Barbara Dunlop - Beauty And The Billionaire

“Morning, sweetheart,” he murmured in her ear.

She smiled. “Morning.”

He caressed her nipple, sending sparks of desire to her brain. His free hand trailed along her belly. She gasped, the warmth of arousal swirling and gathering within her.

“I’ve been waiting,” he rumbled. “You slept too long.”

“Sorry.”

“Make it up to me.” His hand slipped to the moisture between her legs.

He flipped her onto her back.

“Right now,” he growled.

In answer, she kissed him hard.

A pounding sounded on the door, and someone shouted his name.

Hunter jerked back. “What the-?”

It took her a second to realize the person was pounding outside Hunter’s room.

“Don’t move,” he commanded, staring into her eyes. Then he jackknifed out of bed and stuffed his arms into the robe. He pushed the adjoining door shut behind him. Sinclair sat up, shaking out the cobwebs.

She felt a lump under her thigh, and realized it was her phone. Flipping it open, she quickly checked for a return call from Kristy.

Nothing.

The voices rose in the room next door, drawing Sinclair’s attention.

“-be so freaking reckless and impulsive!”

It was Jack’s voice, and Sinclair was afraid she might throw up.

“We have talked and talked about this,” came another gravelly voice. It had to be Cleveland.

The family knew. They were here. And they were angry. And it was all her fault. Sinclair wrapped her arms around her stomach and scrunched her eyes shut tight.

At first, Hunter was too shocked to react.

He’d gone from Sinclair, soft and plaint in his arms, to his grandfather’s harsh wrath in the space of thirty seconds. His brain and his hormones needed time to catch up.

“I can give you the prospectus,” he told them. “The financials and the appraisals.”

“You can bet your ass you’ll be giving us the prospectus, the financials and the appraisals,” shouted Gramps.

Then it was Jack’s turn. “You can’t make unilateral decisions!”

“I can. And so can you and Gramps.”

“Not like this.”

“Yes, like this. There’s no advantage in three guys spending time on what one can do alone.” Hunter was warming up now. He just wished he was wearing something other than a bathrobe. “This is a good deal. It’s a great deal!”

“That’s not the point,” Jack said.

“The point being that you and Gramps are control freaks?”

“The point being you need to play with the team.”

Hunter turned on his grandfather. “You thought it was funny to send me to Lush Beauty. You thought it was funny to send me to Sinclair. Well, guess what? You send me to run a company, I run the damn company.”

“I have half a mind to take away your signing authority,” Cleveland threatened.

“Because that wouldn’t be an overreaction,” Hunter countered, folding his arms across his chest.

“You, young man, spent hundreds of millions without so much as an e-mail.”

“It’s amortized over twenty years. The property values alone-”

“If it wasn’t for Sinclair telling Kristy-”

“What?” Hunter roared, unable to believe what he’d heard.

Jack and Cleveland stopped dead.

Hunter stared hard at them. “You got information from your wife because my…Sinclair talked?”

“And thank God she did,” said Cleveland.

But Hunter was past listening to Jack and his grandfather.

“We’re done,” he said to them, moving to open the door. “Richard has the details. You take a look at the deal. If you don’t like it, I’ll sell my Osland International stock and go it on my own.”

Jack squinted. “Hunter?”

Hunter swung open the hotel room door. “Talk to you later.”

“It wasn’t Sinclair’s-”

“Talk to you later.”

Jack moved in front of him. “I can’t let you-”

“What?” Hunter barked. “What do you think I’m going to do to her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Give me a break,” he scoffed. He wasn’t going to hurt Sinclair. He wouldn’t let anybody hurt Sinclair. But the woman had one hell of a lot of explaining to do.

Hearing the latch click on the adjoining door, Sinclair broke out in a cold sweat. Her fingertips dug into the arms of the chair as she stared straight at the dove-gray painted panel.

The hinges glided silently and Hunter filled the doorway, his eyes simmering obsidian. But his voice was cool with control. “I thought we were a team.”

She wished he’d shout at her, wished he’d rant. She could take his anger a lot more easily than his disappointment.

She’d let him down. She wanted to explain. She wanted to apologize. But her vocal cords were temporarily paralyzed.

“I trusted you,” he continued. “I trusted your confidentiality. I trusted your discretion.”

She fought to say something, to gather her thoughts. “I didn’t know,” she finally blurted out.

“Didn’t know what? Was there something ambiguous about ‘don’t tell anyone, including Kristy and Jack’?”

“But that was before the deal went through.”

“The deal went through at 3:00 a.m. this morning. Are you telling me in the five minutes I was in the shower-” He snapped his jaw. “You called Kristy.” He gave a cold laugh. “You were so anxious to share gossip about my business dealings that you couldn’t even wait until morning?”

“It wasn’t gossip.”

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

She slowly shook her head. She could only imagine the implications of her behavior now that she had all the facts.

“Well, that makes two of us,” he said. “Because I just offered to sell out of Osland International.”

The contents of her stomach turned to a concrete mass.

She opened her mouth, but he waved a dismissive hand. “Much as I’d like to sit around and debate this with you, I’ve got a few problems to solve this morning. I’ll have to talk to you later.”

Then he turned back to his own room, shutting the door firmly behind him.

Sinclair’s cell phone chimed.

She glanced reflexively down to see Kristy’s number on the readout. She couldn’t talk to her sister now. She didn’t think she could talk to anyone.

There was every possibility she’d ruined Hunter’s life. The worry that she might not get plum assignments or choice promotions at Lush Beauty faded to nothing in the face of that reality.

