Читать книгу The Ceo's Little Surprise - Kat Cantrell - Страница 9

Four

Cass’s laughter bubbled to the surface in spite of it all. Gingerly she dabbed at her eyes without fear thanks to Harper’s smudge-proof mascara. “That’s what you want? Dinner?”

She’d been braced for...anything but that. Especially since she had the distinct impression he was working as many angles as she was.

His fingers dropped away, but her face was still warm where he’d stroked her. She missed his touch instantly.

Why had she thought sitting on the desk would give her an edge? Seemed so logical before she actually did it. Gage had taken her chair in deliberate provocation that she absolutely couldn’t ignore. So she’d trapped him behind the desk and put all her good stuff at eye level. It should have been the perfect distraction. For him. The perfect way to spend the entire conversation looking down at him, imagining that he was suffering over her brilliant strategic move.

Karma, baby.

Instead, she’d spent half of the conversation acutely aware that all her good stuff was at eye level. He’d noticed, quite appreciatively, and it hit her in places she’d forgotten that felt so good when heated by a man’s interest.

The other half of the conversation had been spent trying to stay one step ahead of Gage while feeding him the right combination of incentives to get him to agree to help. If he was up to no good, what better way to keep tabs on him than under the guise of working together to uncover the source of the leak? Besides, she hadn’t done so hot at resolving the leak on her own. If they kept their activities on the down-low, no one had to know she’d outsourced the problem.

If they caught the leak—and Gage wasn’t involved—she’d absolutely talk to the other girls about selling the formula. She hadn’t specified what she’d say...but she’d talk to them all right. The conversation might be more along the lines of no way in hell she’d sell, but he didn’t have to know that.

It was a win-win for everyone.

Crossing his heart with one lazy finger, he grinned. “Totally serious.”

“Dinner?” She pretended to contemplate. “Like a date?”

“Not like a date. A date. And you’re paying.”

A God-honest date? The idea buzzed around inside, looking for a place to land, sounding almost...nice. She’d love to have dinner over a glass of wine with an interesting man who looked at her like Gage was looking at her right now.

She shook it off. She couldn’t go on a real date with Gage Branson. It was ludicrous. The man was a heartbreaker of the highest order.

Instead, she should be thinking of how a date fell in line with her strategy. A little after-hours party, just the two of them. Some drinks and a few seductive comments and, oh, look. Gage slips and says something incriminating, like the name of the person he’d planted at her company. The one who was feeding him information he could use to his advantage.

And she would pretend she wasn’t sad it had to be this way.

Coy was the way to go here. But she had to tread very carefully with the devil incarnate. No point in raising his suspicions by agreeing to his deal right out of the gate. “What if I already have plans for dinner tonight?”

She did have plans. If working until everyone else left and then going home to her empty eight-thousand-square-foot house on White Rock Lake, where she’d open a bottle of wine and eat frozen pizza, counted as plans.

“Cancel them,” he ordered. “You’re too busy worrying about the leak to have fun, anyway. Have dinner with someone who gets that. Where you can unload and unwind without fear.”

“What makes you think I need to unwind?” she purred to cover the sudden catch in her throat. Had she tipped him off somehow that she was tense and frantic 24/7?

His slow smile irritated her. How dare he get to her?

“Oh, I’m practicing my mindreading skills,” he told her blithely. “I see that things are rough around here. You can’t be happy that word got out about your unreleased formula. You’re at a unique place in your career where you have millions of dollars and a large number of people’s jobs at stake. You want to keep it all together and convince everyone that you have things under control. With me, you don’t have to. I get it.”

Something inside crumbled under his assessment. Guess that shield she’d thought she’d developed wasn’t so effective after all. How was he still so good at reading her?

Now would be a good time for that distance she should have put between them long ago. She unglued herself from the desk and rounded it, an ineffective barrier against the open wounds in her chest but better than nothing. Let him make what he chose out of her move.

“You can’t come in here and throw around pop psychology,” she told him, pleased how calmly she delivered it. “You don’t know anything about me, Gage. Not anymore.”

Arms crossed, he watched her from behind her own desk, still wearing a faint trace of that smile. “Yet you didn’t say I was wrong.”

She shut her eyes for a beat. Dinner was going to be far more difficult than she’d anticipated.

If Gage was involved in corporate espionage, catching him in the act was the only way to prove to the others she could lead Fyra through these difficult circumstances. Plus it got rid of him, once and for all. His hundred-million-dollar offer wouldn’t be a factor and the leak would be stopped.

He’d get exactly what he deserved.

Then she could get started on getting over him—for real, this time. She could stop hating him. And stop being affected by him. And stop turning down every man who asked her out. The chaos inside with Gage’s name written all over it had driven her for so long. Wasn’t it time to move on? That was what she deserved.

“I’m not what you’d call a fun date,” she said. “I have a very boring life outside of these walls. Dinner is a chance to discuss the leak. Strictly business.”

