Married to His Business / Six-Month Mistress: Married to His Business

Two

Kendall made the trip to Tahoe courtesy of OmniTech, enjoying the brief flight in first class. A rental car awaited her on arrival, a luxury sedan that was quite the posh way to travel, compared to her little economy car at home. Maybe on her new salary, she could ultimately buy something like this, she thought as she settled into the leather seat and pushed the button to open the sunroof. As the balmy summer air tumbled into the car, she donned her sunglasses, fastened her seat belt over her white oxford shirt and khaki trousers and tuned the radio to the jazz station. Then, feeling like a corporate executive for the first time in her life, she pulled out of the rental lot at the airport basking in contentment.

Until she thought about Matthias Barton. Then her contentment fled. And what she’d hoped would be a peaceful, introspective drive that was filled with planning for her future at OmniTech suddenly turned into a grueling marathon of disgruntlement instead.

But then, thoughts of Matthias—never mind disgruntlement—had been regular companions over the two weeks that had passed since she’d last seen him. So as she merged onto the highway, Kendall did her best to think of something— anything—else. How she needed to replace the hardware on her kitchen cabinets. The fact that women’s shoe manufacturers still hadn’t figured out how to wed style with comfort. Why the sky was blue and the grass was green. The atomic weight of boron. Where the contestants of Survivor should go next—though, admittedly, it probably wasn’t polite for her to say aloud where she thought they should go. Whatever it took to keep from hearing again those two little words she’d never thought she’d hear Matthias say to her.

You’re fired.

She still couldn’t believe he’d done it. After giving him five years of her life, years she could have spent building her own career instead of bolstering his, he’d cut her loose in the most insulting way possible. She’d seen him fire plenty of people during the time she’d worked for him, but they were people who’d deserved the boot. Employees who had been, at best, ineffective, and at worst, dishonest. People who had cheated him, or lied to him, or stolen from him. Now Kendall, who had never missed a day on the job, and whose work ethic had been irreproachable, had been relegated to their ranks.

But even that wasn’t what bothered her the most. What bothered her the most was her own reaction to having been fired. She told herself she should be angry with Matthias for the way he’d dismissed her. She should be resentful. She should be outraged. She should be reporting him to the Equal Opportunity Commission. Instead, what she felt was hurt. Hurt in the same way a little girl feels hurt when she’s always picked last for kickball. And hurt feelings were not something a consummate professional like Kendall should feel.

Matthias was right about one thing. She hadn’t learned as much from him as she’d thought she would when she accepted the position, if she couldn’t be the focused, unflinching businesswoman she’d envisioned becoming. She could be as ruthless and determined as Matthias was, she told herself. She could. And she would be, too. Starting the moment she passed through the doors of the Timber Lake Inn.

That must be a new hotel in Tahoe, Kendall thought as she exited onto the road that would take her to her final destination. She’d never heard of it before. It was kind of an odd name for a conference hotel, too. They must be trying to make business travel sound less businessy or something.

She glanced at the numbers on a shop window to get her bearings and calculated that the hotel was another eight blocks down, toward the lake. She hadn’t been to Tahoe since college, she realized as she drove, smiling at the shops boasting kites and artwork and jewelry and clothes. In the winter, there would be skis lined up everywhere, but during the summer, there were water toys and rafts instead. People dotted the streets in their bright summer colors and sunglasses, lolling at café tables and sauntering in and out of stores. The weather was perfect for being outdoors, the air kissed with just a hint of the cool breeze gliding off the lake, the sky a faultless blue streaked with gauzy clouds.

Kendall smiled at the promise inherent in the day. It was a good omen. She had been right to leave Matthias’s employ. Stephen DeGallo’s offer couldn’t have come at a better time. Funny how things just worked out perfectly sometimes. She had a full week to spend in one of the most beautiful places on earth, learning about a new career that, she hoped, would be hers for the rest of her life. Her future at OmniTech was wide-open. If she worked hard and did everything right—who knew?—she might even become the CEO of the company herself someday. Stephen DeGallo was a confirmed bachelor in his late forties with no family he was bringing up through the ranks, and he was known for rewarding his workers with generous benefits and bonuses. Even if he never groomed Kendall for his own position at the company, there was every reason to believe he might someday install her as the head of one of the scores of businesses he owned. Unlike Matthias, who had never offered any indication that he would ever consider Kendall for anything more than his assist—

Dammit. She was thinking about him again.

