Saving the CEO

by Jenny Holiday

  “Oh!” She came apart on him, and it was only two more strokes before he followed her.

  They both froze for a moment, he on his knees with his dick in his hand and she splayed against the brick wall in her pink winter coat, but with her skirt hiked up and her underwear around her knees. Jesus, what a picture they must make. He had a belated thought that he hoped there weren’t any security cameras around. Or, hell, maybe he hoped there were. Probably, the resulting tape would be scorching.

  When she wobbled a little and started to slide down the wall, it galvanized him. He tucked himself back into his pants and stood, hoisting her up with him.

  Her cheeks were red. The uninhibited goddess had gone, and Cassie the sweet bartender was embarrassed now. She gave him a lopsided smile as she blushed. “I guess it’s your turn now,” she whispered.

  Oh, the very idea of what she was suggesting—it was almost enough to get him hard again. He muttered a curse under his breath. It was one thing for him to fall to his knees in the dirty snow of a dark alley, but damned if he was going to let her do it. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. I took care of it.”

  “Holy macaroni,” she whispered.

  Holy macaroni indeed.

  Chapter Four

  “Are you sure?”

  Cassie smiled into the phone as she sat on the edge of her bed putting the final touches on her toenails—electric blue background with hot pink polka dots. She had to keep her fingernails plain to work in the restaurant, so she overcompensated with wild toes.

  “Are you sure sure?” This was Danny’s eloquent closing argument in his campaign to try to get her to come to the farm with him for Christmas. The “farm” was the rural property Danny’s hippie mother had recently acquired, but since the land was mostly limestone, she wasn’t having a lot of luck planting. That, and the part where she didn’t know squat about agriculture. This past summer, as they stood and inspected an acre of dead corn, Cassie had to tell her that sometimes farmers have to irrigate.

  “Irritate? What are you saying, Cassie dear?”

  “Irrigate. Like, water?”

  “Oh, no, Mother Nature provides. That’s the beauty of farming.”

  “Huh,” Cassie had said, surveying Mother Nature’s bounty, which, this season apparently fell under the heading “scorched earth.”

  “You know I love you. I even love your mother. Sort of.” Danny’s mother did things like pat Cassie’s shoulder, and feed her gluten-free, vegan, stevia-sweetened cookies that tasted like bricks, but that was more than Cassie’s own mother ever did. Danny didn’t appreciate his weirdo mom enough.

  “I think my mother is having a midlife crisis.”

  “Hippies are allowed to have midlife crises.” She admired her toes.

  “So if you love her so much, why won’t you come with me?” Then he shifted into his generic theatrical voice. “Help me Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope!”

  Cassie thought back to last Christmas. “I love your mother, but I love my apartment building’s very functional boiler more.” Oh, the cold. She was nearly having PTSD-style flashbacks just thinking about it. “And then there was the part where she decided running water was a bourgeois luxury we didn’t need. Also—television. You know I don’t get to watch TV during the school year.” She wasn’t proud of it, but one of Cassie’s great joys in life was to cram entire seasons of TV into the few short weeks she had between the end of the fall semester and the beginning of spring. Once she was “only” working fifty hours a week, her life suddenly opened up, and she filled the time with great greedy feasts of Dancing with the Stars, Doctor Who, and Glee. She wasn’t proud of her taste, but if a girl’s only guilty pleasure was watching a bunch of middle-aged “teenagers” improbably break into Madonna songs as they went about their plucky, underdog lives, really, what was the harm?

  “She’s let up on the plumbing thing,” Danny offered weakly.

  “Nope!” said Cassie brightly, flipping onto her back and waving her feet in the air to speed the drying process.

  “Cass,” said Danny, his tone growing uncharacteristically serious, “you can’t be alone on Christmas.”

