BILLONIARE SECRETARY BABY

Chapter 7

Only after Matt had gone all stern and disapproving big brother on her for using his relationship with Christain to get a job, did the penny drop. That’s when she’d understood that she’d probably gotten the job because she was Matt’s sister. A favor neither Matt nor Cami had actually asked for. By that time it had been too late to back out, and Cami had been determined to make the best of the chance she’d been given. Of course, if she had actually met Christain Greys during the interview process, she may very well have told him to shove his job. But his minions had conducted the recorded interviews, and Christain had—supposedly—made his decision after watching the recordings.

Cami didn’t know what she’d expected of Christain Greys, but from the very first day he had made it clear he merely suffered her presence, and just half an hour into her first day—after asking her to make him a cup of coffee, photocopy some documents, send two e-mails (one of which she had messed up by leaving off a zero in a seriously huge number), and water his frickin’ ficus—he had sent her downstairs to a junior executive. Once there, the junior exec’s assistant had patronizingly ushered Cami to a desk and instructed her to answer the phone if it rang, before the woman checked her makeup and swanned off with a breezy “Mr. Greys needs me to assist him today.”

The memory still made Cami seethe—four months later—and she clenched her teeth when she thought of how consistently after that first encounter the same thing had happened. She began every day in Greys’s office suite, and after half an hour—during which she had the dubious privilege of making his coffee and watering that stupid ficus, or sometimes sending one of those loathsome little “Thanks for the s*x” notes—she got shipped off to a different exec. Luckily the other executives had stopped giving her mundane tasks to do, and she’d started enjoying her daily little soirees away from the boss’s office. Still, the half hours in the mornings had become almost unbearable. Christain was scathing, brutally frank in his dismissal of her skills, and almost unbearably rude. He never greeted her, never used common courtesies like “please” and “thank you” when he spoke with her, and Cami was convinced a smile would c***k his perfect face.

Christain was still grimly focused on his iPad, and Cami went back to greedily watching the passing scenery, trying to commit as much of it to memory as she could while longing to be out there exploring the wonderful mix of old and new. She loved the wooden buildings that looked as if they’d been around since the Middle Ages, tucked away down alleys and overshadowed by aggressively modern monolithic skyscrapers. Nothing escaped her attention, and she tried to file away the interesting bits, wanting to research and read up on buildings, museums, and shops that captured her interest. All of which helped keep her mind off Christain’s disturbing presence.

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. TWO

Praise Jesus! They had doughnuts! Cami barely noticed all the bowing and talking around her as her senses homed in on that single, all-important fact. By now she was so hungry she actually felt faint, and if she could only get her hands on one of those gorgeous hoops of sugary goodness, all would be right with her world. She nodded dazedly at the half circle of somber-looking businessmen in dark suits bowing to her and was barely aware of the tall, dark presence looming beside her as her eyes drifted again and again to the tempting display of coffee and pastries set up over to the side.

The painfully prolonged polite greetings finally over, she stealthily drifted over to the table of goodies. She was just a finger’s length away from a chocolate-glazed precious with her name written all over it when a firm hand clamped down on her elbow. Her empty stomach sank to the bottom of her sensible shoes, and she stared up at her boss with what she knew was the most effectively pathetic hangdog expression in her arsenal. But he was having none of it; his jaw was clenched so tightly she was amazed his teeth didn’t c***k. She gave one final forlorn look at the doughnuts before he led her to the long conference table in the center of the room.

“Try to pay attention,” he muttered in her ear as he planted her into a seat that, cruelly, faced the delicious spread just a table’s breadth away from her.

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What followed was the longest, most boring and torturous three hours of Cami’s life. The meeting was conducted entirely in Japanese, which Cami didn’t speak but Christain most certainly did, and quite fluently too from what she could tell. She didn’t know why she was there. He had a Dictaphone recording the meeting, so even if she’d been able to understand what was going on, she wouldn’t have had to take notes anyway. All she could do was stare at the doughnuts and other delicious goodies in front of her and imagine how they tasted. At one point a fly landed on her doughnut. It took everything she had not to jump up with a primal scream and chase it away. Instead, she watched in revulsion as it crawled over every inch of her beautiful doughnut. She nearly sobbed in disappointment, gave up on the chocolate one, and shifted her attention to a gorgeous éclair on a different platter. But when that bastard fly, which she had now named Greys Jr., landed on her éclair as well, she slumped back in her chair and stared glumly down at the blank notebook in front of her.

She picked up her pen and started scribbling. Hoping to at least look busy, she composed truly awful haiku and observations about the people seated around the table.

Her attempt at describing Christain:

Hard of abs he is

Beautiful to look at sure

My God what a dick

Okay, maybe that last line was a little ambiguous. Was it an insult or a compliment? Even Cami wasn’t sure.

