Читать книгу The Virgin's Shock Baby - Heidi Rice - Страница 9

PROLOGUE

‘DARIO DE ROSSI IS escorting you to the Westchester Ball tomorrow night and you need to seduce him while you’re there.’

‘What? Why?’ Megan Whittaker was fairly sure she’d just been transported into an alternate universe. An alternate universe that was two hundred years past its sell-by date. Either that or her father had lost his mind. Whichever way you looked at it, the demand he had just levelled at her from across his walnut desk in the Manhattan offices of Whittaker Enterprises, without even the hint of a smile on his face, was not good news, because he did not appear to be joking.

‘To save Whittaker’s from possible annihilation,’ her father snapped. ‘Don’t give me your whipped puppy look, Megan,’ he added. ‘Do you think I would ask this of you if there were another option?’

‘Well, I...’ She wanted to believe him, even though she knew his love for Whittaker’s had always taken precedence over his love for his daughters.

But unlike her sister, Katie, Megan understood that. Having spent the last four years working her way up to head her own tiny department at Whittaker’s, she didn’t begrudge him his dedication to the company that had been in their family for five generations.

She also didn’t really begrudge him a request so outside the norm for a father to a daughter, or indeed a boss to his employee. She knew that to be successful in business your personal life had to suffer, and personal loyalties could be tested. But this was... Well... It wasn’t even rational. What possible reason could there be for her to seduce any man? Let alone a man like De Rossi, a corporate wolf who had risen through the ranks of New York business society in the last ten years to become one of its prime movers and shakers.

Quite apart from anything else, if her father was looking for a femme fatale, surely he must know Megan was not the best candidate for the job.

She simply did not have the necessary temperament, equipment or experience. She had always been more comfortable in business suits and flats than cocktail dresses and heels. She found going to the beauty salon tedious, the concentration on her appearance a waste of time and money. Her intellect and her work ethic were so much more important. And after the few fumbled encounters she’d had at college, she’d been beyond grateful to discover she comprehensively lacked her mother’s voracious and indiscriminate libido. At twenty-four, she was still technically speaking a virgin, for goodness’ sake! These days she would much rather spend her small amount of free time watching TV boxsets with a nice glass of Pouilly Fuissé, than finding a man—especially as the judicious use of a vibrator could take care of her needs without all the awkwardness and disappointment.

‘Someone’s buying up all our stock,’ her father said, the vein pulsing at his temple starting to disturb Megan. ‘I’m almost certain it’s him. And if it is him, we’re in serious trouble. We’re exposed. We have to stay his hand. That means making sacrifices for the good of the company.’

‘But I don’t understand how...’

‘You don’t have to understand. What you have to do is get an invitation back to his penthouse so we can discover if it is him. If you can find out which of our shareholders he’s targeting that would be even better. Then we might have some hope of keeping the bastard off our back until I can secure new capital investment.’

‘You expect me to seduce him for the purposes of industrial espionage?’ Megan tried to clarify where her father was going with this, as something became devastatingly obvious to her. He had to be exceptionally stressed to believe she could pull such a plan off with her limited skills, which meant the company must be in serious financial difficulties.

‘You have your mother’s face and figure, Megan. And you’re not a lesbian... Are you?’

Her face coloured, the heat racing up her neck, the impatient enquiry mortifying her. ‘What? Of course not, but...’

‘Then what’s the damn problem? Surely there must be enough of that oversexed bitch in you somewhere to know how to seduce this bastard. It’s built into your DNA, all you have to do is locate it.’ Her father was becoming increasingly frantic. The bitterness in his voice at the mention of her mother made Megan’s stomach knot.

Her father never mentioned her mother. Not ever. Alexis Whittaker had abandoned all three of them—her father, herself and her little sister, Katie—not long after Katie’s birth, and had died ten years ago when her Italian boyfriend’s Ferrari had plummeted from a clifftop road on the island of Capri. Megan could still remember her father coming to tell her the news at her boarding school in Cornwall, his face white with an agonising combination of grief, pain and humiliation. And she could remember the same hollow sensation in her stomach.

Her mother had been a social butterfly, stunningly beautiful, flamboyant and reckless—with everyone’s life including her own. Megan could barely remember her; she’d never come to visit her daughters, which was why their father had shipped them off to board at St Grey’s as soon as they were old enough.

The hollow confusion had turned to panic though, when paparazzi photos of her and Katie at the funeral had appeared on the Internet. They had been forced to leave the only real home they had ever known, chased out by the photographers wanting to get a glimpse of the ‘grief-stricken’ Whittaker sisters, and the salacious whispers about their mother’s infidelities, spread by some of the other girls at St Grey’s. Her father had moved them to an apartment ten blocks from his own on Fifth Avenue in New York, employed a housekeeper and a security guard, enrolled them in an exclusive private school and made the effort to visit them at least once a month. And eventually the media storm surrounding Alexis Whittaker’s wicked ways and her untimely death had died down.

