Corner-Office Courtship

Nati was so distracted by the glittery sensation of having Cade’s hand on her arm that she completely missed the approach of the kiss.

She didn’t know what to do. It seemed as if she should tell him to back off because, along with even bigger issues, he was a client, and their families had bad blood between them.

She didn’t say anything at all and instead stood there looking stunned.

“See you,” he said, giving her arm another light squeeze before he let go of it.

“See you,” Nati echoed dimly.

Nati watched him go, taking in the sight of that rear view that was almost as good as the front. And all she could think was that he had kissed her.

Enough of a kiss to leave her at odds with herself when a voice in her head shrieked, No!

And the rest of her whispered, More…

VICTORIA PADE is a USA TODAY bestselling author of numerous romance novels. She has two beautiful and talented daughters—Cori and Erin—and is a native of Colorado, where she lives and writes. A devoted chocolate lover, she’s in search of the perfect chocolate-chip-cookie recipe. For information about her latest and upcoming releases, and to find recipes for some of the decadent desserts her characters enjoy, log on to www.vikkipade.com.

Corner-Office

Courtship

Victoria Pade

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Prologue

“Midnight malteds—there must be trouble,” Cade Camden said when he joined his grandmother, his three siblings and his six cousins in the sprawling kitchen of the Denver home where he’d grown up. Georgianna Camden had raised all ten of her grandchildren here after the tragic deaths of their parents.

“Chocolate or vanilla?” she asked without directly responding to his comment.

“Chocolate,” Cade answered.

“It’s been a long time since one of us got arrested for teenage hijinks,” Cade’s older brother Seth contributed.

“Nobody died, did they, GiGi?” Lang, one Cade’s triplet cousins, asked.

Growing up, whenever there was trouble and the sleepless nights that went with it, they’d all congregated in their grandmother’s kitchen. Even if she were angry or disappointed or disgusted with the kids—GiGi had made malteds, done damage control and assured them that they would weather whatever storm came their way.

But tonight, when they’d each been summoned for midnight malteds during GiGi’s seventy-fifth birthday party, it set off alarm bells. It was something Cade had been anticipating anyway, ever since GiGi had requested that her grandchildren all spend the night. For old-time’s sake…

With everyone gathered around the large island in the center of the kitchen, sipping their malteds, GiGi finally explained why she’d asked them here.

“I’ve read the journals,” she said ominously.

As the descendants of H. J. Camden, founder of Camden Incorporated and the worldwide chain of Camden Super Stores, GiGi’s grandkids immediately knew what she was talking about.

Just weeks before Georgianna’s birthday, her oldest grandson, Seth, had come across a small trunk hidden beneath the floorboards of the original barn in Northbridge, Montana, where H.J. was born. The trunk contained several journals written in H.J.’s own hand. Seth had immediately sent them to his grandmother.

“This can’t be good,” Livi, another of the triplets, said softly. Rumors had always flown that Henry James Camden, his son Hank Jr. and even his grandsons Howard and Mitchum had amassed the family fortune by lying, cheating, bribes and much worse.

“It isn’t,” GiGi confirmed. “I haven’t read everything but I’ve read enough to know that the worst that was ever thought or said about H.J.—and even more—is true.”

That sobered everyone in the room.

They all knew that GiGi had never been privy to any of the business dealings, that her response to the rumors and accusations of backroom deals, of misdeeds and wrongdoing had been to instill in her own sons and grandchildren a strong sense of right and wrong. And because H.J. and her late husband Hank had kept business strictly separate from their family life, and been such good and loving heads of the household, she’d chosen to believe better of them.

“During those last couple of months after H.J.’s stroke he said some things to me that made me wonder, that made me think he might have reason to feel some shame. But you know he wasn’t in his right mind most of that time and so I’d still hoped that the worst wasn’t true—”

“But it was,” Cade’s cousin, Dane, finished for her.

“It was,” GiGi said in a dire tone. “H.J. and my Hank especially….” The elderly woman’s voice cracked. She shook her head. She clearly didn’t want to admit it but she raised her chin and continued, “They trampled over other people to build what we have.”

