Training Her Curves - Geneva (A BBW Billionaire Domination and Submission Romance)

by Christa Wick

  About THC-Geneva

  This is the sixth installment in the Training Her Curves series (follows THC-Kinbaku) and is the final of two installments focusing on billionaire CEO Dylan Kehoe and his former Girl Friday, Marjolein.

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  Training Her Curves - Geneva

  "I want you to know I love you."

  The elevator jerked to a halt. My attention drifted with a stunned slowness from my cell phone to Riona Kehoe, who had just pushed the stop button.

  "Like a sister," she added. A smile fought to break out on her round face and failed.

  "That's a relief," I joked with a humor I didn't feel. I had a little over two years of working with the youngest Kehoe sibling, the last three months in person and sometimes around the clock. Usually, I could read her emotions better than my own. She had started closing off about a week ago after her New York trip and completely shut me out yesterday morning right after springing the Geneva trip on me.

  "I mean you're drop dead gorgeous," I continued as her already pale complexion turned milky white. "But I don't think I could get into another girl."

  "I'm serious." Standing less than a foot from me, she wrapped a hand around my wrist and squeezed lightly. "It's been hard for me to make friends -- real ones. Most of the people who get chummy with me were after my father's money or my brothers' hot bodies and perfect faces. No one outside of Jake and Dylan recognized my smarts and creativity until you."

  "Are you trying to make me cry?" I asked, tears already welling along the rim of my lower eyelids. My chest constricted painfully as I wondered again what had happened to her during her trip to Rick Wells' studio in New York. She hadn't come back the same.

  "No," She answered, giving another squeeze. She leaned in and kissed my cheek before breaking contact and retreating to the elevator control panel. "I'm trying to get you to forgive me."

  Not the answer I expected. I stepped closer, as if proximity would offer insight. "What could I possibly have to forgive you for?"

  She didn't answer, just pressed the start button on the panel. Another jerk as the elevator resumed its climb. Five seconds later, the doors opened. As my gazed focused on the reception area in front of us, I saw the object of Riona's transgression.

  Dylan Kehoe stood next to a filing cabinet behind the receptionist's desk, his attention sharp on the open folder in his hands. Something must have stroked inside his skull because his head swiveled in my direction. From thirty feet away, his eyes were dark circles, but red flared across his cheeks.

  That flash of acknowledgement was his only reaction to my arrival. He placed the folder on the receptionist's desk. His body bent briefly as he said something to the woman, his mouth only a few inches from her ear. The second the words were spoken, he turned stiffly and disappeared down a corridor.

  "He didn't know you were coming with me," Riona confessed.

  "That makes us twins," I said drily. She had presented the trip as a quick scoping expedition for purposes of renovating the Geneva hotel, which we didn't yet own but needed to acquire quickly to expand the Century Club's presence in Europe. The company's Zurich location had finished renovations months ago, but we had lost our sex-oriented zoning exemption for that city.

  A wave of guilt rolled over me. I hadn't been at fault with the problem in Zurich, but I had blindly allowed myself to be lured by Maxwell King into becoming bait for the Kehoes. For some reason I still didn't fully comprehend, Jake and Dylan had been horrified by the possibility of my working for King. That and the loss of the permits for Zurich had caused Jake to make an offer on King's European sites.

  The offer was conditioned on King not hiring me and completion of due diligence on King's business. I figured Dylan had to be here for the due diligence.

  "So," I started, one eye cutting in Riona's direction, "We aren't here to decide on renovations?"

  Doing her best to avoid my gaze, she scraped a nail against the faded wall. Paint chipped away at her touch.

  "The company really needs your eyes on King's books," Riona explained, pulling me toward the reception desk. "You've been able to catch things even my micro-managing big brother failed to notice."

  I didn't believe her excuse, even though the company had a "no waste" award program and I had received a bonus each of the two years I worked in the executive office. And the bonus hadn't been granted for some brilliant idea on how we could use fewer paper clips. The second year I had found acquisitions fraud of more than a million dollars.

  Knowing that the truth made a good cover story, I offered Riona an incredulous look. "So this has nothing to do with me and Dylan?"

  Her mouth wiggled left, then right in a flat line. "Well, he's never going to be emotionally available until King is crushed like the insect he is."

  That checked me. My exposure to Maxwell King, beyond the many emails, had been a few brief minutes meeting him in person. He hadn't made a good impression. No matter how furious and hurt Dylan had made me in Miami, I knew King was wrong when he leaned in and whispered five little words in my ear.

  Dylan Kehoe killed my daughter.

  A second wave of guilt rolled over me at the memory. I hadn't told anyone what King said that day. Not verbatim, at least. I had asked Jake why the old man had an agenda against the Kehoes. Jake's answer made it clear it wasn't any of my business -- because it wasn't business.

  Personal reasons, baby girl.

  Riona's phone rang, jerking me back to the present. She had recently changed up her ring tones. Whenever Alexa called, "Girl on Fire" by Alicia Keys began playing. Right now, some seventies era soul was playing -- Jean Knight's "Mr. Big Stuff."

