Billionaire’s Plot Twist (Silver Fox Daddies #35)

Chapter 1

VIOLET

There are two things about me that nobody in this building knows.

One could destroy the life I've spent fourteen months building.

The other would make me seriously reconsider my romantic life choices if Gianni Russo ever found out.

Miss Wolfe. My office. Four o'clock. Sharp.

Seven words on a Post-it, in handwriting so perfect I actually held it up to the light to make sure it wasn't printed. It's 3:52 now, and I've read it maybe one hundred times, and it hasn't gotten any less terrifying.

Gianni Russo wants to see me in his office today. Alone. Door closed.

Not my direct supervisor. Not HR. Him.

The CEO of Russo Industries himself. The man nobody in this building seems willing to discuss at full volume.

I have exactly eight minutes to figure out which version of my life is about to implode.

I grab my phone and text Rudi, across the hall.

Me: might be late. boss wants to see me. can you grab P from swim if I'm not out by 5?

Rudi: Sure. fair warning he's furious, some kid splashed him

Me: at swim class. in a pool

Rudi: I raised that. it did not land

Me: I'll have a chat with him. thank you

Rudi: also everything ok? last time you were "might be late" you came home and reorganized my spice rack at 11pm

I stare at that one for a while. There's no version of the truth that fits in a text.

Not unless I'm prepared to write: Hi, Rudi. My terrifying billionaire boss may have just found the one thing about me I've spent fourteen months burying. Pick up my kid. If anyone with a badge knocks, you don't know me.

Me: Im okay. thank you. really.

I flip the phone face down and make myself think it through one more time. Every audit filed early, not one piece of correspondence misplaced, and I have been so deliberately, consistently boring that two people on this floor still call me Violent by accident and I let them.

Being forgettable is not the same as being harmless. It's camouflage.

I stand up, smooth my skirt over thighs that have never once cooperated with a skirt, push my glasses up my nose, and walk to the elevator like a woman with nothing to lose.

Which is a lie.

I have a four-year-old who still thinks I'm the bravest person alive. I have a name that took fourteen months to build and would take one phone call to burn down. I have a life I built specifically so men like Gianni Russo would never look at me twice.

And now one of them has summoned me upstairs.

I have everything to lose. I've just gotten very, very good at walking like I don't.

The elevator takes eleven seconds to reach forty-two, and I spend all of them looking at my own reflection. Red hair pinned flat, glasses, a blouse two sizes too generous. It's a great costume. Boring. Forgettable. Safe. Exactly the woman I've spent fourteen months teaching everyone to see.

Forty-two is all marble and silence. It's where the people with names in the annual report sit behind glass and make the decisions that end up in the Wall Street Journal, and I have exactly no business being up here.

I stop in front of a solid mahogany door with no window in it, which means there's no way to see what's waiting on the other side, and I knock twice.

"Come in."

Low and calm. It's never once been raised, because it's never once needed to be. I've heard that voice in meetings and in passing, and in the rare moments Gianni Russo walks across the main floor and everyone within thirty feet forgets how to type.

I have my own reasons for knowing exactly what that voice sounds like. Reasons I am absolutely not thinking about while standing outside his office.

I push the door open.

No plastic on the floor. Good sign.

He's standing behind his desk with the whole of Midtown lit up gold behind him, and God. Six-foot-something of Italian muscle in a three-piece suit, the vest cut close over a chest I have spent an unreasonable amount of time trying not to look at.

Dark hair going silver at the temples.

A jaw you could cut yourself on.

Forty-five years old and built like the years just made him meaner.

Looking at him has always been a terrible idea. I've just never been particularly committed to good ones.

He looks up.

And pauses.

Barely. Half a second, maybe less.

Then it's gone.

He looks at me the way he looks at everything, once, like a man checking a figure on a page, and then he's done.

Nothing in it. Not a flicker.

For one stupid second I think maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this is about the audits. Maybe the file on his desk is just a file.

