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“This is the way I drive. If you don’t like it, don’t ask to ride with me.” She took another corner at high speed, and he was pretty sure she was doing it just to annoy him.
If she drove this way all the time, it was a wonder she was still alive. “Out of curiosity, how many accidents have you been in?”
“I’ve never been in an accident.” She whipped into the next lane, cutting off the car directly behind them, whose driver blared its horn in retaliation.
“Have you caused many?”
She shot him another one of those looks. “No.”
“Next you’ll try to tell me you haven’t gotten a speeding ticket.”
This time she stayed silent. That’s what he figured.
She took a sharp left into the underground parking at his building, used her card key to open the gate, zipped into her assigned spot, and cut the engine.
“Well, that was an adventure,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt.
She dropped her keys in her purse and opened her door. “I got you here alive, didn’t I?”
Only by the grace of God, he was sure.
They got out and walked to the elevator, taking it up to the tenth floor. She stood silently beside him the entire time. She could never be accused of being too chatty. Since they left his house she hadn’t said a word that wasn’t initiated by a question. Maybe she was in a snit about the towel. She had enjoyed the free show, but didn’t want to admit it.
The elevator doors opened at their floor, and as they stepped off he rested a hand on the small of her back. A natural reaction, but she didn’t seem to appreciate his attempt to be a gentleman.
She jerked away and shot lasers at him with her eyes. “What are you doing?”
He held his hands up in a defensive gesture. “Sorry. Just being polite.”
“Do you touch all of your female employees inappropriately?”
What was her problem? Here he thought she’d begun to warm to him, but he couldn’t seem to get an accurate read on her.
“I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Well, you did.”
A pair standing in the hallway outside his office cut their conversation short to look at him and Victoria.
“Why don’t we step into my office and talk about this,” he said quietly. She nodded, then he almost made the monumental error of touching her again, drawing his hand away a second before it grazed her shoulder.
He couldn’t help it; he was a physical person. And until today, no one had ever seemed to have a problem with that.
Penelope was already sitting at her desk, tapping away at her keyboard. The only hint of a reaction as he ushered Victoria to his office door was a slight lift of her left brow. He liked that about his secretary. She was always discreet. He also knew exactly what she was thinking. He’d lost another assistant already. Not all that unusual, until he factored in that he hadn’t even slept with this one yet.
“Penelope, hold my calls, please.” He opened the door and gestured Victoria inside, then closed it behind them. “Have a seat.”
Her chin jutted out stubbornly. “I’d rather stand, thank you.”
“Fine.” He could see that she wasn’t going to make this easy. He rounded his desk and sat down. “Now, would you like to tell me what the problem is?”
“The problem is that your behavior today has been completely inappropriate.”
“All I did was touch your back.”
“Employers are not supposed to walk around naked in front of their employees.”
He leaned forward and propped his elbows on the desk. “I wasn’t naked.”
“Not the entire time.”
So, she had been looking. “Need I point out that you were in my house? When I walked into my closet I had no reason to expect you would be there. Sniffing my shirts.”
Her cheeks blushed pink, but she didn’t back down. “And I suppose the towel accidentally fell off.”
“Again, if you hadn’t been ogling me, you wouldn’t have seen anything.”
Her eyes went wide with indignation. “I was not ogling you!”
“Face it, sweetheart, you couldn’t keep your eyes off me.” He leaned back in his chair. “In fact, I felt a little violated.”
“You felt violated?” She clamped her jaw so tight he worried she might crack her teeth. She wasn’t easy to rile, but once he got her going…damn.
“But I’m willing to forgive and forget,” he said.
“I’ve read your e-mails and listened to your phone messages. I know the kind of man that you are, and I’m telling you to back off. I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to, but you have done such a thorough job of ruining my family that I need this position. The way I see it, we’re stuck with each other. If you’re trying to get me to quit, it isn’t going to work. And if you continue to prance around naked in front of me and touch me inappropriately I’ll slap a sexual harassment suit on you so fast you won’t know what hit you.”
He couldn’t repress the smile that was itching to curl the corner of his mouth. “I was prancing?”
Her mouth fell open, as though she couldn’t believe he was making a joke out of this. “You really are a piece of work.”
“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t a compliment! You have got to be the most arrogant, self-centered—” she struggled for the right word, but all she could come up with was “—jerk I have ever met!”
He shrugged. “Arrogant, yes. Self-centered, occasionally. But anyone will tell you I’m a nice guy.”
“Nice?”
“And fair.”
“Fair? You orchestrated the deal that ruined my father. That stole from us the land that has been in our family for five generations, and you call that fair? We lost our business and our home. We lost everything because of you.”
He wasn’t sure where she was getting her information, but she was way off. “We didn’t steal anything. The deal we offered your father was a gift.”
Her face twisted with outrage. “A gift?”
“He wouldn’t have gotten a better deal from anyone else.”
“Ruining good men in the name of the royal family doesn’t make it any less sleazy or wrong.”
This was all beginning to make sense now. Her lack of gratitude toward the royal family and her very generous employment contract. And there was only one explanation. “You have no idea the financial shape that the Houghton was in, do you?”
She instantly went on the defensive. “What is that supposed to mean? Yes, my father handled the financial end of the business, but he kept me informed. Business was slow, no thanks to the Royal Inn, but we were by no means sinking.”
Suddenly he felt very sorry for her. And he didn’t like what he was going to have to do next, but it was necessary. She deserved to know the truth, before she did something ill-advised and made a fool of both herself and her father.
