Exposing the Billionaire (Corporate Affairs, Book #1) (2 page)

Feeling irritation and frustration building inside her, Kate tried to keep her cool and remind herself that she only had to keep this job long enough to blow the lid on this company. “I’m sorry, Ms. Adams, I—”

“Never mind. Just clean this up.”

It took everything in Kate to remain calm and now tell that woman exactly what she thought of her stupid suit and heels. Taking a few deep breaths, Kate gathered up the disorganized copies, then headed back to her desk to sort them all out.

She would have to up her game and make sure she knew what to do if she wanted to keep this job.

There was a quick buzz at her desk, then a deep, silky voice came through the intercom. “Ms. Kaufmann, coffee in my office.”

With a start, Kate realized that was the voice of Lucas Blaine. Flustered, she scattered her papers all over again desperately searching for a notepad, pen, and her coveted tape recorder. This was her first opportunity at Blaine.

Straightening out her skirt and fixing her hair, she walked briskly to the double doors. With only a moment’s pause to prepare herself, she opened one of the doors and poked her head in. “Mr. Blaine?”

His desk chair was swiveled so that the back was facing her, him evidently sitting in it. He was talking rapidly to someone on the phone in what she thought was French, but waved her in with a large hand. Kate came farther into his office, stopping just in front of his large hardwood desk.

While he continued on in French—she would have to listen over the recording of it later to translate—she looked around. The office was huge with ceiling length windows lining the back that left a panoramic view of the city. Off to the right were paintings, large and framed in patina bronze, a mix of forest landscapes and city skylines. She thought one of them might be Tokyo.

On the right was a row of filing cabinets with wood facings and sitting on top of them was a huge spider plant whose leaves were tangling down over it.

It was the only room in the entire building Kate had seen that wasn’t decorated in the same modern silver and gray motif.

After several moments, Blaine said, “
Au revoir.
”

Blaine stood up from his chair and it was the first time Kate realized how tall he was. She had seen pictures of him before, but only a scant few, because he was one of a handful of billionaires that didn’t care to be plastered on the covers of magazines. None of them did him justice.

He turned to face her, walking around to the front of his desk, hand outstretched in greeting.

“Ms. Kaufmann, I presume,” he said in that same rich voice she’d heard over the intercom. “I’m Lucas Blaine.”

His blue eyes stared into her green ones, showing intelligence and intensity. The line of his full lips was curved ever so slightly, making him seem as though he was always on the verge of smiling. His blonde hair was parted to the side, probably kept at a neat and tidy length, though she had the feeling he was due for a haircut. It was starting to get a little long, touching the collar of his white button down shirt—which left the top two buttons open, he wore no tie. And as her eyes traveled lower down she noted his broad shoulders, his fit arms, the muscles showing beneath the fabric. His shirt was tucked into black slacks and she wondered if—

“Ms. Kaufmann?”

Kate was brought out of her musings by his voice—and realized she’d been staring. Feeling a blush creep into her cheeks, she quickly extended her hand and gripped his. It was warm and strong, his hand so big that it practically swallowed hers.

“Yes, sorry,” she apologized. “I was distracted... by the office.”

She tried pulling her hand away, but his remained gripped around hers for several moments longer than it should have been. When the contact ended and his hand dropped back to his side, she swallowed hard.

“It’s lovely. Not at all like the rest of the building.”

His eyebrows rose and she realized that she just insulted the aesthetic persona of his company. Today was just not her day.

She winced and apologized again. “Sorry. Not that the rest of the building is terrible, I just really think your office has a more personal touch.”

His hands dug into his pockets. Her eyes darted to his slacks, then back up to his face. She couldn’t tell if he caught her flickering gaze. If he did, he didn’t mention it.

“Yes, well, I had a little more direct input in the design of my office,” he admitted.

“Not in the rest of your company?” Kate asked, smelling the potential for a new facet to her story.

He laughed. “Oh, I have plenty of say in my company. Just not so much in the way it looks.”

