Mary Wilson - The C.e.o. and The Secret Heiress

“No one would take out Santa,” she said. “Not even a world-class cynic.”

Matt laughed then, a sound that both startled and disturbed Brittany. It was soft and rich, wrapping itself around her in the close confines of the black car, an enticing pleasure that she wanted to push away. “I guess I’m not world-class,” he said, starting to drive again, but so slowly that they could have walked faster. “Just cynic enough to look at LynTech realistically and try to make it viable.

“There’s viable and there’s viable. Right now LynTech has more money leaks than a sieve, and it has subsidiaries that aren’t exactly stable.” He eased into the next lane behind a car decorated with flashing Christmas lights around its rear window. “If we can get some cash flow from new investors, we might survive. If not, it’s a lost cause.”

She knew LynTech hadn’t been in top form when it changed hands. It had been a source of real pain for her father. After he’d spent years building the company, it had started to fail and he didn’t have the time or the energy left to pull it back up. And she hadn’t been there to help. Her sense of business would have sunk the company completely. “Can I ask you something?”

“I have no idea how many years it’s going to take to get out of this traffic,” Matt said.

The traffic was incredible, people out shopping or going off to dinner. “Why did you and what’s-his-name, Holden, walk into Lyntech and take it over, if it was on the brink of corporate suicide?”

He finally made it to the corner and turned onto the main street in front of LynTech. “Corporate suicide? What did you do, take a class to learn sound bites for the business world?”

“I’m just asking a question.”

He shrugged as he fingered the leather-covered steering wheel. “We got involved because we figured if someone was at the helm who wasn’t attached to the company, someone who could make solid, unemotional decisions, it could be viable.”

She’d heard enough about Matt and Zane Holden during the change of power. Her father’s reluctance to hand the corporation over to them had been there, but he hadn’t had a choice. He’d had to get out, otherwise there would have been an ugly takeover from some other sources. “Slice and dice” her dad had called the two of them, “but bright.” He’d chosen the ones to take it, and Matt and Zane Holden had been that choice.

“Didn’t you acquire LynTech with the intent to disassemble it, sell off the parts, pocket the money and get out of town?”

The traffic had stopped again, and horns were being sounded when Matt looked at her. “You claim to be an artist, and talk about magic and fantasy, then in the next breath, you’re talking like some corporate shark. What are you, an artistic business person?”

He was so far off the mark that she could have almost laughed. “I’m just an artist.”

“And I’m just impressed. Most people at LynTech thought we were horrible, especially after kindly Mr. Lewis and the way he coddled them. They couldn’t understand our actions, still can’t, in some measure. But you do.”

She’d absorbed it, but had had little interest in it until she saw how it had affected her father. Now she knew the slice-and-dice concept forward and backward, along with her father’s hopes for the company after he’d learned that Matt and Holden were staying on. His relief had been immense when he’d found out they weren’t disassembling it at all.

“I understand what you’re doing,” she admitted as they moved slowly toward the front doors of the company. Familiar doors to her, doors that she’d actually seen put up when the building had been redesigned ten years earlier. “The question is, what are you and Mr. Holden doing with LynTech now?”

“Trying to fix it.”

“And is it working?”

“Well, cynic that I am, I wouldn’t be sticking around to throw money down a black hole, would I?”

“And money is the name of the game.”

That brought that laugh, sudden and deep, a rich sound that felt as if it was slipping around her. “You got it,” he said as the traffic inched down the street.

She had never met anyone who could laugh and make her feel like laughing, too. She looked away from him again, and out at the city streets. “So, you’re in it for the long haul?”

“Zane is, but I’m just here until everything’s in place.”

“Then what?” she asked.

“Another challenge,” he said. “There are millions of them out there, it’s just a matter of finding them. But first, I need to get past this, and that means I’ve got a night of work ahead of me, if we ever get out of here.”

“Do you want to park and walk?” she asked.

He laughed again, soft and sensual. She stared very hard up the street, concentrating on the way the Christmas lights danced on the polished finishes of the cars ahead. “Just lock the car and walk away?”

“Why not? It’s like a parking lot out here.”

He motioned ahead. “Once we get past the bus stop, it should move better.”

She glanced up farther and saw the bus stop with a single bench and an overhead protection roof decorated with Christmas garlands. Two people were on the wooden bench, and as they got a bit closer, she recognized one of them as the boy who had come to her rescue in the center. “That’s him,” she said, sitting forward to get a better look at the boy, slouched down on the bench, staring at the ground, his hat on backwards.

“That’s who?”

“The boy from tonight,” she said pointing to him.

The woman sitting by him was thin and dark, with a deep scowl on her face as she spoke to the boy. “I guess that’s his mother with him.” Not a loving mother, that was for sure.

“Poor woman,” Matt muttered.

