Untouched Until Her Ultra-Rich Husband Page 4

  “Yes?” he asked with deliberate lack of concern that bordered on tedium.

  “When I say everything...”

  “That doesn’t exactly clean up your mess, does it?” He let fury lick at him because it was better than allowing her magnificence to blind him.

  “If Luli isn’t needed, everything under that profile must also be unnecessary,” she said with simple logic.

  “Come here.”

  She stayed where she was, but had the good sense to take her hands off the laptop and close the screen.

  “Do you realize how dangerous I am?”

  “Do you realize,” she asked in an even quieter voice, lips white, “how little I have to lose? How much I’ve already lost?”

  Eight years, if she was to be believed.

  Her hands were curled into angry fists, but stayed at her sides. “You’re welcome, by the way, for all the times I’ve asked your grandmother, Is this an opportunity you would like me to bring to your grandson’s attention? You could have stepped in at any time to help her manage her affairs. You didn’t. I did. For nothing but a roof over my head and three meals a day.”

  “And you think you can strike back at me for that? By deleting a few paper trails? Any database or personnel records you compromise can be rebuilt from backups. It won’t take long and the price tag won’t be that high.”

  “I estimate the cost at ten million US dollars, based on penalties for failing to finalize certain contracts on time. Or you could keep me on and not lose a penny.”

  “Is that what you think you’re worth?” he scoffed. “Ten million dollars?”

  His words pushed a pin in her back, forcing her to take a step toward him. Anger smoldered around her in a cloud, making her entirely too sexy and distracting when her voice was so sharp and profound.

  “I’ve spent years thinking my value is less than zero. I thought I had to stay here because Mae was the only person who wanted me, and only if I was useful to her. From the moment I emailed you that she had collapsed, my only thought has been that I have to prove my worth to you, but how do I do that when I’m a walking, unpaid debt?” Her hand moved to press into her middle, as though clutching at a knife stuck in her navel. “The debt is my mother’s. I am worth exactly what I decide I’m worth. If I’m to be exploited, I will choose the terms. And if you’re going to put me on the street like a stray dog, you will feel the bite of it.”

  A discreet knock on the door had him snapping out, “Busy!”

  An older brown-faced woman was already peeking in. “I’m sorry, Mr. Dean. I was told you left instructions I report to you the minute I returned.”

  “Mrs. Chen’s nurse,” Luli said, stepping back and letting her hair fall forward to shield how color had risen in her face during their confrontation.

  He swore under his breath and nodded at the woman. “Come in.”

  He swung back to Luli and pointed at her laptop. “Put that on hold for a few hours. Then tell the butler to prepare us dinner.” He needed a damned minute to think.

  The nurse bounced her gaze between the two of them as Luli moved to the desk and tapped a few keys. Seconds later, Luli closed the door behind her.

  The nurse didn’t give him any information he didn’t already have. She offered condolences; he promised a severance package so she could take her time finding another position. She bowed slightly when he dismissed her.

  “Wait,” he said. “How long have you been with my grandmother?”

  She turned back, expression brightening the way most of his employees did when he gave them the opportunity to prove their value to him.

  “Almost twenty years, sir.”

  “You’ve known Luli since she came here? How long has she been working here in my grandmother’s office?”

  “From the beginning, sir.”

  “That was my grandmother’s idea? Was she competent? My grandmother, I mean. Mentally.”

  “Oh, completely, sir! But Mrs. Chen never cared for telephones or computers.” Her hand washed such things from the air. “She thought them unhealthy and brought Luli in as a convenience. Luli spoke Spanish and your grandmother had recently acquired properties in South America.”

  “Luli was quite young when she arrived? What was she like?” Scared? Angry?

  “Quiet.” The nurse’s expression faltered as she delved into her memory.

  “Because she only spoke Spanish?” He seldom thought about his teen years, but recalled adolescent girls traveling in colorful flocks and relentlessly twittering at each other. No matter what the truth was today, Luli must have felt isolated at the time.

  “She spoke a little English, but it was the patch that was the problem. I had to remove it from her tongue. I had completely forgotten about that,” the nurse said with a distant frown.

  “What kind of patch?” he asked sharply.

  “For weight loss. It makes it painful to eat solids. She was already stick thin, but young women will do the stupidest things to themselves in the name of fashion. Mrs. Chen saved her from herself, if you want my opinion.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A CRISP RAP on her door snapped her awake.

  Luli glanced at her alarm clock, but it wouldn’t go off for another hour. She had set it so she wouldn’t oversleep resetting the timer on the laptop.

  “Luli,” he said. “Open the door or I’m coming in.”

  She quickly rose and brushed her hands down her wrinkled dress, then opened the door to Gabriel’s glower.

  He glanced past her to the dented pillow on the single bed, the plain walls and utilitarian night table with only a clock and hairbrush upon it.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Sleeping.”

  “You’re supposed to be eating dinner with me. Why did you tell the butler I wanted to eat with him?”