"Miss Wolfe." He nods at the chair in front of his desk. "Close the door."

Shit.

Nobody has ever said close the door and then handed someone a raise.

I close the door. The latch clicks. I cross the room with my heels way too loud on the floor and stop behind the chair, and I hold onto the back of it, because something in the way he's watching me says this isn't a meeting.

This is an execution.

A very well-dressed execution.

He comes around the desk. He's holding a stack of loose pages, and the edges are soft, like they've been handled a lot.

I stare at them. Something about the font looks familiar. My brain notices. My brain, apparently committed to protecting me until the bitter end, refuses to elaborate.

He leans against the front of the desk, close enough that I can smell him, leather and something citrusy and something warm underneath all of it, and he starts to read.

"He watches her from across the room with the patience of the tide, a man who has learned that everything he wants comes to him eventually. That it is only ever a question of when."

My heart stops.

Not metaphorically.

For one clean second, I am medically deceased.

No. There's no possible way.

"She feels his gaze on her skin like a caress, like a promise. She wonders if he knows, if he's always known, that she's been writing him into her deepest wanting since the day she walked through his door."

The room tilts. My knees go, and I sit down hard in the chair.

There are deaths with more dignity than this.

Secret number two. He found secret number two.

And somehow, impossibly, that feels almost as dangerous as the first.

He turns a page. His eyes come up and lock on mine and stay there.

"You're a compelling storyteller."

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.

Fantastic. Fourteen months of writing in secret, and the one time I need a sentence, I've got nothing.

"Page forty-seven." He taps the corner of the stack. "Of a document you attached to the quarterly expense summary and sent to the Russo Industries distribution list at nine-forty on Friday morning."

The floor is gone. There is no floor.

The distribution list. Not Kylie, not my personal email. Two hundred and forty people, every one of them one search away from a pen name that is not supposed to have a face, and I put my own fingerprints on it because I was in a hurry on a Friday.

I'm going to be sick.

"IT flagged it in four minutes and killed it in the queue." He sets the pages on the desk beside him. "Nobody opened it."

A beat.

"Except me."

Fantastic. Of the two hundred and forty people it could have been, it's the one who signs my paychecks and, allegedly, other things.

I push my glasses up my nose. "Mr. Russo, that was an accident. I was attaching the expense report and the files..." My voice sounds like it's coming from another room. "I'm so sorry. I can explain."

"Tell me about the elevator scene."

"I'd genuinely rather not."

"I'm sure." He picks the manuscript back up and flips to a page without looking for it, because the corner is already folded down.

Dog-eared.

Oh, no. No, no, no.

The man has dog-eared porn about himself.

I am not emotionally qualified for this meeting.

And when he opens it flat, I see the margin: a short pencil line next to one paragraph, and another one four lines down.

He didn't skim this. He read it with a pencil in his hand, and he came back to it, and he marked it.

Holy fuck.

Half of me is panicking. The other half is somewhere lower, and it isn't panicking at all. The other half would like the record to reflect that he dog-eared the elevator scene.

"Stand up, Miss Wolfe."

I don't decide to stand. I just find out that I'm standing. Traitor knees.

And that's when it happens. His eyes go down.

Over my chest and my hips and my thighs and back up again, slow, like he's taking inventory of something he plans on keeping.

It is not the look from the doorway. It isn't a figure on a page.

It's the first time in eleven months anyone in this building has looked at me like that, and that was the whole point of me.

Heat floods my face.

He reads, and he walks while he reads, and it takes me a full two seconds to understand that he's walking me backward.

"He follows her into the elevator and presses the button for the top floor.

The doors sigh closed. She doesn't look at him.

She doesn't have to; she can feel the heat of him everywhere, all along her body, like standing too close to a fire.

He steps in behind her, so close his breath stirs the hair at the nape of her neck... "

My shoulders hit the wall.

"...and then he takes her by the hips."

He stops. There's maybe a foot of air left between us.

