Corner Office Confessions

Two

Samuel Kane had made millions of dollars for Kane Foods International by reading people. A twitch of the eyebrow, a twist of the lips, a nervous glance to the side—all signs of weakness. Weakness could be useful.

At this precise moment, Arlie Banks’s features betrayed an internal battle of exponential magnitude. True, he was having a harder time than he had anticipated in gauging her reactions. Not, he told himself, because her wide sky-blue eyes made thoughts of business hard to hold in his head. And certainly not because he was overcome by the inexplicable urge to extract whatever pin held her smooth blond coiffure in place to see if her hair still spilled down her back as it had when they were seventeen.

Definitely noteither of those things.

“Why did I leave Gastronomie?” she repeated. A clear bid to buy herself time.

“That’s what I asked.”

Her eyes widened a fraction, the edges of her teeth sinking into her lower lip in a way that made Samuel’s pants feel as if they’d been tailored too severely in the crotch.

Fear.

He could practically smell it through her perfume, which was an oddly intoxicating mix of wildflowers, rain and silk.

“The chief marketing officer and I had insurmountable artistic differences.” She shifted in her chair, tugging the hem of her skirt toward her knees.

Lie.

A more scrupulous man might have felt a pang of guilt. He’d asked her an unfair question, and he knew it. Not because the question wasn’t relevant to the interview. Because the answer didn’t matter.

Arlie Banks already had the job.

The second she had stepped into his office, Samuel had known she would be perfect.

Not as their senior food stylist, though his research confirmed she was amply capable.

For lead ingénue in a personal project Samuel had conceived to oust his womanizing wastrel of a twin brother, Mason, from Kane Foods International.

His reason for doing so was as simple as it was crucial: to clear his path to the head of a company he’d done his best to build and Mason his best to destroy. This morning had only helped solidify his resolve. Mason had, in his usual fashion, failed to show up for the interview they were supposed to conduct together.

For a full twenty minutes, Samuel had kept Arlie waiting in the lobby while he sat in his office, seething. What had begun as mild irritation bred into a boiling black rage as the antique grandfather clock in the corner expensively announced the passage of time with small, metallic clicks.

All his life, or for as much of it as he could remember, Samuel had been waiting on his twin.

It had begun the day they were born, when Samuel spent his first hour of life cooling his recently inked heels in the nursery while their eager parents and a small army of nurses coaxed Mason to make his leisurely arrival. When high school rolled around, Samuel sat in the driver’s seat of their shared car while Mason squeezed, hugged, kissed and winked his way through the legion of his female admirers.

Just last week, it had come to a maddening head when Mason not only showed up half an hour late to a meeting with an important investor Samuel had courted for two years, but also managed to receive full credit for brokering the deal. A victory their father, Parker Kane, had profusely congratulated Mason for. As he had in so many instances before.

Some things never changed.

Arlie Banks certainly had.

The girl he remembered had darted around Fair Weather Hall with a kind of effortless charm. Tomboyish and sprightly. Carefree and unpretentious. Completely oblivious of his twin brother pathetically panting in her wake.

True, Samuel had harbored his own brief and exceedingly mild infatuation with her.