  “You said, Tell the butler to prepare us dinner. I presumed us meant him.”

  “No, you didn’t,” he said flatly.

  It had been open for interpretation and she’d been dead on her feet. Also, there was no way the butler would believe the new master of the house wanted to eat with her unless he heard it directly from Gabriel himself. He and all the rest of the staff had given her apprehensive looks, everyone asking, What did you tell him?

  And, exactly as she did when it came to her closed-door conversations with Mrs. Chen, she had given up nothing—earning zero friends in the process.

  Now she’d made Gabriel angry. She’d fallen asleep thinking about his nearly kissing her, imagining things she barely understood. What would it feel like to have his lips on hers, his hand moving to her bottom? Her breasts. Between her legs.

  Fresh heat pressed there, disconcerting her. How was it that all she had to do was think about him, stand before him, and quivers shook her abdomen and her mouth watered? It was mortifying.

  “I’m not hungry,” she tried in a voice that scraped.

  “I’m not requesting.”

  His hard tone told her that all the work she’d put into giving herself leverage had left her with virtually none.

  “Garden,” he said, stepping back to indicate she should lead the way.

  She did, self-conscious the entire time that he was right behind her. She arrived to find a table had been set with Mae’s best china on a silk cloth. One of the maids brought the first course, a small bowl of curry laksa made with shrimp and cockles. Gabriel handled the vermicelli with his golden chopsticks as adeptly as she did.

  And noticed the curious look she sent after the maid.

  “I gave the butler the night off,” he said. “After clarifying he wasn’t my date.”

  “I’m sure he appreciates a free evening.” He was going to kill her when he saw her next.

  “He didn’t offer many compliments when I asked him about you.”

  It
didn’t really surprise her that he’d made those inquiries, but it made her squirm inwardly, knowing that no one would have anything very nice to say. She never dwelt on her ache of loneliness, but it was humiliating to have the staff’s contempt of her become the centerpiece of this already painful dinner.

  “I sat in on his meetings with Mae when they reviewed household expenses and raises. It was my task to prepare the performance reviews and suggest appropriate wage increases.”

  His laugh was a single cut of disbelief. “Have you made any friends here?”

  “Perhaps you’ll be my first,” she said with a smile of false hope.

  She watched for a twitch of humor in his mouth, but it held its tense line while she only wound up thinking about his rejection of her perceived advances.

  She lost her appetite and set aside her chopsticks.

  “I read your note,” he announced.

  “Which—? Oh.” She realized as she brought her gaze back up to his antagonized one.

  He must have tried to hack his way into the network while she’d been sleeping. Of course he had. And he’d found her warning against proceeding further.

  “I thought this whole thing a bluff, but those are an elegant few lines capable of doing so much damage. I have an idea how to get around it. I’ve cloned the entire thing to a testing file. I’ll crack it before I go to bed,” he said with confidence, nipping off the tail of a shrimp and setting it aside as he chewed the meat.

  “You realize there’s more?” she asked cautiously.

  “I’d be disappointed if there wasn’t.” His smile was as false as hers had been. “Where did you learn to code?”

  “We had to design our own website at school. There were a handful of standard templates to choose from. We were supposed to load basic details and a few photos, that kind of thing. I didn’t like the colors it offered and wanted a different layout. I looked up how to hack into the back end and customize it.”

  “For extra credit?”

  “To stand out from the rest. We were also required to have a hobby and volunteer hours. I chose programming and contributed to open-source projects. Since I’ve been here, I’ve had time and opportunity to become proficient in several languages. Mae liked that I could manipulate things to the way she wanted them.”

  “Coding is a skill that’s very marketable,” he pointed out.

  “That’s why I’m demonstrating my skills to you.” She pushed her bowl away. “But who will take me seriously, without a track record or credentials? Which door do I knock on when I land after being deported and have nothing in my pockets but lint? At best, I’d be recruited for click farms or phishing scams, maybe have to resort to criminal activity for my own survival. As I said before, if I wanted to break laws, I would have already.”

  “You don’t fit the stereotype for coding geeks—I’ll give you that.” His penetrating look made her want to touch her hair and see if it was falling out of its knot. He certainly was unraveling her.

  The maid exchanged their soup for plates of barbecued stingray.

  As Luli scraped a tiny morsel of meat from the wing and dabbed it in the sauce, Gabriel asked, “Are you concerned about your weight?”

  “I don’t care for seafood. And these portions were obviously meant for the butler.”

  “Order something else.” He looked for the maid who had already carried their dirty bowls away.

  “I don’t see how acting too good for the chef’s food will improve my social standing. It’s fine. I like the chili sauce with the rice.”

  He tucked into his own. “The nurse said you were wearing a weight-loss patch on your tongue when you came here. Why?”

  “For weight loss.” He was not a man to be played with, she knew that, but she knew where this was going and would really rather not.

  “Why did you want to lose weight?”

  She bit back a sigh.

