by Lucy Monroe
“And the fact there isn’t should tell you something.”
“But—”
“I can find you a better building.”
She didn’t want to sell her grandparents’ home. Her memories there weren’t the greatest. Her Grandfather Madison had often made Jeremy Archer look warm and cuddly by comparison, but Maddie’s mother’s stories of her own childhood had been filled with delight.
Maddie always wished she’d had a chance to know her grandmother, Grace Madison.
“I’ll have to sell the mansion to finance another purchase.” No matter how much she might not want to do it.
The school was too important to give up and Vik was right, as he so often was—the opposition to a boarding school in that neighborhood for the underprivileged was bound to be stiff.
Vik shook his head decisively. “I’ll buy the other building.”
“In exchange for what?”
“Consider it my wedding gift to you.”
“Presumptuous.”
“I’m the only man I will allow you to consider.” Dark brown eyes fixed on her with unmistakable purpose.
She ignored the way his words sent shivers through her insides. “You’re assuming I’ll agree to marry.”
“Your father doesn’t realize it, but I know he didn’t need anything beyond his first threat to convince you to fall in with his plans.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Are you in another relationship?” Vik asked, the words clipped, something like anger smoldering in the depth of his gaze.
“No.” Maddie saw no reason to hedge.
“Dating anyone?” he pressed.
“No.” She frowned. “Why are you asking about this now?”
“Because if you were in a relationship with someone who mattered to you, no pressure your father brought to bear would sway you into marrying someone else.”
He was right, but it rankled. “You think you know me so well.”
“I know that your dad means more to you than you want him to believe.”
“It’s not a matter of what I want.” Her father didn’t think he mattered to Maddie because she wasn’t all that important to him. Not in a personal way.
“Jeremy isn’t going to back off on this.”
“Why now?”
“You need to ask?”
“Yes.” Her father had been too unconcerned about Perry’s scandal for it to be what tipped him into must-get-my-wayward-daughter-married mode.
“Jeremy has been worried about what will happen when you come into your majority for the Madison Trust for a while.”
“Now he knows.”
“I don’t believe he saw that one coming.”
“No. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that I would purposefully put Archer International Holdings at risk.”
“No.”
“But apparently the idea that I might marry someone who might do that had already occurred to Jeremy.”
“Yes.” Something about the quality of Vik’s stillness said he might have had more to do with that than her own father’s paranoia.
“So, he was already considering how to get me to marry the man of his choice?” Maddie surmised. “He’s using Perrygate as a vehicle for his own agenda.”
She wasn’t surprised by her father’s mercenary motives, but she didn’t have to like them.
“You would have to ask him.” Vik indicated to the waitress to bring their bill. “I think the reality is more that he is afraid you’ll end up with Mr. Timwater. Your father will do anything to prevent that.”
“To protect the reputation and future of the company.” Considering Perry’s poor luck with his own business ventures, she could understand her father not wanting him to get even shallow hooks into any part of AIH.
“Sometimes, I think you are as willfully blind as your father.” Vik shook his head. “He wants to stop you from marrying a man who would go public with the kind of claims Perry made in his interview.”
“And Jeremy believes you’re a huge improvement.”
“You don’t?” Vik asked, his tone more than a little sardonic.
She wasn’t about to answer that. “Perry has never been in the running.”
“Several articles in the media over the past six years would suggest otherwise.”
“And the media never gets it wrong.”
“You’ve never denied it, not publicly and not to your father.”
“That’s where you are wrong.” And she had no satisfaction in that truth. “I told my father that Perry was just a friend, but he never believed me. He’s always been more interested in his own interpretations and those of the media than anything I might have to say.”
“I don’t think that’s true, but he is stubborn.”
“So are you, in the way you defend him.”
“Would you respect me if I had no loyalty for my friends?”
“Is my father your friend?”
“Yes.” The single word wouldn’t let her doubt his sincerity.
She used to think Vik was her friend, too.
Then things changed.
Now, she was facing the reality that it wasn’t just that her father wanted her to marry Vik, but so did the man himself. Both had their reasons, but while different those reasons all centered around AIH, not Maddie.
She wasn’t sure where, if anywhere at all, she came into the picture, other than as a minor piece on the chessboard. She certainly didn’t feel like the queen.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I’LL BE BACK at three to take you to the lawyer’s office,” Vik informed Maddie as she unlocked her door and stepped inside.
“Are you sure that’s not a conflict of interest?”
“Would you rather go alone?” he asked, a mocking twist on the masculine lips she’d spent far too much time studying as a teenager.
“No.” Especially not after witnessing the media circus outside her building.
The paparazzi had always found her interesting, but it had never been like this.
And it was only getting worse as the morning wore on.
She’d managed to sneak out of the back entrance earlier, but the story and her location had spread in just that amount of time. There were almost as many media leeches haunting the other entrances to the building as in front now.
Even the parking garage hadn’t been free of their presence.
She’d expected Vik to have his driver drop her off, but she could only be grateful he had insisted on getting out of the car and escorting her all the way to her apartment door.
He’d kept his body positioned protectively between her and the reporters stalking her. Vik was also very good at remaining silent no matter what was thrown at them and Maddie found it easier not to react with him as a buffer.
“Security will have the parking garage cleared,” Vik said after a short text conversation on the elevator.
“Thank you.”
They stepped off the elevator into a thankfully empty hallway.
Vik looked both ways before leading her toward her door anyway. “You need a security detail.”
She shrugged, not wanting to get in to this argument right now, and not at all sure she would win it.
“When was the last time you had this lock changed?” he asked as she opened the door.
She looked up at him, wishing it didn’t feel like all the oxygen got sucked out of the air every time she did that. “Why would I have it changed?”
