In Bed with the Boss's Daughter

Two

Jack answered his mobile phone on the first ring, then crooked it between shoulder and ear to pull on his second running shoe.

“Glad I caught you,” K.G. said without preamble. “Thought you’d be in that sweatbox of a gym by now.”

“I slept in.”

“That’ll be the day. You coming into the office this morning?”

“Briefly.”

“Good.” The word wasn’t much more than a grunt. “My office at ten.”

Jack scowled at the dead phone for a moment, then tossed it onto his bed.

No Can you fit in a meeting?

No Does ten o’clock suit you?

Jack shook his head in disgust, dragged on a sweatshirt and headed for the front door. By ten o’clock he should be midway through a meeting with Dan Lehmann, the electrical contractor on the Milson Landing Project. Rescheduling would muck up Lehmann’s day, and the day was Saturday, theoretically part of the weekend. And as he jogged down the driveway he asked himself, not for the first time, why he put up with his boss’s high-handedness.

The answer used to be simple. K.G. had given him all the breaks he deserved and then some. Where else could a kid who’d left school at the minimum age make it to a corner office on the eighteenth floor? Who else would put a tradesman without a fancy business degree in charge of multimillion-dollar projects?

He lived with K.G.’s peremptory attitude because the son of a b…knew the construction business like no one else, and ever since he’d taken Jack under his wing, he’d been free with that knowledge. In return he expected hard work and loyalty. Jack gave him both and then some…but not for much longer.

A matter of a few short months—less, if he was lucky—and he was gone. The leaving came two years later than he’d planned, and there would be no more K.G.-manipulated delays. It was time to get back to the blueprint for Jack Manning’s life.

At the end of his long driveway he turned left onto the deserted early-morning road and set off at a steady lope. He would rather be at his “sweatbox of a gym” pounding a punching bag instead of the tarmac, but this morning he’d slept through his internal alarm. He didn’t much enjoy running, but he owed his body the exercise, and he always fulfilled his obligations. He ran, and he thought about the satisfying thud of leather against leather and the even more satisfying release of frustrated energy.

Yeah, pounding a punching bag would feel real good this morning. Much more satisfying than pounding his pillow the way he’d done for the two nights since the Acacia bash, since Paris Grantham sashayed back into his life with her nose stuck in the air and her plastic smile and her cool eyes.

And her leg warming your hand through the smooth silk of her stocking, and her fingers gripping your jacket, and her lips soft and yielding under yours….

Jack swore and punched out at the crisp morning air with a left-right combination.

Why the hell had he kissed her? What had he been thinking?

Simple.

He hadn’t been thinking; he’d been reacting. To deep-seated disappointment, to long-term frustration, to an intense desire to wipe that synthetic smile from her lips.

He’d reacted to the futility of a memory he could no longer brick in behind that carefully constructed retaining wall in his mind, a memory that haunted his dreams and stole his sleep. A dream-memory where she danced on a table in a tiny skirt and knee-high boots, watching him through her wild tangle of hair with eyes not steel cool but smelter hot. And while the crowd yelled encouragement, she unbuttoned her shirt, her eyes fixed on his, daring him to stop her.

He did.

He dragged her from the table and felt her body mould itself to his, soft and pliant and accepting. Dream memories of her lips, wide and smiling, against his neck. Her soft laughter, warm and sweet against his skin. Her words, her honesty, his inability to absorb it all.

He’d been pinning some kind of loopy expectations on a six-year-old memory. What a fool!

He jabbed at the air again, but without much conviction. After all, she was a Grantham, and the more like her parents she turned out to be—cold like her mother, manipulative like her father—the easier it would be to remember she had no place in his life.

As he topped the long uphill rise and lengthened his stride toward the intersection, he tried not to think about her parting thrust and K.G.’s early-morning phone call, or the fact that the two might be related.

He told himself the queer feeling in his gut was hunger. K.G. wouldn’t do it. Milson Landing was too big a project, its success too important to the company’s bottom line to risk on a whim, even if that whim belonged to his precious only daughter.

Jack slowed to take the corner into Sycamore Road and automatically started scanning for the Ridleys’ deranged fox terrier.

There was no connection between K.G.’s summons and her threat to seek out a job in Jack’s office.

The foxy came out of the shrubs at the front of lot nine, but Jack dodged the open jaws with ease and sprinted out of range. The mutt didn’t even get close.

He kept up a punishing pace for another two Ks, until the sweat ran freely down his back and the breath rasped harsh in his throat. Only then did he slacken off.

The uneasiness in his stomach didn’t.

