Boss With Benefits (Billion-Dollar Bet, #2)

CHAPTER FOUR

I T TOOK E LLA a good ten seconds to compute the implication of Adam’s announcement, by which time he’d waved at her to come on over and poured her a glass of water.

What on earth was the meaning of this? she wondered in alarm, her gaze flicking between the table with the pastries and the man now heading for the stairs that rose to his office on the mezzanine. Why wasn’t he directing her to the basement as she’d expected? To the finance department, perhaps? Or even to his secretary for further instructions?

Surely, he didn’t intend the audit take place up here on his floor, did he? He had to be out of his mind. She could not work up here with him a matter of metres away. Her concentration would be wrecked. She’d never get anything done.

‘Wait,’ she said, needing to clarify the situation and fix it immediately if necessary.

Adam stopped in his tracks and whipped round. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘There could be.’

His brows drew together in a deep frown and she thought she caught a sigh of exasperation. ‘What is it now?’

‘Am I to understand you wish the audit to take place up here?’

‘That is correct.’

She gave her head a sharp shake. ‘It’s out of the question.’

For a moment, there was utter silence. All Ella could hear was the pounding of her heart in her ears. Then his eyebrows shot up as if he wasn’t used to being challenged, and he said, very coolly, ‘I beg your pardon?’

His expression was darkening forbiddingly, she noticed, but she refused to be intimidated because he wasn’t in charge here. She was. This was her audit—a vitally important one—and it was more crucial than usual that common protocol was followed. His ridiculous presumption needed to be corrected, so she lifted her chin, pulled her shoulders back.

‘My audit will not be taking place up here,’ she said, fixing him with a look that had once been called chilling. ‘Firstly, from a practical point of view, there wouldn’t be nearly enough space for eleven people and everything we require.’

‘Which is why you will be up here with me and your team will be occupying the offices one floor down.’

Well, that was never going to happen. She and her team needed full and direct access to each other. She couldn’t keep dashing up and down the stairs whenever face-to-face communication was required. It would be massively inconvenient and a complete waste of everyone’s time. And then there was the stress of being completely alone with him, the possible intensifying of the attraction and the battle she’d have to fight it. Even hypothetically the thought of it made her feel quite weak.

‘Secondly,’ she continued, even more determined to prevail, ‘a set-up such as the one you suggest could lead to accusations of undue influence. I mean, pastries? The best view in the city? When we’re normally stashed away in a musty room at the end of a corridor with windows that look out onto a wall? Our impartiality would be compromised. Questions would be asked. I simply can’t allow it.’

But if she’d expected Adam to take on board her undeniably valid point and surrender to her superior experience, she was to be disappointed.

‘No questions will be asked,’ he countered, folding his arms across his impossibly broad chest as his cool blue gaze bore into hers. ‘No one would dare. Proximity is required because I will be overseeing this audit personally. I want to make sure that any problems are knocked on the head the second they arise. Every query you or your team have and every piece of information you require will go through me, so you and I will be liaising directly.’

Ella’s stomach clenched. What? No. Absolutely not. ‘That would be highly irregular,’ she said, refusing to be distracted by the play of muscles she could see going on beneath the crisp white cotton of his shirt and instead mentally running through the consequences of such a strategy, the regulations surrounding neutrality and the headache of having to deal specifically with him.

‘In what way?’

‘Regardless of the questionable ethics of going through you for everything, your intended degree of involvement would not only add another layer of complication to an already complex investigation, but it would also make the process way more inefficient.’

‘I disagree.’

That was his prerogative, but his opinion was irrelevant. ‘You’re not the expert here.’

‘Do finance departments jump to attention the minute you tell them to?’

‘Well, no, not always, but—’

‘They will if it’s me doing the telling,’ he said bluntly. ‘As will everyone else. They won’t be able to work fast enough. I’ve cleared my diary for the next two weeks. I will be available to you and anyone else who needs me twenty-four-seven.’

In response to that, Ella’s head began to throb. Once again, he was trampling over her every objection, only this time his counterarguments didn’t make any sort of sense. ‘Why?’

Up shot his eyebrows again. ‘What do you mean, why?’

‘Most CEOs don’t take such a personal interest in something as prosaic as the annual financial audit.’

‘I’m not most CEOs.’

That was certainly true. He was by far the sexiest CEO she’d ever come across. Tall, lean, powerful... And his forearms—long curves of hard muscle dusted with a smattering of dark masculine hair—really were something else. What would it feel like to be enveloped by all that strength? To have his strong hands on her body, his clever fingers coaxing her to the dizzy heights of pleasure? To be wrapped up once again in heat and passion and excitement?

‘I don’t see you as the enemy,’ he said, bringing her back to the conversation with a bump. ‘I believe in working together. Which we can, and will, do.’ He tilted his head and regarded her coolly. ‘You seem to be under the impression that you can influence what’s going on here Ella. But you can’t. This is my company and my audit. I make the rules, not you. So, if you have a problem with that, I’ll just have to find someone to run it who doesn’t.’