  She smiled. She was a lucky girl. “I’ll go to Edward’s.” Maybe. Probably not. Her boss, who was also her late father’s best friend, was always on her case to visit more, and he always tried to lure her over for holidays. Christmas at Edward’s, though, with his funny, sweet wife and their daughter Alana and her little sister Chloe—it was too big a dose of heartbreak. But Danny didn’t need to know that. Still, she was lucky. Not everyone had people fighting over them for Christmas.

  “You promise you’ll go to Edward’s?”

  “Yes!”

  “Do you swear on the grave of your father?”

  She jumped then, when the unnaturally loud buzzer her landlord had recently installed guillotined into her brain. Saved by the buzzer.

  “I gotta go. There’s someone here.”

  “Oh my God, maybe your mother’s been sprung from rehab! Do you think she wants to come to the farm?”

  “It’s not Laura. And if she’s out of rehab this soon, it’s because she sprang herself, in which case I’m not talking to her.”

  “Maybe rehab has a punch card system going. Like at coffee shops. Each stint gets you a punch, and then when you have a whole row punched you get to go home early. I bet she would want to come to the farm. Isn’t physical labor, like, one of the steps—”

  “Gotta go! Call you later!” Cassie threw the phone on her bed and vaulted across the room to the intercom. She did kind of wonder who it was. Danny was the only person who ever came to her place. Maybe someone had sent her an early Christmas present, and it was the FedEx guy. As soon as she had the fleeting, hopeful thought, she quashed it. Hello, was she ten years old? And who would send her a present anyway? She punched the talk button. “Yes?”

  “It’s Jack Winter.”

  Ack! She wasn’t wearing any pants! Lunging for a pair of jeans, she jammed her legs into them without thinking. She’d grabbed a skinny pair, so all ten wet toes came out the other end looking like she’d sent them to a Jackson Pollack appreciation class. “Awww!”

  “Ahh!” There was that unholy buzzer again. “Yes?”

  “Can I come up?”

  “Oh! Yes, sorry! 5A.” Nice move, Rico Suave. She turned in place, trying to look at her apartment through his eyes. His eyes were probably used to a ginormous penthouse. She, on the other hand, lived in what was basically one room. The landlord had tried to sell it as an “efficiency-plus”—and it was large. Largish. But it was still one big room with an alcove that just fit her double bed, affording the illusion of a separate space for sleeping.

  Well, it was what it was. Mr. CEO Dude would just have to deal. At least it was cute. She was rather proud of all the work she’d done to trick it out. If her version of shabby chic was a little heavy on the shabby, well, the lights were dim. She eyed the antique chandelier she’d hung just last week—and they were pretty good-looking lights, too.

  By the time he rapped on her door, her vagina was panting. There was no other way to describe it. He was Pavlov; her vagina was the dog. Okay, not the best metaphor maybe, but she hadn’t even laid eyes on him yet and things were…happening.

  She swung open the door. He was leaning against the jamb looking down, and he was actually panting. “No elevator?”

  She shrugged. “The rent is cheap. The neighborhood is fun.”

  He pushed off the doorframe and must have spied her feet before he lifted his eyes because he said, “Nice toes.”

  “I wasn’t wearing any pants.”

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  Yeah, nice job—why didn’t she just say, “Woof, woof?”

  “What I mean is, I was painting my toenails, and I wasn’t wearing pants. Then you buzzed. So I had to put pants on, and I ruined my toes.” Woof woof.

  A beat of silence, then his voice like scratchy molasses. “Shoot, don’t get dressed on my account
.”

  Was this a booty call? A booty visit? Because she wasn’t actually sure how she felt about that, Pavlov aside. It was one thing to do some ah, stuff, outside Edward’s. Quite another for him to show up at her home. Yeah, this was not good. She didn’t actually know anything about this guy. “How did you know where I live?”

  “I got it out of that hostess at Edward’s.” Before she could protest, he continued. “I’ve come with a proposition. Can I come in?”

  “Uh…” What was she supposed to say to that? It was fine in the alley, but I’m not so sure about the comfort of my own bed?

