The Billionaire Gets His Way / The Sarantos Secret Baby
Now, now, she admonished herself. Don’t go in with that attitude. You’re here to make things better, not worse.
As if cued by the thought, the receptionist glanced up from her computer screen. She apologized for not seeing Violet right away in a voice that sounded in no way apologetic, then asked what she could do for her.
“Hello,” Violet said in as chipper a voice as she could manage. “I was wondering if it might be possible to steal a few moments with Mr. Mason. Gavin Mason,” she quickly clarified. As if that needed clarification.
Obviously, it didn’t, since the moment she’d uttered the first Mason, the receptionist had started shaking her head. “I’m afraid Mr. Mason has a very full schedule today. I’m sorry.”
“I realize he’s a busy man,” Violet said, “and I promise not to take any more of his time than necessary. Truly, just a few minutes would be all I’d need.”
The receptionist smiled mechanically, then dropped her gaze to the computer screen and pushed a few buttons on her keyboard. “Perhaps if you can tell me what this is about, I can make an appointment for you later in the week.”
Which would mean Violet had spent money on her rental clothing for nothing and would have to spend more later in the week. Not to mention stew over Gavin Mason’s threats for another few days.
“Today would be much better,” she said firmly. “I mean, I’m here now, and—” she threw a meaningful look over her shoulder at the waiting area “—and no one else is, and, as I said, it won’t take long.”
“Mr. Mason has a very full schedule today,” the receptionist repeated crisply. “Perhaps if you can tell me what this is about, I can fit you in—”
“Later in the week,” Violet chorused with her, then added politely, “doesn’t work for me, I’m afraid.”
“Well, perhaps if you’d made an appointment …”
Violet tried again. “Maybe if you told Mr. Mason I’m here, he would—”
“Mr. Mason has a very full schedule today.”
“He might—”
“Perhaps if you can tell me what this is about, I can fit you in later in the week.”
There was no way Violet was going to tell this woman she was here because Gavin Mason suspected her of being a call girl who’d written about him in a memoir that was really a novel. But if the only way she was going to see the man was later in the week, then she’d have to settle for that.
“Fine,” she said. “I’d like to make an appointment with Gavin Mason later in the week.”
The receptionist smiled, this time with great satisfaction, lifting her perfectly manicured hands to the keyboard before her. “And your meeting is in regard to …?”
“Public relations,” Violet said off the top of her head.
The receptionist narrowed her eyes. “Can you be more specific?”
“No.”
She narrowed her eyes some more but didn’t push the issue. Instead, she studied her computer screen for a moment and said, “Come back at four-fifty-five on Friday. He can see you for five minutes.”
Violet gaped at that, but didn’t object. How could she? She was the one who had said it would only take a few minutes. A foot in the door, she reminded herself. That was all she needed.
“Fine,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Your name?”
She started to reply with her real name, then realized Gavin Mason wouldn’t recognize it. “Raven French.”
She might as well have yelled that the receptionist’s hair was on fire, so massive was the woman’s reaction. Her hands faltered on the keyboard, she bolted backward in her chair, and when she jerked up her head to look at Violet again, her eyes were wide with horror.
“Raven French,” she echoed. With no small amount of melodrama, too, Violet couldn’t help thinking. Honestly, the woman might as well have been summoning some kind of B-movie hell spawn.
“Ye-es,” Violet said cautiously.
Now it was the receptionist who gaped. But she didn’t say anything, either. Her gaze never leaving Violet’s, she rose unsteadily from her chair and began to back away, bumping into the wall behind herself before flattening her palms against it and sidling to the right.
“Stay right there,” she finally said, her voice going even more Norma Desmond than before. “I think maybe Mr. Mason has a moment right now.”
And with that, the woman disappeared behind the wall. Violet heard the clatter of something tumbling over, followed by a thump and the crash of breaking glass, and a not-so-quietly muttered—nor in any way professional—oath. Then there was the quick rapping of knuckles on a door and an even less-quiet—and even less professional—screech of “Oh my God, Mr. Mason, that horrible woman is here to see you. Here. In your office. Can you imagine the nerve?”
