, clear gaze. “The second condition is that you have to fill me in on your family’s dynamics, so I don’t make things worse.”

  He shifted on the bed and broke eye contact. “Trust me, nothing you do could make it any worse.”

  She had brought up a touchy subject to give herself a chance to wrestle down the feeling of fluttering exhilaration he was causing, but now she wished she hadn’t. While it made her nervous, the knowledge that her boss was noticing her as a woman made her feel as though she’d drunk a whole glass of champagne in one gulp. It bubbled and fizzed inside her.

  “Just give me a bare-bones outline,” she said.

  Exhaustion washed over his face, making the bones show sharply under his skin. “I suppose you’re entitled to know what a minefield you’re walking into.” He closed his eyes for a moment.

  Guilt nagged at Chloe and she wished she had the nerve to touch his hand where it lay inert on the rumpled comforter. “You can tell me another day when you’re feeling better.”

  He opened his gray eyes. “Might as well get it over with.” He pushed himself higher up on the pillows. “The elephant in the room is that my mother committed suicide five years ago.”

  “Oh!” Minefield was the right word. “I’m so sorry.” She winced at how inadequate that sounded.

  “She’d struggled with depression all her life, so it wasn’t a complete surprise.” His foot began to jiggle in a nervous tic. “She shouldn’t have married a military man. Every time my father was assigned to a new base, she struggled to adapt to a new set of people. And my father was ambitious, so he needed his wife to be perfect. The strain was more than she could handle. Maybe if my father had been more . . .”

  He stopped and frowned down at his twitching foot, drawing up his leg so the knee was bent and his foot was flat on the bed.