After several even worse attempts, Cami gave up on the haiku. She segued into doodling, occasionally looking up and nodding to make it seem like she was listening to every incomprehensible word being spoken. She glanced over at Christain and was delighted to note that he’d perched his dark-rimmed spectacles on the tip of his nose. She’d seen them before, of course, but loved how truly nerdy they made him look. Sexy-nerdy, but it was a flaw and she’d take it.

The only other woman present, Ms. Inokawa, also slanted surreptitious glances at Christain and smiled demurely every time he spoke with her. If not for the calculating gleam in her pretty eyes, Cami would have thought the woman sweet and slightly shy, but beneath all that saccharine sweetness beat the heart of a scheming seductress. And she had her sights on Christain.

Well, she was welcome to him. All Cami wanted was a doughnut. Maybe that caramel one, it looked like the fly had skipped—damn it. Sure enough, as if drawn to it by her thoughts, the fly landed on that one too. By the time the meeting was over, the damned thing would have—

“Miss Gaspy?” She jerked upright, realizing Christain had been trying to get her attention.

“Uh . . . yes?”

“I asked if you got that?”

That? What? Wait, had they finally said something in English and she’d missed it? Damn it.

“Yes. Yes, I did.” She tapped the page of her open notebook as if to confirm her words, and when his eyes followed the movement, she hastily closed the book, not wanting him to see her scribbles. His brow lifted and his head tilted as his eyes burned into hers, and she smiled breezily up at him. She’d just check his Dictaphone later to figure out what it was she’d missed. No problem.

“Well?” he asked. Crap. Now what?

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“Yes, I got it,” she repeated slowly, as if to an inattentive child. His eyes narrowed dangerously. God, he was scary when he did that. Okay, so maybe this was something he wanted done right away. That wasn’t good at all. She’d have to cop to the truth. She leaned in toward him and was a little offended when he leaned in the opposite direction.

“I didn’t quite get the last bit,” she confessed, and his eyes flared with what looked like disgust. How was she supposed to know they’d suddenly switch to English? Okay, so she should probably have been paying closer attention, but after three hours of nothing but Japanese, she was bound to have zoned out at some point.

“I want you to arrange a meeting with Craig, Josh, Ryan, Tanaka-san, Inokawa-san, Watanabe-san, and myself for three thirty this afternoon.” Cami ducked her head as she quickly scribbled the information on a blank sheet in her notebook.

“You may use this conference room for the meeting, Gaspy-san,” Ms. Inokawa said in her breathy little voice, shocking the hell out of Cami with her English. Could they all speak English? If so, how rude of them to not once acknowledge her lack of Japanese. Then again, she was just the assistant, who couldn’t even do the only thing that had been required of her at this meeting efficiently.

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The meeting was apparently adjourned, because the men bowed and shook hands, Ms. Inokawa was speaking in that charmingly girlish voice, all the while smiling sweetly, while Cami was left to her own devices, alone at the table. She got up—ostensibly to stretch—and finally made her way over to the fly-tainted, stale-looking pastries.

“Gaspy, get on those phone calls,” Christain growled from the other end of the room. Cami swallowed down her resentment before fishing out the company phone to contact the architect, the contractor, and Ryan Blake—the company’s legal representative—all of whom were staying at the same hotel as Cami and Christain. After a series of meetings with the three men the previous day, the boss had wanted to meet with the Japanese alone this morning in order to straighten out the mess he believed the other men had created. So if he was calling them back in, it must mean he’d made some headway in that morning’s meeting.

The speed at which they all answered their phones attested to the fact that they’d probably been anxiously awaiting her call, and Cami set up the meeting within minutes. Christain was still amicably chatting with the Japanese trio, but the moment she disconnected the second call, he looked at her with a raised brow. She nodded in response to the question she could see in his eyes, and he went back to his conversation without acknowledging her affirmation. Stifling her irritation at his rudeness, she started compiling a list of all the documentation they would need for the second meeting. She was well engrossed in that task when Christain’s voice, coming from directly behind her, startled her back into the present.

“Are you coming? Inokawa-san has arranged lunch for us,” he informed her, and Cami bit back a groan of relief. She jumped up quickly before he could revoke the invitation, and swayed slightly as the lack of food and jet lag hit her. His hand caught her elbow and steadied her.

“What’s going on with you?” he hissed.

“I haven’t eaten much of anything since the in-flight meal yesterday morning,” she hissed back. “So excuse me for feeling a little light-headed.”

“Nonsense. You had dinner last night and breakfast this morning.” He waved his hand dismissively, refuting her claims with innate arrogance.

“No, you had dinner and breakfast. You told me we’d have a dinner meeting and ordered only enough for yourself, and if you consider that one piece of bacon and mouthful of eggs I gobbled down this morning breakfast, then you and I have seriously different ideas of what constitutes a healthy meal.”