Filthy Rich Alpha - Virna DePaul Page 0,15

you get the text about coming in bright and early?”

“No.” She paused for a few seconds to survey the main office area. It was a lot quieter than usual, and there were no traders hanging around talking shop or commenting on an online poker game in progress on someone else’s monitor. Greg seemed to be right about that. “Who sent it? What’s going on?”

A thickset man with a close, bristling haircut came out of a trader’s office, smoothing a tie that was simultaneously too wide and too short. Like him.

Greg looked pointedly in the man’s direction, then back at Cara.

“Who’s he?” she asked in a whisper.

“Mike Gaunt. The new office manager. He’s going around and he’s taking notes.”

At least he wasn’t looking at her. She sized him up in a glance. Ice blue eyes. No visible lips. Expressionless face. Over forty, not yet fifty. Never had any fun because he couldn’t possibly have a sense of humor.

Great. What a day for her to be the Forty-Five-Minutes-Late Girl.

Gaunt stopped at a cluster of financial-news terminals and took a seat next to Chip, the intern. Chip smiled nervously at the unsmiling man beside him and pointed to one of the monitors.

“Poor kid,” Greg said. “But at least you can get into your office without Gaunt seeing you.”

“Thanks for the heads-up.” She strode away and turned the corner. Most likely Branden Duke had cleared out and left the actual running of his new acquisition to Gaunt.

It was for the best, Cara told herself, despite her deep sense of disappointment that she actually might not be seeing Branden Duke again. God, she was pathetic.

Disgruntled, she went into her office and had barely sat down when her phone rang. Another familiar Brooklyn number. She picked up, cradling the receiver on her shoulder while her fingers moved over the keyboard as she greeted Iris.

“Hello there. Did you look at Deets today?”

Cara had no interest in gossip sites. Iris was a devotee. When the famous gossip site Gawker had been taken down, several new sites had popped up in its place, Deets being one of them.

She stopped typing. “Why?”

“I’ll stay on the line,” Iris said.

Cara took out her smartphone and pulled it up. She glanced at the headlines as she scrolled through them until one stopped her cold:

“Hot Mystery Babe Flees Decadent Slumber Party at Money Mogul’s Mansion!”

There was a photo of her outside the grand front doors of Branden Duke’s Long Island mansion. She looked disheveled. Wantonly so. The blurb was even worse:

This pouty blonde with honey-dipped hair was spotted in the wee hours trying to escape the pleasure palace of money mogul Branden Duke. Don’t ask us who she is. Just tell us if you know. Bonus question: why has Duke muscled in on the exclusive brokerage firm of Dubois & Mellan? Their richest clients want to know if their investments are safe. So do we. Lock up your stocks and bonds and your daughters, New York. The man is too sexy and too smart.

“Holy hell,” she breathed. “What is this? Who took that picture?”

“You tell me,” Iris said. “Although you look great.”

“I look like a hot mess,” Cara countered. “That’s the work party I attended. All I was doing was waiting for the…car.”

“Car?”

“Branden Duke’s limo. He owned the house. And he’s…erm…my new boss. I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to catch you up on things.” That wasn’t quite true. She’d had the time. She’d just been struggling with her feeling about Branden so much, wanting to work them out before she filled Iris in on everything that had been going on. “He…um…arranged for his driver to take me home.”

“Really? Funny what did you do to earn that favor?” Iris asked.

“He…um…well, nothing. Although we might have kissed before I left. And before I knew he was my boss,” she said quickly.

Iris hissed in a breath. “Wow. Looks like there’s a lot you need to catch me up on. A kiss you say? Your lips look…hmm. Crushed by passion? And who messed up your hair like that? This doesn’t look like a girl who got a mere kiss.”

Cara stared at the photo then glanced up when someone knocked on her door.

It was Mike Guant.

“Um…can I call you back, Iris?”

“Definitely and without delay, girlie.”

“Talk soon, I promise,” Cara said, then hung up.

She whisked her smartphone off the desk and into a drawer before pasting on a wide, fake smile. “Oh, hello. You must be Mr. Gaunt. Please come in.”

The stout man entered and chose a chair,