As they passed by, Brittany was shocked to see the woman slap the boy on his shoulder, and he moved to get away from the blow. He looked at her, his face twisted with anger, but he didn’t move again. “She hit him,” Brittany said. “Stop the car!”

“Stay out of it,” he said as he kept going. She reached for the door handle, but Matt caught her other arm. “No. Don’t do it. You don’t know what’s going on.” He looked back over his shoulder. “And he’s okay. He probably did something that got her crazy.”

They were past him now, and she sank back in the seat, jerking her arm away from Matt’s touch. “How could you just let her do that?”

He slowed the car, pulled out of traffic and stopped. He turned to her, one hand on the steering wheel and one resting on the console. “Okay, what do you suggest we do to stop her?”

She sank back in the seat, resting one arm on the door frame and pressing her other hand to her eyes. “I don’t know. Call the police.”

“And they’d come, take a report, then send them home together where she could really do some damage. She’d be angry and embarrassed and take it out on him.”

She lowered her hand and looked at Matt and hated him for his perfect logic. “Do you think so?”

“I know so. I grew up around that kind of stuff, and you wouldn’t help him if you stepped in right now.”

He moved a bit closer to her as people rushed by outside, carrying bright Christmas parcels and going to their homes. “B.J., the kid is in a situation you can’t change. No one can change it. Leave it alone.”

She swallowed hard. “Just like that?”

He moved slightly, his hand lifting, and this time he touched her cheek, the contact of his fingers lighter than a feather’s kiss, but riveting. “Just like that,” he said in a low voice. “Walk away. You’ll never see him again.”

“You can do that?” she asked.

“I’ve done it all my life, and I’ve survived.” He smiled slightly, a shadow at his lips, and it made her heart lurch. “I’d like you to survive, B. J. Smythe not Smith.”

She’d known him an hour tops, and as he repeated her lie back to her with that smile, she felt her heart sink. It was no secret that he’d like to do away with Brittany Lewis.

Matt didn’t know why he was doing this, touching her, and experiencing this overwhelming need to fix whatever was “broken.” He wasn’t a rescuer of people. Companies, yes. People, no. He gave them a wide berth, and that’s what he should have been doing with B.J. right then. This whole thing felt awkward and alien to him. And when she moved quickly, turning away from him and breaking that contact, he let her do it.

“I’ll survive,” she said, pushing toward the car door. “I just hope that kid can.”

“He will. He’s tough,” he said, turning from her to look over his left shoulder at the traffic. It had thinned some and he slipped easily out into the road.

“You sound so damn sure,” she said.

He didn’t look back at her. He didn’t want to start that craziness all over again. “I am. He’s a survivor.” He negotiated a lane change and sped up to a normal speed finally. “Now, ask me whatever it is you need to know about the center.”

“If he isn’t going to the center, could he?”

“I meant a change of subjects,” he said.

“I want to know.”

He gripped the steering wheel, smoothing the leather with his hands and wondered why he could still almost feel the silky heat of her skin on his fingertips. “If someone in his family works for LynTech, he can.”

“And if no one in his family works there?”

“Then he can’t, at least until it opens in the new facility where we were. Then it’s going to go public and be available to people working in the neighborhood.”

“For a price?”

“It needs to get some capital to help keep it going. That’s a given.”

“I know, money is the bottom line, even with the kids.”

“If it was up to Lindsey, she’d let all kids in for free, even a kid like that.”

“There you go again. He might be a good kid, just impulsive. A lot of people are impulsive. He’s not about to hot-wire some car and go for a joyride.”

“Give him time.”

“What is it with you pigeon-holing people you don’t even know?”

He glanced at her and was a bit taken back to see a real degree of anger in her face, even with the lights of Christmas touching the sweep of her throat as her chin lifted a bit. This was crazy. He was tired of defending himself to her. “All things being equal, I should be at my place working, and if I hadn’t been kept late waiting for…” His words trailed off and he looked back at the evening streets. “I’m not going down that road.”

“You can say it. If Brittany Lewis hadn’t kept you waiting you’d be doing something exciting like balancing figures.”

He narrowed his eyes on the road, thinking that after meeting B.J. anything would be anticlimactic. “Now I have to figure out how to tell her father she never showed. He’s not going to be a happy camper.”

“Maybe she got held up somewhere?”

“You’re probably right,” he conceded, rerouting his thoughts to something less complicated. Something very simple. “She probably got held up trying to figure out which color lipstick looks best with wedding gowns,” he said, turning toward the middle of the city.

“Why did you bring up wedding gowns?”

“I guess it’s not big news when she dumps another fiancé,” he murmured. “But being a no-show for a job that her father knocked himself out to set up for her seems pretty self-absorbed and petty. She’s probably never worked a day in her life, then her dad gives her a chance to do something productive, and she bolts. She’s probably on her way to some exotic place to lie around in the sun until the urge to work goes away. And her father’s going to feel betrayed and angry and—”