Royal Seductions: Secrets: The Duke's Boardroom Affair. Michelle Celmer

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СКАЧАТЬ reaction, but she didn’t seem to appreciate his attempt to be a gentleman.

      She jerked away and shot lasers at him with her eyes. “What are you doing?”

      He held his hands up in a defensive gesture. “Sorry. Just being polite.”

      “Do you touch all of your female employees inappropriately?”

      What was her problem? Here he thought she’d begun to warm to him, but he couldn’t seem to get an accurate read on her.

      “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

      “Well, you did.”

      A pair standing in the hallway outside his office cut their conversation short to look at him and Victoria.

      “Why don’t we step into my office and talk about this,” he said quietly. She nodded, then he almost made the monumental error of touching her again, drawing his hand away a second before it grazed her shoulder.

      He couldn’t help it; he was a physical person. And until today, no one had ever seemed to have a problem with that.

      Penelope was already sitting at her desk, tapping away at her keyboard. The only hint of a reaction as he ushered Victoria to his office door was a slight lift of her left brow. He liked that about his secretary. She was always discreet. He also knew exactly what she was thinking. He’d lost another assistant already. Not all that unusual, until he factored in that he hadn’t even slept with this one yet.

      “Penelope, hold my calls, please.” He opened the door and gestured Victoria inside, then closed it behind them. “Have a seat.”

      Her chin jutted out stubbornly. “I’d rather stand, thank you.”

      “Fine.” He could see that she wasn’t going to make this easy. He rounded his desk and sat down. “Now, would you like to tell me what the problem is?”

      “The problem is that your behavior today has been completely inappropriate.”

      “All I did was touch your back.”

      “Employers are not supposed to walk around naked in front of their employees.”

      He leaned forward and propped his elbows on the desk. “I wasn’t naked.”

      “Not the entire time.”

      So, she had been looking. “Need I point out that you were in my house? When I walked into my closet I had no reason to expect you would be there. Sniffing my shirts.”

      Her cheeks blushed pink, but she didn’t back down. “And I suppose the towel accidentally fell off.”

      “Again, if you hadn’t been ogling me, you wouldn’t have seen anything.”

      Her eyes went wide with indignation. “I was not ogling you!”

      “Face it, sweetheart, you couldn’t keep your eyes off me.” He leaned back in his chair. “In fact, I felt a little violated.”

      “You felt violated?” She clamped her jaw so tight he worried she might crack her teeth. She wasn’t easy to rile, but once he got her going…damn.

      “But I’m willing to forgive and forget,” he said.

      “I’ve read your e-mails and listened to your phone messages. I know the kind of man that you are, and I’m telling you to back off. I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to, but you have done such a thorough job of ruining my family that I need this position. The way I see it, we’re stuck with each other. If you’re trying to get me to quit, it isn’t going to work. And if you continue to prance around naked in front of me and touch me inappropriately I’ll slap a sexual harassment suit on you so fast you won’t know what hit you.”

      He couldn’t repress the smile that was itching to curl the corner of his mouth. “I was prancing?”

      Her mouth fell open, as though she couldn’t believe he was making a joke out of this. “You really are a piece of work.”

      “Thank you.”

      “That wasn’t a compliment! You have got to be the most arrogant, self-centered—” she struggled for the right word, but all she could come up with was “—jerk I have ever met!”

      He shrugged. “Arrogant, yes. Self-centered, occasionally. But anyone will tell you I’m a nice guy.”

       “Nice?”

      “And fair.”

      “Fair? You orchestrated the deal that ruined my father. That stole from us the land that has been in our family for five generations, and you call that fair? We lost our business and our home. We lost everything because of you.”

      He wasn’t sure where she was getting her information, but she was way off. “We didn’t steal anything. The deal we offered your father was a gift.”

      Her face twisted with outrage. “A gift?”

      “He wouldn’t have gotten a better deal from anyone else.”

      “Ruining good men in the name of the royal family doesn’t make it any less sleazy or wrong.”

      This was all beginning to make sense now. Her lack of gratitude toward the royal family and her very generous employment contract. And there was only one explanation. “You have no idea the financial shape that the Houghton was in, do you?”

      She instantly went on the defensive. “What is that supposed to mean? Yes, my father handled the financial end of the business, but he kept me informed. Business was slow, no thanks to the Royal Inn, but we were by no means sinking.”

      Suddenly he felt very sorry for her. And he didn’t like what he was going to have to do next, but it was necessary. She deserved to know the truth, before she did something ill-advised and made a fool of both herself and her father.

      He pressed the intercom on his desk. “Penelope, would you please bring in the file for the buyout on the Houghton Hotel.”

      “What are you doing?” Victoria demanded.

      Probably making a huge mistake. “Something against my better judgment.”

      Victoria stood there, stiff and tight-lipped until Penelope appeared a moment later with a brown accordion file stuffed to capacity. She handed it to Charles, but not before she flashed him a swift, stern glance. Penelope knew what he was doing and the risk he was taking. And it was clear that she didn’t approve. But she didn’t say a word. She just walked out and shut the door behind her.

      “The contents in this file are confidential,” he told Victoria. “I could be putting my career in jeopardy by showing it to you. But I think it’s something you need to see. In fact, I know it is.”

      At first he thought she might refuse to read it. For several long moments she just stared at him. But curiosity must have gotten the best of her, because finally she reached out and took the file.

      “Take СКАЧАТЬ