She pushed Matthias out of her brain—again—and looked for another street number. Two more blocks.

When she braked for a red light, she used the opportunity to get her bearings. A glance at her watch told her it was just coming up on three o’clock, precisely the time she’d anticipated arriving, knowing her room would be ready by then. She was supposed to meet Stephen and the other trainees at six for an informal dinner, so they could all get to know one another, and training officially began at eight in the morning. Dress would be casual, but Kendall had packed a couple of suits in with her trousers and shirts, just in case. She was, after all, a consummate professional.

Of course, she was in Lake Tahoe, too, so she’d also included blue jeans and T-shirts and shorts and sandals, her preferred attire for relaxing. She wasn’t such a workaholic that she didn’t take advantage of her off time. Unlike Matthias, who—

Dammit, she was doing it again.

The light changed green, so she banished thoughts of Matthias—again—and urged the accelerator down lightly, taking the last two blocks slowly. The lake was in view now, but she didn’t see any hotels large enough to qualify for corporate lodgings up ahead. She took her eyes off the road long enough to glance down at the passenger seat, where she’d laid the directions and a map, to confirm she had the address right. Maybe she’d written it down wrong, she thought. Because this block and the one beyond it was nothing but more quaint shops and cafés and cozy B and Bs.

Just as she neared the end of the last block and began to look for a place to turn around, she saw a sign with an arrow pointing to the right that read Parking for Timber Lake Inn. Braking quickly, she was able to make the turn just in time.

But the drive led to the entrance of a tidy, cheerful little bed-and-breakfast. Kendall frowned, wondering where she’d gone wrong, then noted a sign above the door that identified it as the very hotel she’d been looking for. Huh. That was odd. The place looked more like a honeymoon hotel than it did a corporate facility. Stephen DeGallo must like to use places like this to make his new hires feel more comfortable. Yet another way in which he differed from Matthias, who, Kendall was sure, would have scheduled an orientation for…

Well, actually, Matthias would have trained people in the buildings where they would be working, she thought. Or rather, he’d have other people training his new employees in the buildings where they would be working. It would be more professional that way. More businesslike. God forbid he should ever want anyone to feel any other way.

When Kendall realized she was thinking about Matthias again, she shoved the thought away again—harder this time—and pushed open the car door. By now a bellman had emerged from the hotel and was descending the stairs to help her with her bag. Instead of the liveried uniform he might have worn at a larger hotel, however, he was dressed in khaki shorts and a polo bearing the logo of the Timber Lake Inn stitched on the breast pocket. Coupled with his shaggy blond hair and ruddy complexion, he looked as if he should be standing at the edge of the ocean toting a surfboard instead of lugging bags for a lakeside hotel.

“Dude,” he greeted her with a smile, reinforcing the image. “Welcome to the Timber Lake Inn. I’m Sean. I’ll get your bags.”

“Thanks,” Kendall replied with a smile of her own as she reached into the car to pop the trunk open. “I’m Kendall Scarborough. I’m here for the OmniTech orientation session.”

Sean nodded. “Well, wherever that’s going on, you can probably get there by walking. We’re pretty centrally located here.”

The comment puzzled Kendall. “It’s going on here,” she said. “At the hotel.”

Sean’s eyebrows shot up at that. “Whoa. First I’ve heard about it. But then, I was on vacation last week and just got back today. All I knew about going on this week was the Tyson-Gerhart wedding and the Truckee Ski Club reunion. Those have got us booked to full capacity.”

Kendall looked at the hotel again. It didn’t look big enough to host those functions and a training session. Not that she’d expected the OmniTech orientation to be a huge event, but since it would run for a week, and since Stephen DeGallo himself would be part of it, she’d just assumed the company would be training quite a few people. A business that size employed hundreds in San Francisco alone, and Kendall had been under the impression that this session would include new hires from all over the Northwest. There must be more to the hotel than the two stories she could see.

