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“Oh, I won’t tell anyone.”
“I know you won’t.” He pointed at the petit four that she’d scraped up off the floor, still resting in her palm. “You’ll keep my secret, and I’ll keep yours. Does that sound fair, princess?”
His news wouldn’t be a secret for long, anyway. Dalton’s office was right down the hall. If Artem hadn’t heard Ophelia’s sensual ode to cake and made this spontaneous detour, the deed would already be done.
He’d enjoyed toying with her, but now their encounter had taken a rather vexing turn. As much as he liked the thought of half an hour behind closed doors with those lithe limbs and willowy grace, the meeting she so desperately wanted simply wasn’t going to happen. Not with him, anyway.
Maybe Dalton would meet with her. Maybe Artem would suggest it. I quit. Oh, and by the way, one of the sales associates wants to design our next collection...
Maybe not.
“Okay, then. It was nice meeting you, Mr. Drake.” She offered him her free hand, and he took it. “I’m so very sorry for your loss.”
That last part came out as little more than a whisper, just breathy enough for Artem to know that Ophelia Rose with the sad sapphire eyes knew a little something about loss herself.
“Thank you.” Her hand felt small in his. Small and impossibly soft.
Then she withdrew her hand and squared her shoulders, and the fleeting glimpse of vulnerability he’d witnessed was replaced with the cool confidence of a woman who’d practically thrown cake at him and then asked for a meeting to discuss a promotion. There was that ballsy streak again. “One last thing, Mr. Drake.”
He suppressed a grin. “Yes?”
“Don’t call me princess.”
Chapter Two (#u480fde13-6669-5c69-acd7-44a4a02c15ad)
“Really, Artem?” Dalton aimed a scandalized glance at Artem’s unbuttoned collar and loosened bow tie. “That penthouse where you live is less than three blocks away. You couldn’t be bothered to go home and change before coming to work?”
Artem shrugged and sank into one of the ebony wing chairs opposite Dalton’s desk. “Don’t push it. I’m here, aren’t I?”
Present and accounted for. Physically, at least. His thoughts, along with his libido, still lingered back in the kitchen with the intriguing Miss Rose.
“At long last. It’s been two months since Dad died. To what do we owe the honor of your presence?” Dalton twirled his pen, a Montblanc. Just like the one their father had always used. It could have been the same one, for all Artem knew. That would have been an appropriate bequest.
Far more appropriate than leaving Artem in charge of this place when he’d done nothing more than pass out checks and attend charity galas since he’d been on the payroll.
The only Drake who spent less time in the building than he did was their sister, Diana. She was busy training for the Olympic equestrian team with her horse, which was appropriately named Diamond.
Artem narrowed his gaze at his brother. “I’ve been busy.”
“Busy,” Dalton said flatly. “Right. I think I remember reading something about that in Page Six.”
“And here I thought you only read the financial pages. Don’t tell me you’ve lowered yourself to reading Page Six, brother.”
“I have to, don’t I? How else would I keep apprised of your whereabouts?” The smile on Dalton’s face grew tight.
A dull ache throbbed to life in Artem’s temples, and he remembered why he’d put off this meeting for as long as he had. It wasn’t as if he and Dalton had ever been close, but at least they’d managed to be cordial to one another while their father was alive. Now it appeared the gloves were off.
The thing was, he sympathized with Dalton. Surely his older brother had expected to be next in line to run the company. Hell, everyone had expected that to be the case.
He didn’t feel too sorry for Dalton, though. He was about to get exactly what he wanted. Besides, Artem would not let Dalton ruin his mood. He’d had a pleasant enough evening at the symphony gala, which had led to a rather sexually satisfying morning.
Oddly enough, though, it had been the unexpected encounter with Ophelia Rose that had put the spring in his step.
He found her interesting. And quite lovely. She would have made it almost tolerable to come to work every day, if he had any intention of doing such a thing. Which he didn’t.
“Has it occurred to you that having the Drake name in the papers is good PR?” Artem said blithely.