She stared at nothing for nearly an hour, then shoved herself into a standing position. She crossed to the closet and took out the clothes she’d been wearing when she arrived in Paris. They looked pale and boring compared to the new outfits, but she didn’t have the heart to wear any of them.

She combed her hair, brushed her teeth, left the cosmetics on the counter and gathered up the suitcase with her old clothes inside. It seemed like a long walk to the elevator, longer still across the marble-floored atrium in the hotel lobby.

She figured Hunter would check out for her, so she wound her way past smiling tourists, bustling bellboys and intense businessmen. The men reminded her of Hunter and made her sadder by the moment.

Finally, she was out on the sidewalk, glancing up and down for a taxi. A hotel bellhop asked her a question in French. She tried to remember how to ask for a taxi, but it had slipped her mind.

In the sidewalk café next to her, propane heaters chugged out the only warmth in her world. People were eating breakfast, enjoying the sights of the busy street, their lives still intact.

The bellhop asked the question again.

She remembered. “Cabine de taxi?”

“Going somewhere?” came Hunter’s voice from behind her.

“The airport,” she answered without turning.

“I thought Mahoneys didn’t run away.”

“I’m not running away.”

“You mad at me?”

The question surprised a cold laugh from her.

“Because I’m pretty mad at you,” he said.

“No kidding.”

A taxi pulled up, but Hunter let someone else take it. “So, what’s your plan?”

She sighed. “Why’d you do that?”

“We’re not finished talking.”

“I thought you had problems to solve.”

He snorted. “And how. But I want to know your plans first.”

Sinclair looked pointedly down at her suitcase.

“You left the rest of your clothes in the closet,” he said.

“Those are your clothes.”

“So, you’re going to pout? That’s your plan?”

“I’m not pouting.” She was making a strategic exit from an untenable situation before he had a chance to ask her to go himself.

Another taxi came to a stop, and Hunter sent it away.

“Do you think we could sit down?” he asked with a frustrated sigh, gesturing to the café.

Sinclair shrugged. If he wanted to ream her out some more, she supposed she owed him that much.

He picked up her suitcase, and she moved to one of the rattan chairs. She folded her hands on the round glass table and looked him straight in the eyes.

“Go ahead,” she said, steeling herself.

“You think I’m here to yell at you?”

She didn’t answer.

“Good grief, you’re as bad as Jack.” Hunter signaled the waitress for coffee, and Sinclair decided it might be a very long lecture.

“It seems to me…” said Hunter, as the uniformed woman filled their cups. He shook out a packet of sugar, tore off the corner and dumped it into the mug.

Sinclair just stared at the rising steam.

“You have two choices,” Hunter continued. “You can slink back to New York with your makeover half done and take your chances with Roger. Or you can buck up and stay here a few more days to finish it.”

“It seems to me,” she offered, forcing him to get to the heart of the matter. “Those are your choices, not mine.”

“How so?”

“Why would you want me to stay? Why would you want to help me? I ruined your life.”

“We don’t know that yet.”

“Well, I might have.”

“Possibly. Did you do it on purpose?”

“Of course not.”

“So you weren’t dishonest, you simply lacked certain details and a little good judgment.”

She tightened her jaw. She normally had great judgment. “Right,” she said.

A small glimmer flickered in his eyes. “You want to fight me, don’t you?”

She wrapped her hands around the warm stoneware mug. “I’m in the wrong. I can take it.”

“Very magnanimous of you.”

“Are we done? Can I go now?”

“Do you want to go now?”

She didn’t answer.

“Seriously, Sinclair. Do you want to walk out on Paris, the makeover and me just because things went off the rails?”

Things had done a lot more than go off the rails. She forced herself to ask him, “What do you want?”

“I want to turn the clock back a couple of hours to when you were sleeping in my arms.”

“I want to turn it back nine.”

He nodded, and they sat in silence for a few moments while dishes clattered and voices rose and fell at nearby tables. A gust of cool wind blew through, while the propane heaters chugged gamely on.

Hunter took a sip of his coffee. “Let me tell you why Jack and Gramps were so upset.”

“Because you spent hundreds of millions of dollars without telling them?” As soon as the flip answer was out, she regretted it. “Sorry.”

But Hunter actually smiled. “Good guess. It’s because they wanted me to call them first. They wanted to jump in and assess the deal before I made a decision. They wanted to research and analyze and contemplate. Do you have any idea how long Jack and Cleveland’s brand of due diligence takes?”

Sinclair shook her head.

“The deal would have been lost before they even lined up the legal team.”

“Did you explain that to them?”

He shot her a look. “That was my plan. Until you stepped in.”

“Sorry,” she said again, knowing it would never be enough.

“I know you are.” But he didn’t sound angry. He sounded resigned.

Cars whizzed by on the narrow street, while a contingent of Japanese businessmen amassed on the sidewalk nearby.

“What will you do now?” Sinclair asked.

“That’s entirely up to you.”

“You’re seriously willing to keep this up?”

He nodded. “I am. There may be a lot of yelling from Jack and Gramps over the next few days, but I want to finish what we started.”

“I can handle yelling.”

“Good. You know anything about ballroom dancing?”

“Not much.”

“Then that’s next on our list.” His expression softened. “You are going to take their breath away.”

A knot let go in Sinclair’s stomach.

“Flower for the pretty lady?” came an old woman’s gravelly voice. She held a white rose toward Hunter, her bangles and hoop earrings sparkling against colorful clothing and a bright silk headscarf. “I will tell her fortune.”

Hunter accepted the flower and nodded.