As his words hit their mark, Ella’s blood chilled and her stomach fluttered. The heat whipping through her system fled. The heady desire vaporised. Adam looked calm enough, but there was a trace of steel behind his words. A glint of ruthlessness in his eyes. The ripple of tension in the air told her that he would stop at nothing to get what he wanted and that if she knew what was good for her, she’d surrender.

Suddenly simmering with outrage, she burned with the urge to march up to him and inform him that not only did he not make the rules that he was breaking left right and centre, despite his apparent wish to avoid trouble, but also that threatening the auditors was not a good move.

But she couldn’t, dammit. Because, for one thing, when she got too close to him, her brain malfunctioned. And for another, whatever the reason for his stubborn insistence on the status quo, whether he saw this as some kind of a game or was simply a control freak, the truth was he held all the cards. She couldn’t afford to antagonise him. If he acted on this power trip of his and got her thrown off the job, she could wind up unemployed, her career in ruins. She’d instantly lose everything. The condo she’d just bought would be repossessed. The security and empowerment that earning her own money gave her would disappear overnight. What would she do then? Where would she go? How would she survive?

She wasn’t going to throw away everything she’d worked so hard for and jeopardise the future she deserved over a tussle for control. The late nights of study, the exhaustion, the doubts that she was good enough to make it weren’t going to be for nothing. Like him, she would do whatever it took to get what she wanted, and right now it was clear that that meant keeping him onside until the audit was done and the financial records signed off.

So no matter how much she hated that he kept forcing her to make decisions that challenged her integrity, no matter how churned up he made her feel inside, she had no choice but to acquiesce. Somehow she would maintain the audit’s independence. She would never let him see how bothered she was by the idea of the two of them working up here together alone. She could certainly contain the attraction she still felt for him. She had far too much at stake to let that get the better of her.

‘Fine,’ she said, with a cool smile and a deliberately casual shrug, as if she weren’t bothered by the outcome of the conversation—or him—at all. ‘You win.’

Once she’d wrestled her frustration at being thwarted under some sort of control and checked the regulations concerning impartiality, Ella headed downstairs to greet the team and make sure that everyone knew what they were doing—which they did because, unlike her, they’d had weeks to prepare. Then she returned to the penthouse, set herself up and turned her attention to work, determined to put her infuriating client firmly from her head.

Unfortunately, however, this turned out to be easier said than done.

By virtue of the fact that she’d been parachuted into this assignment at the last minute, she was going to have to work doubly hard and longer hours to keep on top of things. So she could not afford to waste even a second, let alone great chunks of time.

Yet that was precisely what happened. More calls than she cared to count went to voicemail. Files that should have been opened instantly weren’t. And all because, whether he was at his desk or wandering around his office on the phone, the man up there on the mezzanine was just too darn distracting.

To her despair, the ruthlessness she’d witnessed earlier hadn’t diminished his appeal in the slightest. On the contrary, every time she thought about it, shameful thrills of excitement shot through her.

In spite of her best efforts to stop it, her gaze slid in his direction with frustrating predictability. Her imagination, which had never troubled her before she’d met him, had gone into overdrive. She kept envisaging heading up the stairs and sidling into his office, where he’d invite her to come on over and make herself comfortable on his lap. Or perhaps he’d make his way down to her, clear the table with one sweep of his arm and lift her onto it. Either way, they ended up in a wholly unacceptable clinch.

This disruption to her concentration did not bode well for a trouble-free audit to be completed within the specified time frame, so after lunch Ella attempted to do something about it.

First, she shifted her position so that he wasn’t in her direct vision, in the hope that out of sight would be out of mind. But that didn’t work because, apparently, her awareness of him was all-encompassing. Then she tried loitering downstairs with her team, but the unproductivity of such a move was just too annoying to pursue.

She hated that controlling her response to him was proving such a challenge. She hated even more that he didn’t appear to be remotely bothered by her, which was insane, because the last thing she needed was the added stress of the attraction turning out to be mutual.

But she would not allow another man she’d slept with to mess with her head and jeopardise her career, so she eventually figured she’d just have to double down on her efforts. If she was to stand any chance of not screwing this job up, she had to get a grip and focus. She had to keep what was at stake for her at the forefront of her mind and start acting like the professional she was.

So she stuck Post-it notes adorned with the word PROMOTION!!! to various items that surrounded her. She allowed herself to imagine in full dreadful detail how her life might fall apart should this audit go wrong—the humiliation, the uncertainty, the peril. Every time her gaze threatened to drift in his direction, she forced herself to recall her last performance review, during which she’d been told that she wasn’t quite ready for the next step up, and that snapped it straight back to the laptop.