Kate tried not to appear deflated. “Oh.”

“Clarice handles most of the smaller details around the office. I just make sure the business part keeps running.”

Kate bristled at the mention of her superior—or, as Kate had come to think of her, her arch nemesis. It was pure force of will that kept Kate from rolling her eyes, which was why she didn’t have any left over to stop her mouth from running. “No wonder everything feels so stiff. We’re all walking around inside one of her stilettos.”

Her employer appeared to be biting back a smile, his blue eyes twinkling mischievously. He considered her, standing in his office in her pencil skirt and white button down blouse. “Clarice can be a bit of a...”

“Ballbuster?” Kate supplied before her brain could tell her mouth that that was an incredibly stupid thing to say to her employer. There seemed to be a lot of miscommunication between her brain and mouth today.

Kate waited for the reprimand to come—surely she had finally crossed the line—but was pleasantly surprised when Blaine merely laughed.

“Yes,” he admitted with a smile that showed two gorgeous dimples and crinkled his eyes charmingly. “I couldn’t have said it better myself. But Clarice is still the best at what she does. I’m sorry that you’ve gotten off to a rough start with her.”

Pushing back a lock of thick, wavy hair that had escaped from her clipped back tresses, Kate found herself smiling back at him. “It was my fault. I should have been more careful with what I was doing.”

Blaine merely waved a large hand dismissively. “This is only your second day. You’ll adjust.”

Kate cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, you called me in for coffee.”

An amused look crossed his features. “Yes, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Of course.” Kate gave him a curt nod, then turned away from him, heading out the door. As she did, she had the odd sensation of him watching her go.

She returned in only a few minutes—after checking to make sure her tape recorder was working properly—carrying a cup of coffee with two lumps of sugar and just a hint of creamer. She had filled the mug a little too high in her haste to get back into the office and now it threatened to spill over the lip.

Walking slowly to be careful, Kate silently decided that heels were a terrible idea. Between trying to keeper her balance and not tip the mug, she was using what felt like all her brain power. That was the excuse she was going to use to explain what happened next.

She came around the side of his desk so that she wouldn’t have to lean over it to place it beside him. She was just going to place it on his desk, but he ended up reaching out for it instead. It was hot, she was holding it by the handle and didn’t want him to burn himself—that would not have been a good mark to her job performance—so she ended up jerking it the wrong way. And promptly spilled its contents all over his shirt.

“Oh god,” she muttered, horrified.

Immediately, she pulled out several tissues from a box sitting on his desk, then leaned over to try desperately clean off his shirt. She used her left hand to balance by placing it on his armrest, while the right hand tried to clean up the mess.

It was useless. She could already see that the white material was turning a light brown color, becoming transparent as it soaked up the coffee. Beneath it she saw the outline of his abs and as her hand continued to frantically dab at the spot, she felt how hard they were.

At this point, she knew it was useless, but she continued to dab at him. Her movements were no longer frantic, though, but lingering and soft. His muscles flexed under her touch and she felt more than heard his sharp intake of breath. Heat began to spread through her face and down her neck. She looked up to apologize—
again
—but when she caught his eyes, no words could escape her mouth.

They had become a brilliant blue, almost flashing, and in their depths was a sharp heat.

Her breath caught. All those features she had noticed earlier suddenly seemed far more appealing, more intense, now that she considered them with that gaze.

“Ms. Kaufmann,” he murmured, his voice so deep it was more of a vibration through her body than a sound in her ears.

“Kate,” she said before thinking.

He smiled. It did nothing to soothe the intensity in his eyes. All it did was make him look
hungry
.

“Kate. Would you be so kind as to get me another shirt?” His gaze dropped to her lips, her neck... “There should be several in the closet outside.”

“Of course.” She could have killed herself for how high pitched her voice sounded. “I’ll... I’ll go do that. Now.”

With a deep breath, she straightened herself and walked as quickly as she could in her heels. This time, she
knew
his eyes were locked on her retreating form.

