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His mouth quirked. “Oh, come now, Francesca. The art of a good brush-off is an excellent skill to have as a young woman in New York City.”
She put her pencil down. “I can’t imagine you’ve ever been on the receiving end of one. I wouldn’t think it’s very nice.”
“The point isn’t to be nice. That’s what gets you kissed in elevators.”
She was considering a clever response when he grabbed the card from the flowers and scanned it. She held out her hand. “Give that back.”
He waved it at her. “It’s in Russian. What did he say?”
Heat filled her cheeks. “It’s a private note.”
His ebony gaze sat on her face. “My principled Francesca,” he murmured sardonically. “I would expect no less from you. Do you want me to talk to him?”
“Absolutelynot. I’ll handle it.”
“Fine.” He nodded toward his office. “I need to make a couple of calls then we can start on the plan for Leonid.”
“I’m almost done the outline.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s almost five. Should I order dinner in?”
He flexed his shoulders and frowned. “I’ve been inside all day. It’s gorgeous out there. Why don’t we do the work on my terrace and my housekeeper will make us dinner?”
She wasn’t at all sure putting them on anything but a business footing was a wise move at this tenuous stage, but she wasn’t about to stir the waters of what seemed like an inordinately sunny Harrison day either.
“Sounds good,” she agreed. “It’ll be much nicer to get out of the office.”
He finished up his calls, they collected their work and drove to his penthouse on Central Park West in Harrison’s elegant Jaguar. His penthouse was located on the top level of the coveted Central Park West address that everyone who was anyone seemed to be bickering over, but few were lucky enough to obtain. It was beautifully decorated, of course, customized by Harrison’s architect during construction so that an entire grand staircase had been moved to one end to create a wide-open floor-to-ceiling-window-lit main level that accommodated his art collection.
Done in sleek, bold colors, with blue and slate dominating, the penthouse reminded her of his office. Sterile and unobjectionable. She slipped her shoes off and wandered over to survey the art. It was not a collection on the scale of Leonid’s—maybe twelve pieces in total, but priceless no doubt from Harrison’s four-million-dollar Chagall purchase. She walked from one to the next, remembering Viktor’s sermon about what to look out for. When she reached a Chagall done in the same vibrant blues as the one Harrison had bought in London, she stopped and took it in. They could be from the same collection.
“It’ll have company now...” She jumped when Harrison spoke from behind her. He moved with a catlike grace that made him virtually undetectable.
“Relax,” he drawled, his mouth tilting with amusement. “I’m not Viktor Kaminski.”
No, he wasn’t. He was far more dangerous. Especially when he smiled like that. It was like watching the sun come out on a rainy day. She shifted her gaze back to the painting to get her pulse under control. A bird and a woman were perched in a magnificently colored bouquet of flowers floating over the waters of what must be Nice, with its palm trees and similarity to the one she’d seen in London. Again, as with the other one, the image did not make complete sense. The bouquet had the tails of a fish instead of stems, and the buildings dotting the Riviera were curved not straight.
“It’s fantastical, almost supernatural,” she murmured. “Things that shouldn’t be together are and it seems perfectly natural. Like he envisioned some sort of alternate universe.”
He nodded, his gaze moving to the painting. “I think he did. The art historians describe his work as figurative and narrative art. Chagall was embraced by many—the surrealists, the cubists, the suprematists—but he rejected them all. He created a new reality for himself—one that was based on both his inner and outer worlds—the story, the dream he wanted to tell. This series in Nice,” he said, waving a hand at the painting, “is always very mystical and inspirational. The colors are incredible.”
She got that completely. “Is he one of your favorites?”
“Likely my favorite.” The amber flecks in his eyes she found so fascinating glimmered in the expertly angled lighting, giving him a softer appearance. “Some of his later works are much more heartbreaking. They speak of the personal tragedies he suffered before he ended up here in New York.”
“I would like to see some of those. I’m sure they’d be amazing.”
“They are very moving.”
She found herself fascinated by this side of him. The emotion in his eyes when he talked about the artist hinted at a depth to him, an ability to feel he kept hidden underneath the layers.