“At least tell me you had new locks installed when you moved in.”
“Why would I?” she asked again. “I’m sure the building management took care of it when the previous tenants moved out.”
His expression said he didn’t share her confidence. “You don’t own the apartment?”
“No.” She’d always planned to move into the mansion once she’d turned it into a school after she got control of her Madison Trust inheritance.
“Who has a key to this door, besides any previous tenant?” h
e asked with sarcastic emphasis on his last words.
Maddie leaned against the doorjamb when he showed no signs of following her inside. “Romi.” She grimaced. “Perry, but he’s not going to show his face.”
Vik just shook his head before pulling his phone out and making a call. “Get the building access cards affiliated with Madison Archer’s apartment deactivated and new cards issued for her, Ramona Grayson and myself.”
He listened in silence for a moment. “Yes, have Ms. Grayson’s delivered to her and the others to my office. I will pass Miss Archer’s on when I see her later this afternoon. I want a security system installed, along with high-grade safety locks while we are gone.”
The day before, Vik’s high-handedness would have made Maddie livid. Today? It just felt like someone was watching out for her.
“You know, for a corporate shark, you’re pretty good at this white-knight stuff,” she observed as he tucked his phone away.
“I make a good ally.”
“But a terrifying enemy, I bet.”
“You’ll never have to find out.”
“Even if I refuse my father’s ultimatum?” She didn’t bother to point out that if she did agree, she could still choose to marry a different man.
They both knew how unlikely that was.
Her youthful affections notwithstanding, she wasn’t about to marry a stranger or a man who had multiple divorces under his belt.
Vik reached out and cupped her nape, stepping forward until mere centimeters separated their bodies, the heat from his surrounding her in a strangely protective cocoon. He didn’t say anything, just caught her gaze, his dark eyes compelling her to some sort of belief.
Her breath escaped in a whoosh, unexpected and instant physical reaction crackling along her nerve endings while her heart started a precipitando. “Viktor?”
“You will never be my enemy, Madison.”
“You’re so confident I’ll do what you want?”
“I’m confident in you, there’s a difference.”
There so was. He couldn’t have said anything more guaranteed to get to her. People who believed in Maddie were a premium in her life. And less by one after this morning.
Dark espresso eyes continued to trap her even more effectively than his hand on her neck. “Trust me.”
“Do I have a choice?” she asked with an attempt at sarcasm.
“No.” His reply held no responding humor. Tilting his head, he stopped only when their lips almost touched. “You don’t, and do you know why?”
“Tell me,” she said in a voice that barely registered above a whisper.
“You already do.” Then his mouth pressed against hers and the drumbeat in her chest went to the faster paced stretto, while electric pleasure sparked from his lips to hers.
A sensation she’d only known once before despite the fact she’d tried kissing other men. Six years ago when she’d thought the best way to celebrate becoming an adult would be to tell the man she’d been infatuated with for years that she loved him.
Even the memory of that old humiliation could not diminish the feelings of ecstasy washing over her from this elemental connection.
The kiss didn’t last long, just a matter of seconds, but it could have been hours for the impact it had on her. When Vik pulled away and stepped back, Maddie had to stop herself from following him.
“Three o’clock. Turn your phone ringer off. I’ll text.”
She nodded, her mind blown by a simple kiss. Which did not bode well for her emotional equilibrium.
She fought acknowledging the possibility that tycoon Viktor Beck might well be more dangerous to the almost twenty-five-year-old Maddie as Archer business protégé Vik had been to her as a teenager.
“Go inside and lock the door, Madison.”
She nodded again, but didn’t move as she tried to reconcile the present with the past.
He shook his head, a curve flirting at the corner of the usually serious lines of his mouth. “You’re going to be trouble.”
“That’s what my father says.”
“I was thinking of a very different kind of trouble.” Vik traced her bottom lip. “Believe me.”
“Oh, really.” Her lip tingling from his touch, warmth infused her that corresponded to the heat in his voice.
His smile became fully realized, and it was almost as good as the kiss.
She wasn’t the one who was going to be trouble.
“Oh,” she said again, this time without intending to, her body reacting to that warm expression in ways she just didn’t with other men.
Vik waited in silence, no sense of impatience in evidence, but Maddie knew every minute he spent with her cost his tightly packed schedule.
She nodded to herself this time. “See you later.”
Maddie stepped back into her apartment. Closing the door on him was a lot harder than it should have been.
She threw the dead bolt and a second later there was a double tap on the door. Vik’s goodbye.
Using the pay-as-you-go cell phone she’d bought to provide Maddie Grace, volunteer, with a contact number, she called the school and let them know she wouldn’t be in for at least a couple of days. She couldn’t risk being caught in her Maddie Grace persona and having the best part of her life exposed to the media furor.
The next call she made was to Romi, who started cursing in French when Maddie told her friend that Jeremy Archer was using Perrygate to try to push Maddie into an approved marriage.
Maddie didn’t tell Romi about the threat to her own father’s company or Maddie’s response to it. Romi would demand her friend not sign the papers.
“Are you going to do it? Are you going to marry the man you’ve been crushing on for the last ten years?”
“That was a schoolgirl crush. I’m twenty-four years old now.”
“And still a virgin. Still avoiding relationships.”
“I’m not exactly alone in that.”
Romi’s silence was as good as a verbal acknowledgment.
“Besides, I could marry one of the others.”
“Right.”
“Maxwell Black offered a marriage of convenience with children by artificial insemination.” She couldn’t help a small smile at the memory of her father’s reaction to that offer.
She knew Romi would get a kick out of it as well.
“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.
