Double-Cross My Heart (7 page)

Feeling hot and cold all at once, Eden was glad the office had emptied out for lunch. Around her the building seemed silent, the ventilation system sighing on and off like a respirator.

Not a bad analogy, she realized grimly. If she didn’t do something fast, the company was as good as dead. With buzzards like Alex circling overhead, they’d be picked clean in no time.

In the past five years, business columnists had proffered respect at his thoroughness. He struck swiftly, encircling a weakened business with breathtaking efficiency before he administered the death blow. There had been the occasional dissenting voice on the ethics of Alex’s business, but most opinions merely acknowledged his success. Few challenged his capability to make money where others couldn’t.

Greg had uncovered the truth, along with a scattering of other financial information about Alex. Not that any of the rest mattered. The list of his donations to cancer research and hospice charities, his seats on various boards and his low-profile, big-yield fundraising for breast cancer treatment were all aspects of his financial profile.

But the fact that hit her between the eyes were those damn stock buys three months ago. Two months before he’d met her and supposedly got interested in Michele Cosmetics to
help
Eden.

Damn him!
He’d been too good to be true! She should have known better. Usually, she could spot a player by the glint in his eye. Five years before, she’d gone out with the king of players.

She’d thought she’d learned to expect duplicity from the world around her, even as she’d decided to keep her own ethics. The fiasco with a married lover only reconfirmed that. Her brief relationship with Dave Sanders had, in fact, taught her a number of good things. Never date anyone connected with work and always be suspicious if the guy doesn’t let you know where he lived. Still, she could look back on it as a learning experience. Everyone had an agenda. She knew that and while it wasn’t her natural mode of operation, she’d learned to incorporate it into her expectation of others.

Hell, she and Dave met these days without a shadow of self-consciousness. Not that he’d stopped trying to get her back into the sack, the fool. But she’d had his number for a long time now and forewarned was forearmed.

Dave meant little to her. She even felt a kind of forbearing tolerance for the idiot despite thinking that being married to him would be a good example of hell.

Still, she usually recognized insincerity. How had she misjudged Alex so completely? He wasn’t just playing her in the dating sense, he was after her company, the lying rat.

It hurt less to think about the threat to the company. In the dating world, she’d suffered her share of disappointments, but this one with Alex hurt down to her toes. Promising relationships weren’t easy to find and she’d hoped Alex was different.

Lots of rich men gave millions to charity. The tax deduction was incentive enough. He might have a conscience when it came to sharing his wealth, but apparently that didn’t extend to how he earned the money.

Had he come to the AIDS charity event looking for her? He must have. How would he have struck up an acquaintance if he hadn’t be so lucky as to come by when she was being mugged?If that hadn’t been part of the set-up….

Eden replayed the sequence of that night over in her head. Shit! How very convenient for him to have come along right when she was being robbed. And the mugger had “dropped” her purse!

A short, hard laugh escaped her. Alex drew the line at stealing a woman’s purse, but apparently her job was fair game, the son-of-a-bitch.

Leaning her head back against the chair’s headrest, Eden briefly allowed herself to remember his kisses and the heated feel of his hard body next to hers as they danced.

He’d have been a terrific lover. She didn’t trust him, but that didn’t change the heat generated between the two of them. Still, he was just as much a threat to her as was Wendi. More really, because Alex was smarter.

What the hell was she going to do? She had to meet him in six hours, had to act like nothing was wrong, like she hadn’t confirmed her suspicions that he was a weasel. And when they met, he’d greet her with an open-mouth kiss as he pulled her into full-frontal body contact, like he always did.

Her heart rate kicked up at the thought. The guy knew how to kiss.

He would also be expecting her answer to his supposed solution to “her” problem here at work.

A grim smile eased on to her stiff face. What would he do if she said she didn’t care to get revenge? That she’d decided Michele was right, she wasn’t ready to run the company? Just the thought of saying those words made her throat close up in protest, but she could force herself to say them if necessary.