Three hours later it churned like a cement mixer when he caught sight of the woman crossing Grantham’s car park. Not because of her long-legged stride or the skirt that drew attention to it, but because it was Paris Grantham.

Jack bent to pick up the keys he’d dropped and told his stomach not to jump to conclusions. Two people arriving at the same building at the same time didn’t necessarily mean they were there for the same meeting. Could be coincidence.

On a Saturday morning, with the car park all but empty? Yeah, right!

He pocketed his keys and headed for the lift bay, where she waited in her little yellow dress, smooth bare legs and strappy high heels. But when she turned and smiled, the action was quick and not quite smooth, as if driven by nerves.

“Fancy meeting you here,” she said brightly.

Jack punched the lift button and decided he’d been way off beam about the nerves. She looked too cool and polished to be nervous. His cement mixer switched to turbo.

“Princess,” he greeted her evenly. “Looks like you’ve got the jet lag beat.”

“Yes. And my feet are back to normal size.”

This time her smile was real and ripe with early-summer sunshine. It took Jack a count of three to control his light-headed dizziness, and he jibbed himself about sunstroke in a dim basement. It was more likely a result of terminal tiredness. To avoid that smile, he looked down at her feet. They arched inside her sexy shoes, and the way his body reacted, she might as well have arched them right over his….

Don’t even think about it, he told himself, lifting his gaze quickly. “Is there any reason why you wear those things?” he growled, annoyed with himself as much as her.

Her smile dimmed, and irritation sparked in her eyes. “They match my dress.”

He noted how the dress was perfectly plain apart from the bright color and the fact that it skimmed every curve of her body and ended a good six inches above her knees. His gaze kept on sliding downward, and about halfway to her ankles he decided the legs were a perfect match for the dress, forget the shoes!

And then he remembered why she was here and why he was here, and his eyes snapped back to hers. “Are you here to see your father?” he asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact. He asked me to come in. It’s about this job he has for me.” The elevator pinged its arrival, and she ambled past him, holding the doors when he didn’t follow. “Coming?”

He stepped into the lift, and she pressed the top button—K.G.’s floor. Jack swore beneath his breath. “Tell me you’re working for your father.”

“God, I hope not!”

Their eyes met and held, hers wide with mock horror—or maybe not so mock. No one wanted to work directly with K.G., not even his daughter. A wry smile tugged at Jack’s lips, then her eyes slid down to his mouth, and as quickly as that the mood shifted.

He wondered if she was thinking about the other night, about how he’d kissed her in anger and frustration. Heat closed around him, along with the drift of her perfume, something unexpectedly soft and warm. He badly needed to loosen his tie, and usually that didn’t happen for at least two hours.

Floor fifteen, he noted. Still four to go.

Why was this lift so damned slow?

He made a mental note to speak to the building manager about having it serviced. Eyes trained on the indicator, he returned to the question she’d so neatly sidestepped. “What is this job, exactly?”

“He didn’t exactly say…”

Eighteen.

“…although he did mention a special PR project.”

Nineteen.

Ping.

Jack knew, without a shadow of a doubt, which project. He’d petitioned K.G. for weeks about appointing a PR person to Milson Landing, with no response. He hadn’t wanted to believe K.G. would do something this shortsighted, this foolhardy.

Taking the three steps out of the lift required enormous effort—maybe it was the weight of all that cement in his belly.

Paris flicked her hair back and started down the corridor, even though Jack was slow to follow. She wanted, so badly, to ask why he was here, what this was all about, but she didn’t want to let on how little she knew. K.G. had done his don’t-you-worry-your-pretty-little-head thing when she’d pressed him for details, and her hopes of earning his respect through a working relationship had plummeted.

Everything with Jack might have changed in six years, but nothing with K.G. had changed a bit.

She didn’t know why he’d asked her to come home, but it wasn’t because he’d suddenly recognized her true worth. The bad feeling in the pit of her stomach intensified. K.G.’s reasons involved Jack—they must, or why was he following her down the corridor? She knew he was there because the back of her neck prickled with awareness, even though the thick carpeting muted their footfalls. On this floor everything was muted, beige, restrained, as if subdued by her father’s personality.

Despite it being Saturday, K.G.’s secretary sat guarding the portals of power. Evelyn inspected Paris over the top of her glasses, her eyes beetling over the yellow dress, her mouth pursing at its length. Evelyn’s disapproval dated back to the day she’d caught Paris feeding papers from her father’s briefcase into the shredder.

