Hail to the King Read online

  “And?” Desmond King prompted.

  Shit. She'd started to speak. She tore her eyes away from his, looking down to her folded hands, and continued. “While the Journal hasn't checked in yet, the Times confirmed that their journalist flew in two days ago. I contacted London and Singapore a little too late for them to get back to me yet.”

  He didn't answer, so she peeked up, to find him still watching her with too much focus.

  “Good. Keep me updated if you hear from them, will you?”

  Confused, Ryn looked from Wallace to Desmond. Surely, he meant to let Wallace know; she didn't deal with the CEO herself.

  Catching her glance, Desmond smiled. She didn't like it. At all. The corner of his lips hiked up, but his eyes remained just as cold.

  “Wallace was so good as to tell me you'd be happy to join me for the night. Singapore and London will more than likely get back to you before morning. You do have a company phone, don't you?”

  “Oh. Right.” Eloquent, she was not, right now. “I don't usually use it after hours, but I can go get it.”

  “Please do, Kathryn.”

  Her name rolled on his lips, sounding a little too sensual.

  Shit. She wasn't supposed to be affected by that sort of thing. Not from one of them. She was better than that. Ryn might have taken her time to get down those damn stairs, but she went up at full speed, despite her high heels. Retrieving her handbag from the guest room where her things were permanently stored, she opened it and rifled through it to find her work phone. Or more specifically, her only phone. It wasn't like she could afford payments on a phone of her own.

  Her hand stopped as it hovered over her passport. She frowned. She hadn't bothered with it in the past. Why would she need it? Desmond King wasn't going to whisk her to the other side of the globe. She didn't have time to ponder it. Ryn just grabbed it and shoved it in her black evening purse, along with her phone, before retracing her steps.

  This time, the CEO was standing alone at the bottom of the staircase, no sign of Wallace.

  She looked around, confused. He never missed an opportunity to gloat, or to threaten her for that matter. A knowing look, a cruel smile, accompanied with barely veiled threats. “Be a good girl.”

  “If you’re looking for your boss, I asked him to double-check some numbers for me. He’s gone,” Desmond King told her, extending his hand. “Shall we?”

  It almost sounded like a real question. As if she had an actual choice.

  She didn’t.

  “Let’s.”

  3

  Irritating

  Now

  “I’ll watch The Lord of the Rings if you stay on the line.”

  Ryn knew she shouldn’t have answered. No good ever came from answering a withheld number. But given the fact that she had applied to three dozen jobs over the weekend, she couldn’t really afford to let it go, in case it was one of the companies getting back to her.

  Somewhere at the back of her mind, a little voice told her that no one ever got an answer that quickly, but she’d picked up anyway. Stupid.

  She sighed. Now she couldn’t hang up, because the man would have to watch The Lord of the Rings. It was her geekish duty to ensure he did. He might never get the chance to tell her, but he'd agree that it was the best movie of their generation, and he’d feel foolish for waiting so long to see it. She liked winning too much to pass that up.

  “How long am I supposed to stay on the line? And how do I know you’ll actually watch it?”

  “Because I’m a man of my word,” he replied simply.

  Ryn snorted. Her opinion of his sex couldn’t be any lower. She knew where he could stuff his word.

  “And you can go back to what you were doing as soon as I’ve convinced you to go to dinner with me.”

  There was exactly one answer she could give to Desmond King.

  “No.”

  Saying it out loud brought a smile to her lips. A simple word, two letters, just one syllable. It had been a long time since she’d been in a position to say it out loud.

  Dinner? After everything? The nerve of that man!

  “Ryn,” he started, his tone half exasperated, half impatient.

  She didn’t let him spout any bullshit.

  “Last time we talked, you offered to buy my silence. So no thanks. Pretty sure I can guess what you have to say. The answer is, I'm not interested.”

  It wasn't that she wanted to sell her story to a paper, or tell someone what had happened to her. On the contrary. That shit had to stay under wraps if she was going to find a job somewhere. Who would employ her, if they knew what she'd done? But accepting a payoff wasn't an option.

  Wasn't that exactly how it had all started? At the very, very beginning, decades ago. Her father took money from a big guy in a suit who had clever lawyers, and when the shit hit the fan, they paid for it.

  Peter Woodrow had been a lowly clerk for a big firm. One day, staying late to finish his workload, he heard the wrong conversation; the bosses were talking about dumping some toxic waste too close to residential areas. The slums, of course. They caught him as he listened in, and next thing he knew, he was given a big job, company car, the works. Years passed with no drama, until someone printed a scoop saying that ‘an anonymous source’ had leaked their dirty laundry.

  The sharks closed in on her family. He'd signed an NDA, with collateral of millions of dollars. Peter swore he hadn’t said anything, but it hadn’t mattered at the end. The lawyers had set him up, and knew he couldn't afford to pay the fine for being in breach of contract. Instead, they made him take the fall; he claimed to be responsible for the waste dump, was fired, and never found another job.

  Might have had something to do with the fact that after the scandal, his best friend was Jameson.