  All my tension over Dylan's presence and the single meeting with King vanished for a few seconds. It was all I could do not to double over laughing at the expression on Riona's face as she realized Simon St. Simon was calling her.

  A mere nine hours after his last call.

  "Better take Mr. Big Staff's call," I joked, intentionally mangling the song's title.

  "I don't care if he has a dick as big as the Eiffel Tower," she said, her heart-shaped mouth curling at one corner. "If he call's me 'sweetheart' one more time, I'm flying to London and cutting off his crown jewels."

  "I predict when you finally meet him, you're going to fall madly in love," I prodded. "Or at least in lust."

  Her mouth did that left/right wiggle thing again and then she shook her head.

  "Damn," I swore under my breath as the receptionist returned from whatever errand she had been running for Dylan. "Is there something going on with you and Rick?"

  "No," she answered, her voice distant as Jean Knight began singing again. "Not Rick. I'll meet you in the conference room after I take this call."

  Riona walked away, her path carrying her to the far side of the outer office. I turned to the receptionist, a small part of me glad she was a decade older than Dylan and I hadn't had to discover whether a mere whisper by him in her ear would make me jealous.

  "Conference room?" I asked.

  Her sharp nose lifted then angled towards her left. "That way, miss," she answered in perfect English. With a quick nod, I thanked her and headed into the lion's den.

  ********************

  I found the conference room just as some office runner was trying to figure out how to open the door with a carafe of coffe
e in one hand and some blank writing pads in the other. I held the door while he walked through and greeted Dylan.

  All the young man received for his courtesy was a dismissive grunt, Dylan's attention held fixed by some printout he had marked up with a red pen. Realizing my former boss thought only the young man had entered the room, I took the opportunity to study Dylan.

  Just as devastatingly handsome as the last time I saw him, but that wasn't why I was looking. If I believed his brother and sister, Dylan was in love with me and had been for a long time. Admitting only to desire, he had professed no such emotion or feeling for me the night we fucked in Miami.

  The closest I had come to admitting the possibility to myself was that last day in Dallas before he returned to Chicago. Jake had been going crazy searching for Alexa and Dylan had discovered her location. Instead of giving his brother the information, he had tried to strike a bargain.

  Always the ruthless CEO.

  Jake hadn't told me what Dylan was trying to negotiate from him. I wholly suspected it had something to do with Riona, who had a mind of her own and didn't appreciate her oldest brother's constant attempt to keep her sheltered. Whatever he had wanted from Jake, he didn't get it. Dylan had handed over the details when, tears in my eyes, I admonished him for withholding the information from Jake.

  Saying nothing to me, acting -- as he so often did -- as if I didn't even exist, he had nevertheless pushed his phone across the table and told Jake a plane was waiting to take him to Phoenix.

  I hadn't spoken with Dylan since that day. No calls, no emails, nothing. Whatever he had a business need for, his new assistant messaged me.

  So, yeah, kind of hard to believe it when Riona and Jake said their brother loved me.

  "Coffee for you, Miss?"

  I almost jumped at the question, the office runner's presence forgotten as I stared at Dylan.

  "Uhm...no," I managed to answer, my gaze sliding to the young man as Dylan looked up from his printout.

  "I didn't realize this was turning into a fashion shoot," Dylan said, his tone as arid as the autumn leaves that graced the sidewalk outside the hotel.

  I felt my cheeks turn pink. Looking for a distraction and a reason not to reply to my boss, I held my hand out to the office runner. "But I will take one of those pads."

  The man nodded, his cheeks appearing even rosier than my face felt. Taking the writing paper, I suppressed a groan and hoped the guy had no idea who I was. Wicked Threads had already released its fall catalog. More aptly, it had released its FALLOUT catalog. For one brief week, the media had stopped its lurid chatter about Jake and Alexa and focused on me and Riona.

  Wicked Threads Lingerie Launch -- P.H.A.T. or just FAT?

  Kinky fashion roll out -- with extra rolls!

  Among the unfavorable jabs in the press, those were the mild ones. Riona laughed it off and pointed at the incoming orders. Despite all the bitchy responses in traditional fashion magazines, the flood of orders screamed success. We had to add two extra servers to handle the online orders and over one hundred extra operators.

  The cruel headlines, however, were only a part of the downside to my agreeing to the photo shoot. There was so much media and internet attention, I had become as recognizable as Anna Nicole Smith. Men tried to pick me up at the gas station and grocery store!

  Looking at the office runner with those two bright spots of embarrassment on his face, I had the dreadful feeling my fame, however fleeting, was international.

  "Anything else, Miss?" the young man asked, his gaze hopeful.

  "No," Dylan answered for me. His gaze lifted from the spreadsheet once more to spear the office runner.

  "Thank you," I started, my demeanor apologetic until I realized what I was doing. Apologizing for Dylan had stopped being part of my job description months ago!

  "Yannick," he murmured. "My name, in case you need anything."

  I flashed a smile at him, the gesture modeled on Riona's wicked grin because I wasn't feeling the connection.

  The smile caused Yannick to linger...and Dylan to growl.

  "She won't, now go."