The screeching was then replaced by another clatter and thump, only this time it sounded more like something being thrown than being dropped, and the oaths that followed were the likes of which Violet hadn’t heard since accidentally downloading Scarface from Netflix one night instead of Sense and Sensibility, which she had been so certain was next in her queue.
Then, suddenly, there was silence. And somehow, that was even scarier than Say hello to my little friend!
The receptionist suddenly reappeared from behind the wall. After a few delicate ahems, she said, “Mr. Mason will see you now.”
“Um, thank you,” Violet said.
But she didn’t feel particularly grateful. In fact, by the time she moved around the wall and saw the door to Gavin Mason’s office, her insides were taut with anxiety. As demanding as she’d been to see him, she halted at the threshold, now reluctant to enter. Bending at the waist, she peeked inside, looking left, then right, then left again.
But the room was empty. It was also nowhere near as sterile as the rest of the building, filled with massive, dark wood furnishings scattered atop an immense Persian rug that was woven in rich, jewel-tone colors. The paintings on the walls, too, were colossal, brutally executed abstracts in colors that were even denser than the rug. Clearly whoever inhabited the office was as bold and dynamic and larger-than-life as his possessions, but he hadn’t come to work yet. Thinking she must have approached the wrong door, Violet straightened and began to take a step in retreat.
Then, out of nowhere, a large, capable hand snaked out, wrapping large, capable fingers around her wrist and jerking her through the doorway. Before she could even squeak out an objection, the door slammed shut behind her. Automatically, she spun around, but her revolution was hindered by her trapped wrist, and, unaccustomed to her heels, she lost her footing and pitched forward.
Right into Gavin Mason.
Three
When Anna had told him Raven French was waiting outside to see him, Gavin had been even more furious than he’d been Saturday at her book signing. It was easy—and safe—to defame a man from a distance. But coming to his office like this violated the first primal rule in The Man Handbook: You never challenge a man on his own turf unless you want to get your ass kicked from here to Abu Dhabi.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked by way of a greeting. Doubtless that violated some rule in whatever handbook women used to get by in life—probably something with the word chocolate in its title—since their first rule would almost certainly dictate polite behavior. Which was all the more reason, Gavin rationalized, to be impolite.
To her credit, she didn’t flinch. Even though he had adopted his most menacing corporate bigshot behavior. Even though he towered over her. Even when he deliberately moved forward to crowd her space even more—and was assailed by the fragrance of something surprisingly subtle and even more surprisingly sweet. On the contrary, she met his gaze levelly and smiled. A flimsy, uneasy smile to be sure, but a smile nonetheless.
Men three times her size—who had infinitely more strength and power than she possessed—had practically wet themselves when Gavin had been this intentionally scary. Raven French, however, smiled. Which just went to show how very badly she’d underestimated him.
“And hello to you, too, Mr. Mason,” she said. But her voice wasn’t nearly as steady as it had been on Saturday. When he’d invaded her turf.
He said nothing in response to her salutation, since he was still waiting for an answer to his question. Both simply gazed at each other in silence, as if neither was sure how to proceed next.
Interesting. On Saturday, there had been no hesitation between them, even though they’d been on display in front of a number of bookstore patrons, which should have inhibited their exchange. Now when it was only the two of them, alone, neither seemed to know what to say.
He still couldn’t believe she’d come here. No one challenged him. Ever. He was the challenger in any situation, be it the boardroom or the bedroom. If Raven French had even an ounce of sense, she’d realize that. And she’d give him satisfaction immediately, in whatever form he demanded it, be it a retraction for her ridiculous book or—
Or something else.
A thought started to creep into his brain at that, one he really had no business entertaining, so he tamped it down. That was a form of satisfaction he neither wanted nor needed from her. Even if she did have long inky shafts of hair that made a man want to wind great handfuls of it around his fist. Even if she did have extraordinary violet eyes a man could find himself drowning in. Even if she did have a red, ripe mouth that made a man want to commit mayhem.
