“Good. If anyone asks, you’ve been hired on as my new personal assistant.”
“Are you sure Emma will be okay with that?”
“A busy man like me can have two personal assistants. Emma holds down everything I do at the company. You will hold down everything I do in my personal life. It will explain why you come and go with me, as well as why you come home with me.”
“I agree to your terms,” I said.
As the two of us ate dinner, I kept my sights on the exits and the front door. Physically, this job was going to be easy. But mentally? It was going to be exhausting. This man was annoying and a pain in the fucking ass. He was cocky, insolent, and a sugarcoated womanizer. I had spent enough time with him in his own surroundings to know how much I would want to kill him once this was all over with.
If there was some sort of threat looming over his idiotic little head, I could see why someone would want him dead. Which didn’t make my job any easier.
Nonetheless, no matter what I believed, I had to be professional. If a new wardrobe was required, then I had the money to do that. With the amount of money this man was going to be paying on my contract, I could replace my wardrobe with the finest fabric one hundred times over and still be able to by my own fucking private island.
Annoying or not, this contract was going to set me up for the rest of my life.
This guy was all about money, though, and that was going to get old. He was one of those guys who believed his money made him powerful. Not his intelligence or his empire. Not the people around him or those he chose to surround himself with personally. But his money. He felt his money could buy him anything. Any house. Any car. Any woman.
And those men were always the most dangerous, no matter who was attacking them.
I was going to have to keep my eyes peeled in every single direction. Because I had a feeling Derek Steele had created more enemies than friends.
Chapter 3
Derek
I HAD NO IDEA IF I had made a mistake or not in hiring her on, but I knew I had no choice. The break-in had spooked me enough to set aside the fact a woman was just hired to augment my security staff. She did seem to know what she was doing at lunch. She was observant. Strong. Fluent in languages I didn’t even know and a great asset to whoever she was with. I would’ve been an idiot to not hire her.
But those fucking clothes had to go.
I sent her shopping for her wardrobe and gave her an account number to charge everything to. She fought me tooth and nail on paying for her stuff, but I threw her words back in her face. So long as she was on the clock with me, her major expenses were mine to bear, and that was fair. She was literally hired to do anything to keep me safe and to take any measures necessary to save my life while we tracked down who the hell was sending me these fucking letters.
The least I could do was buy her some decent fucking clothes.
My phone rang, and it was Sam. In her clipped, blunt way of talking, she told me she was on her way back to my house. I grinned as I hung up the phone, shrugging my suit jacket off my shoulders. A part of me was curious as to what she bought this afternoon. With a woman like that who was rough around the edges, she probably bought a wardrobe that was all black and consisted of pantsuits. Or maybe she had bought actual suits, tailored to her body to make some feminist point about me telling her how she needed to dress for her job or something.
She struck me as that kind of woman, and I chuckled as I made my way to sit at my desk.
The office buzzed up to tell me she was here, and I waited for her at the door of my office. She came inside with numerous bags hanging from her arms. She stood in the middle of my carpeted floors, her eyes locked onto me as her hands began to turn white.
The bags were cutting off the circulation to her fingers.
“Need help with those?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said. “I got them. How many stories are in your home? Since I’ll eventually be there.”
“You didn’t do any research on my home?” I asked.
“There’s four, but I was only trying to make conversation.”
“You could show me the clothes you bought. That would’ve made for decent conversation, I’m sure.”
“Why? Because you don’t think I understand how to do elegance?”