  With a head bob, Yannick retreated, his body spinning at the last minute so that he backed out of the room, his gaze on me as he closed the door.

  "In case you didn't notice," Dylan snarked once we were alone. "There are no cameras here."

  He had returned to studying the printout, his attention glued to the paper as he shot his barb at me. My blood started to boil. A lot had happened in the month since he returned to Chicago. Alexa had ended her contract as the spokesmodel and come over to the creative side. It was great to see her flourishing like that, excited by the work and less visible to the public, but it also meant the catalog and print ads had to shift their focus.

  Riona wasn't about to back down from running with a "luscious" lead across all advertising. She came up with a "Night and Day" angle, extending her wicked sense of fashion into corporate couture with a campaign that had me as Day and Riona as Night, although we both appeared in both sections of the catalog and commercials.

  Too much money had been invested for Jake and Riona to treat Dylan's threat to cancel the entire project seriously if I appeared in the ads, but I had been reluctant to commit. I didn't want the attention from the public that would follow any more than I needed Dylan's approval.

  To bring me fully on board, Jake and Riona had offered a large sum and, far more importantly, signed over a part of their interest in the clothing line while naming me as Vice President of Development.

  But Dylan had apparently decided that I was of no more utility than a Barbie doll.

  Jerking a chair away from the table, I stuffed my oversized bottom into the seat and grabbed a pen from the pack in front of him. Stretching forward, I dragged a stack of folders labeled "guests" and flipped the cover on the top one open.

  "We can always have cameras brought in," I offered, my tone dripping acid.

  "You're intent on being a distraction," he shot back.

  The desire to grab the thickest folder I could find and whack him upside the head had me squirming in my seat. I counted to ten, pretending to read the paper in front of me, but didn't feel any calmer.

  "I'm intent," I countered, "on not paying more for King's European operations than necessary."

  "King will get all that's coming to him and nothing more."

  I looked up from the folder in time to catch Dylan's hard gaze on me. I had no smart ass retort, no reply at all. His gray eyes glittered darkly, his entire expression fierce. My thoughts flashed back to Riona's comment outside the elevator about how Dylan wanted to crush King like an insect.

  I already knew I didn't have the full story, but the amount of fury burning in Dylan's eyes made me wonder just how big a chunk I was missing.

  I blinked, uncertain whether my pending tears were angry or something else.

  His mouth flattened, the brows furrowing even deeper. His right hand released its grip on the printout to briefly cross over his chest and brush his fingertips against the left breast pocket of his jacket. His expression went blank the instant his hand moved back to the paper.

  I knew that face -- conversation over.

  The conference room door burst inward. Riona stomped across the threshold then slammed it shut. She jabbed her finger in Dylan's direction.

  "I hope we're not about to make the same mistake with King as you made with St. Simon!"

  "There was no mistake with St. Simon," Dylan responded blandly before sweeping up his notepad and the folder he had been reading through. "You would understand that if you weren't such a bratty prima donna."

  Riona stopped cold, the angry glare instantly misting as a hurt pout spread across her lips. His words had issued unadorned, like a professor reciting facts established a long time ago. I think that was what made them so effective. If he had shouted, pointed, slapped his palm against the desk, or done something similar, she could have brushed them off as a bad tempered reply, just as he c
ould have easily brushed off her accusation as arising from her frustration with St. Simon's changes to her design plans for the London location.

  The fire in her eyes returned as Dylan strode past her with a seemingly casual indifference. She waited until the door closed quietly behind him before plopping down in the chair he had just vacated and burying her face against her arms.

  "Was he just as horrible to you before I came in?"

  Her arms and the desk beneath them muffled her question, but I could just make the words out. I thought through my potential answers. I wanted to say he was worse because I hadn't started anything with him. My mere presence had insulted Dylan, as had my agreement to model for the fashion line and serve as one of its two primary spokesmodels. Then there was the whole thing about how he'd broken my heart, halved my self-confidence and generally made me feel like a fool who had spent the last two years of her life crushing on a completely unobtainable man.

  What he had said to Riona had been provoked and, as much as I cherished her friendship, had a layer of truth. Her very real talent had combined with her wealth to produce a bit of a diva. While she had been correct on all other points, such as swapping photographers for the shoots and such, St. Simon was his own force and talent. He didn't create things, he perfected them, in part because of his meticulous attention to detail and unfailing sense of balance.

  His "tweaks" didn't infuriate Riona because he was wrong -- quite the opposite.

  She lifted her head, the question I hadn't yet answered still alive in her gaze.

  Sighing, I lifted one hand and brushed at the air. "He is what he is and will always be."

  "Yeah, horrible," she agreed with a little sniff. "Find anything yet?"

  I barked out a laugh. "Honestly, I haven't started looking."

  Rolling my lips, I hesitated with something I wanted to say. I knew my search was poorly informed. I was looking at the business end, but everything pointed to this being a personal issue -- no matter how much money or property or staff were on the line.

  "It would help if I understood what this search is really about," I said at last. "The attorneys and accountants have spent two months going over the financials. If something like a debt isn't recorded, it won't be enforceable against us. There's no real diversification in the holdings, so complexity isn't going to trip us up."