That wasn’t why he was here. It wasn’t why she was here, either. Why was she here, anyway?
“Was there something you wanted, Ms. French?”
Immediately, he cursed himself for being the one to give in to their standoff. Damn. How had that happened?
She smiled again, a little less sharply than before, and he knew she had noticed the same thing. Damn. Again.
“Yes,” she said. “I was hoping you and I could discuss this matter more reasonably than we did on Saturday. You could start by releasing me and giving me a little breathing space.”
“What’s to discuss?” he asked. But he didn’t release her. Or give her any space. “You wrote a steaming pile of garbage that included a thinly veiled chapter about me that painted me in a very bad—not to mention false—light. Your book has significantly damaged both my professional and personal lives. And unless you come clean publicly and admit you were lying through your teeth, you’ll have to pay for it.”
She inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly. Then she surprised him by admitting, “You’re right. That chapter is a pack of lies. In fact, every chapter in that book is a pack of lies. I admit it. None of what I said about any of the men in that book is true.”
Gavin arched his eyebrows at that. She was already giving up? Evidently, his reputation had preceded him. But then, it always did. Maybe she really did know what she was up against here.
Reluctantly, he loosened his grip on her wrist and released it. But he was only reluctant because that left her less vulnerable. It wasn’t because he’d actually kind of liked holding her wrist. Well, okay, he’d kind of liked holding her wrist. But only because it gave him the upper hand, that was all.
“You’re admitting you made it all up?” he asked suspiciously.
She nodded. “Every word.”
Now Gavin’s eyebrows arrowed downward. She was saying exactly what he wanted to hear. So why wasn’t he enjoying this more? Oh, right. Because she hadn’t agreed to make her confession public. “And you’re willing to admit that publicly?” he asked.
She nodded readily. “I am.”
“You’ll inform both local and national media outlets? Tell everyone that nothing in the chapter entitled ‘Ethan’ is true?”
“I will.”
Okay, that was what he’d wanted to hear. But he still didn’t feel triumphant. Why was she giving up so easily? Why wasn’t she fighting him?
More to the point, why was he so disappointed that she wasn’t?
Still needing to hear her spell it out, he asked, “You’ll admit, in public, on national television and in the press, that you deliberately defamed me in your book?”
Her gaze skittered away from his and she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Then she crossed her arms over her midsection in a way that could only be called defensive. “Well, um, no,” she hedged. “I won’t do that.”
Ah-ha. That was why he’d been feeling disappointed. Because that last admission was the one he’d really wanted her to make. And now she wasn’t. He suddenly felt strangely happy that they were still sparring. What was that all about?
“You’ll admit it’s all a pack of lies,” he said, “but you won’t admit it’s defamatory?”
She smiled at him, and his confusion compounded. Because her smile was self-satisfied and somehow became her, and there was nothing becoming about a self-satisfied woman. Women were only supposed to be satisfied by the men in their lives, regardless of the nature of that satisfaction. Women satisfying themselves was—
Well, okay, women satisfying themselves was actually pretty erotic, he had to admit. But only when that self-satisfaction was sexual in nature. Even if it was Raven French doing that, it would still be erotic. In fact, he thought as he homed in again on her ripe, red mouth, if it was Raven French doing it, it would be even more—
Annoying, he immediately, adamantly, interrupted his own wayward musing. Unfortunately, like all men, once a sexual thought began to unravel in his mind, there was absolutely no way to stop it, and the next thing he knew, he had an image imprinted at the forefront of his brain of Raven French lying stark naked in the middle of his bed, one hand covering her breast, the other between her legs, stroking herself with measured, leisurely caresses and looking as if she were about to come apart at the seams.
Damn. An image like that wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. And he had a busy afternoon ahead of him.
“That’s right,” she said.
For a single maddening moment, Gavin thought she was agreeing with his belief that women shouldn’t be satisfying themselves unless it was sexually. For another, even more maddening moment, he thought she was going to reach behind herself and lock the door, peel off every stitch of clothing, and gratify herself right there in his office in exactly the way he had imagined.