He pressed the intercom on his desk. “Penelope, would you please bring in the file for the buyout on the Houghton Hotel.”
“What are you doing?” Victoria demanded.
Probably making a huge mistake. “Something against my better judgment.”
Victoria stood there, stiff and tight-lipped until Penelope appeared a moment later with a brown accordion file stuffed to capacity. She handed it to Charles, but not before she flashed him a swift, stern glance. Penelope knew what he was doing and the risk he was taking. And it was clear that she didn’t approve. But she didn’t say a word. She just walked out and shut the door behind her.
“The contents in this file are confidential,” he told Victoria. “I could be putting my career in jeopardy by showing it to you. But I think it’s something you need to see. In fact, I know it is.”
At first he thought she might refuse to read it. For several long moments she just stared at him. But curiosity must have gotten the best of her, because finally she reached out and took the file.
“Take that into your office and look it over,” he said.
Without a word she turned and walked through the door separating their offices.
“Come see me if you have questions,” he called after her, just before she shut the door firmly behind her. And he was sure she would have questions. Because as far as he could tell, everything her father had told her was a lie.
Four (#ulink_dabcd9f5-8f29-57ac-a835-21e627209997)
Victoria felt sick.
Sick in her mind and in her heart. Sick all the way down to the center of her soul. And the more she read, the worse she felt.
She was barely a quarter of the way through the file and it was already undeniably clear that not only had the royal family not stolen anything from her and her father, they had rescued them from inevitable and total ruin.
Had they not stepped in, the bank would have foreclosed on mortgages she hadn’t even been aware that her father had levied against the hotel. And he was so far behind in their property taxes, the property had been just days from being seized.
The worst part was that the trouble began when Victoria was a baby, after her grandfather passed away and her father inherited control of the hotel. All that time he’d been riding a precarious, financial roller coaster, living far above their means. Until it had finally caught up to him. And he had managed to keep it a secret by blatantly lying to her.
She had trusted him. Sacrificed so much because she thought she owed him.
Because of the royal family’s generous offer, she and her father had a roof over their heads. And she had the opportunity for a career that would launch her further than she might have ever dreamed possible. Yet she still felt as though the rug had been yanked violently from under her. Everything she knew about her father and their business, about her life, was a lie.
And she had seen enough.
She gathered the papers and tucked them neatly back into the file. Though she dreaded facing Charles, admitting her father’s deception, what choice did she have? Besides, he probably had a pretty good idea already that something in her family dynamic was amiss. If nothing else, she owed him an apology for her unfounded accusations. And a heartfelt thank-you for…well…everything. His family’s generosity and especially their discretion.
And there was only one thing left to do. Only one thing she could do.
She picked up the phone and dialed Charles’s extension. He answered on the first ring. “Is now a good time to speak with you?”
“Of course,” he said. “Come right in.”
She hung up the phone, but for several long seconds just sat there, working up the courage to face him. And she thought yesterday had been humiliating. Getting her butt out of the chair and walking to his office, tail between her legs, was one of the hardest things she’d ever done.
Charles sat at his desk. He had every right to look smug, but he wore a sympathetic smile instead. And honestly she couldn’t decide which was worse. She didn’t deserve his sympathy.
She handed him the file. “Thank you for showing me this. For being honest with me.”
“I thought you deserved the truth.”
She took a deep breath. “First, I want to thank you and the royal family for your generosity. Please let them know how much we appreciate their intervention.”
“’We’?” he asked, knowing full well that her father didn’t appreciate anything the royal family had done for them.
Although for the life of her, she couldn’t imagine why. Pride, she supposed. Or stubbornness. Whatever the reason, she was in no position to make excuses for him. Nor would she want to. He had gotten them into this mess, and any consequences he suffered were his own doing.
“And while I appreciate the opportunity to work for the Royal Inn,” she said, removing her ID badge and setting it on his desk, “I’m afraid I won’t be accepting the position.”
His brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”
She had taken this job only to appease her father, and now everything was different. She didn’t owe him anything. For the first tine in her life she was going to make a decision based entirely on what she wanted.
“I’m not a charity case,” she told Charles. “I owe you too much already. And unlike my father, I don’t care to be indebted to anyone.”
“You’ve seen the file, Victoria. We were under no obligation to your father. Do you honestly believe we would have hired you if we didn’t feel you were qualified for the position?”
She didn’t know what to believe anymore. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”
“What will you do?”
She shrugged. She was in hotel management, and the Royal Inn was the biggest game on the island. She would never find a position with comparable pay anywhere else. Not on Morgan Isle, anyway. That could mean a move off the island. Maybe it was time for a change, time to stop leaning on her father and be truly independent for the first time in her life. Or maybe it was he who had been leaning on her.
“I’ll find another job,” she said.
“What will you do until then?”
She honestly didn’t know. Since the buyout, what savings she’d had were quickly vanishing. If she went much longer without a paycheck, she would be living on the streets.
“I have an idea,” Charles said. “A mutually beneficial arrangement.”
She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that, but the least she could do was hear him out. She folded her arms and said, “I’m listening.”
“You’ve seen the shambles my life is in. Stay, just long enough to get things back in order and to hire and train a new assistant, and when you go, you’ll leave with a letter of recommendation so impressive that anyone would be a fool not to hire you.”
It was tempting, but she already owed him too much. This was something she needed to do on her own.
She shook her head. “You’ve done too much already.”
He leaned forward in his seat. “You would be the one doing me the favor. I honestly don’t have the time to train someone else.”
