Baby For The Playboy (Billionaires of San Valentino #3)

1. Stephanie

STEPHANIE

“Ms. Vincent?”

Stephanie Vincent looked up from the pitch notes she had been reviewing.

The man behind the reception desk was setting down his phone, and he beckoned her forward.

She rose from the chair where she had been sitting for the past quarter of an hour and smoothed her skirt, hoping she still looked professional. She approached the desk.

“Mr. Norcross is ready for you now,” the receptionist said. He pointed down a hall that led past his desk and toward an imposing-looking oak door. “You can go straight in; he’s expecting you.”

Stephanie nodded, though her nerves prickled at the thought of just walking up to that door like she belonged and opening it.

Oliver Norcross was one of the most influential and powerful bankers in all of California, and certainly here in the San Valentino area.

Today’s pitch was a big deal. If she was successful, it might change the trajectory of her company.

She was going to open that door even if it killed her. But she wished he was opening it for her. That would certainly have felt more welcoming.

“Thank you,” she told the receptionist, and started down the hall. The thick carpet silenced her footsteps, adding to the impression that her presence here was completely invisible.

She wished she had taken the time to go to the bathroom and check her reflection in the mirror.

As an ambassador for SilkSoft Skincare, Stephanie’s looks were more than just vanity.

They were marketing. She needed to have perfectly clear skin in a meeting like this one to prove that her products did what they said on the label.

She was tempted to run her hands over her cheeks and make sure they were smooth, a nervous habit that had taken her years to break.

She balled her hands into fists instead, slightly crumpling the pitch notes she had prepared.

She walked up to the door, squared her shoulders, and pushed it open.

Oliver Norcross looked smaller in person than she had expected.

When she had seen his picture in the news, he had seemed like a horribly imposing figure, but the man before her was probably less than six feet tall.

He greeted her with a smile. “You’re Stephanie Vincent,” he said.

“Thank you for coming to meet with me today.”

“Thank you for taking the time to see me. I know you must be very busy.”

“Oh, I am, but I still look forward to taking meetings like this one,” he said. “I get to meet the most interesting characters. Why don’t you sit down—or would you prefer to stand?”

“No, this is good.” She sank into the chair on the far side of the desk, already feeling more at ease.

Norcross sat down too. “So your company is about… makeup? Is that right?”

“Skincare,” she clarified. “Related, but not exactly the same.”

“Tell me about the difference.” He folded his hands on his desk.

“Well, makeup is more about appearances,” Stephanie said, wondering if he truly didn’t know.

It was more likely he was trying to get the measure of SilkSoft’s mission.

“Good skincare will impact your appearance, of course, but there’s more to it than that.

The skin is the body’s largest organ, you know, but we forget to think of it that way sometimes. It deserves to be well taken care of.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle of lotion. “If you’d like, give that a try,” she said. “This is one that does well with men. It’s unscented, and it’s great for cracked and callused hands. If you use it every day, your hands will be soft and comfortable in no time.”

Norcross squirted a little bit out into his palms and rubbed it in. “It does feel nice,” he agreed. “And I like that it doesn’t leave my hands feeling sticky, like some lotions do.”

She nodded. “That’s a special formula I’ve been developing with my research team for a while now.

We’ve perfected it with this hand lotion, but one thing we want to work on if you give us this grant is taking that formula to our line of facial creams and serums. We want it to feel like you’re wearing nothing, like your skin is just naturally soft and smooth. ”

“How are you going to do it?” Norcross asked. “Is it a simple matter of converting the formula?”

“Well, no, it isn’t simple,” Stephanie admitted, shifting in her chair. “If it was, we wouldn’t need financial backing. We’re still in the early days of making that product, and there’s a lot of testing left to be done.”

“Testing?” He frowned. “What kind of testing?”

“Nothing unethical. We don’t test on animals.” She grinned. “My team and I patch test the products on ourselves, both to see what works and to see if they cause any adverse effects. When we were developing our vitamin B serum last year, we all broke out in hives.”

“That’s adventurous,” Norcross chuckled. “But you must be pretty courageous, I suppose, since you’ve gone into business for yourself like this.”

“Well, I try to be,” Stephanie said. “I always say that if you’re not going to do something yourself, nobody is going to do it for you.”

“Very wise.”

“But that being said, I do have to ask you for this loan,” she went on. “I simply don’t have the funding to keep going as I have been, and it means so much to me to continue the work I’m doing. I believe in this brand. It’s going to be the next big thing, I’m sure of it.”