Then he remembered that she was the enemy, that she had defamed and libeled him and turned him into a laughingstock at both work and play, and he reminded himself that, even if she did do that whole erotic self-satisfying thing right there in his office, it would be really bad form for him to enjoy watching her.
Wait. What was the question?
Oh, yeah. She’d been admitting she had flagrantly lied about him, but that flagrantly lying hadn’t defamed him.
“Why plead guilty to the first, but not the second?” he asked.
“Because my book is a pack of lies, but it is in no way defamatory.” He opened his mouth to object, but she hurried on. “It’s fiction, Mr. Mason. Fiction is, by definition, untrue, and therefore lies. Likewise, by being untrue, it cannot be defamatory.”
He bit back a growl of irritation. “So we’re back to that again, are we? Your novel that everyone knows isn’t a novel at all, but a memoir about your sordid, tawdry life.”
“We’re back to that because that’s what’s true. Not the part about my life being sordid and tawdry,” she rushed to clarify. “Since it’s neither of those things and never has been. Well, not too sordid,” she clarified further after a telling second. “And only a little bit tawdry. And only in the past, not now. And only if you define tawdry in the sense of shoddy and unsophisticated, not crude and gaudy. And if you define the sordidness more as callousness and unpleasantness and not poverty and squalor. Okay, maybe poverty wouldn’t be so out of place, but I did not come from squalor. Nor do I live in squalor now.”
She spoke so rapid-fire and with such a roundabout delivery that Gavin’s brain was looped in knots by the time she finished—she was finished, wasn’t she?—with her. whatever it was she’d been talking about.
“The book is fiction,” she continued before he had a chance to think any more about what she’d said. Not that he wanted to think any more about it, since that would probably make his brain explode. “There’s no way you can prove otherwise.”
Due to the fog that had rolled in over his thinking, it took another moment for her statement to settle in. But when it did, just like that, the fogged cleared, and Gavin felt the upper hand slip back into his grasp. “I can’t, can I?”
Something in his tone must have notched a chink in her determination, because her expression, which had begun to grow smug, suddenly went a bit slack. “Um, no?” she replied—in the inquisitive tense, not the demonstrative, which heartened him even more. “No, you can’t?”
“Ms. French, I can not only argue that the book is nonfiction, I can prove it.”
“That’s impossible?” she said. Asked. Whatever. “Because there’s no way to prove it? Because it’s all a figment of my imagination?”
“Really?” Gavin said. Asked. Whatever. Dammit.
This time, Raven French only nodded her reply. Evidently she, too, had realized that she was beginning to sound like an uncertain second-grader.
He strode over to his desk and withdrew his copy of High Heels and Champagne and Sex, Oh, My! from the drawer into which he had crammed it over the weekend. As he thumbed through the pages, he made his way back to where Raven French was standing, this time stopping with even less space between them than before to make her even edgier. Immediately, she took a step in retreat. Without looking up, he completed another step forward. That elicited another one backward from Ms. So-called Raven French.
“Tell me,” he said as he continued to flip through the pages and took yet another step forward, knowing it would be impossible for her to retreat further, since the door was now at her back. “Is Raven French your real name?”
When she didn’t answer right away, Gavin glanced up from the book to see that she’d bowed her head and was fiddling with a button on the sleeve of her jacket. When he looked at her face, he was astonished to find that she was blushing. What kind of high-price call girl blushed?
Immediately, he answered himself, Those whose prices are so high because they’ve become such accomplished actresses.
Doubtless the blushing was a part of her professional persona. Or at least had been when she was making a living on her back—or her stomach or knees or whatever position commanded the most money—before she had begun to support herself with the more honorable profession of libel.
“Ms. French?” he prodded. “Raven? Is that your real name? “
“Um, no. It’s a pen name.”
Just as he’d suspected. “And why would you take a pen name, unless it was to protect yourself from all the men you’d be outing in your book and all the lawsuits that would result once it was published?”