No one said anything to that.

After a moment of collecting herself, GiGi went on. “I’ll grant you that much of what was done was done decades ago—your dads put more effort into giving back and sharing our good fortune. But even they…” GiGi shook her head in disappointment. “Well, they still did H.J. and your grandfather’s bidding.”

“I raised you to be better people and I’m proud of you.” GiGi paused a moment, glancing around the island at each of her ten grandchildren and smiling. “But the more I read in these journals, the more I begin to understand the price other people paid for our success and prosperity. We all benefited from what was done. What if the sons and daughters, the grandsons and granddaughters of people taken advantage of by H.J. still suffer? What if these families never bounced back?”

“It’s a thought that none of us wants to have GiGi, but—”

“But nothing, Dylan,” the older woman said to another of Cade’s cousins, using the I-won’t-take-any-excuses tone they all knew well. “We need to know just how much damage, how much of a ripple-effect might have been caused. And we need to do something about it.”

“You want to make amends?” Cade asked.

“I’ll need to do more research, but yes. For my birthday gift, I want each of you to promise me that you’ll help find out what the repercussions were for whatever was done so we can atone for the wrongs. Seth, you’ve already done your part by finding the journals.”

“GiGi, we could be opening up a can of worms with this,” Cade’s cousin, Derek, warned. “If we go around admitting wrongdoing people will come out of the woodwork to make claims—even when there wasn’t any wrongdoing. We’ll have more lawsuits than any amount of lawyers can handle.”

“I’ve thought about that,” GiGi said. “It has to be done subtly. With a helping hand here, a good word there. Maybe we’ll throw some business in the direction of someone who needs it. Or hire them to come to work for us, or buy whatever they’re selling. We’ll work behind the scenes—”

“You want us to be manipulative?” Lindie, the third of the triplets, asked.

“Only for the greater good,” GiGi answered. “So we can make up for what wrongs were done without opening that can of worms Derek mentioned. And we keep it strictly between us. No one else can know what we’re up to.”

“I don’t know, GiGi,” Lang said. “This could be risky. There are people out there who hate us and, now that we know they have real reason to, you want us to stroll in and try to make nice?”

“And without admitting anything wrong was ever done?” Cade added. “As if it’s just a coincidence that we’re offering something to the family of someone H.J., Gramps, Dad or Uncle Mitchum screwed over?”

“And what if they think we’re there to screw them over again?” Dylan contributed.

“It won’t be easy,” GiGi acknowledged. “And yes, there may be hard feelings and resentments and grudges to deal with. But we’re all living the way we do at the expense of other people. Are any of you all right with that?”

In unison, GiGi’s ten grandchildren said, “No.”

“Of course not.”

“You know us better than that…”

“Then we have to make up for it. Carefully. Quietly.”

“And you’re going to dispatch us each separately, on these… missions?” Lindie asked.

“That’s the current plan. And the first mission—as you put it—is a matter of the heart. Cade, I’m giving this one to you.”

“Great. I get to be the test case.”

“Only because you fit the bill, and I’ll be paying close attention to putting each of you in just the right situation. Cade, you have that ratty wall in your house with the wallpaper falling off and you need it fixed.”

“Oka-ay…” Cade said with reservation.

“There’s a small shop in Arden, in Old Town there—”

“It isn’t going to look suspicious for me to go out to the suburbs to find someone to paint a wall for me?” Cade asked.

“It’s only twenty minutes from here on the highway, and I have it on good authority that the girl who owns the shop does a beautiful job. Her reputation is cause enough to go to her,” GiGi said. “Her name is Natalie Morrison. She sells furniture and objects she’s painted. It’s like folk art. But she also does murals and custom wall treatments. I thought you could hire her to tear off that paper and paint something—”

“I don’t want folk art on that wall,” Cade said.

“You can have her do something that makes it look like leather or marble or something. And in the process, you can find out what happened after H.J. pulled the rug out from under her grandfather, Jonah Morrison.”