Sean collected her bags and she followed him into the lobby, which immediately made her feel comfortable. It was everything a place called the Timber Lake Inn should be, from its knotty pine walls to the huge creek stone fireplace on the opposite side of the room. The hardwood floors were covered here and there by woven rugs in Native American geometrics, and wrought iron fixtures hung from the exposed log ceiling. A wide staircase to the right of the reception desk led up to a line of rooms on the second floor, but none of them seemed to be meeting rooms. As if to illustrate that, one of the doors opened and a couple exited, looping their arms around each other and cuddling like newlyweds.

Nothing about the place suggested it was used for business events. In fact, the place looked…well, cozy. That was the only word that came to Kendall’s mind.

The word returned when she entered her room…until she discovered it was actually a suite appointed with more pine walls and more exposed ceiling beams and more Native American rugs. In the main room, French doors opened onto a spacious balcony that offered a glorious view of the lake, which was picked up again in the bedroom by a broad picture window. The bathroom boasted a jacuzzi and small television, and there was a wet bar tucked into the far side of the living room. An enormous basket of fresh fruit and wine sat at the center of the dining table, and a massive bouquet of flowers, fragrant and splashy, was perched on the desk. Envelopes bearing her name—her first name—were tucked into each.

“Still think DeGallo wants you only for your MBA and your business savvy?”

Kendall spun around with a start at the question to find Matthias leaning in the still-open door to her room. Her lips parted in surprise, but not entirely because of his unexpected arrival. He looked…different. And not just because he was casually dressed in clay-colored trousers and a navy-blue polo, where she was more accustomed to seeing him in suits. She’d seen him dressed for non-business-related functions before, everything from rugby in the park to black-tie opening nights. It wasn’t Matthias’s clothing that looked off today. It was Matthias.

His clothes were a little wrinkled, his hair was a little shaggy, and his eyes were a little shadowed, as if he wasn’t getting quite enough sleep. In fact, his whole face looked a little shadowed, a little leaner, a little rougher. And Matthias had never been “a little” anything. He was an all-or-nothing kind of man, emphasis on the all, especially where his physical appearance went.

She ignored the little pang of concern that pinched her at seeing him in his less-tidy-than-usual state. It was none of her business if he was working too much. None of her business if whoever he’d hired to take her place wasn’t keeping him on track the way she had. She wasn’t her boss’s keeper. Especially since Matthias wasn’t even her boss anymore.

“What are you doing here?” she asked by way of a greeting, congratulating herself on keeping her voice steady, clear and indifferent. “I mean, I know why you’re in Tahoe. But what are you doing here? At my hotel?”

He raised a shoulder and let it drop, then pushed himself away from the doorjamb. As he strode into the room, he told her, “I made better time driving from San Francisco than I thought I would, so I’m a little ahead of schedule. I don’t have to meet the caretaker for another hour, so I thought I’d drop in and say hello.”

Kendall eyed him suspiciously. It wasn’t like Matthias to “drop in” on anyone, for any reason. And he must have gone to some lengths to find out where she would be staying and when she would be arriving, because she hadn’t shared any of that information with him. Not to mention they hadn’t exactly parted on the best of terms. They hadn’t spoken to or seen each other since he’d had her escorted out of the building like a common thief. If he was here now, it had to be because he wanted something.

So she asked him, “What do you want?”

Matthias looked at Kendall and wondered which of dozens of answers to that question he should give her. He wanted a lot of things, actually. He wanted the Perkins contract. He wanted the Barton Limited stock to go through the roof. He wanted to be worth a billion dollars by the time he was forty. Hell, he even wanted world peace, since it would create so many new business-friendly governments. And, okay, he wanted a new personal assistant, too, since, so far, everyone he’d interviewed had been, at best, unqualified and, at worst, a lobotomy gone tragically wrong.

Mostly, though, he wanted Kendall to open her eyes and see what was so obvious to him. Talk about a lobotomy. What had happened to the pragmatic, professional, enterprising, efficient woman he’d hired? Looking at Kendall now…

Well, actually, looking at Kendall now, Matthias wondered what she’d done to herself. The dark blond hair she normally had twisted up out of her way hung loose, cascading past her shoulders in a thick, silky mass. Wow, it was a lot longer than he’d thought—not that he’d ever thought much about Kendall’s hair. But it was long. Thick. Silky. Had he mentioned silky? And long? And thick? Her glasses were gone, too, and he noted with some surprise that her eyes were huge without them. And green. He’d never noticed that Kendall had green eyes. Really green eyes. Pale green. Like bottle glass. And every bit as clear.

