“Is that what I was doing?”
“We’re going to have a problem if you don’t take accountability for the changes you need to make. That’s why you hired me, right?”
No, he’d hired her because she liked to win. And because he had a score to settle with his father but, in lieu of being able to do that, he’d settle for taking a few chunks out of Xavier’s hide. Sabrina was his ticket to that. “I hired you because I need my inheritance. You have a proven track record working with executives to better their ability to lead. Nowhere did I agree to change.”
Sabrina blinked. “Then you’ve already decided that we’ve lost.”
No. That was not happening. If nothing else, he needed that money to undo all the damage Xavier would likely do to LBC without Val there to fix it.
“Sit,” he told her with a head jerk at one of the chairs as his temper started simmering again. Or maybe it hadn’t fully cooled from Xavier’s drive-by earlier.
To her credit, she didn’t argue and just did as he said, which wasn’t going to work either. He wanted a partner, not a lackey. “I’m a team player. Always. I don’t boss people around for the sake of getting my way. If your four-week plan includes strategies to turn me into a corporate shark, you can trash it. I need you on my side. To work with me to use my strengths and gloss over what you perceive to be my weaknesses. Can you do that?”
Sabrina let her spine relax against the back of the chair and shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“You promised me yesterday that we’d do this together. You moved me with that speech. Figure out a way,” he said. “And that’s as tyrannical as I’m going to get.”
There was no way in hell he’d let this job-switch mandate turn him into his father. Or, worse, into Xavier. But he was going to use his stint at LeBlanc to show everyone that, while his brother might have been their father’s favorite, Val could and would pass whatever test the old man posthumously threw down in his path—as long as he had Sabrina to help him avoid becoming the soulless corporate type his father had likely hoped this task would shape him into.
Together.
That was not a coaching strategy, not the way Val meant it. He was essentially asking her to get into the game with him, to be his Cyrano de Bergerac behind the scenes as he took the spotlight. Be in lockstep next to him, figuring out how to guide him on the fly.
Sabrina didn’t work that way. She needed to analyze. Study. Contemplate. Caution was her default for more reasons than one, and having a well-thought-out plan helped. Together in her mind meant supporting him as he followed the plan. Not that she’d be part of a team.
Sabrina was and always had been a team of one. She’d never disappointed herself, never cheated on herself, never broken her own heart. The only way to avoid all that was to stay far away from anyone who could possibly wield that type of power.
She glanced at the printed pages in her hand, the ones she’d worked on until midnight because she’d needed the distraction first and foremost, but also because she’d said she’d deliver her initial four-week plan today. None of which she could actually use if Val was serious about trashing anything that resembled either change or modeling him into a corporate executive.
Instead, he wanted her to storm the gates of the CEO office alongside him. The concept scared the bejesus out of her. But, at the same time, it felt like an unparalleled opportunity. What better way for her to glean the skills she needed to remake herself into a CEO? She’d been on the sidelines for many, many long years, parroting strategy to her clients in clinical one-off sessions that were more personal growth than nitty-gritty.
She couldn’t tell him no. Neither did she think yes made a lick of sense.
“Watching the gears turn in your head is fascinating.”
Sabrina made the mistake of glancing at Val. He hadn’t moved from his chair, but it didn’t matter. His presence filled the room, winnowing into corners with ease, and not all of those corners were in the room. He’d found plenty of her nooks and crannies too, even the ones that she’d have said were quite hidden beneath her layer of frost.
She hadn’t slept well last night, that was the problem. Too busy trying to banish Val’s sensual edge from her consciousness to sleep, but she’d finally given up, realizing far too late that she’d have had better luck willing her skin to change color.
“Really?” she commented mildly. “You should get out more if watching me think is the slightest bit interesting.”
“If you were just thinking, I might agree.” He tipped the chair a bit, peering at her from behind strands of his ridiculously long dark hair. The tips grazed his cheekbones for crying out loud. “You were doing far more than that. Come on. Spill. I want to know what you were so furiously working out in your head.”
She stared at him while scrambling to put parameters around a rapidly shifting dynamic. What was she supposed to do, admit that he was pushing her out of her comfort zone? Worse than that, he was pushing her, and she wasn’t pushing back. “Nowhere in our agreement does it say I have to share my thought process with you.”
The grin that flashed across his face shouldn’t have been so affecting. “That’s the whole basis of our agreement, Sabrina.”
And he should stop saying her name like that, as if they were intimate and he had a right to color his tone so richly when he spoke to her. Val at full throttle was throwing her off. They had to get out of this private office before he pushed her beyond what she could handle.
“Fine. I was thinking that I have to start from square one with you. That none of the strategies in this plan are going to work, since you’re being so stubborn.”
His chair swiveled as he contemplated her. “Good. Then that means I’m getting through to you. Dump that whole thing in the trash, and let’s start over. Figure out step one together.”
There was that word again. Together. As a team. She had the wildest urge to see what that felt like.
Blinking her eyes for a beat, strictly for fortification that did not come, she did as he suggested, sliding the entire file into the trash. Oh, God. She’d thrown away her game plan, her link to sanity. What was she doing? Without structure, she’d crumple. Wouldn’t she?
“You’re much braver than I was expecting,” Val told her quietly, and her gaze flew to his. He caught it easily and held on, letting so many nonverbal things tumble between them that she almost couldn’t breathe.
The compliment shouldn’t mean so much, but it did. It was bar none the most affecting thing anyone had ever said to her, and the greedy part of her soul that craved recognition gathered it up tight before it slipped away.
But Val wasn’t done slicing her open.
“What did you see in Xavier, anyway?”
She flushed, heat climbing across her cheeks. “That’s not relevant.”
She’d seen a powerful man who came with guarantees: she’d never trust him, never fall for him and never allow him to hurt her. None of which she’d admit to anyone, let alone her client. Why was Val so fixated on her relationship with Xavier? This wasn’t the first time he’d brought it up, and she had a sneaking suspicion it wouldn’t be the last.
Val shrugged. “It’s relevant to me because I don’t see you two together. You’re far too deep for him.”
That was a new one on her.
Most men called her icy or, at least, that’s what they said to her face. She didn’t have any illusions about what they called her behind her back, and that bothered her not at all since she purposefully cultivated a reputation for being remote