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Desire is more than skin-deep
It’s just Sage Matthews’s luck that the man stirring her dormant passions wants to buy her cosmetics company. Cole Sinclair inherited the kind of success Sage is working hard to build, and after almost ten years away, he’s back to save his own empire. Takeover bid: denied. But in the bedroom, their rivalry morphs into sizzling chemistry. And Sage is falling dangerously fast for the wild streak beneath Cole’s designer suits.
Sage’s up-and-coming company is a thorn in Cole’s side. If they can’t agree to terms, both will be eliminated by the competition. From Nashville to sultry Milan, he’s using all his seductive powers of persuasion. But the kind of partnership Sage craves takes compromise and trust—and the courage to go beyond the surface to find what’s real...
“Now I want it even more.”
Sage slammed her eyes shut and swallowed hard, silently willing the parts of her body shifting into overdrive back into neutral. She should have stayed behind her desk with her legs tightly crossed, because this man was on the verge of talking the panties right off her.
When she opened her eyes, his gaze was locked on her lips.
“Is this your idea of keeping friends close and enemies closer?” The mocking tone she’d hoped for fell flat, and her question echoed in her ears like a breathless pant.
“You’re not my enemy, Sage,” Cole murmured. “You’re a challenge.” He brushed his knuckles down her cheek. “And I do love a challenge.”
If she’d been clearheaded, a snappy comeback would have been on the tip of her tongue. However, her brain had taken the backseat in her headspace, allowing a wave of longing to take the wheel.
“That lipstick is beautiful on you.” His eyes never leaving her lips, Cole swiped the pad of his thumb across a sticky spot near the corner of her mouth. Sage stood mesmerized as he slowly licked the sugary glaze from his thumb, while her imagination conjured up illicit images of him licking her everywhere.
“What’s it called?” he asked.
“‘Taste Me.’”
“You just read my mind.” Cupping her chin in his hand, Cole leaned in and brushed his lips against hers.
Dear Reader,
At some point, we’ve all thought, “Life would be a lot easier if everyone was just like me.”
That’s exactly what Espresso Cosmetics CEO Cole Sinclair finds in rival cosmetics company owner Sage Matthews. Only nothing comes easy as Sage proves to be every bit as cocky, stubborn and competitive as he is.
I enjoyed the interaction between Cole and Sage as their sexy game of one-upmanship progresses to grudging respect, friendship and, finally, love. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it!
All my best,
Phyllis
Phyllis Bourne
www.millsandboon.co.uk
PHYLLIS BOURNE is a native of Chicago’s South Side and began her writing career as a newspaper crime reporter. After years of cops and criminals, she left reporting to write about life’s sweeter side. Nowadays, her stories are filled with heart-stopping heroes and happy endings. When she’s not writing, she can usually be found at a makeup counter feeding her lipstick addiction. You can find her on the web at www.phyllisbourne.com and facebook.com/phyllisbournebooks.
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For Byron
Contents
Cover
Back Cover Text
Introduction
Dear Reader
Title Page
About the Author
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Copyright
Chapter 1
“Who put the scowl on your face?”
Cole Sinclair looked up from the newspaper he’d been absorbed in to see his stepfather standing in his office doorway.
“No, don’t tell me. Let me guess.” Victor Gray raised a finger in a halting gesture. “Stiletto Cosmetics.”
Folding the business section in half, Cole slung it across his desk in disgust. “How’d you guess?”
“If you’re frowning, it usually has something to do with them.”
Cole pushed away from his desk and began to pace in front of the wall of windows offering a panoramic view of downtown Nashville. He’d known when he’d returned to his hometown that reviving his family’s troubled cosmetics company would be a monumental task.
The widely held opinion that Espresso Cosmetics was old-lady makeup was firmly entrenched. Moreover, an upstart cosmetics company had set up shop in town, grabbing both headlines and Espresso’s dwindling customer base.
“The media’s handing out good press to Stiletto like candy on Halloween,” he muttered. “Meanwhile, we can barely get a reporter to return a phone call.”
Victor hovered in the doorway. “They’re just capitalizing on their fifteen minutes of fame since that singer mentioned them on television. It won’t last much longer.”
Cole wasn’t so sure. Stiletto had been generating buzz on the web even before pop star Crave gave them a shout-out on national television. He stopped midpace to glance out the window. An electronic billboard in the distance stood out against the gray January skies. It flashed continuous images of a cheeseburger with toppings stacked nearly as high as Espresso’s aging eleven-story building.
He stared blankly at it, his mind on how Stiletto was gaining ground with a generation of young women Espresso was desperate to attract. Unfortunately, an article in today’s paper had pushed that demographic even further out of their reach.
“I stopped by to see if you wanted to go to lunch with me later,” his stepfather said. “I saw a billboard of the most mouthwatering burger I’ve ever seen on the drive in this morning, and I’ve been drooling ever since.”