But ever since Megan had been ripped away from St Grey’s, she had promised herself two things: she would protect the sister she loved from the fallout of her mother’s disgrace, and she would work herself to the bone to prove to her father that she was nothing like the woman who had given birth to them.

And up until this moment, she had thought she’d succeeded. With her second objective at least. Katie, unfortunately, appeared to be almost as wild as their mother, despite Megan’s best efforts to tame her rebellious temperament.

Megan, though, had concentrated on making her father proud. She’d got a first at Cambridge two years ahead of her peers in computer science. And then an MBA at Harvard Business School specialising in e-commerce. To prove herself worthy, not just to her father but to her colleagues at Whittaker’s, she’d refused his offer of a vanity position and had instead started on the ground floor of the building in Midtown. After six months in the mailroom, she’d applied for an internship in the tech department. It had taken her three years to work her way up the ladder from there, rung by torturous rung. Her recent promotion had put her in charge of the company’s small three-person e-commerce department, finally proving once and for all that her mother’s shameful behaviour had no bearing on who she was. Until this moment.

How could her father even consider asking her to seduce De Rossi? Did he expect her to have sex with the man, too?

‘I can’t do it,’ she said.

‘Why the hell not?’

Because I’m about as far from being De Rossi’s ideal woman as Daffy Duck is from Jessica Rabbit.

‘Because it wouldn’t be ethical,’ she managed, recoiling from the hot flash of memory from the only time she’d ever met De Rossi in the flesh.

He’d certainly made an impression.

She’d heard of him, but the gossip hadn’t prepared her for the staggeringly handsome man who had arrived at the Met Ball with supermodel Giselle Monroe hanging off his arm like the latest fashion accessory. The brute force of his powerful body had barely been contained by the expertly tailored designer suit, and his bold heated gaze had raked over her when they’d been introduced by her father. The knowledge in his ice-blue eyes had disturbed her on a purely visceral level. And set off a thousand tiny explosions of sensation over every inch of exposed skin.

She’d been careful to avoid De Rossi for the rest of the evening, because she’d known instinctively the man was not just tall, dark and handsome, but also extremely dangerous—to her peace of mind.

‘Don’t be naïve.’ Her father flicked a chilling glare at her. ‘There are no ethics in business. Not when it comes to the bottom line. De Rossi certainly doesn’t have any, so we can’t afford to have any either.’

‘But how did you even persuade him to take me to the ball?’ Megan said, becoming desperate herself.

‘It’s a charity ball. He’s paying for a table. You’re going to be Whittaker’s representative there. I asked him to escort you as a courtesy to me; he’s a member of my club.’

So she had officially become a pity date—which would have been mortifying, if her father’s ulterior motive wasn’t a thousand times worse.

‘De Rossi’s only weakness that I could find is for beautiful women,’ her father continued in the same deceptively pragmatic tone. As if he were talking sense, instead of insanity. ‘Not that it’s exactly a weakness. He’s never been foolish enough to marry one of them, unlike me. And he never keeps them longer than a few months. But he’s between women at the moment, according to Annalise, who keeps up with this nonsense,’ he said, mentioning his mistress. ‘And he never has one out of his bed for long. Which gives you all the opportunity you need. He’ll be on the hunt and I’m putting you in his path. All you need to do is get his attention.’ The dispassionate statement had shame burning the back of Megan’s neck. ‘Get an invite to his penthouse on Central Park West,’ her father continued. ‘Once he takes you there, you can get access to his computer and his files. Computers are your forte, are they not?’

That he’d thought this scenario through in such detail wasn’t helping the chill spreading through Megan’s abdomen—or the flush of awareness flaming across her scalp. ‘But anything he has on there will be password protected,’ she said, trying to be practical.

‘I have his passwords.’

‘How?’

‘It’s not important. The important thing is to get access to his computer before he changes them. Which means acting quickly and concisely.’

And setting her up as some kind of Mata Hari? The idea would almost be funny if it weren’t so appalling.

‘You can’t ask me to do this,’ said Megan. She’d always strived so hard to please her father, to prove herself worthy of his trust. There weren’t many things she wouldn’t do for him, but this request scared her on so many levels. ‘You wouldn’t ask me to, if I were your son,’ she added, trying to appeal to her father’s sense of justice. He wasn’t a bad man, he was fair and, in his own gruff, distant way, he loved her and Katie. Obviously he was so stressed he had completely lost his grip on reality. But he had to be under a huge amount of pressure, if De Rossi was sniffing about the company.

She knew enough about De Rossi’s business practices from the financial press to know that once his conglomerate got their hooks into your stock you were as good as dead in the water. He was famous for asset stripping. If he really was planning a hostile takeover, he could reduce Whittaker’s to rubble in weeks, a legacy company destroyed in a heartbeat simply to feed his insatiable appetite for wealth at any cost. But her father’s solution was beyond desperate, not to mention illegal, and doomed to failure. She had to make him see that, and find another way.