“Morrison… As in the Northbridge Morrisons?” Seth asked, connecting the name with the small Montana town where H.J. had begun, and where Seth currently ran Camdem Inc.’s extensive ranching operations.

“Jonah Morrison!” Livi said as if the light had just dawned for her, too. “Wasn’t he your first love, GiGi?”

“He was my high school sweetheart,” GiGi amended. “Apparently H.J. bought the loan on the Morrison farm and foreclosed on them to make sure that the Morrisons left Northbridge.”

“You didn’t know that until you read it in the journals?” Cade’s younger sister, Jani, asked.

“I was informed that the Morrisons had sold to H.J. I had no idea he’d foreclosed on them. And I thought that the Morrisons left Northbridge by their own choice, that they might be headed to Denver. Jonah and I had already broken up, and I’d met your grandfather by then.”

“Then you ended up in Denver, too, and you never looked up your old love?” Lindie asked.

“Of course not,” GiGi said. “I loved your grandfather and Jonah was old news. Why would I look him up? But then I read about the Morrisons in the journals and remembered how Maude Sharks recently was bragging at the club about this girl she’d hired to paint the nursery in her daughter’s house—”

“This Morrison girl?” Cade asked.

“It was like fate shining a light on what we needed to do first,” GiGi marveled. “I did some digging and sure enough, Natalie Morrison has family roots in Montana and a grandfather named Jonah. So that’s where we start. Where you start, Cade.”

“With me hiring your old flame’s granddaughter to fix my wall,” Cade concluded without enthusiasm.

“And in the process, find out what ever happened to Jonah and if having his family’s farm foreclosed on by H.J. was a blessing or a curse. For him and for the family that’s come after him—including this girl.”

“If it was a curse, what then?” Cade’s brother, Beau, asked.

“We’ll be giving Natalie work and we’ll figure out what else we can do to make things up to her and the rest of the Morrisons,” GiGi said confidently. “It’ll be up to Cade to figure all that out through the girl.”

For a moment no one said anything as the full impact of what they’d learned settled over them.

Then Cade took a deep breath, sighed and said, “So I guess I’m up to bat…. Happy birthday, GiGi.”

Chapter One

“Oh, you aren’t real, are you—from outside I thought you were…”

Only when Nati Morrison heard the man’s voice did she remember how she’d positioned the life-size scarecrow she was working on behind the checkout counter. Nati wasn’t visible to the man; she was sitting on the floor behind the counter, sewing straw to the inside hem of the scarecrow’s skirt.

She couldn’t see her visitor, but it could be Gus Spurgis, the Scarecrow Festival’s organizer, bringing her fliers for the October festivities. She decided to joke with him.

In a silly voice, she said, “May I help you?” and pushed forward on the pole running up the scarecrow’s back to animate her.

There was no immediate response.

Then Nati looked up, and there, leaning over the counter, was a complete stranger—not Gus Spurgis. Instead it was a man with a staggeringly handsome face and the most beautiful blue eyes she’d ever seen.

He smiled. “I hope you don’t pay your receptionist much—she’s a little stiff. And kind of freaky.”

“She does work cheap, though.” Nati played along as she got to her feet.

And took in the full picture of the man in the business suit standing on the other side of her counter.

Tall, broad-shouldered, with the body of an athlete, he had dark brown hair the color of bittersweet chocolate; a long, slightly hawkish nose; just the right fullness of lips; and a pronounced bone structure that included a finely drawn jawline and chin. It all came together with those incredible cobalt-blue eyes to make him so good-looking that it left Nati a little breathless.

And since he also seemed vaguely familiar on top of it she was lost for a moment in wondering where she might have seen him before.

But she decided she must be imagining things. She was sure that if she had ever—ever—encountered this particular man before, there wouldn’t have been anything vague about the memory.

After a moment, she pulled herself together to stop staring at him, and returned to the subject of her scarecrow.