"A shiver runs the length of her. He pulls her back against him and she feels the hard evidence of how badly he wants her, and something inside her melts.

And when his hand slides beneath her skirt, when his fingers trace the lace edge of her panties, she doesn't move. She doesn't breathe. She waits."

He lowers the page.

"Tell me, Miss Wolfe. When he pins her against the elevator wall..."

He lifts one hand and plants it flat on the wall beside my head. He isn't touching me. Nothing about this is touching me. My body doesn't care about the distinction; I go wet so fast it's humiliating.

"...like this. What happens next?"

He's so close I can see gold flecks in eyes I'd have sworn were black, and a tiny pale scar above his left eyebrow that I've never been close enough to notice. His mouth is six inches from mine. Maybe five.

"She..." My voice cracks. "He... they..."

"Use your words." Low, and a little amused. "You're a writer, aren't you?"

"Unemployed one, I'm assuming."

"Not yet."

And that is the thing that puts the floor back under me. Not the threat. The yet. And the fact that he read the line wrong.

"You put the stress in the wrong place."

His eyebrows lift, just barely. It's the first thing I've done all day that he wasn't expecting.

"Did I."

"She waits. You leaned on waits. It's not the verb, it's she. She's the one deciding. That's the whole point of the sentence." My mouth is running without a permit from my brain. "If you're going to read my work out loud to me while I stand against a wall, at least read it right."

Did that just come out of my mouth?

Something crosses his face, fast, and it's gone before I can be sure of it. But it wasn't anger.

It was delight.

And somehow that is much, much worse.

"Noted," he says. "Answer the question."

"You've asked about six."

"The one about the elevator."

"He kisses her." It comes out lower than I mean it to.

His jaw tightens. His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there a beat too long.

And his right thumb moves over the heavy gold ring on his hand. Once.

I know that move. I've seen him do it in exactly two meetings, both times about a minute before somebody's badge stopped working. In my book, he does it right before he tells a man to go wait in the car. It's the last thing he does before he does something.

He's never done it looking at me.

"She's already wet," he says, and there's gravel in it now. "Before he's touched her."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because she's been... thinking about it."

"For how long?"

He already knows. He's just going to make me say it, in my own words, in my own voice, standing against his wall, because that's who he is.

I could lie. I'm good at it; it's the second-best skill I've got. But he's holding the evidence, and I've never once written a heroine dumb enough to lie to a man with the receipts.

"Since the day she walked through his door."

He doesn't move. Not for a long time.

Then his free hand comes up, and one knuckle touches the hinge of my jaw.

Just the knuckle. It slides down the side of my throat, to the hollow at the base of it, to the top button of my blouse, and it stops there, resting on the fabric over my sternum, right where he can feel my heart trying to get out.

He tips his head.

His mouth comes down until I can feel the shape of it against the corner of mine without any part of it actually landing, and he breathes in, slow, like he's memorizing something, and I make a sound I have never made in my life.

Five inches. He never closes it.

He steps back. His thumb goes to the ring again, and this time it stays there, pressed down hard, like he's holding something shut.

He's trying not to do something. The deeply concerning part is that I want to know what.

"Eleven months," he says.

"What?"

"You've worked here eleven months."

Eleven. Not about a year. Not a while. He's got it down to the month. Like he's been counting the months himself.

"And you push your glasses up when you're trying to hide something." His voice is very even. "You did it right before you told me you could explain. You do it in every meeting you take notes in. Usually twice."

That is not in a file.

Nobody puts that in a file.

That's from watching. Eleven months of being the most invisible woman in this building, or so I thought. And the whole time, he was counting.

And there is a difference between being watched and being noticed.

He picks up the manuscript and looks at me over the top of it.

"You wrote him patient, Miss Wolfe. You got that part right. Eleven months of it."

His eyes drop to my mouth, then lower, and stay there.

"You also wrote a man who slides his hand under her skirt and waits."

A pause.

"That's the part you got wrong. When I'm done waiting, I don't trace the edge of anything."