  “Not that kind of proposition.”

  “Oh.” Was that a ping of disappointment? She moved aside to let him in. Her apartment seemed to have shrunk. He filled it with his imposing golden presence. Stripping off his coat, he sat, long legs and sharp masculine angles incongruent against her turquoise art deco sofa.

  “You’re wearing jeans,” she said, demonstrating a talent for stating the obvious as she sat on the armchair perpendicular to the sofa. It was just that he looked so different when he wasn’t wearing one of his bazillionaire suits. The fitted dark jeans and gray Henley, together with the Sorel boots he’d kicked off in her entryway, made him look more like an L.L. Bean model than Canada’s thirty-fifth richest person.

  “Yes. Unlike you, I’m very pro-pant.” He shot her a look. “Though I do make exceptions under certain circumstances.”

  She popped up. “Do you want a scotch? Scotch would be good, right?” A scotch approximately the size of Lake Ontario, perhaps?

  “Thanks.”

  She could feel him checking out the place as she prepared the drinks in the small kitchen tucked into one corner of the room. Her home, she reminded herself. Her affordable, calm, hard-won home. Nothing to be ashamed of.

  “Cute place. You have an eye for décor.”

  A flush of pride followed, but she beat it back with self-deprecation. “It’s a bit girlie, though, no?” Drinks in hand, she headed back to the sitting area.

  “You are a girl.” He grinned and accepted the outstretched glass. “Last time I checked.”

  …

  Damn. Listen to him. It sounded like he was flirting. It was just too easy with her. Already blushing, she was way too teasable. Their fingers brushed as she handed him his drink, and he had a flash in his mind’s eye of her scrambling to put her pants on when he buzzed. But no, if this was going to work, they were done fooling around.

  “It’s just Johnnie Walker, and Red Label at that. Sorry, no fifty-year-old Glenfarclas here.”

  “A perfectly reliable brand.” He clinked his glass against hers. Time to start thinking with his brain. “So, math, huh?”

  Again, she sat on the armchair, the farthest from him she could put herself in the little apartment. “Pardon me?”

  “You’re majoring in math.”

  “I thought you had a proposition.”

  “I do, but I want to hear about the whole math thing first.”

  She shrugged. “Well, yeah, math. I’ve only got a semester’s worth of credits left until I graduate, but at the rate I’m going, that will take me a year and a half.”

  “You must do all right at Edward’s.” Not that it was any of his business, but hey, why let that stop him? He’d meant it when he said her apartment was cute, but it was tiny. It couldn’t cost that much.

  She shifted and looked away. “Yeah, I have…other expenses.”

  “Cocaine habit?” he teased.

  She looked up sharply, her eyes wounded for a second before she recovered. Shit. Did she have a cocaine habit? Well, that was the point of this little interrogation, wasn’t it? Find out if she was the man for the job. In a manner of speaking.

  “I support my mother. She’s very…expensive.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “She moves around a lot.” Her tone had grown clipped. Clearly mom was not a topic she wanted to discuss. Fair enough. He could relate.

  “So, anyway, what I was really wondering is, why math? You’re a natural? It’s always been easy? Child prodigy? What?”

  She tilted her head, considering. “I don’t know. No, it hasn’t always been easy. But at a certain point, after calculus, it kind of starts to get easier.”

  He couldn’t contain the disbelieving guffaw.

  “It does!” she insisted. “Anyway, I always liked it. A math problem is like a puzzle. It’s something you can solve. It’s finite, and there’s a certain kind of…” She trailed off, looking at the ceiling as she searched for the right word. “Satisfaction there. You solve the problem, and then it’s done.”

  “So what will you do when you graduate? That will be it for Edward’s, I imagine? You said you weren’t a lifer.”

  “Yeah. Though I’m lucky to have the job at Edward’s.”