  “Advantage. My mother requested the school attach it and I went along with it. Many girls had liposuction or nose jobs. The tongue patch was nothing.” She dismissed it with a twitch of her shoulder.

  “What kind of school would arrange such things?”

  “One that trains pageant contestants.”

  “You were training for a beauty contest?”

  She lifted her gaze, mildly affronted. “Why is that shocking? I was a front-runner.”

  “I didn’t know there was such a thing. This is the same school where you were making websites?”

  “To build our online presence from the earliest age, yes. I was eleven when I started and built it into something that would have been a decent calling card today, but it’s long been taken down.” She was still annoyed at her hard work disappearing into cyberspace.

  “This is why you wanted your site to stand out from the crowd?”

  “Everything was a contest.” Understatement of the decade. She tasted another bite of stingray. It was smoky and stringy, but tender and not too fishy. Tolerable.

  “Which means no friends there, either?” he guessed.

  “Some girls were friendly, but my mother’s view was that a consolation sash like Miss Congeniality is for those who need consoling—something winners don’t require, so there was no need to aspire to achieve it. She once played a vicious mind game with a rival, though, by pretending she was trying to win that particular title.”

  “Your mother competed?”

  “Won every major title, yes.”

  “And yet she had no money for an apartment?”

  “She has expensive tastes. And she was angry with my father. Me, too, I think.”

  “Why?”

  Luli sighed, hating to face this head-on.

  “There’s renown in keeping the crown in the family and the prize money I won paid for my school, but how can you claim to be the most beautiful woman in the world if your own daughter is threatening to take the title from you?”

  “She sounds like a lovely person. Did no one notice you dropped out and disappeared?”

  “She told people I’d gone to live with relatives. A few schoolmates inquired online and I backed her up. The reality was too...”

  To this day, thinking of her mother’s casual divesting of her sent a lightning strike of agony into her heart. Her mother had been purely self-serving. It was why she’d had an affair with a married man in the first place. Getting pregnant had probably been one more way to squeeze support out of him. One more thing she hadn’t thought through and wound up regretting. She had considered her daughter a commodity and certainly never loved her the way mothers were supposed to love their children. It had left Luli with a gaping emptiness in her soul, one Mae hadn’t filled, but had at least acknowledged and attempted to paper over.

  “I wasn’t sorry to be away from my mother,” Luli admitted quietly. “I saw no point in telling people what had really happened. The best-case scenario would have been that she was arrested and I would be living as an orphan there, without prospects. Not even at school any longer.”

  “Did you want to compete? Or did she force you to do that, too?”

  “I saw opportunity and applied myself. I only competed in national titles for girls in the younger categories. I left before I moved into the teen contests. I’m confident I would do well in the global pageants if I entered today. It’s one of my contingency plans, if I’m deported. There’s quite an investment up front, though. You have to win all the feeder pageants. It’s a long game.” She was talking too fast. “That’s the only reason I set up an account for myself in Venezuela. If I’m forced to draw from it, I promise I’ll pay you back with interest.”

  He didn’t immediately refuse her, only narrowed his eyes. “Pageants sound like a path to modeling. Would it be so bad to start there?”

  “In Venezuela? The minute I gained any sort of publicity, my mother would come back into my life.
I’d prefer to avoid that.”

  “That’s the main reason you don’t want to be deported? Your mother?”

  “Sí.” She poked at the stingray flesh, unable to take another bite of it.

  “Stop torturing that. It’s already dead.” He took her barely touched plate and set it atop his emptied one. “I’ll finish it if you’re only going to play with it.”

  “I’ll clean toilets if that becomes the only option available to me,” she told him, clutching her empty hands in her lap. “I will pursue programming, which I know can pay well, but it’s also a long game. My physical attributes mean I can aim for a higher and faster return if I try modeling or something like it. It only makes sense that I try. Don’t you agree?”

  She held her breath, waiting for his assessment. So far he hadn’t pulled any punches. If he said she wasn’t attractive enough, she would rethink her strategy.

  His gaze swept across her face in an almost tangible caress, like a cool scarf of silk wafted over her skin.

  “I can’t deny you’re beautiful.” The gravel in his tone had her reflexively holding her breath, waiting for a strange all-over ache to subside.

  Then he looked away and his expression hardened, making something catch in her chest. She wanted him to keep looking at her, keep sending that electric current through her that held such possibility.

  “I’m only asking that you take me with you and give me time to establish myself,” she pleaded softly. “I’ll continue my work on Mae’s investments in exchange for accommodation and meals—”

  “Quite the bargain, considering your minimalist approach to both.”

  “I would need a small loan for clothing and makeup, but I can continue wearing this uniform for office work—”

  “Like hell you can.”

  She closed her eyes, angry with herself for trying too hard. Judges could always smell desperation.

  Ignoring the sting behind her eyes, she considered other avenues of persuasion. He hadn’t seemed interested in sex in exchange for favors, maybe because he sensed her inexperience in that department? Should she tell him she’d read up on that particular topic? Extensively? She was always willing to put in the work to do better.