‘If I had a son and De Rossi was gay, that would be an option.’ Instead of looking persuaded, the tic in her father’s cheek went ballistic. ‘As neither is the case, it’s a moot point.’

The blush seared her skin, the knot in her stomach tightening into a hollow ball of anxiety. It was no good, she was going to be forced to state the obvious.

‘De Rossi might as well be gay for all the interest he’s likely to take in me. He dates supermodels.’

And I’m hardly supermodel material.

At five-foot-five, and with the lush curves she had inherited from her mother, Megan had felt like an over-endowed pixie next to the slim, stunning woman who had fawned over De Rossi at the Met Ball.

But Megan’s lack of appeal to men had always felt like a boon. She didn’t want to become any man’s decorative accessory. Especially not a man like De Rossi, who even on their brief acquaintance she suspected was as ruthless with women as he was in his business dealings.

She could control those mini explosions. They were nothing more than a biological reaction.

‘Don’t sell yourself short.’ Her father huffed, looking exasperated now as well as desperate. ‘You have enough of your mother’s charms to attract him if you put your mind to it.’

‘But I—’

‘If you don’t do it, there’s only one other person I can ask.’

Megan’s panic downgraded. Thank goodness, he had someone else he could ask. She would not have to even attempt something that was bound to humiliate and degrade her, and was extremely unlikely to be successful. ‘Who?’

‘Your sister, Katie.’

The panic went from ten to ninety in a nanosecond.

‘But Katie’s only nineteen,’ she cried, shocked. ‘And she’s in art school.’

After an endless string of school expulsions and acting out against their father’s authority, Katie had finally found her passion as a talented and brilliant artist. And she didn’t give a fig about Whittaker’s.

‘An art school I pay for,’ her father remarked, the dispassionate expression chilling Megan to the bone. Katie and her father had been at loggerheads for years—ever since the sisters had moved to New York after their mother’s death. It had taken Megan months to persuade their father to pay for the exclusive academy that had only offered Katie a partial scholarship—something she had never told her sister. She didn’t know how Katie would react if she discovered their father was paying some of her tuition fees and was prepared to pull the plug on the dreams she’d worked so hard for to save Whittaker’s. But Megan doubted it would be good.

‘Your sister is also as reckless and wild as your mother,’ her father added. ‘Given the right incentive, I think we both know she’d pass this assignment with flying colours.’

No, she wouldn’t, she’d be crushed, Megan thought.

Katie was as lively and spirited as Megan was cautious and grounded. But for all her recklessness, she also had an open and easily bruised heart—and absolutely no regard for business ethics or expediency. Katie would be appalled that their father could ask such a thing of either one of them. And Katie’s own worst enemy was usually Katie. She was volatile and unpredictable, especially if she was hurt. So much so that Megan had no idea what she’d do if forced into this situation by their father. She could have a mad passionate affair with De Rossi or annoy him so much he’d destroy Whittaker’s just for the hell of it. But one thing was for sure, putting a hothead like Katie into the path of someone as ruthless as De Rossi would be a car crash of epic proportions, and Katie would be the one who got destroyed.

‘The only reason I haven’t already asked her is because she knows nothing about computers,’ her father said. ‘And De Rossi likes his lovers more mature, according to Annalise,’ he added. ‘You’ve got a better chance. But if you leave me with no choice I will have to explain to your sister that if she wants to stay at her fancy art school she will have to—’

‘Okay, I’ll do it,’ Megan jumped in, before her father could state the unthinkable. ‘I’ll give it my best shot.’

Even if her best shot had very little chance of being a success, her pride and her ethics felt like a small price to pay to save her sister from heartbreak—and Whittaker’s from guaranteed annihilation.

‘Good girl, Megan,’ her father said. ‘Take the day off tomorrow. Annalise will accompany you to select an outfit suitable for the occasion and take you to her beautician to get you properly prepared.’

‘Okay,’ she said, feeling dazed at the enormity of what she had just agreed to—and how ill-prepared she was for the challenge. Annalise’s alluring sense of style and supreme sexual confidence had always intimidated Megan.

‘Don’t disappoint me. Whittaker’s is counting on you,’ her father finished, dismissing her as he turned back to the papers on his desk.

‘I know and I won’t,’ she murmured, trying to sound confident.

But as she returned to her small office on the building’s tenth floor, the pressure of what she had to achieve sat in her belly like a brick. An annoyingly hot brick seeping an uncontrollable and completely unregulated warmth throughout her body.

She didn’t feel confident; she felt like a sacrifice, about to be staked out in the wolf’s lair, with nothing to protect her but a designer gown and heels and an overpriced beautician’s appointment.