“PR. Is that what they’re calling it nowadays?” Dalton rolled his eyes.
It took every ounce of Artem’s self-restraint not to point out how badly his brother needed to get laid. “I didn’t come here to discuss my social life, Dalton. As difficult as you might find it to believe, I’m ready to discuss business.”
Dalton nodded. Slowly. “I’m glad to hear that, brother. Very glad.”
He’d be even happier once Artem made his announcement. So would Artem. He had no desire to engage in this sort of exchange on a daily basis. He was a grown man. He didn’t need his brother’s input on his lifestyle. And he sure as hell didn’t want to sit behind a desk all day at a place where he’d never been welcomed when his father had been alive.
According to the attorneys, his father had changed the provisions of his will less than a week before he’d died. One might suppose senility to be behind the change, if not for the fact that his dad had been too stubborn to lose his mind. Shrewd. Cold. And sharp as a tack until the day he passed.
“Listen,” Artem said. “I don’t know why Dad left me in charge. It’s as much of a mystery to me as it is to you.”
“Don’t.” Dalton shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. You’re here. That’s a start. I’ve had Dad’s office cleaned out. It’s yours now.”
Artem went still. “What?”
Dalton shrugged one shoulder. “Where else are you going to work?”
Artem didn’t have an answer for that.
Dalton continued, “Listen, it’s going to take a few days to get you up to speed. We have one pressing matter, though, that just can’t wait. If you hadn’t rolled in here by the end of the week, I was going to beat down your door at the Plaza and insist you talk to me.”
Whatever the pressing matter was, Artem had a feeling that he didn’t want to hear about it. He didn’t need to. It wasn’t his problem. This idea that he would actually run the company was a joke.
“Before the heart attack...” Dalton’s voice lost a bit of its edge.
The change in his composure was barely perceptible, but Artem noticed. He’d actually expected his brother to be more of a mess. Dalton, after all, had been the jewel in their father’s crown. He’d been a son, whereas Artem had been a stranger to the Drakes for the first five years of his life.
“...Dad invested in a new mine in Australia. I didn’t even know about it until last week.” Dalton raised his brows, as if Artem had something to say.
Artem let out a laugh. “Surely you’re not suggesting that he told me about it.”
His brother sighed. “I suppose not, although I wish he had. I wish someone had stopped him. It doesn’t matter, anyway. What’s done is done. The mine was a bust. It’s worthless, and now it’s put the business in a rather precarious position.”
“Precarious? Exactly how much did he spend on this mine?”
Dalton took too long to answer. He exhaled a slow, measured breath and finally said, “Three billion.”
“Three billion dollars.” Artem blinked. That was a lot of money. An astronomical amount, even to a man who lived on the eighteenth floor of the Plaza and flew his own Boeing business jet, which, ironically enough, Artem used for pleasure far more than he did for business. “The company has billions in assets, though. If not trillions.”
“Yes, but not all those assets are liquid. With the loss from the mine, we’re sitting at a twenty-five million dollar deficit. We need to figure something out.”
We. Since when did any of the Drakes consider Artem part of a we?
He should just get up and walk right out of Dalton’s office. He didn’t owe the Drakes a thing.
Somehow, though, his backside remained rooted to the spot. “What about the diamond?”
“The diamond? The Drake diamond?” Dalton shook his head. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. I know you’re not one for sentimentality, brother, but even you wouldn’t suggest that we sell the Drake diamond.”
Actually, he would. “It’s a rock, Dalton. A pretty rock, but a rock nonetheless.”
Dalton shook his head so hard that Artem thought it might snap clear off his neck. “It’s a piece of history. Our family name was built on that rock.”
Our family name. Right.
Artem cleared his throat. “How much is it worth?”
“It doesn’t matter, because we’re not selling it.”
“How much, Dalton? As your superior, I demand that you tell me.” It was a low blow. Artem would have liked to think that a small part of him didn’t get a perverse sort of pleasure from throwing his position in Dalton’s face, but it did. So be it.