Shirt, shirt, shirt,
she thought to herself over and over again, trying to focus. It was easier once she left the office, his presence no longer overwhelming her entirely. But her fingers still tingled and her skin felt like fire where his eyes and grazed over her.

Shirt
, she reminded herself.

She looked in the closet outside the door and sure enough there was a stack of pearly white, perfectly folded dress shirts. Kate grabbed one off the top, assuming it was the appropriate size, and went back to the office door. She paused and fixed her skirt, her shirt, her hair before pushing open the door and walking in.

Only to stop immediately.

There stood Lucas Blaine, six feet three inches of what she decided was gorgeously formed male, shirtless. His smooth, naturally tanned back was towards her, his defined shoulders and arms a little tense.

At the sound of the door, Blaine turned and revealed his cut chest and abs. His slacks were belted almost on his hips and the finest trail of golden blonde feathered out beneath his belly-button.

When Kate finally managed to pick her jaw up off the ground, she walked on unsteady feet towards him. She stopped a fair distance from him, almost afraid to get too close. Her arm extended as far as it could, offering him the clean shirt.

His blue eyes had found her green ones again. The intensity in them hadn’t faded in the least.

“Thank you,” he told her and his voice momentarily made her forget how to breathe.

“Of course,” she whispered, then turned and got the hell out of there as fast as she could.

A
lone in her apartment after her second day at the Blaine corporation, Kate found herself more determined than ever to find what she needed and get this story done—fast. After her first encounter with Lucas Blaine she realized that she couldn’t waste time trying to get on anyone’s good side. Especially Blaine’s.

An image of his bare sculpted chest flashed through her mind and she had to forcibly push it away.

She had to keep her personal attraction to him in check. It wasn’t worth her career. In all likelihood, whatever heat was flashing in his eyes that day would fizzle and die not long after she threw away everything in her life for him.

“Not that I would ever do that,” she mumbled to herself.

Grabbing her tape recorder, she played back what she recorded in her boss’s office earlier in the day. She had been right in guessing it was French he’d been speaking. Making some quick notes of what he’d been saying, she spent most of the night translating it.

Unfortunately, when it was all said and done all she discovered was that he enjoyed traveling to Paris and hoped he would be able to make the trip again to further engage with clients located there. Not to mention he loved their food.

Feeling a slight letdown, Kate shut down her laptop and laid down for the night. She would have to find something more concrete tomorrow.

“I need to get into his office.”

* * *

K
ate didn’t have any luck the next day. It turned out that Blaine had a meeting half-way across the country and would be gone for just shy of a week. At first, Kate had been hopeful that this would be her opportunity to get into his office to snoop around without him noticing.

Then she ran into Clarice.

“Mr. Blaine will be out of the office for the next six days,” she explained in that brisk way of hers. “In that time, I have a list of tasks that you need to perform. The completion of said tasks will determine whether or not you will be able to continue working for Mr. Blaine.”

And that’s how her week from hell started. Kate still had hope that maybe she could find what she needed from Blaine’s office—it wouldn’t matter then if she was fired or not—but all of Clarice’s tasks required her to be driving all around the city doing errands. Every time she came back into the office, Clarice would have something new for her. She was never left alone long enough to even try to sneak in.

After stopping by Lorenzo’s, a high-end dry cleaner, to pick up several incredibly expensive suits, Kate went back to the office to drop them off and realized that it was the end of the work day.

“Well,” Clarice said, her lips pursed in that lemon juice way. “It looks like you’ll be staying with us another day still.”

The rest of her week continued like that. Every day, Kate found herself coming home exhausted. She would stay up a little bit doing research on Blaine, but she couldn’t find anything directly useful.

Mostly, she discovered that he was an entrepreneur, starting a small business when he was only nineteen and selling it when he was twenty-three, then diving back in to work his way into a senior management position at another corporation. By the time he was twenty-five he had managed to buy enough stock in the company to take it over. It was renamed Blaine Enterprises and supposedly cleaned up its act.