Even if Alex didn’t believe her, he couldn’t very well come out and challenge her decision. That would mean he’d have to confess and be direct about his agenda.

Damn him. Like everyone else, he had his agenda and his was a doozy.

The bitter disappointment in her chest made breathing more difficult. She hated caring so much that he’d used her.

Stiffening her backbone, Eden got up and crossed to her coat closet. Inside a small refrigerator contained her stash of chocolate milk, the electric cord slithering under the door and around to the nearest outlet. A plant hid the cord nicely. She’d never felt it necessary to share her weaknesses with the world. If nothing else, corporate life had proved that to her over and over again. Alex was doing the same.

She should have suspected him of something like this immediately when she realized who he was. Corporate raiders weren’t known for their ethics.

But he’d seemed different. Decent and honest somehow. She’d have nominated him for sainthood if she’d found out about his donations for low-income breast cancer patients without finding out he was playing her.

Silently, Eden scoffed at herself. Her ideals had died a hard death and, all the way around, this situation was shoveling the dirt on top of them.

With the chocolaty richness still soothing the back of her throat, Eden tried to calm the fury in her chest. Taking another swallow, she made herself focus. She felt battered and bruised in the cardiac region, but this wasn’t just about her heart. Alex Holt had his sights set on her company, and he’d get it, too, with the way Michele and Wendi were running things.

Damn Michele and her elderly lothario!

But what the hell was Eden going to do to prevent the death of Michele Cosmetics and her own dreams with it?

Leaning back in her chair, she took a deep breath and considered the problem. Tough situations called for tough decisions. Maybe she needed to ramp up her own ballsiness and get into the game alongside Michele, Wendi and Alex.

Reaching for the phone, she dialed Jessica’s number, her head buzzing with possibilities as she caught a sample lipstick threatening to roll off her desk.

“Jessica?” she asked when the phone was answered.

“Hey,” her friend responded cheerfully, the sound of Sesame Street audible in the background.

“Where have you been all morning?”

“At Greg’s mother’s,” Jessica replied. “Why? What’s up? Has that old battle axe done something else stupid?”

“No,” Eden responded, knowing her friend was referring to the woman who had been her boss and was still Eden’s. “Actually, I’ve discovered that Michele isn’t my largest problem.”

“What do you mean?” Jessica’s voice sharpened.

“Greg hasn’t called you?”

“No,” her friend said tersely. “I’ve just walked in this minute and my cell phone is dead. Why? What did he find out?”

“Alex Holt started buying Michele Cosmetics stock three months ago.”

“My God. Three months ago?” Jessica fell silent for a moment. “That’s it, then. From what Greg was telling me last night, your Alex is a barracuda. He’s very efficient and he doesn’t move on a company unless he’d pretty sure of himself.”

“He’s obviously not ‘my Alex’,” Eden pointed out grimly, “and I don’t care what the hell he’s got planned, I’m not giving up easily.”

“Well, what can you do? I mean if your uncle is such an asshole, you can’t work at his company? Unfortunately, he’s hit it right on the nose about your job potential in the cosmetics industry. I mean, that’s partly why I’m sitting home with baby food in my hair. This is a competitive biz. You’re caught in a catch-22. Another cosmetic company might be willing to hire you, but you know they’d expect you to give over on what you know about Michele’s products. They wouldn’t be as finicky as your uncle, by any means. Still, if the company goes down, does it matter?”

“No one’s as finicky as George,” Eden said, her voice strong. “But I don’t want to be part of the company going down. I’m not willing to do that to the people I’ve worked with for the last twelve years. I’m to the point that maybe I don’t mind giving Michele the shaft. She as good as promised me I’d be running the company when she retired and then she screwed me over by getting with Carl and bringing Wendi in. But I do still feel a loyalty to everyone else who works here. They’re like my family. Heaven knows, they may be the only family I have in my old age.”