“Fifty million dollars,” Dalton said. “But I repeat, it’s not for sale, and it never will be.”
Never.
If Artem had learned one thing since becoming acquainted with his father—since being “welcomed” into the Drake fold—it was that never was an awfully strong word. “That’s not your call, though, is it, brother?”
* * *
Ophelia hadn’t planned on stopping by the animal shelter on the way home from work. She had, after all, already volunteered three times this week. Possibly four. She’d lost count.
She couldn’t go home yet, though. Not after the day she’d had. Dealing with all the happily engaged couples was bad enough, but she was growing accustomed to it. She didn’t have much of a choice, did she? But the unexpected encounter with Artem Drake had somehow thrown her completely off-kilter.
It wasn’t only the embarrassment of getting caught inhaling one of the fifteen dollar petits fours that had gotten her so rattled. It was him. Artem.
Mr. Drake. Not Artem. He’s your boss, not your friend. Or anything else.
He wasn’t even her boss anymore, she supposed. Which was for the best. Obviously. She hadn’t exactly made a glowing first impression. Now she could start over with whoever took his place. So really, there was no logical reason for the acute tug of disappointment she’d felt when he’d told her about his plans to resign. None whatsoever.
There was also no logical reason that she’d kept looking around all afternoon for a glimpse of him as he exited the building. Nor for the way she’d gone all fluttery when she’d caught a flash of tuxedoed pant leg beyond the closing elevator doors after her shift had ended. It hadn’t been Artem, anyway. Just another, less dashing man dressed to the nines.
What was her problem, anyway? She was acting as though she’d never met a handsome man before. Artem Drake wasn’t merely handsome, though. He was charming.
Too charming. Dangerously so.
Ophelia had felt uncharacteristically vulnerable in the presence of all that charm. Raw. Empty. And acutely aware of all that she’d lost, all that she’d never have.
She couldn’t go home to the apartment she’d inherited from her grandmother. She couldn’t spend another evening sifting through her grandmother’s things—the grainy black-and-white photographs, her tattered pointe shoes. Her grandmother had been the only family that Ophelia had known since the tender age of two, when a car accident claimed the lives of her parents. Natalia Baronova had been more than a grandparent. She’d been Ophelia’s world. Her mother figure, her best friend and her ballet teacher.
She’d died a week before Ophelia’s diagnosis. As much as Ophelia had needed someone to lean on in those first dark days, she’d been grateful that the great Natalia Baronova, star ballerina of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1940s and ’50s, died without the knowledge that her beloved granddaughter would never dance again.
“Ophelia?” Beth, the shelter manager, shook her head and planted her hands on her hips as Ophelia slipped off her coat and hung it on one of the pegs by the door. “Again? I didn’t see your name on the volunteer schedule for this evening.”
“It’s not. But I thought you could use an extra pair of hands.” Ophelia flipped through the notebook that contained the animals’ daily feeding schedule.
“You know better than anybody we always need help around here, but surely you have somewhere else to be on a Friday night.”
Nowhere, actually. “You know how much I enjoy spending time with the animals.” Plus, the shelter was now caring for a litter of eight three-week-old kittens that had to be bottle-fed every three hours. The skimpy volunteer staff could barely keep up, especially now that the city was blanketed with snow. People liked to stay home when it snowed. And that meant at any given moment, one of the kittens was hungry.
Beth nodded. “I know, love. Just be careful. I’d hate for you to ruin that pretty dress you’re wearing.”
The dress had belonged to Ophelia’s grandmother. In addition to mountains of dance memorabilia, she’d left behind a gorgeous collection of vintage clothing. Like the apartment, it had been a godsend. When she’d been dancing, Ophelia had lived in a leotard and tights. Most days, she’d even worn her dance clothes to school, since she’d typically had to go straight from rehearsal to class at the New York School of Design. She couldn’t very well show up to work at Drake Diamonds dressed in a wraparound sweater, pink tights and leg warmers.
