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“Come in, please,” said Richard Walker, the public relations adviser who had texted her earlier. “So nice to meet you two in person.”
They walked into the large conference room. A nice, oval table stood in the middle, surrounded by oversized leather chairs. One could get distracted by the floor-to-ceiling glass windows showcasing an infinity of sleek buildings and busy streets. But Kira greeted Richard with a smile and walked in alongside Luc.
She hadn’t expected for his father, Charles, to join them for this meeting, but the charming older man, always impeccably dressed in a designer suit, sat at the end of the table. A frown indented his forehead, his expression worried.
Richard closed the heavy doors behind them and shot them a nervous smile.
Wasn’t this supposed to be a meet and greet with Richard only? What was Charles doing there, brooding? Kira’s stomach sank, and she plopped down the chair with less finesse that she would have wanted. A sensation of dread swirled inside her. A simple meeting didn’t require Charles’s presence. But the look in the charming man’s face told her this meeting would be far from simple.
Luc sat across from her, barely exchanging more than a few words with his father.
Had she done something wrong? Would she be fired from the assignment she’d just started? She shook her head.
A male assistant walked in, carrying a fancy crystal water pitcher, and filled their glasses efficiently. Tension crackled in the air. Her heart beat in staccato, and her focus darted from Richard, who fumbled with a high-tech remote and turned off the lights, to Charles, who remained stoic. The assistant nodded and left the office, closing the door behind him.
She wanted to look at Luc, but kept strong. She felt his gaze on her, studying her, and small goose bumps raised on her arms. Damn it. She had to do something, anything to dispel this heightened sexual tension. “Richard, I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.”
He’d probably show pictures of Luc kissing Julia Marr, a famous actress who happened to be married. And then explain Luc shouldn’t be engaging in this type of scandal, not when he had all eyes on him. His behavior could be bad for Montague Corp., and the reputation Charles had built during many years stateside and abroad. Montague Corp. was a shipping company almost as big as FedEx, and that was saying something.
“You might regret that,” Richard said, then clicked on a button and sleek blinders dropped from the ceiling, blocking any inconvenient brightness from outside.
In the darkness, the conference room made her feel less vulnerable to Luc’s insistent quiet attention on her. She shifted her chair and laser focused her gaze on the screen, only to find…
Her.
In Luc’s arms.
Her blood froze in her veins.
Unable to stay still, she surged to her feet and erased the distance between her and the screen. Maybe her vision had deteriorated overnight—though at twenty-five, that was a stretch, right?
Her nerves hopscotched inside her. There was no denying it. On the side-by-side pictures from some gossip website, the way she covered him with her body and the expression of lust in her face, reminding her of some old school movie poster, incriminated her though she’d done nothing wrong. And certainly nothing inappropriate. But nothing could erase people’s false conclusions.
“What’s going on?” she said, her throat dry. “Is this a joke?”
She read the headline across the top of the pictures. Busy twenty-four hours for French playboy.
“I wish,” Charles muttered, looking up at the ceiling.
She didn’t need to see her reflection to feel color draining from her face. All this work and she’d become known as his latest hookup? A sick feeling filled her stomach and she tasted acid. “It’s not what it seems. You have to believe me,” she said, looking at Charles. “Luc, please explain to him what happened—”
“I could, but would it make a difference, ma chère?” he said in a blasé fashion, pointing at the screen.
“No,” Richard said. “We’re in a sticky situation. I was hired to go over Mr. Luc Beauford’s poor choices in sleeping with a married woman. Yet, now we have another scandal in our hands—he slept with his own assistant.”
She shook her head violently. “No one knows me. Besides, today’s my first day as his assistant and—”
“They already know you work for the company. Paparazzi bribe doormen for that kind of information all the time.” Richard waved her off. “And that’s not all—last night another woman was seen in his penthouse. Most likely the doorman has been tipping them since Luc’s arrival.”
Charles rubbed his forehead.
“A-another woman?” Kira repeated, blinking. A wave of jealousy washed over her, followed by a fresh one of embarrassment. She didn’t even know the guy—didn’t even like him. Yet even on a platonic level, she was already being betrayed by him.
“That was before you, Kira,” Luc said from the other end of the table.
She detected a trace of cold irony in his voice and wished she could throw a sharp object at him. Yet, a lot of it had been her fault—she’d gone inside his room and, for a moment, indulged. She’d forgotten her role and paid the price—much like when she spontaneously agreed on a blind date Shelby set her up in as a teen—just to find out her sister had chosen the most socially awkward boy in school, to have them date as a prank, or as Shelby had amusingly put it, a social experiment.
Richard coughed discreetly. “We’ve been getting calls. A few business partners have withdrawn from contracts, saying they’re already tired of Luc’s unleashed sexual conquests. They certainly don’t make us look good for present or future partners.”