Paris’s seven-year-old reasoning had been simple. If there were no papers, then her father would have no work, thus he would come to her ballet concert. Of course Evelyn hadn’t understood her reasoning, and she doubted her father had, either. He’d laughed and indulgently scrubbed her hair, but he hadn’t come to her concert.

Paris lifted her chin. “He’s expecting us,” she stated imperiously as she breezed toward K.G.’s door.

Evelyn bounded out from behind her desk and took charge of the door handle, effectively stopping any unannounced arrival.

“How about you let him know we’re here, Evelyn?” Jack suggested with a lopsided grin that seemed to render the middle-aged secretary witless.

Paris took advantage of Evelyn’s distracted state to push past.

“Good morning, princess.” K.G. came out from behind his desk, and as she offered her cheek for the obligatory kiss, Paris wished her father wouldn’t call her princess in that indulgent tone. She opened her mouth to tell him so, but he was busy shaking Jack’s hand and ushering him to the conference area at the side of his office. Paris shut her mouth and helped herself to a seat.

“I won’t be here long enough to sit,” Jack said. “I’m due down at the Landing.” He might as well have said, get to the point; that was what he meant.

“Good. You can take Paris with you. Show her round.”

Jack’s lips tightened, but he didn’t even glance her way. “No,” he said evenly. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

A moment’s pause. “She’s not dressed appropriately.”

What? Paris blinked and sat up straight. She started to object, but K.G. laughed over top of her. “One thing you’ll learn about my daughter is she never dresses appropriately.”

Paris narrowed her eyes, lifted her chin and wished she’d worn her red slip-dress. Now that little number reeked of inappropriate!

“I don’t intend learning anything about your daughter.”

Jack’s dismissive tone set her blood to slow simmer, but K.G. slapped his thigh, obviously highly entertained. “No? I distinctly remember you asking me to find you a PR rep for the Landing.”

“I need an experienced PR person.”

“Lucky for you my daughter’s been doing public relations work in London.”

“Really?”

Paris’s simmering blood turned cold with K.G.’s announcement, then surged with indignation at Jack’s reply. PR wasn’t quite what she’d been doing in London, but with Jack looking at her like she was incapable of spelling PR, let alone doing it, it was close enough. She looked coldly down her nose at him. “Is that so hard to believe?”

One eyebrow rose to a leery angle. “Who were you working for, princess?”

“I worked in my mother’s business.”

“That being?”

“My mother does parties,” she replied archly.

The eyebrow rose higher. “Drinks for a few close friends?”

“A few hundred. We put together corporate functions and product launches, fashion parades and charity balls—”

“And I’m sure you did them very well,” Jack cut in. He turned back to K.G. “I don’t need a party planner. I need someone with media savvy.”

Paris’s indignation morphed into anger. She was sick of being treated like she wasn’t in the room. She leaned forward and speared Jack with a steely eyed gaze. “Unless you’ve been living on another planet, you should know I’ve been media savvy since birth.” She shifted focus to her father and smiled sweetly. “Which magazine had exclusive rights to my christening, Daddy? Southern Society, I think.” She switched back to Jack and dropped the smile. “I’m on Christmas-card terms with every society columnist in Sydney and London—and half their editors—and while I suspect titillating snippets of gossip isn’t your job’s focus, I’m sure my contact network could stretch to find the odd serious journalist.”

The room was silent for a count of four before K.G. rubbed his hands together and announced to the room in general, “That’s settled then. Perfect.”

“Perfect…how?” Jack’s delivery was dangerously slow.

“I trust you to look after her, keep her out of trouble.”

Paris swore she heard Jack’s jaw click into inflexible mode. “I don’t have time to baby-sit your daughter.”

“Rubbish,” K.G. boomed. “Lew needs more responsibility. Start delegating. Besides, you’ll fit in with Jack’s schedule, won’t you, princess?”

Baby-sit? Fit in with his schedule?

She exploded out of her chair and fixed on the first thing that came into focus out of her apoplectic blur. “My name isn’t princess, it’s Paris. I don’t know why you didn’t choose something easy like Jane or Kate, but you chose Paris. Please use it!”

K.G. roared with laughter. “Well said, princess.”

She felt like screaming with frustration, but it would do no good. For twenty-four years her father had indulged her, but he’d never listened to her. Why would he start now?

He pushed to his feet and slapped Jack on the back. “I’ll leave you two to sort out the details.”

“Hang on a minute.” Jack looked as stunned as Paris felt. “Nothing’s settled. You can’t leave this—”

“Have to,” K.G. said, checking his watch. “Caroline’s picking me up. We have a flight to catch.”