“What do you want, Mr. Barton?” she asked again, bringing his thoughts back to where they needed to be.

It was a good question, he thought. He wished he had a good answer to go with it. But the fact was, he still wasn’t sure why he was here. Yeah, her hotel was on his way, but even if it hadn’t been, he would have driven the extra miles to see her. He’d done a little checking this week—okay, he’d done a lot of snooping—to find out where Kendall would be staying and the particulars of this “week-long orientation.” But his mole at OmniTech—yes, Matthias had one there, just as he was sure DeGallo had one at Barton Limited—hadn’t been able to uncover much about it.

Which had just hammered home to Matthias that the guy was up to no good. Had there been a legitimate orientation seminar going on, it would have been a matter of company record. As far as Matthias could tell, however, Kendall was the only new hire of any consequence that Stephen DeGallo had made recently. As he’d told her two weeks ago, the guy didn’t hire outside the company for the kind of position he’d offered her. And any alleged orientation there might have been for her position should have taken place on-site—not in a cozy, romantic little hotel overlooking Lake Tahoe.

“I’ve come to offer you your job back,” he said, surprising himself as much as he’d obviously surprised Kendall. He really hadn’t been intending to do that at all when he drove into town. He’d just been planning to…

Okay, he wasn’t exactly sure what he’d been planning to do. But now that he thought more about it, offering Kendall her job back made sense. No one he’d interviewed had come close to matching her qualifications. Matthias was confident that if he made her the right offer, she’d come back on board. Everyone had their price. Kendall was no exception. She’d just been feeling unappreciated, he told himself. He hadn’t emphasized enough how valuable she was to Barton Limited. Oh, sure, he’d given her raises and more benefits. But any good employee needed ego stroking, too. Just because Kendall had never seemed like the kind of person who wanted that kind of thing didn’t mean it wasn’t important to her.

He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought about that before. At least not consciously. Evidently his brain had been considering it subconsciously, to have thrown out the offer to hire her back. That was probably what had been behind Matthias’s driving into town to find her in the first place. He’d been planning—subconsciously—to renegotiate the terms of her employment and invite her back.

Yeah, that was it. It had to be. Why else would he have come?

Kendall, however, didn’t seem to be as open to the idea of her return to Barton Limited as Matthias was, because she didn’t answer him right away. In fact, she was looking at him as if she was kind of indignant.

No, it must be grateful, he told himself immediately. Indignity, gratitude…those got mixed up all the time. They had a lot of the same letters in common. After all, why would she feel indignant?

“I have a job,” she said tersely.

Or maybe she’d said it sweetly. Those got mixed up a lot, too. Matthias was sure of it. The letter thing again.

“And I’m very excited about it,” she added.

No, definitely terse, he thought. And not a little shirty.

Instead of replying, he strode across the room to the broad panoramic windows that looked out over the crystalline blue water of the lake and the bright blue sky above it. The day was glorious, the view crisp and clean, the dark green mountains on the other side of the water streaked with purple shadows from the forests of trees, the sun dappling the water as if it were scattering diamonds. This place was as far removed from the skyscrapers and concrete of San Francisco as it could be, and the last thing anyone should think about here was work. Which was why Matthias so seldom visited places like this. And which was why—one of many whys—he knew Stephen DeGallo was up to no good.

He sensed more than heard Kendall as she came up behind him, and was unprepared for the feeling that washed over him when she came to a halt behind him. He’d been edgy since leaving San Francisco, as he always was when he traveled. Travel was such a waste of time, and Matthias was always impatient getting from point A to point B so he could get on with business. This time, however, the feeling hadn’t lessened once he’d arrived at his destination. He’d still been feeling anxious when he entered Kendall’s room. But when she stood beside him then, he was suddenly overcome by a feeling of calmness. Peacefulness. A strange sense of well-being that he hadn’t felt for…