He read her expression. “You’re surprised.” His lips curled. “The beast does feel, Francesca. When he lets himself.”
Like that night in the car...when he’d let go of that formidable control of his and kissed her senseless.
She couldn’t help taking a step on the dangerous side. “Why doesn’t he let himself do that all the time?”
He lifted a shoulder. “A beast doesn’t need to connect. He lives on another level entirely.”
That he did. Her mouth pursed with the desire to speak, but she shut it down. He might tell himself that. But everyone needed to connect, to experience their human ability to feel. Even a beast.
“Shall we get started, then?”
He nodded. “Elisa is making a shrimp-and-lobster paella. Would you like a drink first?”
She shook her head. “Mineral water is fine.” Tonight she was keeping this all about business. Every last single minute of it.
The pentagon-shaped terrace, boasting coveted southern, eastern and western views of New York, including one of Central Park, was an amazing space to work in. Frankie booted up her PC in one of the comfortable seating areas scattered around the space, and took in the view.
“I’ve received input from Marketing and Sales,” she told Harrison when he returned with their drinks.
“Good.” He came over to sit beside her to look at the screen. He was overwhelmingly male and distracting with his long legs splayed out in front of him. It was going to take all her powers of concentration to keep her mind where it should be.
“Did we get operations to mock up an organizational structure?”
“Yes, it’s here.” She flipped to the slide. The drawing illustrated every division of the massive company that was Grant International, including a new parallel subcompany to Taladan for gauges and meters in Siberius. It was mind-numbing to look at, the scale was so vast. Pretty much every piece of a car you didn’t see on the outside was made by Grant International.
Harrison studied the diagram. “That’s fine. Slot an overall positioning slide in at the beginning and I’ll give you some points.”
She added an up-front slide. He started dictating points, then stopped, backtracked and changed some of his wording. It sounded like semantics to her but she kept typing.
“Point three—the Siberius brand will be maintained as is, pending the outcome of the operations group and consumer research studies.”
Frankie started typing. He frowned and waved a hand at her. “Delete that. I want to bury it further down in the plan.”
Bury it? Why would they do that?
She kept her mouth shut. He had a reason for everything he did, much of it unbeknownst to her. They finished the opening slides and started on the marketing plan. Frankie thought the team had done an excellent job of making gauges and meters a sexy topic for the industry audience the campaign would be targeted at, but Harrison ripped out two of her favorite ideas.
“Why?” she asked, with her newly granted ability to question. “Those are really smart, creative ideas that work for the target audience. Isn’t that key to growing a brand?”
He nodded, his dark lashes coming down to veil his gaze. “But I think it’s overkill in this case.”
They moved on to the next section of ideas the marketing team had grouped as “core must-haves.” The first point included ads in trade publications. “Take that out,” Harrison instructed. Now she really didn’t understand. When Josh had gone through the ideas with her he had told her advertising was key to creating mass awareness for a product. “If nobody in the North American market knows about Siberius’s cool products,” she asked, “how are you going to expand its base?”
He gave her a pained look. “Expanding Siberius’s base isn’t an important priority for us right now. It’s doing fine in the strength areas it currently occupies.”
This was hurting her brain. She put her laptop down and eyed him contemplatively. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we supposed to be selling Leonid on how Siberius will flourish within Grant International? Encouraging him we are the right way to go? He said he had innovative products no one else has. How do we promote those?”
“Every company says they have innovative products,” he bit out impatiently. “I am conscious of not setting unrealistic expectations when anything could happen when the board gets ahold of this deal.”
She frowned. “But of course they’ll support the plan if this is the only way you can get Leonid to sign. They’ll have no choice.”
“That’s an idealistic way to look at it, but the reality is they’ll do what makes business sense. I can only make suggestions. In scenarios like this when we’re acquiring similar resources, the board will likely force us to streamline the two companies into one. It’s doubtful Siberius will be left standing as its former entity.”
“So why are we spending all this time doing a plan?” The words were hardly out of her mouth before it hit her. Harrison had no intention of keeping Siberius intact. He was going to lure Leonid in with this plan and dismantle Siberius when it was done.