Neither could she simply go out and buy a whole new work wardrobe. Between her student loan bills and the exorbitant cost of the biweekly injections to manage her MS, she barely made ends meet. Plus there were the medical bills from that first, awful attack, before she’d even known why the vision out of her left eye sometimes went blurry or why her fingers occasionally felt numb. Sometimes she left rehearsal with such crippling fatigue she felt as if she were walking through Jell-O. She’d blamed it on the stress of dealing with her grandmother’s recent illness. She’d blamed it on the rigorous physical demands of her solo role in the company production of Giselle. Mostly, though, she’d simply ignored her symptoms because she couldn’t quite face the prospect that something was seriously wrong. Then one night she’d fallen out of a pirouette. Onstage, midperformance. The fact that she’d been unable to peel herself off the floor had only made matters worse.
And now she’d never perform again.
Sometimes, in her most unguarded moments, Ophelia found herself pointing her toes and moving her foot in the familiar, sweeping motion of a rond de jambe. Then she’d close her eyes and remember the sickening thud as she’d come down on the wooden stage floor. She’d remember the pitying expressions on the faces of her fellow dancers and the way the crimson stage curtains had drawn closed on the spectacle with a solemn hush. Her career, her life, everything she’d worked for, had ended with that whisper of red velvet.
She had every reason to be grateful, though. She had a nice apartment in Manhattan. She had clothes on her back and a job. She’d even had the forethought to enroll in school while she’d been dancing, because she’d known that the day would come when she’d be unable to dance for a living. She just hadn’t realized that day would come so soon. She’d thought she’d had time. So much time. Time to dance, time to love, time to dream.
She’d never planned on spending her Friday nights feeding kittens at an animal shelter, but it wasn’t such a bad place to be. She actually enjoyed it quite a bit.
“I’ll be careful, Beth. I promise.” Ophelia draped a towel over the front of her dress and reached into the cabinet above a row of cat enclosures for a bottle and a fresh can of kitten formula.
As she cracked the can open and positioned it over the tiny bottle, her gaze flitted to the cage in the corner. Her hand paused midpour when she realized the wire pen was empty.
“Where’s the little white kitten?” she asked, fighting against the rapidly forming lump in her throat.
“She hasn’t been adopted, if that’s what you’re wondering.” Beth cast her a knowing glance. “She’s getting her picture taken for some charity thing.”
“Oh.” Ophelia hated herself for the swell of relief that washed over her. The shelter’s mission was to find homes for all their animals, after all. Everyone deserved a home. And love. And affection.
The lump in her throat grew tenfold. “That’s too bad.”
“Is it?” Beth lifted a sardonic brow.
Ophelia busied herself with securing the top on the bottle and lifting one of the squirming kittens out of the pen lined with a heating pad that served as a makeshift incubator. “Of course it is.”
She steadfastly refused to meet Beth’s gaze, lest she give away her true feelings on the matter, inappropriate as they were.
But there was no fooling Beth. “For the life of me, I don’t know why you won’t just adopt her. Don’t get me wrong—I appreciate your help around here. But I have a sneaky suspicion that the reason you came by tonight has more to do with visiting your fluffy friend than with feeding our hungry little monsters. You’re besotted with that cat.”
“And you’re exaggerating.” The orange kitten in Ophelia’s hand mewed at a volume that belied its tiny size. Ophelia nestled the poor thing against her chest, and it began suckling on the bottle at once. “Besides, I told you. I can’t have a pet. My apartment doesn’t allow them.”
It was a shameless lie. But how else was she supposed to explain her reluctance to adopt an animal she so clearly adored?
The truth was that she’d love to adopt the white Persian mix. She’d love coming home to the sound of its dainty feet pattering across the floor of her empty apartment. If the cat could come live with her, Ophelia would let it sleep at the foot of her bed, and feed it gourmet food from a can. If...
But she couldn’t do it. She was in no condition to let anyone depend on her for their survival. Not even an animal. She was a ticking time bomb with an unknown deadline for detonation.
