LITMIR.BIZ

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and closed the drawer, chuckling. “I’ll be honest with you, Stevens, having corporate staff substitute for retail associates is more about giving you stuffed shirts in your ivory tower a taste of the real business than letting the sales staff off for the day, though they do deserve it since they’re the real money-makers.”

      Stevens made a face. “Point taken. But I don’t see what that has to do with sponsoring a soccer team against company policy.”

      “It hasn’t a thing to do with it,” Darren admitted. “I just wanted to get to know the lady.”

      Stevens rolled his eyes. “Five hundred dollars to get to know a woman, when you’ve got a whole string of them dangling after you?”

      “It’s my five hundred bucks,” Darren said with a shrug.

      “What about the company policy?”

      “My company, my policy.”

      “And how long do you suppose it’ll be before she figures out you’re D. K. Rudell instead of simple Darren Rudd?”

      Darren grinned. “Long enough, I hope.”

      Stevens shook his distinguished gray head. “I do not understand you, sir. I have never understood you. I don’t think I ever will.”

      Darren laughed and clapped his vice-president of operations on the shoulder. “Stevens, weren’t you ever young and single?”

      “Of course.”

      “Well?”

      “Well what?”

      “Didn’t you ever run the race just for the joy of the chase?”

      “I couldn’t afford such indulgences,” Stevens intoned dolefully.

      Darren shook his head in pity, then grinned unrepentantly and crowed, “Well, I can, and I have a closetful of track shoes to prove it.”

      “And the notches on your bedpost, no doubt,” Stevens muttered.

      Darren tapped his temple with a forefinger. “The only record I need is right up here.”

      “Let us hope you keep it there,” Stevens said with a sniff. In another life, Darren mused, Stevens had undoubtedly been an English butler. No one else could be that starchy. Still, he was a genius at corporate management. Thanks to him and his team, RuCom ran like a well-oiled machine. His only real fault was in his attitude toward the sales staff, whom Stevens and most of the other executives in the corporate office considered beneath them, when in reality they were the lifeblood of the company. Darren had instituted a yearly Retail Staff Appreciation Day as a means of giving his corporate staff a taste of real retailing, and being one who believed in leading by example, at least in his business life, he had gladly taken a turn behind the counter.

      In truth, he’d thought it would be just like the old days when he’d been struggling to find his niche in a marketplace dominated by giants, but it wasn’t. Too much water had gone under the bridge since he’d opened his first shop in Lubbock, fresh out of college at Texas Tech. The water had rushed under that bridge, actually, sweeping him along with it, and now he was the biggest boy in the business. Sometimes he missed the old days—but not for long. He made a mental note to ditch the Porsche and go with the Caddy when he met Charly on Thursday.

      Charly. Odd nickname for a woman, especially one that looked like her, not that she was drop-dead gorgeous or anything. Now that he thought about it, she wasn’t his usual type at all. He tended to gravitate toward the heavily, usually surgically, endowed sort. He liked long hair, blond preferably, blue eyes and stunning figures, stiletto heels and red lipstick. What was it about redheaded, shapely but unremarkable Charly that revved his engines so? It certainly wasn’t the way she dressed! He’d had Sunday school teachers who dressed with more pizzazz.

      Funny, he hadn’t thought about that at the time. Now that he did, he was pretty sure she hadn’t been wearing any makeup. Her squarish face was pretty, yes, in a wholesome fashion, her mouth pleasingly plump and dusky rose, nose short and, well, neither wide nor narrow, blunt nor pointed. Her brows were straight, short dashes of red-brown above round eyes that were definitely her best feature. An odd golden color mottled with specks of green and blue, they were rimmed with thick lashes much brighter and lighter than her brows. He’d had the strange sensation of waking up to find those eyes gazing at him from the next pillow, their red-gold lashes sparkling with morning light. He wondered what she’d be like in bed.

      He always wondered what they’d be like in bed. That’s what kept him moving on, what made him one of the hottest top ten bachelors in the nation, according to the press, that and the millions he had stashed away. He didn’t fool himself that his appeal to the opposite sex was strictly personal, and while he was definitely not above taking advantage of the appeal of his millions, it secretly rankled, just a bit, that his luck with women had improved so phenomenally once his business had taken off. Maybe Charly was his chance to put that old hang-up to rest. Maybe that was why he’d invented a new identity for himself on the spur of the moment.

      Something had told him that Charlene Michman Bellamy would run from D. K. Rudell. So he’d be Darren Rudd and let her run to him instead. It would be a new experience, and new experience, after all, was the name of the game, wasn’t it? Same old same old got boring all too quickly, especially these days. Yeah, it was worth five hundred bucks and more just to see if plain Darren Rudd could pull it off.

      Stevens had worried that she might be running a scam, that she might not be who she said she was or soliciting funds for anything other than her own use, but Darren didn’t believe it for a minute. She was much too genuine, this Charly. She might be, in fact, the most genuine article he’d ever come across. He shook his head, wondering why that mattered, why it intrigued. But in the end, he didn’t really care: the game was in play, and, as always, he intended to win.

      Chapter Two

      She was waiting in the parking garage, ostensibly adjusting the strap of a sandal with a four-inch-high heel, her firm rump all but exposed by the minuscule skirt of her spandex slip dress, when he slid the silver sport car into its assigned space. As he got out of the car, she straightened and feigned surprise, one long-nailed hand flying up to her chest and calling attention to the abundant cleavage exposed by the two tiny triangles which comprised the bodice of the so-called dress. Frowning, she adopted a petulant air, rippling her leonine mane with a practiced toss of her head.

      “I’m glad I ran into you like this, D.K. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about yesterday.”

      He activated the antitheft device on the car by depressing a button in the tiny remote attached to his key chain and said drolly, “So you’ve decided to apologize for stepping out of line—way, way out of line—and making that scene yesterday.”

      She folded her arms beneath her ample breasts and threw out a hip, red mouth pursed in an effort to appear either hurt or repentant and managing neither, despite great inducement. Tawny Beekman had been living rent-free in a luxurious apartment two floors below the penthouse that Darren Keith Rudell called home. He’d offered it to her as a means of helping her straighten out her abysmal finances, since he owned the building, the apartment had been empty and she’d been evicted by her roommate. The couple of months’ reprieve he’d initially offered had stretched to nearly a year, with Tawny tearfully declaring over and over again that she couldn’t afford a decent apartment since she’d given up “dancing” for a living. She was supposedly supporting herself as a waitress, but he had his doubts. During that year she had done her best to renew their brief affair, though he had deliberately ended their very casual sexual relationship even before she’d moved into the building.

      D. K. Rudell knew better than to let his casual affairs come too close. He never made passes at the women who lived in his building or worked in his employ. He never played around with married women or the family members of his friends or business acquaintances. He made certain that no woman ever spent an entire night in his bed, and he never, but never, gave any woman, save the cleaning lady and his sister,

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