That burger did look good, Cole thought. Real food. A lot better than the upscale dining experiences he’d endured while handling Espresso business these past months.
He also recognized that Victor’s invitation was for more than lunch. His late mother’s second husband, the only father he’d ever known, was extending another olive branch to help rebuild their once-close relationship after eight years of estrangement.
“Another time, Vic. I doubt I’ll have an appetite by lunchtime. Dinner, either.”
“So are you going to tell me what’s going on or keep frowning until your face gets stuck like that?” the older man said, still hovering in the doorway.
“There’s something you need to read.”
Cole watched his stepfather hesitate before venturing beyond the doorway into the overhauled office that no longer bore the feminine traces of the company’s founder.
Cole snatched the copy of America Today off the mahogany executive desk he’d brought in to replace the elegant Queen Anne writing table his mother and Espresso founder, Selina Sinclair Gray, had ruled from. Snapping it open, he pointed out the article responsible for his current mood and handed it to Victor.
He watched his stepfather’s eyes narrow as he zeroed in on one of the photos accompanying the story. The older man drew the newspaper in until it nearly touched his nose.
“Wow!”
“Exactly,” Cole said, still steaming over it. Then he caught an uncharacteristic gleam in Victor’s eyes. It lit up his entire face. In fact, he was practically ogling the newspaper.
What the...?
“God knows I worshipped the ground your mother walked on,” his stepfather said, “but would you take a look at those long legs in that short skirt and those high heels. I don’t see a thing here to put a frown on a man’s face.”
Cole snatched the paper back from him.
Victor shook his head and a sly grin spread over his lips. “She’s got a young Angela Davis thing going on with that wild Afro, too. Yes, sir! If I were five or ten years younger, she’d be your new mama.”
Cole stared at the smaller photo he’d ignored before, the larger one having grabbed his attention and earned his ire.
“More like twenty-five to thirty years younger,” he grumbled. “She could be your daughter.”
Cole frowned at the photo of the woman sitting on the edge of a desk. So this was Stiletto’s owner. His gaze drifted to the untamed mane of kinky coils surrounding a no-nonsense face and full, unsmiling lips. Sage Matthews looked exactly like what she and her company were—a pain in his ass.
He shoved the newspaper back at his stepfather and pointed. “This photo is the problem.”
Victor re-examined the newspaper and then looked up at him. “The young lady in this one is okay, but not nearly as good-looking as that Matthews woman. She’s smoking hot.”
“Enough about her.”
“Okay, okay,” his stepfather said, still examining the photo. “You know, the old woman standing next to the young one in this picture looks kind of like...”
“A man in drag.” Cole finished. He jabbed his finger toward the offending photo of an attractive young woman juxtaposed against an older one presumably representing Espresso. “Not only are they relegating us to the brand for senior citizens, they exaggerate the point with one of the ugliest old ladies I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, as you just said, he’s no lady.”
A vein on the side of Cole’s head pulsed. “You think?” Sarcasm permeated the question. “What gave it away, the hot mess of a gray wig or the damned goatee?”
“Hmm.” Victor tilted his own graying head to one side, then the other as he continued to study the grainy color photo. “Not really a goatee. I’d say it was more of a five o’clock shadow.”
“Are you actually defending that photo?” Cole asked.
The corner of his stepfather’s mouth quirked upward. “You know he kind of looks like the guy who stars in those Maw-Maw movies.”
“Who or what is a Maw-Maw?”
Victor looked up, an incredulous look on his face. “Wow. You have been out of the country a long time. Maw-Maw is the star of a slew of movies about a wisecracking, busybody matriarch, who can’t stop sticking her nose in her family’s business.” He chuckled and shook his head. “Can’t believe you never heard of them. I have a couple on DVD. I’ll let you borrow them.”
“No, thank you,” Cole said firmly, his patience waning.
“Oh, come on. You have to at least see Maw-Maw Passes the Plate. It’s the one where Maw-Maw puts an envelope containing a thousand dollars into the church offering plate by mistake.” His stepfather burst into a fit of laughter, slapping the newspaper against his thigh. “The old girl starts leaping over the church pews, like a sprinter clearing hurdles in the summer Olympics, trying to get it back. She even tackles a deacon. It’s hilarious!”
Cole cleared his throat loudly.
“I’m not interested in any movie featuring a grown man wearing a dress. Right now, all I care about is this article and the damage it’s doing to Espresso’s image, which isn’t one bit funny.”
“Sorry about that, son.” Victor dabbed at the tears that had gathered in his eyes from laughing. “I guess I got sidetracked.” He extracted a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and resumed studying the article.
A few minutes later, he shrugged. “Okay, so they took a bit of a dig at us. Try not to get so bent out of shape over it. It’s not that big a deal.”