Although it took considerable effort, to her relief, these strategies worked. Largely managing to ignore Adam’s existence, she soon found confidence in her spreadsheets and settled into the role. Being on a different floor to her team turned out not to be as problematic as she’d expected, and over the next couple of days they made excellent progress, aided, she had to admit, by the degree of his involvement, which—both annoyingly and pleasingly— had resulted in improved efficiency and ultra-quick results.

Ella wasn’t prone to pettiness, but she couldn’t deny that she’d relished bombarding him with emails, some of which didn’t actually require his attention. She wanted to make him pay for effectively holding her ransom by spamming his inbox. She wanted him to sorely regret forcing her to bend to his will. However, she was thwarted in those endeavours too, because not once did he tell her to desist. No matter how trivial or important the request, each was handled promptly without either comment or complaint.

There were only two issues to which she was having trouble getting a response. One was an unaccounted-for trip to London in the company’s private jet back in August last year. The other was the steady yet rapid purchase of millions of shares in a multinational called Helberg Holdings, whose portfolio was so sprawling yet in such trouble that no one could work out what he was doing with it.

Both anomalies had raised a flag with her team. Neither had yet been addressed, despite her repeated efforts to do so. Frustratingly, Adam had ignored the half dozen reminders she’d sent him, so on Wednesday afternoon she decided to tackle him directly.

Setting her jaw, practically vibrating with resolve, she picked up a notepad and pen and headed up the stairs to his office. ‘Do you have a moment to go through some queries?’ she said, trying not to notice how the sun streaming in through the acres of glass was giving him a corona that made him look like some sort of a god.

‘Not right now, I’m afraid,’ he replied as he pushed his chair back and got to his feet. ‘I’m about to head off for a meeting.’

‘When will you be back?’

‘I’m not sure. It could go on for a while.’

‘I thought you said you’d cleared your diary for the next two weeks.’

‘This one’s unavoidable.’

With a tight smile, he strode past her and out through the door before she could protest any further. And to her extreme irritation the meeting of his went on for so long that she didn’t see him for the rest of the day.

Undeterred, however, she tried again the following morning. But on that occasion she didn’t even manage to say a single word to him, because the minute she appeared at his door, he picked up his phone and said coolly, ‘Do excuse me, I need to take this,’ and that was that for the next two hours.

By Thursday evening, he’d left her with no choice but to take more drastic action. Determined to pin him down, she saw her opportunity when he left his office and headed for the lift. She slipped through the doors just before they closed, trapping them together, a move she regretted almost immediately when her lungs tightened and her head spun, as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the space. How could she have forgotten what happened when she got too close to him? she wondered for one dizzying moment. Clearly, concentrating on work and being ignored by him these last few days had lulled her into a false sense of security.

But she would not be derailed from the plan, no matter what his effect on her, so halfway into the lift’s descent she hit the alarm, causing it to judder to an abrupt halt.

‘Why did you do that?’

Adam’s vaguely amused tone belied the stony glare he gave her. She ignored the rash of goose bumps breaking out all over her skin, the flare of heat and the quivering of her nerve endings, and focused. ‘We need to talk.’

‘And what exactly do you need to say that couldn’t have been said in my office?’

‘That’s the trouble. Nothing of significance was being said in your office. All I heard were excuses.’

He didn’t even respond to that. He just let his glittering gaze drift over her before it settled on her mouth and lingered.

‘You know what happens when you and I find ourselves trapped together in confined spaces,’ he said, his voice seeming to drop an octave while her lips tingled and her mouth dried. ‘I realise we weren’t going to refer to that night again, but what else am I to read into this manoeuvre of yours other than invitation?’

In response to that, Ella’s heart gave a great lurch and then began to race. He was right. What was she doing? Instead of focusing on getting the answers she wanted, her head was clearing of everything but the urge to push him up against the polished walnut wall and kiss him the way she imagined in the early hours of the morning when she couldn’t sleep. What would he do if she did? Fire her? Or would he bury one hand in her hair and lift her skirt with the other, then tackle his belt, his zip, his underwear, and within seconds be thrusting deep inside her, driving her to the dazzling heights of pleasure she’d only experienced with him?

The former seemed more likely, she thought, her head spinning like a top. He was so cool. So contained. He’d shown no sign of being troubled by their continuing attraction. So what did he mean by bringing up that night? Why the seductive tones? Was he messing with her, playing mind games to remind her who was in command?

Well, right now, that evidently wasn’t her. In hindsight, this plan had been a terrible idea. So before her last few functioning brain cells disintegrated and she acted on the wild desire suddenly crashing through her, she pulled herself together and jabbed the button to restart the lift.

‘You’re right,’ she said, consoling herself with the knowledge that she could try again tomorrow. With space. With air. Somehow. ‘My mistake.’

And when they reached the ground floor—in a matter of seconds, although it felt like an hour—she didn’t flee into the night as if the hounds of hell were snapping at her heels. Instead, she lifted her chin, gave him a cool smile and bade him a pleasant goodnight.