Still not looking at him, but at least giving up on making the button do something it clearly did not want to do, she replied, “Actually, it was the publisher’s idea for me to take a pen name, not mine.”
He nodded, found the page he wanted, marked it with his finger, and studied not-Raven French again. “So they must have wanted to protect themselves from all the lawsuits that would result once your book was published.”
She did look up at that, but the moment her gaze connected with his, it skittered away again. And, once more, pink blossomed on both cheeks. Amazing, Gavin thought.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a conversation with a woman who blushed. Even by design.
“Actually,” she said again, “they didn’t think my name was, um, exciting enough. They thought the book would do better if the author’s name actually sounded like a call girl’s name.”
“In that case, you won’t mind telling me your real name.”
“I guess not….” But her voice trailed off without her doing it.
Gavin said nothing, only did his best to crowd her space some more in an effort to make her even more uncomfortable. And he told himself it was because he wanted to maintain the upper hand and not because he was hoping maybe she’d blush again….
Violet’s breath hitched tighter in her chest when Gavin Mason inched another millimeter toward her, an action she wouldn’t have thought possible since the guy had practically crawled inside her already. And dammit, she really wished her muddled brain had put that another way, because saying anything about him being inside her only made her thoughts even more muddled.
She tried to pretend his nearness had no effect on her. Because his nearness really did have no effect on her. None whatsoever. Not a bit. In fact, she had barely noticed how much warmer the air—among other things—became when he was this close. And she had hardly paid any attention to the scant spicy scent of him that teased her nose, or the way the lamplight in the room somehow made his arresting pale blue eyes even paler and more arresting. And no way had she paid any attention to his broad, broad, oh-my-God-they-were-like-a-football-field shoulders or his chiseled, honestly-he-could-slice-gouda-with-those-things cheekbones.
Nope, the only thing Violet noticed was how his nearness had no effect on her. In fact, she noticed that so much that she continued to gaze at the floor, because it was way more interesting than Gavin Mason.
“Ms…. whatever your name is?” he prodded, making her twitch. “You were going to tell me your real name? “
Actually, she still hadn’t decided whether she was going to do that or not. Even if she refused to tell him her real name, she was sure he’d find some way to discover it. Not that she was taking any great pains to hide it. It had been the publisher’s idea, too, to copyright the book under her pen name. It wasn’t unusual for authors who assumed pen names to do that, they’d told her. To protect their privacy, they’d said. In case they made a gazillion dollars with their books and became big celebrities, she’d been told.
Yeah, like that was going to happen with a big lawsuit hanging over her head.
“Violet,” she heard herself say. Oh. Evidently part of her had made the decision to tell him her name. Would have been nice if that part of her had informed the other parts. “Violet Tandy.” She started to go one step further and tell him that Violet was a nickname, and that her real name was Candy Tandy, but if he didn’t believe Raven French was her real name, he certainly wasn’t going to buy into Candy Tandy.
He had started to open the book again, but closed it once more. “Violet?” he asked, his voice reflecting his obvious bewilderment.
Something in his tone made her feel defensive for some reason, and she tipped her head back to look him defiantly in the eye. Doing that, however, only made her defiance crumble. Nevertheless, she squared her shoulders and commanded herself not to look away.
“Yes. Violet. Is there a problem with that?”
He opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. Then he shook his head. “Not a problem. It just doesn’t suit you, that’s all.”
Violet thought it suited her quite well, but she didn’t want to make an issue of it, so she said nothing. Gavin must have thought she would, because he remained silent for a moment more, one dark eyebrow cocked in query. Strangely, he seemed a bit disappointed in her continued silence, but then he opened the book to the page he had marked. And then—oh, dammit—he began to read aloud. “The moment I saw Ethan, I knew he was a captain of industry, the kind of man who had built his business from the ground up. He’d begun with dirty fingernails and secondhand clothes, performing backbreaking labor from sunup ‘til sundown to collect a paycheck that barely sustained him. He schooled himself at night, both in the ways of business and the streets, still managing to earn his degrees—yes, he had three of them—”