“Not a big deal?” Cole fumed, the headline imprinted on his brain—Not Your Granny’s Makeup: Stiletto Cosmetics Puts Its Spiked Heel in the Competition. He quoted the article, “As Cole Sinclair makes a last ditch attempt to rescue his family’s declining Espresso Cosmetics from near extinction, an edgy new brand is poised to pick up the torch.”
Victor removed his glasses, folded the paper and tucked it under his arm. “We just had our first successful collection in nearly a decade thanks to you,” he said.
“And there wasn’t a single word in the press about it, despite the efforts of our public relations team.”
“Still, it was a huge boost to Espresso employees who haven’t had much to celebrate in a very long time,” the older man said. “You should be patting yourself on the back, not worrying about a ridiculous photo in some rag.”
“America Today has a nationwide circulation. Not to mention online and international editions.”
“My point is Espresso is finally making a comeback,” Victor said.
“Comeback?” Cole leaned against the front of his desk and folded his arms. “We’re a long way from what I’d consider a comeback.
“A sold-out holiday collection was a heck of a good start.”
Cole shrugged off the praise with a grunt. His first order of business as CEO of Espresso’s cosmetics division had been to sit down with the company’s chief financial officer, Malcolm Doyle, to find out exactly where years of stagnant sales had left them financially.
The second had been to untie the hands of the creative and product-development teams and allow them to do their jobs. For too long their ideas had languished due to Victor’s insistence on remaining loyal to what he believed Cole’s mother would have wanted for her company.
“You’ve done more for Espresso in five months than I accomplished after years of being in charge.” Victor’s chin dropped to his chest, his gaze cast toward the carpet. “It’s just I thought...”
“The success of the holiday collection was just a drop in the bucket.” Cole cut him off, refusing to play the blame game.
All he cared about was making Espresso relevant in the cosmetics industry again. It was too late to take back the harsh words he’d exchanged with his mother the very last time he’d seen her. Now the only way he could make it up to her was to save her legacy.
He swallowed hard. “We’d need a tsunami to erase the red ink from the company books and our old-lady image from women’s minds.” Rounding his desk, Cole tapped at his computer keyboard until the survey he’d commissioned appeared on the screen. “I was going to email you a copy of this later, but you might as well take a look at it now.”
Victor sat in Cole’s leather executive chair, once again retrieving his reading glasses from his pocket.
“This is a survey taken over the holidays of customers shopping at various department-store cosmetics counters,” Cole explained. He leaned over Victor’s shoulder, right-clicking the mouse to expand a page. “Here are just a few of the comments female shoppers made when asked about Espresso.”
The older man read aloud. “‘My great-aunt uses their foundation. We call her Auntie Cake behind her back because her face always looks like it’s been dipped in batter.’” Victor winced. “Ouch.”
“It gets worse.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Keep reading.”
“‘Their makeup counters are deader than a morgue.’”
Victor read another one. “‘I didn’t know they were still around.’”
Cole pointed out a remark made by a twenty-two-year-old woman actually making a purchase at an Espresso counter. This time he read it aloud. “‘I’m only here because my grandmother ran out of her favorite pink lipstick. No way I’d wear this old-lady stuff. I’m a Stiletto girl all the way.’”
His stepfather exhaled a long drawn-out breath. “This is why you’re so peeved about that article.”
Cole nodded. “The more I think about it, the more I believe it’s too late to change people’s minds about us. Our senior-citizen image is too entrenched.”
“But...” Victor started to protest, but Cole held up a hand to stop him.
“Hear me out,” Cole said. “Why keep banging our heads against a brick wall? Stiletto already has the hip, edgy vibe and is gaining popularity with the young demographic we’re chasing.”
“I’m not following you, son.”
Cole smiled for the first time in what felt like weeks. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?
“It’s the acquire-to-grow strategy—something I was in charge of implementing during my tenure at Force Cosmetics. Simply put, if we can’t beat them, we’ll just have to buy them.”
He paused to give Victor a chance to let the idea sink in. “We would keep Stiletto’s name and packaging the same, meanwhile continue to revamp Espresso and rebrand it as makeup for the classic or mature beauty or something along those lines.”
The older man pressed his lips together a few moments, before he finally spoke. “Couldn’t we just develop our own offshoot brand?”
Cole shrugged. “We could, but that would take a long time. Even then, consumers can be fickle. There’s no guarantee it would catch on and turn into a winner for us.”
“But how?” Victor frowned, deepening the creases in his forehead. “You heard what Doyle said. The cosmetics division is buried in red ink. Your sister’s Espresso Sanctuary spas propped us up until you came back and threw us a lifeline.”