“Don’t be silly. You still have time to have kids,” Jessica scolded before saying, “If you won’t sell out Michele’s formulas, you’ll need to look at other industries. Throw the net a little wider.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Eden conceded. “But just getting a job somewhere else in some other corporation isn’t what I want. My expertise is in this business, so I’d probably have to take a pay cut. I’d have to start over learning an entirely different business. I’m good at this and it’s what I want to do. Besides, Michele Cosmetics is vulnerable. My getting a job somewhere else won’t solve that problem.”

Cradling the phone against her shoulder, she absently picked up a tiny jar of hand lotion from the latest batch sent for her approval and tilted a dollop out on her hand. The scent of vanilla mixed with a faint floral undertone immediately surrounded her.

Jessica went on, “If the company’s in trouble, though, why be finicky about selling the formulas and other proprietary information to a competitor? With Alex going after Michele, she’s not going to be in business much longer. She won’t need the formulas. You’ll just be selling them out from under Alex.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him to prosecute me, if I sold company info,” Eden said grimly.

“He wouldn’t! My God.”

“Yes, he would. You don’t know him.
I’m
just coming to know him. The guy’s capable of great deceit. Just look at how he’s been dating me, acting all heroic and sweet, when he’s really just trying to use me.”

“Damn, for a good woman, you sure attract your share of sleaze balls.”

“What?” Eden retorted into the phone. “I do not.”

“Dave Sanders,” her friend said simply.

“Not the same, at all. Dave’s a cheating player with a wife who’s too financially comfortable or too clueless for words, but he’s not in Alex’s league. Dave dated me and lied about being single, but Alex is deliberately setting me up. Dating me to get to the company! It’s totally different and twice as diabolical.”

Jessica hesitated. “You’ve got a point there.”

“I’m not beat, though. I just have to think the best way to screw him over as bad as he’s trying to screw me.” Eden heard sounds in the corridor outside her office. She was running out of time. Lunch hour was almost over and she had to decide her best plan before she joined Alex for their date this evening.

“No! Sugar plum,” Jessica said suddenly, her voice fainter as if she’d turned away from the phone. “Don’t climb on the counter. Mommy will get you a drink.”

Realizing she’d lost Jess’s attention, Eden shuffled through the papers on desk, waiting while her friend tended to her toddler.

“Sorry,” Jessica said a second later. “So if you’re uncle’s not going to hire you, you don’t want to leave the cosmetics industry and you don’t want to sell the formulas, what’s left? Heck, I guess you could promise to be Alex’s sex slave and maybe he’ll decide to let you run the company instead of de-constructing it, like he always does.”

“I’m not opposed to sexual slavery,” Eden said crisply. “But it would have to be the other way around. I think he needs someone to screw him for a change.”

“Hey, great idea,” Jessica said. “And the good thing about that plan is that you get to do him under while getting to do him, if you get my drift.”

In spite of her dilemma, Eden had to laugh. “A two-year old could get your drift. You better hope Haylie’s not listening.”

“She’s busy tormenting the dog,” Jess said. “But seriously, why do men get to do all these devious things and still have great sex? Think about Dave!”

“I wouldn’t classify my ancient history with him as coming under the heading of ‘great sex.’ And I’m not primarily concerned with sex, at this moment. I need to find a way around Alex and save the company.”

“Okay,” Jessica paused, “what about your thoughts on getting the board to back you for CEO?”

“That was before Wendi,” Eden told her impatiently. “I was hoping to get the board to encourage Michele to name a successor—me being the only obvious one—and help her move toward retirement.”

“You could still do that.”

“My God, Jess, it’s too late for that, even if I could get the board to ignore Michele backing Wendi. I’m telling you, the entire company is at risk and I can’t warn the board or Alex will undermine my reliability by squealing about my family tie to George Thompson. The board will be in confusion and Alex can step in, as he plans on doing anyway!”