a drink to hold on to kept her hands busy, though she’d learned from her father long ago to stick with club soda and lime at business receptions. “You’ve got to keep your wits about you,” he maintained. “You never know what might come up and you want that edge.”
Her father turned now and waved her over. She’d known the men he was talking with since she’d been in braces.
“Here she is, our secret weapon,” her father said.
“How go the fashion wars?” asked Danforth’s CFO Bernard Fox, portly but still dapper in a beautifully cut Armani suit.
“A Hun dressed in Versace is still a Hun,” Cilla said lightly.
“Good point. I hear Sam here wants us to come up with a strategy for thirty percent growth over the next three years,” said Burt Ruxton, longtime board member. “Since you’re the first timer at the meeting, we’ll let you come up with it.”
“Are you still holding a grudge over that time I dropped your satellite phone in the swimming pool, Uncle Burt?”
“Not at all. Although if profits go up thirty percent, you might finally get around to replacing it.”
Cilla’s father looked over her shoulder and brightened. “Ah. Here’s someone I want you to meet. About time you showed up,” he said more loudly.
“Checking my e-mail,” said a voice behind her.
A very familiar voice.
And Cilla turned and found herself nose to nose with Rand Mitchell.
“Rand, this is my daughter, Cilla. Cilla, this is Rand Mitchell. He’s doing some business development for us in Europe.”
She’d always thought jaws dropping was a figure of speech, at least until her own did. Surprise? Shock, more accurately. And she couldn’t help it. She laughed.
A corner of Rand’s mouth tugged up into a rueful smile in response.
“What’s the joke?” her father demanded, looking between them. “Do you two know each other?”
“Sort of,” she managed, working to tuck away her amusement. “I had a flat on the highway coming in and Rand was my good Samaritan.” He stood now in a gorgeous suit, looking polished, professional and entirely good enough to eat.
That probably wasn’t such a good idea anymore, she thought. Getting her body to agree, of course, was going to be the challenge.
“Well.” Sam Danforth clapped Rand on the shoulder. “Nice to see that you’re looking after Danforth’s important assets. Rand is our man in Europe,” he said to the rest of the group and introduced Rand around. “Thanks to him, we’re finally making a name for ourselves over there.”
“I bet you’re making a name here, too,” Cilla said.
SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE, Rand was fairly sure, had written a “Top Ten Business Don’ts” list, and at the top of that list had to be sleeping with the boss’s daughter. Stupid, brainless, dense. Normally, he’d be kicking himself up one side of the room and down the other.
Oddly, he wasn’t. The whole thing was too absurd to be taken seriously. After all, what were the chances?
As a committed fast-tracker, he supposed he had to wonder what impact his adventure with Danni—or Cilla, it now appeared—might have on his future. Then again, he’d never planned to stay at Danforth longer than the obligatory year, maybe less, if something appealing came calling.
“So you’re our man in Milan,” said Cilla.
“Cilla’s the couture buyer for Danforth’s and does some of the bridge-line buying for Forth’s,” her father put in. “We’ll have to get her involved with the European branches. Maybe you two can find some time to hunker down over that while we’re here.”
“We’ll be sure to do that,” Rand said blandly, wondering just what Papa Danforth would say about the kind of hunkering they’d been doing already.
Cilla kept a poker face. Of course, it didn’t do to think about poker at this point. Or getting her naked and having his hands on all that warm skin, or the way her body shuddered when he—
“So you’re the dot-com whiz.” Ruxton eyed him speculatively.
If “whiz” defined a man who’d made the better part of three million in an IPO and pissed three quarters of it away in a venture capital firm, maybe. Instead of raking in the bucks from the bonanza of IPOs launched by the legions of bright young things he’d funded, Rand had watched his investments die or go into hibernation, waiting for the market to return before considering an IPO. Until they went public, he couldn’t get his money back. Maybe one day, but it wouldn’t be any time soon.
Rand smiled briefly. “It was a wild ride while it lasted.”
Cilla tilted her head at him. “Would you do it again?”
He considered her question, well aware that his audience was far bigger than just her. “The experience didn’t make me afraid of taking chances—I think your biggest returns always come from thinking outside the box, and risk is always part of that. I learned a lot about moderation and hedging my bets, though. I’m probably better at gauging a situation than I was,” he added.
A response suitable for a job interview, Rand thought in satisfaction, which, in a way, this was. He’d spent the four months since he’d come on board at Danforth getting the Milan venture rolling. No one knew him, aside from looking at the reports on his project. Never hurt to impress the board, he figured.
Granted, the Danforth job didn’t represent the degree of challenge he was accustomed to, and the company was sure as hell a lot more conservative. Then again, by the time they’d come calling, he’d been unemployed for a year, waiting for the right opportunity to arise. A year, at his level, you could justify; more than that made you look like a problem candidate to future employers. So even though he hadn’t needed the money he’d said yes, reasoning that the European expansion was marginally interesting to him. Besides, any job that entailed being in stores that dressed beautiful women couldn’t be all bad.
“So you’re comfortable being back in the bricks-and-mortar world?” Fox watched him closely.
“If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be here,” Rand said with perfect truth. He wasn’t one of those idealists who thought everything about the world was going to go Internet, he was just a businessman who’d recognized potential when he saw it.
The cocktail hour wore on and he shook hands and made appropriately incisive or off-the-cuff remarks, depending on how he judged the situation. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cilla head out of the room. He circulated long enough to be discreet, then followed.
The foyer was lit with the warm light of sunset reflecting in through the wall of windows. Cilla stood near them, Mt. San Jacinto providing her backdrop.
“Danni? As in Danforth?”
“It was the best I could come up with.” She turned and looked at him apologetically. “It’s like Paris Hilton, people recognize the name, and I didn’t want to be recognized.”
“We swapped numbers this morning.” And it left him feeling shut out.
“I would have said something once I knew you better,” she told him. “It’s just hard. There are the stores and there’s all this money and I just wanted this morning to be about us…” She trailed off. “Does that make sense?”
Slowly, he nodded. He might not like it, but he could understand it. “So it never occurred to you that the guy you met in the hotel bar could be here for the Danforth meeting?”
“Did it occur to you in my case?” she countered.
He shrugged. “I knew Danforth had a daughter, but I thought you stayed out of management,” he told her.
“And