Cole crossed his arms over his chest. While Espresso’s finances had dwindled in his absence, his personal wealth had grown tremendously. “Don’t worry. I’ve got it covered,” he said. “I’m about to make Ms. Matthews an offer too good to refuse.”
Chapter 2
Sage Matthews pulled the phone away from her ear long enough to give it, and the woman on the other end of the line, the side eye.
“Your makeup brand would be a perfect addition to our store lineup.”
The buyer for the trendy boutique chain droned on, but the silent alarms on Sage’s bullshit detector drowned out the rest of her spiel. It sounded identical to the ones she’d heard all morning.
“Strange—that isn’t what you said a few weeks ago.” Sage kicked off her shoes under her desk and wiggled her toes. High heels were the worst form of torture, but when you owned a company called Stiletto, you had to dress the part.
She glanced at the notation she’d scribbled on a message slip next to the buyer’s name. “I believe you said Stiletto’s branding was too provocative. Your exact words were downright raunchy.”
“Um...well,” the woman stammered. “You must have misheard me. I said it was delightfully racy as in sexy. Clearly, there’s been a misunderstanding.”
Misunderstanding, huh? Sage stifled the harrumph on the tip of her tongue. “Hard to tell,” she said, “considering the way your secretary tossed me out of your office afterward like she was a nightclub bouncer.”
“Oh, dear. Please accept my apologies if my staff was a touch overzealous. Again, I assure you it was all a big mistake. One I hope we can...”
“Just stop.” Sage had heard enough.
“P-pardon?”
“Before you continue, you should know I refuse to do business with anyone who lies to me.”
Silence.
Figuring the buyer was weighing her options, Sage waited, making no attempt to fill the dead air. Long awkward moments passed, before a sigh emitted over the line. “Okay, the truth is I didn’t want to risk offending my more conservative clientele by selling lipsticks and eyes shadows with names like Spank Me and Missionary Position.”
There was another sigh, this one deeper and more drawn out. “Next thing I know, the hottest female singer on the planet is telling a national television audience she adores your lipsticks. Suddenly the same customers I was worried about offending are clamoring for Stiletto products, and I couldn’t be more sorry for turning you down.”
Finally, Sage thought, the truth.
She’d returned nearly a dozen calls that morning from eager buyers, the same people who had practically slammed the door in her face previously, criticizing everything from Stiletto’s faux black leather packing to the titillating names of their products. Of course, they’d changed their tunes in the weeks since pop star Crave had whipped out a tube of Stiletto lipstick and called it her secret weapon.
Sage knew it was just foolish pride. Still, she couldn’t help feel irked that instead of owning up to their blunder, they’d tried to gloss over it. Insulting her intelligence with meaningless flattery.
“My assistant will contact you later today to schedule a meeting to discuss adding Stiletto to your boutique’s lineup,” she said, satisfied. “However, you should know that as circumstances have changed, so has my first offer. Any deal we strike now will definitely have terms more favorable to Stiletto.”
“Eh...uh...of course,” the boutique’s buyer said. “I look forward to our meeting.”
Sage ended the call just as her assistant, Amelia, bounded into her office clutching a pink message slip. A huge grin deepened the dimples in the cheeks of her smooth brown skin. “I thought it would take forever for you to finally get off the phone.”
“What’s up?” Leaning forward in her office chair, Sage propped her elbows on her desktop. She dropped her chin to her chest and began rubbing out the kinks that had developed in her neck from talking on the phone all morning.
“You’ll never guess who called for you.” The nineteen-year-old shifted from one leg to the other, practically bouncing with excitement. “Not in a million years.”
“Well, don’t keep me...” Sage stopped midsentence and glanced up at her assistant. “Hold on. What are you still doing here?” She glanced at her watch. “Your accounting class starts in five minutes.”
Amelia huffed and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “I know. I know.”
The teen had started working for Stiletto a few hours a week after school during her last year of high school. Sage thought she was doing the girl a favor, but quickly discovered that in the efficient and organized Amelia, she’d struck employee gold.
A year later, when graduation and her eighteenth birthday aged her out of the foster-care system, the job became full-time with the stipulation that Amelia would enroll in college. Having grown up in the foster-care system, Sage knew the importance of having an education to fall back on when you had no one to depend on but yourself.
“Well?” Sage raised a brow.
“But I couldn’t leave. Not just yet. Not until I tell you who...”
“I don’t care who called. There isn’t anything or anyone more important than you being at school right now,” Sage said.
The same brusque tone that sent her other employees, and most people, scurrying for cover rarely intimidated Amelia. Nor did it dampen her bubbly enthusiasm over the caller she was dying to tell her about.
“Stand down, General. I’m going to class, but first you have to hear who called you before I explode.”
“For goodness’ sake. Spit it out so you can haul your fanny over to the community college.” Sage sighed. “And if you’re going to call me General, can’t you do it behind my back like everyone else around here?”