“Freaky, huh?” she mused, glancing at her handiwork. The scarecrow had a real-looking painted clay face surrounded by hair made of straw, a puffy calico dress with more straw sticking out at the wrists and bloomers that came out from beneath the hem of the dress to form legs. “Since I sculpted and painted the face in my own likeness, I think I’m insulted.”

“It’s interesting—I’ll give you that. But you didn’t do yourself justice.”

Was that a compliment or a comment on her sculpting skills? Nati decided not to take it personally one way or the other. “It’s supposed to be sort of a caricature,” she explained. “I know my nose turns up a little at the end—”

“Just enough to be kind of perky,” the man said, his gaze going from her nose to the scarecrow’s.

“But in order to exaggerate it, I gave her a ski-jump nose,” Nati went on. “And I’m grateful that I don’t have that pointy of a chin—”

“No, your chin is just fine… Delicate. Nice…”

She hadn’t been fishing for compliments but she was flattered.

He went on with his critique. “And you definitely missed on the mouth. Yours is good—you have nice, full lips. But that’s one tight-lipped smile on the scarecrow.”

Her chin was delicate? Her lips were nice and full?

Nati felt some heat come into her face even as she told herself that it was silly. There was nothing flirtatious about what he was saying or the way he was saying it. Was there?

It had been a long time since a man other than her grandfather had noticed much of anything about her, and maybe it was going to her head. Just a little.

It was silly, she told herself again. Silly, silly, silly. They were just making small talk.

Her shop door opened just then and a tiny, frail old woman came in.

“Hi, Mrs. Wong,” Nati greeted, glad for the distraction. Then she said to her male visitor, “If you’ll excuse me for a minute. Feel free to look around…”

Turning her back on the man, who was somehow managing to unnerve her without even trying, Nati grasped a small cheval mirror and brought it around to the front of the counter.

“Oh, that’s just beautiful!” Mrs. Wong said.

She had brought the heirloom to Nati to restore the painted ivy decoration on its frame.

“I’m just amazed,” the older woman said. “There wasn’t much more than a shadow left and you brought it back to life. It’s as pretty as it was the day my father gave it to me—that was seventy-two years ago.”

“I’m glad you like it. Let me carry it out to the car for you.”

“Why don’t you let me do that?” the male customer offered.

“No, that’s okay, it isn’t heavy,” Nati assured him.

But she had an ulterior motive. As she carried the mirror out to the elderly woman’s car parked at the curb, Nati took a peek at her own reflection, making sure her appearance compared favorably to the scarecrow’s.

She’d worn her chin-length, golden-brown hair loose today, just barely turned under at the ends. She would have liked it if she had a comb to run through it to neaten it up a little. As it was, her swept-over bangs were falling a bit in her face.

She had on her usual makeup—a little pinkish powder she’d brushed onto her apple-round cheekbones, a little mascara to bring out her brown eyes, and although she’d applied a light lipstick when she’d left the house this morning, it was four in the afternoon and it was long gone.

She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that suddenly seemed awfully plain and maybe a size larger than necessary. She was comfortable, but now she would have liked to look more stylish. And maybe show off some of her curves.

But still, as she slid the mirror onto its side into the backseat of Mrs. Wong’s car, she decided that she wasn’t too much the worse for wear.

She was better off than the scarecrow.

Not that it mattered. The guy was only a customer, she reminded herself. At least she thought he was. Whatever his reasons for visiting her shop, they weren’t about her personally.

Once she’d made sure the mirror was secure, she closed the car’s rear door and turned back toward her shop, noticing that while Janice Wong was browsing through the painted and stenciled tole pieces she had for sale, the good-looking guy was watching her through the plate-glass windows. Rather raptly…

At least he was until she caught him at it, and then he glanced away.

Maybe he was a summons server and he felt guilty about what he was really there to do….

There had been a summons server from the Pirfoys’ attorneys at the start of the divorce, who had acted a little like this guy…

But the divorce was final. The settlement had been signed. The almighty Pirfoys couldn’t come back and try to take anything else from her or from her grandfather, and surely Doug wouldn’t be bothered doing anything else six months after the fact, would he? Especially when the divorce had been so much to his advantage.

