Voyeur - Lacey Alexander [50]
“So tell me about being a corporate raider,” she said a moment later as they sat down to dinner and Braden poured them both a second glass of wine. “Are all your takeovers hostile?” She raised her eyebrows, half teasing but truly curious.
Braden smiled at her playfulness. “Most are friendly, actually,” he admitted, much as he might have enjoyed making himself out to be some bad-ass rocking the corporate world. “I look for companies in trouble, find investors to go in with me, and arrange a buyout. Then I restructure the company—sometimes selling off parts of it, other times just reorganizing it to be more cost-effective. When a company is seriously in trouble, I can be doing them a big favor and they usually know it. Hence the lack of hostility,” he said with a grin.
“So you own all these companies, huh?” she asked, clearly impressed.
“Well, I own pieces of a lot of companies. Sometimes I sell the pieces off after I’ve made a good profit, and I use the money to orchestrate the next takeover.”
She tilted her head. “How does a guy get into this line of work, anyway? Did you tell your mother you wanted to be a corporate raider when you grew up?”
He chuckled. He loved her intelligent sense of humor and couldn’t remember the last time he’d found that particular element in a woman he was dating. “Actually, I started as a stockbroker fresh out of college. I was into deep analyzing companies and discovered I was good at it. Made a bundle for my clients—and for myself, too. Enough that I was able to start dabbling with small buyouts and, soon, enough that I didn’t need the broker’s commissions anymore.”
“You must be very good at what you do to make that much money at it.”
“The best,” he said, eyes on hers. He’d never seen any point in being modest.
“And you’re a pilot, too?”
“That’s just a hobby. I keep a little Cessna at the airport in Long Beach. Best feeling in the world, flying. Second only to sex.”
“I’ll stick with the sex,” she said, casting a flirtatious grin.
Under the table, he grazed his palm up her thigh. “I’ll help you with that.”
She let out a soft giggle. “You’re too kind.”
“And you’re too hot . . . for me to resist.” He found himself smiling, too, now, stretching farther, wanting to feel that perfectly smooth cunt again—but he couldn’t quite reach.
“You’re such a silver-tongued devil,” she teased.
“Hey, gotta keep up with my lover the writer.” He finally withdrew his touch, deciding he’d definitely be getting more of her later, and dug into his lasagna. “Speaking of which, the book still going well?”
She gave another nod. “Shockingly so.”
“Why is it shocking?”
“Well, I was completely without a story when I got here. Now it’s zipping along. And I’m not even sure where it’s headed—which is not the norm for me—but I’m just trusting the story to keep finding its way, and so far, it’s working like a charm. The last few days have been the kind writers dream of—where the words just flow without thought. Totally amazing.”
He listened to her pretty sigh, and said, “Maybe it’s like flying.”
She tilted her head, gave him a slow smile. “Yeah. Maybe it is.”
The pleasurable silence hung between them—perhaps a beat too long. At least too long for his comfort. He liked her, a lot, but he’d never been into relationships, so even thinking about how pretty her eyes were or how in sync their thoughts felt at this moment seemed like a bad idea. Time for a new topic. “You don’t seem much like Monica.”
She didn’t look surprised. “Opposites attract, I guess, even in friendship sometimes. Now, you, on the other hand, seem exactly like Monica.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”
“Confident. Take charge. Sex-crazy.”
He blinked. “Monica is sex-crazy?”
And she flinched.