A token protest. She knew good and well it was anything but.

“Is that really what you want, Cass?” he asked softly, as if he already knew the answer. “Because it sounds to me as if you need a friend.”

Of all the things she’d thought he come back with, that was not one of them. The laugh escaped her clamped lips before she could catch it. “What, like you’re volunteering? I have lots of friends, thanks.”

But did she really? This time last week, she would have said Trinity would take a bullet for her. They’d been friends for almost fifteen years. It still stung that no one had stood up for Cass in the board meeting, but Trinity’s silence had hurt the worst.

Alex’s defection was almost as bad.

Cass and Alex had met in a freshman-level algebra class. It had taken Cass four months to convince Alex she had what it took to be the CFO of a multimillion-dollar corporation and Cass had been right. Alex’s lack of confidence and all the talk of selling hurt.

Cass was afraid the cracks in Fyra’s foundation were really cracks in her foundation. The last person she could stomach finding out about the division in Fyra was Gage Branson, and it would be just like him to sniff out her weaknesses.

So she wouldn’t show him any.

“There’s always room for one more friend,” Gage countered softly. “In fact, I changed my mind. Let me take you to dinner and you can relax for a while. Wear a dress and we’ll leave our titles at the door.”

There he went again, working his magic because that sounded like the exact date she’d envisioned. He was the last man on earth she should be envisioning it with, though. “How do you know that’s what I need?”

“Cass. I know you. You can’t have changed too much over the years. At least I hope you haven’t.”

Before she could figure out how to respond to that, he rounded the desk and took her hand to hold it tight in his surprisingly smooth one. For a guy who’d always spent a lot of time outdoors, his skin should be rougher. It was a testament to GB Skin and the effectiveness of his products that it wasn’t.

She stared at his chiseled jaw, gorgeous hazel eyes and beautiful face framed by the longish brown hair he’d always favored and something unhitched in her chest.

Gage had broken her so thoroughly because she’d once given this man her soul.

That hadn’t been an accident. A mistake, surely, but not because she didn’t realize what she was doing. She’d fallen in love with Gage willingly. He’d filled her, completely. Because he understood her, believed in her. Taught her, pushed her, stimulated her.

All of it rushed back and she went a little dizzy with the memories of what had been holy and magnificent about their relationship.

“Say yes,” he prompted, squeezing her hand. “I promise not to mention how boring you are.”

Despite everything, she laughed, oddly grateful that he had figured out how to get her to.

“Yes,” she said. There’d really never been another choice. “But we split the check.”

He couldn’t be allowed to affect her. The good stuff about their relationship didn’t matter because at the end of the day, Gage didn’t do commitment and never would.

“That part’s nonnegotiable,” he said with a wicked smile. “I’m paying. After all, I bullied you into it.”

Mission accomplished. He had no clue he’d spent this entire conversation persuading her into exactly what she wanted to do. For that alone, she returned the smile. “You haven’t seen the price of the obscenely expensive wine I plan to order.”

“I’ll pick you up at eight,” he said, clearly happy to have gotten what he wanted, though why he considered dinner such a coup was beyond her. He had an angle here that she hadn’t yet discovered.

She watched him leave. That gave her nearly ten hours to figure out how to keep Gage at arm’s length while cozying up to him. Hours she’d use to figure out how to pump him for information while keeping him in the dark about her motives.

Ten hours to figure out how to seduce answers out of Gage Branson without falling for him all over again. All she had to do was focus on his sins and the rest would be a walk in the park.

* * *

Gage knocked on Cass’s door at seven fifty-five.

Nice place. A bit too glass-and-steel for his tastes but Cass’s house overlooked a big lake with a walking trail around it. His own house in Austin was near a lake. Funny how their tastes in views had aligned all these years later.

She swung open the door wearing a sheer lacy dress that hugged her body in all the right places. Cranberry-colored, which was somehow ten times racier than red would have been, it rendered him speechless. When he’d told her to wear a dress, he’d fully expected her to wear anything but.

His body sprang to full attention. He could not get a handle on her.

“You’re early,” she said with an amused brow lift. “I like an eager man.”

The blood that should have been stimulating his brain into a snappy response seemed to have vacated for a warmer locale in the south.

Cass wasn’t a college student any longer. Not that he was confused. But he was having a hard time reconciling how much she’d changed. Cassandra Claremont, CEO, might be the most intriguing woman on the planet. She was also far more of a challenge because she seemed to have developed Gage-proof armor.

Dinner was supposed to level the playing field. Warm up that ice so he could get her used to the idea of selling him the formula because she recognized what she owed him. She might be willing to talk to the other ladies about the formula, but he needed her to convince them, not talk about it. For that, she had to be totally in his corner. How was he supposed to get her there when he couldn’t get his feet under himself long enough to figure out what game she was playing?

“Uh...” Brain not engaging. He shook off the Cass stupor. “It’s only early if you’re more than fifteen minutes ahead. Technically, I’m right on time.”