  Their family fell apart. Ryn and her older sister, Bexley, had been old enough to remember the days when they hadn't had much. They’d respectively been eleven and fifteen when their father got his promotion. To them, the nice clothes, the shopping trips, the fancy bags, and the private school had always felt like a dream, something not quite real. Back in the day, they'd been four people, surviving on one meager salary. Six years of plentitude hadn't erased their formative years.

  But their little sister Natalie had been just six when their disposable income exponentially increased. She spent half of her life with pretty things, then suddenly, her father fell and the dream disappeared.

  Natalie never adapted. At twelve, she'd been a brat; by age fifteen, she honestly had needed a good slap, but by then, Ryn had left the house, like Bex, heading to college with a scholarship and three part-time jobs that kept her too busy to pay attention to what was happening at home. Or maybe she willfully ignored it.

  Her dad blamed the reporter who outed his old boss for their misfortune, her mother blamed her father, Natalie blamed everyone. Bex and Ryn didn't give a shit. All that mattered was making sure that their lives didn't fall apart like every other Woodrow's.

  And yep, they’d both totally failed on that account.

  Ryn had been a whore for three years, and Bex might only have months to live. Her doctors weren’t optimistic.

  Ryn’s heart hurt in her chest. She forced herself to focus.

  The page had turned from the worst chapter of her life yet, and she sure as fuck was going to learn from what had happened in the past. Her father's first mistake had been to sign his name on a dotted line instead of walking out of there and finding himself a new job.

  She wasn't going to fall for that; not now, not ever.

  “Last time we talked,” Desmond echoed slowly, an edge to his voice, “I offered you part of the compensation Wallace Clarke is going to have to pay us, given the fact that you are one of the aggrieved parties. The most aggrieved party, in fact.”

  She snorted. “Sure you did. Anyway, I'm sure you have a lot on your plate, so nice speaking to you. Bye now.”

  She hanged up, grumbling, "Fuck Lord of the Rings," for the firs
t time in her life. May the god of nerds forgive her for her sin.

  He wouldn’t even have watched the movies, anyway.

  Two seconds later, the King Construction company phone still in her hand was ringing again.

  Withheld number, of course. She sighed.

  Damn job hunting. But what if it really was a prospective employer this time?

  She was still technically working for King Construction, but following the arrest of Wallace Clarke on Monday, she’d been contacted by HR. They’d invited her to take paid leave for an undetermined amount of time.

  She knew what that meant.

  The admins must have been rushed off their feet, trying to keep things going without a COO there, but they’d still pushed her away. They didn’t want her in the building. Sooner or later, she’d get canned. Might as well find a job and resign herself. It would look better on her résumé.

  Besides, she hated the building, hated Wallace’s disgusting office, and every memory attached to it. It was time for a change.

  A big one.

  “Ryn Woodrow,” she introduced herself politely.

  “Look, we need to talk.”

  Ugh. Him again. Her thumb hovered over the ‘end call’ button.

  “It's just dinner. No lawyer, no contract, no expectations whatsoever. Just two friends catching up.”

  Ryn had to roll her eyes. “We're not friends by any stretch of the imagination, Mr. King.”

  She didn't have friends.

  Friends liked to go for drinks together and watch movies, and she either didn't have time or didn't have the money for that sort of thing.

  “I have a comprehensive file of information about you, Ryn. My brother had to look into the details of your life during our investigation. If we hadn't, we would just have assumed that you were stealing our money to pad your own pocket, but it just didn't add up. You live in the slums, your account rarely has more than two figures cleared, you shop at....”

  She had been too shocked to answer at first, but now she barked, “how dare you!” her voice trembling with fury.

  He had no right. None.

  She noticed that her hand was shaking; her heart was beating too fast. The mirror in front of her reflected the picture of a broken woman, a fucking mess with tears on her cheeks.

  Shit. She wasn't normally so emotional.

  “You embezzled our funds, and we had our PI investigate you thoroughly. I'm sorry you're feeling uncomfortable with it, but it was necessary.”

  She hated him, if only because he was telling the truth. His voice wasn't unkind, but every word stung like poison.

  “Thanks to our findings, your name is completely staying out of the court case. Wallace and his lawyers might bring it up, but we'll shut it down and bring the attention back to him. Intrusive as our research might have seemed, it's saving you from going to jail, and I'm not going to apologize for that.”

  Why wasn't she hanging up yet? It made no sense. She didn't want to speak to him. And yet her thumb still wasn’t pressing down on the button.

  You want him to watch Lord of the Rings, that’s all, she reasoned, lying to herself.

  “You need help. You need out of that dump where you could get snatched and killed any day. Getting rid of Wallace doesn't solve the rest of your issues. I'm concerned about you.”

  “And that's why you want to see me, to solve all my problems?” The tone of her voice denoted no small amount of sarcasm. They both knew he had an agenda. She wasn’t buying his act. “It's not your place to be concerned about me.”

  He ignored that.

  “I’m a problem solver. That's literally my job description. I've been musing upon a solution that may take care of most, if not all, of your predicaments, and I want to discuss it with you. Soon. Tonight. Hell, now, if you're available.”

  She snorted, glancing at the time displayed by the phone. It wasn't even nine in the morning.