“Perhaps it will,” Norcross said slowly. He let out a sigh. “I have to tell you, Ms. Vincent—I like you. I like this lotion.” He pushed it back across the desk toward her.

“You can keep that bottle,” she said quickly.

He nodded. “Thank you, I will. But this is a tough industry, and I’m not hearing you mention a clear marketing differentiator. What’s going to separate you from all the other skincare products out there? Why will people choose yours?”

“We’re going to be the best,” Stephanie said. It sounded trite even to her own ears.

“They all say that,” Norcross said. “That’s the problem. I’d like to help you out with this, but I don’t know if I can justify the loan in the amount you’re asking for. I’m sorry.”

Stephanie felt as if her stomach had been hollowed out. Just like that, in the matter of a few sentences, the whole thing was over. “You’re turning me down?”

Norcross nodded. “I’m sorry. But don’t hesitate to set up another meeting if you come up with something else you’d like to share. I do think your goals are interesting, and I’d like to hear more about them.”

He looked down at some papers in front of him, and Stephanie realized she was being dismissed.

Great. Back to the drawing board. What am I going to do now?

Her spirits hadn’t lifted by the time she made it back to the apartment she shared with her terrier, Bruno. He leapt eagerly at her as she let herself in and she scooped him up and went to sit on the couch. With a sigh, she scratched him behind the ears.

“What am I going to do now, Bruno?” she murmured. “We have no funding. That was my best plan.”

He licked her face soothingly and wagged his tail.

Stephanie tipped her head back and stared at the ceiling. There was simply no getting around the fact that she needed money to continue building her business. She wouldn’t be able to keep making product if she didn’t get funding from somewhere. And now the bank had turned her down.

I need to find someone else who might endorse my company.

Someone who might be able to get behind what I’m doing enough to invest. But where am I going to find someone like that—someone who both has enough money to invest in this line and understands and values skincare well enough to take a chance on me personally?

It seemed impossible. And if she was even going to have a shot at it, she knew, she was going to have to meet with a lot of people wealthy enough to make investments all at once. She needed a bunch of possibilities all in one place.

She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to think of the answer.

And then her eyes snapped open.

The San Valentino Innovator Awards.

It’s perfect.

But it was insane. Stephanie had dreamed, now and then, of receiving an invite to the SVI awards ceremony, but she had certainly never gotten one.

The awards were ostensibly for people who were doing bold and daring things in their independent businesses, and a lot of them did honor that sort of thing, but as an unspoken rule, you had to be above a certain threshold of profitability to be a contender.

It was a threshold Stephanie had never come close to crossing with SilkSoft.

The people who gave out those awards probably didn’t even know who she was.

But they could know. They could find out. Or, more to the point, the other people on the guest list could find out.

An event like that would be full of big names. Rich people. People who had already succeeded in business and were now looking to pay it forward. If she was in that room, she might meet someone who would be charmed by her story and her desire to make her hopes and ambitions come true.

She could attend the awards ceremony.

She could sneak in and meet with people she had no business meeting with.

They would be important and influential, and either they would help her or they would be able to connect her with someone else who could.

Even being in that room and having the chance to talk about SilkSoft would be good, would advance her toward what she was trying to do.

It would mean more people knew about it, and that would be to her benefit.

Of course, if I get caught sneaking in, I’ll look incredibly foolish—and that’s the best-case scenario.

Still, she was smiling as she moved Bruno to the floor. He trotted along behind her to her closet, where she began to comb through her clothes, looking for the perfect thing to wear to the event.

How was she going to get in? No doubt it was the kind of thing where you would have to show an invitation at the door, and she didn’t have one.

Her name wouldn’t be on any guest lists, either.

She would have to find a way to convince people she was supposed to be there without having any evidence to support her claim. That was going to be difficult.

But Stephanie believed she could do it. She was a charmer and she knew it.

She was good at making people see things her way.

If only it had worked with Oliver Norcross today!

But he seemed to have been prepared to say no to her from the moment she had walked in the door, she thought gloomily.

She had been naive to think she’d ever had a chance at that bank loan.

It’s exactly like I told Norcross when I was meeting with him today. If you’re not going to do something yourself, nobody is going to do it for you.

Nobody was going to hand her success. Nobody was going to give her what she needed to make her dreams come true.

She was going to have to go out and get that for herself. And going to this awards ceremony… that might just be the first step on the journey that would lead her to finally building this company into the enterprise she had always dreamed it would one day become.

She just needed to have the courage to take this step.