No, she was just being paranoid.

First she had been silly to think something was clicking with this perfect stranger—even though she wasn’t in the market to have things click—and now she was afraid the guy was there to cause her some kind of problem.

She must be delirious. That’s what she got for eating nothing but gummy bears for lunch.

“All set,” Nati announced to the older woman as she went back into the shop.

“And I paid you in advance, didn’t I?” Mrs. Wong asked.

“You did. You’re good to go.”

“I’ll make sure my neighbor is careful when he takes the mirror out of the car and brings it in for me,” Janice Wong promised. “And I just might come back another day for one of those old tin coffeepots—they’re so cute!”

“I’ll be here,” Nati assured her, holding the door open for the tiny woman.

Then she turned her attention back to the man…

“I’m sorry for the interruption,” she apologized. “But now I’m all yours—” She cut herself off the minute the words came out. But she couldn’t help it—she warily enjoyed the sight of this gorgeous guy’s amused grin. She liked how the small lines crinkled at the corners of those excruciatingly blue eyes of his.

“What can I do for you?” she finally asked.

“I’m looking for Natalie Morrison.”

Summons server.

Nati felt dread run up her spine.

“You found her,” she said, going back behind the counter where she felt somehow safer. “It’s Nati, though. No one calls me Natalie.”

The man did not bring an envelope out of his breast pocket. Instead he merely said, “Okay, Nati. I’m Cade Camden.”

Not a summons server—that was good. But a Camden?

That was why he looked familiar. They’d never met but pictures of the Camdens showed up in newspapers and magazine articles periodically because they were one of Denver’s preeminent families. There were a lot of them, so Nati couldn’t have put a name with any of the faces, but she had seen the faces. And she certainly knew the family name.

Her own family’s first negative encounter with the wealthy had been with H. J. Camden. He was the reason the Morrisons moved to Denver in 1950, the reason behind Nati’s great-grandfather losing his farm and needing to pack up his wife and son—Nati’s grandfather—in order to find work beyond the confines of the small Montana town where he was born. It was a story she’d heard numerous times.

But did Cade Camden know it? And what was he doing in her shop? Looking for her specifically?

Nati considered battering him with questions.

She considered throwing him out of her shop in honor of those who had come before her.

But instead, with more reserve than she’d shown so far, she repeated, “What can I do for you, Mr. Camden?”

“Call me Cade.”

Nati didn’t do him the courtesy of saying his name. She merely waited for his answer, not quite sure how to feel about a Camden standing right there in front of her.

“I bought a house not long ago,” he said. “It has a wall in the dining room that has the most hideous wallpaper you’ve ever seen. It’s ripped and peeling and falling off. The wall underneath looks like it could be kind of a mess, too, and I’ve heard that you can do wonders with wall treatments—not stenciling or anything frilly, but something understated, classy.”

“How did you hear about me?” she asked, and this time she was fishing.

“I believe you did something in a nursery for one of my grandmother’s friends. You come highly recommended.”

Nurseries were a large part of her business outside of the shop, so that claim was feasible. But it didn’t explain whether or not he knew about their families’ past.

Knowing who he was and what he said he wanted was a start. But Nati contemplated a few more things as she studied him.

She considered saying she was too busy and didn’t have time for a project like that now. And then recommending someone she knew would botch the job.

She considered taking the job and charging Cade Camden an arm and a leg, effectively cheating him to get even in some small way.

But in the end she didn’t like what that approach would say about her own integrity. Having a clear conscience was more important than making some sort of petty point with this stranger who was generations away from the man who wronged her great-grandfather decades ago. A stranger who might not even know what had gone on.

She could merely refuse to work for him, she told herself, and send him on his way.

But her shop had only been open a few months and she wasn’t in any position to turn away work. She needed any money she could make. And Camden or not, he was offering her a job.