  “Now? I bet you have about a billion appointments.”

  “I'll reschedule.”

  She frowned, knowing just how hard rescheduling the calendar of an executive was on short notice. Wallace had been the COO of King Construction, after all. As an assistant, Ryn realized that Desmond was offering to move Mount Everest a few inches to the left.

  He was fucking serious about wanting to speak to her, then.

  Or bluffing.

  Probably bluffing.

  “Sure. I can do now. In a public setting. Away from your office,” she instructed, looking forward to hearing him backpedal.

  So much for being a man of his word now.

  She found herself almost smiling.

  Almost.

  Excuses in three, two, one....

  “Sarabeth's on Madison, nine thirty.”

  Shit. Holy shit.

  “For real?”

  She heard him chuckle briefly on the other end of the phone. Strange. She wouldn’t have thought that he’d be one to chuckle. An evil laugh was more in character.

  “I’m always serious about Sarabeth’s omelets, Ryn.”

  On that note, he hung up before she regained hold of her senses and backtracked. She glared at the phone. Since he’d used a damn withheld number, she couldn’t call back and cancel.

  Shit. Eight thirty-five. She’d better start getting ready, if she was supposed to somehow brush her hair and haul her ass to Manhattan in under an hour.

  4

  First Sight

  Three years ago

  Desmond and his three brothers had built a dozen Tower clubs around the world now, but he had to admit, there was something about the original one here in New York City, the one his father had started.

  Desmond loved everything about the TriBeCa building. The atmospheric dim lighting, the sophisticated lines and curves of the building, the simplicity of its furniture. When he walked in, Lillie greeted him with a sunny smile and her signature wicked wink. She was family. The very first employee they had personally handpicked. Ten years later, she ran the place. Dressed in black, with a golden tower pin proudly displayed on her chest, she looked so very professional.

  “Boss.”

  “Mrs. Ryker. Anything requiring my immediate attention?”

  She shook her head, as she usually did, because whenever any emergency occurred, she handled it herself right away. She was quite capable.

  Desmond worked two or three shifts at The Tower every week for one simple reason: he enjoyed it. The Tower was home.

  “In that case, I'll be working on next month's schedule and handling the membership requests. Buzz me if you need me.”

  “Will do, Des.”

  She was one of the very few who got to call him that.

  Desmond turned on his heels to head in the direction of his office, concealed behind a wall on the opposite side of the hallway.

  His chest collided with a solid form as he moved. Somewhat solid. It was also soft. Warm. And it smelled quite delightful, too.

  Desmond found himself taking a whiff of the heady scent. Nutmeg, cinnamon, and some other spices he couldn’t distinguish. He wanted to bite into it.

  The Kings were all tall, but at 6’4”, Desmond towered over his brothers, father, and cousins. Most women he encountered didn't get past his chest. The stranger who'd bumped into him was one of the few exceptions; her mess of copper curls reached his chin.

  “Sorry,” a soft, husky voice whispered.

  That was the kind of voice that belonged in the bedroom. He could imagine it repeating his name over and over. It somehow prepared Desmond for the devastating charms of the woman it belonged to.

  When she lifted her head, he was hit, full force, by the warmth of her large, deep-set russet eyes. She had a straight snub nose, and lips that shouldn't look so heavy, wide, and tempting. Not in public.

  Desmond's trousers were suddenly uncomfortably tight.

  He frowned, trying to understand the effect she had on him. It wasn't the first time he'd seen a pretty woman, dammit. Not even today. He'd me
t, dated, and fucked celebrities, models, known beauties. But no woman had ever made him grow hard just with one glance, one word, one touch. Not much of a touch, either. It wasn't like she'd reached into his pants and grabbed him. She'd simply head-bumped his chest, for Christ's sake.

  "Watch where you're going, you idiot! That's Desmond King."

  He stiffened, slowly tearing his eyes away from the temptress, and focusing on the fool standing next to her.

  Wallace Clarke. An old acquaintance of his father's. One of Desmond's brothers had purchased the company where he used to work, and retained him as the COO. They usually tried not to fire the management when they could help it.

  After hearing him belittle the woman like that, however, Desmond was questioning their decision. He was tempted to can Wallace’s ass to make him pay for it.

  But the fucker knew his father, and that unfortunately gave him a pass.

  “No harm done,” Desmond said, as pleasantly as he could manage, to reassure her.

  The redhead's eyes went down to the tips of her toes and stayed there. She looked like she was about to cry and Desmond’s eyes narrowed.

  “Excuse my submissive, Mr. King.”

  His submissive? That didn't add up. They didn't have the right dynamic. What the fuck was happening here?

  “I don't think you've met Kathryn before. She’s recently been promoted to executive assistant.”

  “I don't believe I've had the pleasure,” Desmond replied, his eyes not leaving hers, trying to read the situation.

  Wallace was touching her, none too subtly. First, he caressed her bare arm, and then he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her to him.

  The submissive was allowing it. Oh, she wasn't enjoying it, or responding to it, but she made no move to push him away at all.

  “Are you enjoying Mr. Clarke’s company, Kathryn?” he asked directly.