“Good night, Harry.” Jocelyn smiled happily at the elderly guard sitting behind the reception desk.
“Night, Miss Stemic.” Harry smiled back. “You sure look chipper. Got a heavy date tonight?”
For a brief moment an image of Lucas’s leanly chiseled features filled her mind. His dark eyes glittered with emotion. His lips were curved in a sensual smile that sent her heartbeat into overdrive. What would it be like to have a date with Lucas? she wondered. To have him look at her with love and longing, instead of with his normal impersonal friendliness? It would be mind-boggling, she thought, answering her own question. World changing. Her world, at least. The closest thing to heaven on earth she was ever likely to find.
“He must really be something to send you off into a trance like that,” Harry teased.
“That he is,” Jocelyn agreed wholeheartedly and then hurried toward the outside doors before Harry could ask any more questions. Questions she couldn’t answer. She could hardly tell him that she was head-over-heels in love with a man who viewed her as nothing more than a highly competent administrative assistant. It sounded pathetic, but it wasn’t.
Just because Lucas didn’t love her at the moment didn’t mean that he might not come to love her in the future, she assured herself. After all, she hadn’t loved him at first sight, either. When she’d interviewed for the job as his administrative assistant, she’d only thought he was incredibly sexy. It hadn’t been until she’d worked with him for a few weeks that her feelings had developed into love.
It was quite possible that, given time, his liking for her might deepen enough for him to forget his determination never to become emotionally involved with a woman who worked for him. And she had time. Lots of time. Her whole lifetime.
She smiled as she shoved open the heavy, plate-glass door and caught the fragrant whiff of pine from the wreath hanging on it. It was the Christmas season, and anything was possible. Absolutely anything.
Jocelyn stepped outside, and her breath caught in her lungs as a gust of icy wind slapped her across the face. Bending her head, she hurried across the almost empty parking lot intent on getting to her car before she froze.
“Hey, babe.” The irritating greeting scraped across her nerves a second before a hand closed around her upper arm. The hand jerked, pulling her against a hard masculine chest, and a man’s arms embraced her.
Jocelyn instinctively tore herself out of them. She didn’t want any man except Lucas hugging her.
“You can’t still be mad at me, babe. Not after all these months,” he said. “Hell, everyone sleeps together these days. I’m the one who should be mad. You ruined a perfectly good weekend. To say nothing of all the time I wasted dating you with nothing to show for it.”
Ignoring him in the hopes he’d go away, Jocelyn pulled her remote opener out of her coat pocket and unlocked her car.
To her extreme annoyance, he hurried around the hood of her car and slipped into the seat beside her.
Jocelyn pushed back a stray tendril of her chestnut hair yanked out of the neat chignon she normally wore to work by the vicious wind, briefly wondering what Bill was doing here. She hadn’t seen him in more than a year.
Deciding she didn’t care enough to even ask, she said, “Get out of my car.”
“Not yet. You and I need to have a talk, babe. I need help, and you’re going to give it to me.”
“Not this side of hell,” Jocelyn said flatly.
“Oh, I think you will.” His gloating expression sent a premonition of disaster through her. “You wouldn’t want old Lucas to find out that his oh-so-efficient administrative assistant and the half brother he hates were lovers, now would you?”
“We weren’t lovers!”
“You could try telling him that, but which of us do you think he’ll believe when I show him this. Mmm?”
Bill handed her a sheet of paper.
Gingerly Jocelyn took it with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach—a feeling that plummeted into nausea as she read. It was the copy of a receipt for a hotel room made out in her name and Bill’s. And unfortunately it was real.
Late last January he’d invited her on a skiing weekend in the Poconos. Thinking it sounded like fun, she’d agreed to go on the condition that they have separate rooms and that she pay all her own expenses. But when they’d arrived at the resort, she’d discovered that Bill had canceled her room earlier in the week and registered her into his.
Since Jocelyn had driven up from Philadelphia with Bill and the only local car rental place was closed for the night, she didn’t have any way to leave. The final straw was when she had tried to get her own room and been told that the lodge was filled to capacity.
Angry and frustrated, as much at her own gullibility as at Bill’s scheming, she had told Bill exactly what she thought of him. Then she had dragged half the blankets off the suite’s one bed and had curled up on the couch in the sitting area to spend a very uncomfortable night. First thing in the morning she left. It had been the last time she’d seen Bill.
“How did you know I was working for Lucas?” she said, trying to give herself time to think.
“Dear cousin Emmy. She was bragging about how she’d helped you find the job as old Lucas’s administrative assistant.”
“But why contact me now? I’ve had this job for six months.”
“Because I’ve suffered a few financial reverses.”
Bill shoved his fingers through his perfectly barbered hair. “To put it bluntly, I’ve spent every penny Dad left me, and if I can’t find a new source of income—”
“You’ll have to go to work like the rest of us?” she said unsympathetically. “Blackmailing me won’t help you. My entire life’s savings wouldn’t keep you for a week.”
“Not you, you stupid witch! Lucas.”
Jocelyn grimaced. “Surely you can’t think I have his power of attorney?”
“You always did think small,” he said coldly. “I don’t want to embezzle from the company. I want to take over the company. I can sell it for a fortune. It should have been mine, anyway.”
“Lucas’s father left it to him.” Jocelyn repeated what Emmy had told her.
“I think Lucas substituted a fake will for the real one. Mom does, too.”
Jocelyn watched as his mouth suddenly compressed, giving him a mean, vicious look, and she shivered, glad they were in an open parking lot in full view of any passersby.
“Has it occurred to either of you that Lucas’s father might not have had any choice but to leave the company to Lucas?” Jocelyn said. “From what Emmy said, the company originally belonged to Lucas’s mother. Maybe it was—” she gestured ineffectively “—whatever the modern-day equivalent of an entail is?”
“Not a chance. Mom was very careful to look up Dad’s first wife’s will before she married him. Lucas’s mother left everything she owned to her husband. No, the only explanation for why Dad didn’t leave the company to me was because Lucas substituted a fake will. And I want you to help me find the real one.”
“Use your head, Bill,” Jocelyn tried to reason with him. “Even if, for the sake of argument, there had been another will, why would Lucas keep the original? He would destroy it the first chance he got.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” Bill insisted. “He’d want to be able to gloat over it, thinking about how he’d outsmarted me and Dad. So you’re going to help me find that will or I’ll tell Lucas about us being lovers. And then where will your job be?”
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