  “You’re good at it—they’re lucky to have you.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Edward was my father’s best friend. He’s dead—my father, I mean.” She delivered the news with a detached matter-of-factness. “Edward feels responsible for me. I wouldn’t take his money, but I would take his job. I never would have gotten hired at a place like that otherwise.”

  “Why not?”

  “Let’s just say I don’t look the part.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ha!” She did her Vanna White thing again, this time gesturing over her own body. “You’re nice. But high-end places like Edward’s hire beautiful girls. There’s a certain look. A type.”

  He wanted to protest that she was beautiful, that she put all those paper dolls to shame. But that wasn’t the kind of thing he did, so instead he supplied, “Ballerinas.”

  “Yes!” She looked delighted with this description. “And don’t worry, I don’t feel bad about it. Ballerinas are always hungry, I imagine, and I’d rather be happy than hungry.

  “Anyway, the plan is to quit when I’m done with school.” She was talking faster now, warming to her tale. “I’m planning to take the actuarial exam.”

  “An actuary!” He was surprised, though he shouldn’t have been. It was an obvious career move for a math major. “That seems kind of…boring.”

  “It will be. But as far as I can tell, it’s the way I can make the most money the fastest.”

  “That’s one expensive mother.”

  The ice came back into her eyes. “I have other ambitions beyond the financial sinkhole that is my mother.”

  He took his cue from her tone. That would be the end of this line of questioning. All right, so she seemed perfect for the job. And more importantly, he felt like he could trust her. Jack might not be a numbers guy, but he hadn’t become a self-made multimillionaire without being able to read people. Well, most people—apparently he’d been deluding himself for decades about Carl.

  “I want to hire you.”

  She looked like he’d shoved a lemon in her mouth.

  “I need some…math help,” he added.

  “What kind of math help?”

  He raked his hands through his hair as the familiar rage started to swirl in his gut. Fucking Carl. Even promising himself that Carl was going down didn’t calm the fury. Probably because he was equally angry at himself for getting played. It felt like a personal failing. It was a personal failing. “My CFO—my longtime CFO—is ripping me off.”

  Her mouth rounded in surprise.

  “Yeah. That’s why I came into the bar that first night I met you. He and I had a longstanding Tuesday night dinner tradition. We’d go over numbers, talk about upcoming projects. But that was before I found out he was defrauding me.”

  She whistled. “Hard to eat dinner with someone who’s been stealing from you, I guess. How much are we talking about?”

  “I don’t know yet—I’m afraid it could be in the range of hundreds of thousands.” Fuck, it rankled to say it out loud. “I also don’t know how long it’s been going on. Years, maybe.”

  “You don’t need me. You need co
ps or forensic accountants or something.”

  He blew out a frustrated breath. “I know. And believe me, I will be nailing this guy’s ass to the wall. But that’s not what I need you for—that’s just the context. I have a big deal in the works—a potential purchase of this company called Wexler Construction. I’ve been working on this for more than a year.”

  “Is this a hostile takeover? Like in the movies?”

  Damn, she was cute, her legs tucked up under her, curled into her chair.

  “No. It’s a private company, so it’s all about convincing Wexler—Wexler Senior, who’s about to retire, to sell to me instead of handing the reins over to Wexler Junior, otherwise known as the Idiot Son.”

  “Why do you want this company?”

  The question took him aback. It was a good question. But not the kind a business insider would ever ask. Why did anyone want any company? “Most of the company’s assets I’ll probably sell. But Wexler owns a lot of potentially useful land, stuff he hasn’t sold or developed yet—including a private island in Lake Muskoka,” he said, speaking slowly as he thought about how to explain it. “I bought up some property on the shoreline nearby years ago. I want to open a resort, and I’ve been waiting for an island just like his to come up.”

  “You can’t open your resort on the shore?”

  “I could. But a private island has a certain cachet. We’ll ferry people over. It’s a big island, so there’ll be hiking, fishing, swimming, fine dining, the whole deal. But tucked away on an island, away from it all—literally.”