Every bone in her body hated the idea. The company had belonged to Leonid’s father. He wanted his legacy preserved. That had been his whole hesitation in signing.
She eyed him. “It’s a bait and switch.”
The impatience in his gaze devolved into a dark storm brewing. “No,” he rejected in a lethally quiet voice. “I made a promise to Leonid to do what I can to see Siberius preserved. It is beyond my or any other CEO’s control to promise him it will remain intact when business realities say it won’t.”
Yet he wasn’t even giving the company a fighting chance with this plan. She lifted her chin. “I see.”
“Francesca...”
She shook her head. This was the part where she needed to stop talking because it got her into trouble. “Let’s keep going,” she said quietly, looking down at her screen. “Where were we?”
“Francesca,” he growled. “This is business. Put the self-righteous look away and be a big girl. You have no idea of the stakes here.”
The “big girl” remark did it for her. She looked up at him, eyes spitting fire. “Dictate to me what you want in this plan and I will do it. But do not ask me to say that this is right.”
“It is right.” His ebony gaze sat on her with furious heat. “This is the law of the jungle. Only the fittest survive.”
“In your world,” she said evenly. “Not in mine.”
“And what would your world have me do? Allow some other predator to snap Siberius up because I’m the one stupid enough to tell Leonid the truth? Not happening.”
“I believe in karma,” Frankie said stubbornly. “I know what a good man Leonid is. He’s putting his trust in you.”
The fury in his eyes channeled into a livid black heat that was so focused, so intense, it scorched her skin. “I know all about karma, Francesca. I know more about it than you will ever want to know in your lifetime. Trust me on that.”
She watched with apprehensive eyes as he got up, paced to the railing and looked out at the fading light of New York. Having him ten feet away allowed her to pull in some air and compose herself. This job meant everything to her; she was proving she could make it on her own. But so did the principles upon which she’d been brought up.
“I’m not trying to be difficult,” she said quietly to his back. “But my father taught me to treasure my ethics at all costs. That if I was ever in a situation that would make it hard for me to sleep at night, maybe I shouldn’t be a part of it.”
He turned around, leaned back against the railing and rested his elbows on it. His anger had shifted into a cold, hard nothingness that was possibly even more disconcerting than the fury.
The chill directed itself her way. “Although my grandfather built Grant Industries, it was my father who had the foresight and brilliance to modernize its methods and transform Grant from a successful but stagnant regional player in the American auto industry to a force to be reckoned with worldwide. He spent every minute of his life at the office, sacrificed everything for the company and eventually it paid off. When I was ten, my father came home one night with a big smile on his face and told us Grant Industries had made the list of the one hundred most profitable companies in America.” He lifted a brow. “Imagine. Coburn and I were only eight and ten—but we got that, we got what that meant.”
She nodded. Wondered why he was telling her this.
“As soon as we finished university, Coburn and I joined the business. It was in our blood just like it was in our father’s. We had the bug. But neither of us ever expected to take on the mantle so soon.”
Because his father had killed himself.
Her insides knotted, a cold, hard ball at the core of her. The skin on his face stretched taut across his aristocratic cheekbones, a blank expression filling his eyes. “One day my father’s usual superhuman working day stretched into two. Then three. He looked like a wreck. He would go into the office, put his engineering teams through crazy all-night sessions, then come home and sleep it off. At first we weren’t too concerned—it wasn’t unlike him to be tunnel-visioned when he was working on a project. But the pattern started getting more and more frequent. More dramatic. One particular night, he came home and he was talking so fast none of us could understand him. We couldn’t get him to rest so we called a doctor. He was diagnosed that night as a manic depressive.”
Her heart went into free fall. “How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Oh, Harrison.” She went to get up but he held out a hand, staying her.
“His condition got progressively worse as the years went on. The stress of success and the accompanying pressure made the cycles more acute, sent him into longer bouts of mania. My mother had to focus entirely on keeping him well and ensuring his condition was kept under wraps so the press, the shareholders, didn’t catch on.”
