Royal Seductions: Secrets: The Duke's Boardroom Affair. Michelle Celmer

on the accelerator and whipped out onto the road, shifting so smoothly he barely felt the switch of the gears.

      She swung around a corner and he gripped the armrest to keep from falling over. “You in a hurry?”

      She shot him a bland look. “No.”

      She downshifted and whipped around another corner so fast he could swear the tires on one side actually lifted off the pavement.

      “You know, the building isn’t going anywhere,” he said.

      “This is the way I drive. If you don’t like it, don’t ask to ride with me.” She took another corner at high speed, and he was pretty sure she was doing it just to annoy him.

      If she drove this way all the time, it was a wonder she was still alive. “Out of curiosity, how many accidents have you been in?”

      “I’ve never been in an accident.” She whipped into the next lane, cutting off the car directly behind them, whose driver blared its horn in retaliation.

      “Have you caused many?”

      She shot him another one of those looks. “No.”

      “Next you’ll try to tell me you haven’t gotten a speeding ticket.”

      This time she stayed silent. That’s what he figured.

      She took a sharp left into the underground parking at his building, used her card key to open the gate, zipped into her assigned spot, and cut the engine.

      “Well, that was an adventure,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt.

      She dropped her keys in her purse and opened her door. “I got you here alive, didn’t I?”

      Only by the grace of God, he was sure.

      They got out and walked to the elevator, taking it up to the tenth floor. She stood silently beside him the entire time. She could never be accused of being too chatty. Since they left his house she hadn’t said a word that wasn’t initiated by a question. Maybe she was in a snit about the towel. She had enjoyed the free show, but didn’t want to admit it.

      The elevator doors opened at their floor, and as they stepped off he rested a hand on the small of her back. A natural reaction, but she didn’t seem to appreciate his attempt to be a gentleman.

      She jerked away and shot lasers at him with her eyes. “What are you doing?”

      He held his hands up in a defensive gesture. “Sorry. Just being polite.”

      “Do you touch all of your female employees inappropriately?”

      What was her problem? Here he thought she’d begun to warm to him, but he couldn’t seem to get an accurate read on her.

      “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

      “Well, you did.”

      A pair standing in the hallway outside his office cut their conversation short to look at him and Victoria.

      “Why don’t we step into my office and talk about this,” he said quietly. She nodded, then he almost made the monumental error of touching her again, drawing his hand away a second before it grazed her shoulder.

      He couldn’t help it; he was a physical person. And until today, no one had ever seemed to have a problem with that.

      Penelope was already sitting at her desk, tapping away at her keyboard. The only hint of a reaction as he ushered Victoria to his office door was a slight lift of her left brow. He liked that about his secretary. She was always discreet. He also knew exactly what she was thinking. He’d lost another assistant already. Not all that unusual, until he factored in that he hadn’t even slept with this one yet.

      “Penelope, hold my calls, please.” He opened the door and gestured Victoria inside, then closed it behind them. “Have a seat.”

      Her chin jutted out stubbornly. “I’d rather stand, thank you.”

      “Fine.” He could see that she wasn’t going to make this easy. He rounded his desk and sat down. “Now, would you like to tell me what the problem is?”

      “The problem is that your behavior today has been completely inappropriate.”

      “All I did was touch your back.”

      “Employers are not supposed to walk around naked in front of their employees.”

      He leaned forward and propped his elbows on the desk. “I wasn’t naked.”

      “Not the entire time.”

      So, she had been looking. “Need I point out that you were in my house? When I walked into my closet I had no reason to expect you would be there. Sniffing my shirts.”

      Her cheeks blushed pink, but she didn’t back down. “And I suppose the towel accidentally fell off.”

      “Again, if you hadn’t been ogling me, you wouldn’t have seen anything.”

      Her eyes went wide with indignation. “I was not ogling you!”

      “Face it, sweetheart, you couldn’t keep your eyes off me.” He leaned back in his chair. “In fact, I felt a little violated.”

      “You felt violated?” She clamped her jaw so tight he worried she might crack her teeth. She wasn’t easy to rile, but once he got her going…damn.

      “But I’m willing to forgive and forget,” he said.

      “I’ve read your e-mails and listened to your phone messages. I know the kind of man that you are, and I’m telling you to back off. I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to, but you have done such a thorough job of ruining my family that I need this position. The way I see it, we’re stuck with each other. If you’re trying to get me to quit, it isn’t going to work. And if you continue to prance around naked in front of me and touch me inappropriately I’ll slap a sexual harassment suit on you so fast you won’t know what hit you.”

      He couldn’t repress the smile that was itching to curl the corner of his mouth. “I was prancing?”

      Her mouth fell open, as though she couldn’t believe he was making a joke out of this. “You really are a piece of work.”

      “Thank you.”

      “That wasn’t a compliment! You have got to be the most arrogant, self-centered—” she struggled for the right word, but all she could come up with was “—jerk I have ever met!”

      He shrugged. “Arrogant, yes. Self-centered, occasionally. But anyone will tell you I’m a nice guy.”

       “Nice?”

      “And fair.”

      “Fair? You orchestrated the deal that ruined my father. That stole from us the land that has been in our family for five generations, and you call that fair? We lost our business and our home. We lost everything because of you.”

      He wasn’t sure where she was getting her information, but she was way off. “We didn’t steal anything. The deal we offered your father was a gift.”

      Her face twisted with outrage. “A gift?”

      “He wouldn’t have gotten a better deal from anyone else.”

      “Ruining good men in the name of the royal family doesn’t make it any less sleazy or wrong.”

      This was all beginning to make sense now. Her lack of gratitude toward the royal family and her very generous employment contract. And there was only one explanation. “You have no idea the financial shape that the Houghton was in, do you?”

      She instantly went on the defensive. “What is that supposed to mean? Yes, my father handled the financial end of the business, but he kept me informed. Business was slow, no thanks to the Royal Inn, but we were by