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“Who?”
“The she who’s supposed to be up here in an hour.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “Mrs. Tate?”
“Uh, sure.” She hadn’t even heard the name. “Who is she? And why is she coming up here in an hour?”
“She manages one of the stores downstairs.”
Viv wrinkled her brow in confusion.
Smiling, Damien returned to her, reaching up to brush a long strand of wet hair behind her ear. “And she’s coming in an hour to get you fitted for some clothes.”
Viv’s jaw dropped open. No way was the man going to buy her clothes! She had only promised to stay for a few hours, and she could certainly wear her suit from yesterday. For that matter, she could just stay in this robe—or in one of his deliciously soft, obviously tailored dress shirts.
“No, that’s not...”
Damien cut her off with a kiss. She tried to continue talking—to tell him he was being ridiculous—but he just deepened the kiss. When Damien Black kissed her, there was no thinking of anything else. Just him—strong, warm, sexy, gentle, demanding. Nothing and no one else existed.
By the time the kiss ended, she’d forgotten what she’d intended to say. And judging by the pleased expression on his face as he turned away, that suited him just fine.
* * *
“YOU KNOW YOU have to stay away from her, right?”
Sitting across the desk from Sam Donovan, the team’s corporate attorney, Damien crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the man.
Stay away from Viv? The lawyer might well ask him to never again take a deep breath. It was not going to happen.
The meetings this morning had gone on for hours, and had been long, bitter and stressful. Frankly, only the thought of going back to the hotel to Viv had kept him from blowing his stack. She’d been the reason he’d kept his cool. The sooner he could finish with this legal shit, the sooner he could return to her and begin making her see that her career was not over.
“Forget it.”
Sam wasn’t giving up. “I mean it.”
His glare deepened. Unlike most people, who would wither under such sharp attention, Sam glared back. He could get away with it. He was, after all, Damien’s oldest friend—his college roommate, whom Damien had hired as the head of the legal department for the Vanguard.
“You can’t, Damien.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“She’s your employee.” Sam glanced at his watch—a nice one, fitting the generous salary Damien had offered to lure him away from a big corporate firm in DC. Right now, Damien was regretting that move. “At least, she will be in a few minutes, once the acting general manager calls and tells her we want to rehire her.”
Damien relaxed into his chair, trying to sound thoroughly reasonable, not wanting Sam to know he was desperate. “She’ll have her job again. Stoker’s out. Neeley’s benched, pending a trade. All’s well that ends well.”
“Yeah, according to you. What about her?”
“Viv will understand.”
Once he explained the truth—that he was the majority shareholder of the team, but he’d had no idea who she was, or what had happened to her—she’d let this go. They could get right back to where they’d left off this morning, before he’d switched on the TV and seen his world nearly blow up in his face.
“She could still sue.”
“She won’t.”
“She could go to the press about the firing.”
“She won’t,” he repeated. “Whatever you’re worried about, forget it. She’s a sharp, reasonable woman. She’s not a shark, not at all cold and calculating.”
Unlike some women with whom he’d been acquainted.
“I know that. I’ve met her, remember?”
Of course. He’d run in to Viv yesterday; the rest of the staff had been working with her for two months.
Sam went on. “And I respect her—she’s smart, and she got a raw deal here. I’d give anything to make it not have happened, and I wish I’d been here yesterday to stop that Mensa candidate from firing her.”
Sam hadn’t been at the press event to witness the infamous incident, and he’d been at off-site meetings all day yesterday. He’d been as in the dark about the entire situation as Damien.
Until this morning. When the press had discovered Viv’s name and where she worked.
“But it did happen,” Sam said. “Now we have to handle it.”
“Right, and we did. She just has to hear we’re not standing behind Fred Stoker or Bruno Neeley, and she’ll be fine.”
“You can’t be certain of that. She could make a stink about being let go.” Sam pounded his palm on his desk. “I still can’t believe that son of a bitch did it without even calling me.”