To the detriment of her boys’ emotional well-being.
“We thought we had his condition under control after handling it for two decades. Then my father made a deal with Anton Markovic to buy one of his Russian-based companies.”
Anton Markovic? The sadistic oligarch Juliana didn’t like in her house?
For the first time since he’d starting speaking, a flare of emotion moved through his dark gaze. “My father saw the potential in a post-Communist era and knew it would only grow. Buying Markovic’s company was supposed to cement Grant as the most powerful auto parts manufacturer in the world. Except Markovic sold us a false-bottomed company that was on the verge of bankruptcy. Under normal circumstances, Grant would have easily absorbed the hit but we were overexposed at the time, in the midst of leveraging capital for an expansion. As a result, the debt from the deal almost crippled us.”
She tried to absorb all the information he was throwing at her. “Couldn’t you have gone to the courts?”
“We did. His holding company was bankrupt by then.”
She swallowed hard, not sure she wanted to know where the story went after this. The emotion in his eyes became hard to watch. “Coburn and I told him it’d be fine. We’d rebuild ourselves stronger than ever. But the miscue threw him into a depressive state he couldn’t pull himself out of. There was also the stress of his impending race for governor of New York.” His lashes swept down over his cheeks. “My mother left the house for a half hour one day, thinking he was asleep. I came home to find he’d shot himself.”
Oh, my God. Her heart broke into a million pieces. It was public knowledge that Clifford Grant had shot himself at the family residence. But to find your father like that, by yourself? This time she did get up and walked over to him, setting her hand on his bicep.
“I am so sorry, Harrison.”
He looked down at her hand as if it was an intrusive appendage that had crept into his lair and threatened his solitary confinement. She could feel the emotion he declared he didn’t have vibrating through him. Then his eyes hardened until they resembled an exotic, impenetrable rock, polished by the elements he’d endured until there were no cracks, no dents, just icy determination. “I’m not looking for your pity, Francesca. I told you this because I need you at my side with this deal. I need you to understand where I’m coming from. Acquiring Siberius is the final piece in my plan to cut Anton Markovic off at the knees for what he did to my father. The company is valuable to me only because it supplies Markovic with vital instruments.”
Understanding dawned. Suddenly all of it—Harrison, Coburn, the way they both were—it all made sense. Coburn spent his days running from the truth, Harrison pursuing vengeance.
He wanted her on board so he could land this deal and finish Markovic. Collateral damage in Leonid was inconsequential.
“So we finish the presentation, he signs and it’s done. What does this have to do with me?”
His expression was implacable. “I need you to be a part of this until he signs. Leonid likes you. Kaminski likes you. You will smooth out the rough edges.”
She turned to look out at the park. It was lit by the skyscrapers surrounding it, a beautiful oasis in a cutthroat city of deal makers. It wasn’t lost on her that Leonid was a cutthroat businessman himself who undoubtedly had his share of blood on his hands. No one in a position of power could avoid the gray areas. It was the gray that defined you.
But it was the emotion she’d just seen in Harrison’s eyes that clutched at her heart. A raw incomplete grief that was as present now as it had been when Anton Markovic had torn out his heart.
Dampness attacked the corners of her eyes. She blinked it back and did what her father had always taught her to do. She went with her gut. And perhaps a large slice of emotion. Because no human being should ever have to go through what Harrison had without making it right.
She turned to him and nodded. “Let’s get back to work, then.”
His gaze darkened. “I’m an honorable man, Francesca. I will keep my promise to Leonid if I can. But it will ultimately be up to the board.”
She hoped he could. But sometimes a need for vengeance could wreak havoc on such honor.
CHAPTER EIGHT (#u0e140246-1a69-5adc-862e-4bafba8f68a9)
HARRISON WAS HAVING trouble sleeping. Dawn was breaking across Manhattan, a vibrant ribbon of burnt orange stretching low across the skyline, casting the base of the skyscrapers in a mist of shimmering fire. It mirrored the turmoil inside of him, the slow burn that threatened to engulf him.