“Where are you going?” Paris couldn’t believe he intended walking out with nothing settled.

“The Coast. I’ve meetings on the new casino project all next week, but we might stay on, take a break. Head farther north if we feel like it.”

“You’re taking a holiday?” Paris couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d said he was taking an acid bath.

“Have to take one now or I mightn’t get another chance.” He glared at Jack. “Can’t trust just anyone to look after this place, you know.”

Paris didn’t know. She had no idea what the little side play was about, although it obviously meant something to Jack. His eyes narrowed, as if with sudden comprehension. “Is that what this is all about? Some form of punishment?”

K.G. rubbed his jaw. “You consider looking after my daughter a punishment? Shame on you, Jack.”

Both K.G.’s parting words and the echo of his self-satisfied laughter after the door closed behind him convinced Jack he’d called it right. This was some sort of payback for his impending departure and the latest sign of K.G.’s refusal to accept his resignation in good grace.

First he’d delayed Jack’s departure by offering him sole management of the Landing Project…if he saw it through to completion. Then he insisted on keeping the pending resignation a secret until he’d decided on a successor, a move he still hadn’t made. Jack had concurred, because although Grantham’s good word might not make a lick of difference to the success of his new business venture, his bad word could destroy it.

For the same reason, he now found himself saddled with the last person he wanted alongside him as the most important project of his career reached its culmination.

He had to accept it, but he didn’t have to like it.

His right hand fashioned a fist, but he didn’t punch the door that had closed in K.G.’s wake. He squeezed tight around his frustration, containing it within that fisted hand. Then he turned to face her.

“You asked him to give you this job, didn’t you?”

She gave a perplexed little shrug. “How could I ask for a job I didn’t know existed?”

“Come off it, Paris! You asked your father for a job in my office because of the other night, and K.G. didn’t even stop to consider whether you’re suitable or not.”

“What makes you so sure I’m unsuitable?” she asked, and there was something about the way she looked at him, all high and mighty, that really riled Jack. That and the way she totally ignored his mention of the other night. “If you like, I can supply you with a list of my credentials.”

“One, your surname’s Grantham. Two, you have contacts in some dubious sections of the media. Not much of a list.”

Her eyes flared with the impact of his direct hit, but she simply lifted her chin higher and spoke with cool, crisp diction. “Why don’t you tell me what this job entails, and I will tell you if I can do it?”

“The question isn’t whether you can do the work but if you can work with my staff. Frankly, I don’t think you have what it takes to be a team player.”

“What does it take?” she asked with infuriating calm.

“Everyone pulls their weight. There are no servants to run errands for you. You want something done, you do it yourself. We don’t work nine-to-five, we work whatever it takes to get the job done, and I mean done. No half measures.”

“I don’t have any problem with that.” She smiled.

Jack snorted. “You have no idea. You won’t last a week.”

“Why, Jack,” she drawled, “that sounds like a challenge.”

“No. It’s the simple truth.”

She raised one brow. “Based on which facts?”

“The fact that you’re twenty-four years old and still living out of your father’s pocket.”

That stung. He could see it in her eyes, in the infinitesimal lift of her chin and the sudden tightness of her smile. “In my bag is the key to the apartment I’m moving into this afternoon. I won’t be living in anyone’s pocket, especially once I receive my first paycheck. When will that be, Jack?”

He recited the payroll procedures, because that gave him something to concentrate on other than his steadily growing irritation and the haunting trace of hurt in her eyes.

When he’d finished, she asked, “Are there any other procedures I should know about?” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and folded her arms across her chest. Both actions drew his attention to the sunshine-bright, curve-hugging dress…and the body inside it.

“There’s a dress code,” he decided.

“I don’t usually get complaints about my fashion sense.”

“We’re not talking fashion. We’re talking suitability in the workplace.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You want me dressed in one of those drab gray suits like Evelyn wears?”

“Sounds perfect.”

“With my coloring? You must be joking!” She punctuated the remark with a dismissive little laugh, and Jack’s irritation indicator shot off the clock.

“Is that the attitude you’re bringing to this job?” he growled before he could stop himself.

“Hey, I was joking. Haven’t you any sense of humor?”

“Not where this job is concerned,” he snapped.

She took a step closer and touched him on the arm. “Lighten up, Jack. All that hostility can’t be healthy.”

He pulled away with what he hoped passed for indifference, though there wasn’t an indifferent cell in his body. He hated how readily he responded to that one fleeting touch of her fingers, that elusive scent, the mocking smile. Her mere presence. His head steamed at her words, while his body…his body ached to eat them right off her tongue.