More Than a Millionaire / The Untamed Sheikh. Emilie Rose

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      He’d certainly laid his cards on the table. And while part of her respected him for his honesty, the other hated knowing his strategy.

      Her lawyer had confirmed the courts would be unlikely to deny him some form of connection. If the worst case scenario he mentioned came about, the child’s welfare came first. And she’d rather her child live anywhere than here in a place where his or her safety would always be at risk.

      “I’ll help you find a house. But don’t believe for one minute that equates to me accepting the inevitability of you as a parent to my—this baby. You are not parent material.”

      One corner of his mouth quirked up with stomach-flipping, breath-catching effect. “Guess I’ll have to prove you wrong.”

      “Is that your latest floozy?” Harlan Patrick spit the question from the opposite side of Ryan’s desk.

      Ryan glanced at the photo lying on the top of the open file he’d composed on Hightower Aviation. He’d printed the professional shot of Nicole from the Hightower Web page. The photographer hadn’t managed to catch the fire in her aquamarine eyes or the golden glints in her light brown hair.

      He wasn’t ready to share his surrogacy plan with his father yet or discuss how it had gone wrong. “I don’t sleep with every woman I meet.”

      His father snorted in disbelief. He’d always believed the worst of his son—probably because until recently Ryan had given him reason to. Ryan had spent a lot of time acting obnoxious as a kid hoping his mother would get sick of his shenanigans and send him back to his father, but his strategy hadn’t worked. By the time he’d gone off to college the rebel pattern had become a habit.

      But his partying and rebelling days were over. And while he would never deliberately deceive anyone, he wasn’t above letting his father’s tendency to jump to conclusions work in his favor for once.

      Nicole Hightower was exactly the kind of woman his father wanted him to marry. Ryan had no intentions of marrying anyone, but if his father saw him and Nicole together and believed there might be a long-term relationship in Ryan’s future, then he wasn’t going to correct him. At least not now. There would be ample time for that later—after his father handed over the presidency of Patrick Architectural.

      “Her name is Nicole Hightower. She’s a client services manager for Hightower Aviation Management Corporation.” He removed Nicole’s picture from the file, laid it to the side of his blotter and passed the folder to his father. “We should consider fractional ownership or leasing a plane from HAMC.”

      “Why? So you can have another damned expensive toy? My God, Ryan, you risk your neck with no thought to who will take over Patrick Architectural if you kill yourself.”

      The repetitive lecture that had launched Ryan’s current campaign set his teeth on edge.

      “You already have a thirty-thousand-dollar motorcycle and a sixty-thousand-dollar boat. What next? A five-million-dollar plane? And I suppose you want to get your pilot’s license, too.”

      Ryan bit back his irritation. “I don’t want or need a pilot’s license. Hightower maintains and staffs the plane. Patrick Architectural flies associates all over the country on a last-minute basis, and we pay a premium for those tickets. High tower guarantees that if we contract their services we could have our plane and their pilot on the runway within four hours or less.”

      “Pretentious waste of money.”

      “They’d fly us directly to our destination without connecting flights, layovers, limited flight schedules and other inconveniences. They can even land the jets at smaller airports when there isn’t a large hub near our destination.”

      “The costs of owning a plane would be prohibitive.” His father dismissed the idea without even looking at the data. Typical.

      “Not necessarily. I’ve talked to a Hightower representative. There are a variety of options. We can buy a plane outright, lease or even buy a specified number of flight hours per month or year in a pay-as-you-go program. The best deal is fractional ownership which means we’d only buy a oneeighth to one-sixteenth share, but a plane would always be available to us. When the size of our team required it, we’d be able to request a smaller or larger aircraft.

      “The company makes it work for us. Their motto is Comfort, Convenience and Time Savings. From what I’ve heard, they deliver that promise.”

      He rolled to his feet, circled the desk and tapped the folder in his father’s hands. “Turn to the chart on page six. Take a look at the data I asked Cindy to compile.”

      God bless his assistant’s fascination with tracking the most ludicrous factoids.

      He waited until his father did as asked. “This graph catalogs how much time our employees have lost over the past year on layovers, flight delays, inconvenient connector flights and last-minute cancellations or reroutings. They’re on the clock during that lost travel time. There’s your waste of money. Averaged out, our total travel expense comes close to covering the monthly cost for fractional ownership, but without the added benefit of a tax write-off and convenience. Access to our own plane would allow us to expand globally.”

      His father’s gaze sharpened as the idea took root and the automatic rejection to any idea Ryan presented faded. Harlan ran a finger down the sheet as he perused the data a second time.

      Ryan shoved his hands in his pockets and walked to the window overlooking downtown Knoxville. “The packet includes Hightower Aviation’s brochure. Read the documentation and you’ll see that a plane could be an expedient asset for us. If we set up the aircraft as a mobile office complete with wireless Internet and a fax machine, we could work midair and-or meet with clients on the way to a site. A bedroom suite containing a full bath is also available so we can fly overnight and arrive rested and ready to work first thing in the morning—negating the additional expense of a hotel room. An airplane is not a frivolous waste of money.”

      “And the girl?”

      His father wasn’t stupid. Ryan had known he wouldn’t be so easily distracted. He faced his father, who also happened to be his mentor and sometimes his enemy. “As our client services representative Nicole would be our main contact. When we need to travel we’d call her directly and tell her our requirements—right down to which meals we’d want served on the flight. It’s her job to make it happen.”

      “You think she’d be assigned to us?”

      “I’m told she’s the best they have. We would make her part of any deal we strike.”

      His father tapped the edge of the folder on Ryan’s desk. “I’ll give it a look, but I doubt it’s feasible.”

      Another wave of irritation washed over Ryan. “If it weren’t feasible, I wouldn’t have presented the idea to you.”

      “We’ll see.”

      Ryan smothered his frustration. History had shown his father would do everything he could to prove Ryan’s idea a bad one. Only when he couldn’t, would he come around.

      Ryan looked forward to the day his father retired, leaving Ryan as president of Patrick Architectural. But first he had to prove he could handle the job, or his father would sell the firm his great-grandfather had started right out from under him.

      Days СКАЧАТЬ