Wrong Brother, Right Man

“I’m not admitting anything of the sort,” she shot back primly. “I’m saying this is uncharted water. If I’m not reshaping you into a CEO, what am I doing?”

“Winning,” he said succinctly. “Just as soon as you figure out if we’re on shaky ground or in uncharted water.”

The man was going to unglue her. “Are you deliberately trying to sabotage this?”

He abruptly extricated himself from behind his desk and sidled around it to end up on her side of it, leaning against the edge as he towered over her. This close, his masculine scent couldn’t be ignored, and her needy, treacherous insides sniffed it out instantly, inhaling him in one gulp.

Mayday! Val was not for her. She had rules about dating clients, rules about men like him, rules about her rules. Why was all of that so hard to remember when he pursed his perfect lips and watched her with undisguised wickedness sparking in his expression?

“I’m deliberately trying to get you out from behind your walls so we can work together. You’ve got more land mines ringing you than a military outpost in Iraq. I get that I’m asking you to do this gig differently than you’re used to, and that there’s no tried and true formula that fits me. I trust that we’re going to figure it out. Together,” he stressed.

Trust. That was a word that didn’t get thrown around in her world very often. But if she’d engendered his, great. That was a fantastic first step. Unfortunately, it was the first in a long line of them.

“Then you have to trust me when I say that the first step is that makeover.” Please, God, get him the hell out of this office, and make him go somewhere else. “You need a wardrobe that tells people that you’re the one who makes the decisions. Then you don’t have be a shark because people already recognize your power even before you open your mouth.”

He nodded once and extended his hand. “You have to come with me. That’s part of the deal.”

“What? No. I’m not going with you.” She needed decompression time, best done miles and miles away from Val.

“Yes,” he said simply and wiggled his fingers. “We’re a team. I need your critical eye. What if the suits I get give people the wrong message? Come on. We can talk about next steps at the same time.”

Yeah, no, that was not happening. She did not take men shopping for suits. Or anything else. That was entirely too intimate an activity. “That’s what the tailor is for. You explain what you’re looking for, and he creates it. When you’re spending five grand on a suit, they tend to be a little better than average at customer service.”

“This is why you have to come,” he returned without blinking an eye and pushed his hand further into her space. “Because there is no way I can actually hand someone my credit card to purchase suits that cost five thousand dollars. You’re going to have to do it for me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Seriously?”

Judging by the mulish glint in his gaze, she had two choices. She could test out which one of them could hold out the longest or give up now since he didn’t intend to concede. He’d spent the better part of fifteen minutes laying out how this coaching assignment needed to work differently than her other ones, and either she could climb on board his crazy train now or keep fighting him—and losing.

“Fine,” she spit out for the second time this morning, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. “But I can stand on my own.”

He didn’t move his hand. “The offer to help you out of your chair has nothing to do with your abilities and everything to do with my character. The faster you learn that, the easier this is going to go.”

That sank in much more quickly than she would have credited and, for God knew what reason, she believed him. Or, rather, she accepted that he thought it was true. She’d expended an enormous amount of energy trying to be accepted into a man’s world, and letting one treat her like a woman didn’t get her anywhere but frustrated. Val was in a class by himself and probably really didn’t get the dynamic, nor would he if she explained it. So she opted to skip the lecture about sexual politics in the c-suite and clasped his hand.

The shock of it swept over them, and he didn’t even bother to hide the result. Awareness swamped her, heightened by the decidedly carnal edge to his smile as he pulled her to her feet, which didn’t diminish the snap, crackle and pop in the least. He still leaned on the desk, only now she had him boxed in against it, and the delicious position put her in a reckless frame of mind.

How else could she explain the sudden urge to step into his space and pin him to the desk as she kissed him?

She didn’t do either. Yanking her hand free through an enormous burst of will that she hoped never to have to muster again, she stepped away.

The tension should have been severed instantly. But no. Her skin prickled with a strange, shivery sort of heat that made her restless. She could not stop her muscles from flexing. Rationally she recognized it as a fight-or-flight adrenaline response pumping through her body, but that didn’t make the experience any easier.

Nor did she believe for a moment that, if Val closed that distance, fighting him would be her first instinct.

“If we’re going shopping, we should leave,” she told him hoarsely and cleared her throat. “The faster we get that done, the faster we can move on.”

“I’ll drive,” he offered, and it was so not fair that he had the capacity to sound normal when her insides were a quivering mess. Over a touch of their hands that lasted less than a half a second, no less.

She had to pretend everything was kosher. “Whatever. That’s fine.”

It turned out that being wedged into Val’s SUV gave her none of the reprieve she’d been hoping for. The vehicle was roomy enough, but he drove with his elbow on the center console and, when he turned corners, his arm drifted over into her space. She spent the entire drive trying to make herself smaller so he didn’t accidentally graze her, which was enough of an indicator that she should have been adamant about not going on this shopping trip.

The exclusive shopping center he’d selected near Grant Park had the right qualifications for the type of look she’d envisioned for him. They walked into the suit shop, which had maybe five of its wares on display, and her brain had just enough functional cells left to figure out that he’d brought her to a place that custom-made suits, as opposed to selling ready-to-wear. Of course, that was what a man built like Val needed. He was tall, with a wiry frame that matched his brother’s pretty well, and that was literally the last thing she needed to focus on at this inopportune moment.

The sales clerk or tailor or whatever title people held in a place she had no business being in rushed over to start working his magic on Val. Sabrina hung back, seriously thinking about slinking to the car. What value would she have at this point, anyway? Her job was to ensure he crossed the finish line, which was way off in the distance.

That’s when Val motioned her forward to introduce her to the clerk. “This is my companion. She’s going to make sure I’m dressed appropriately.”

So that was it then. She’d been dragged into the entire process, bless him. “I thought I was just here to pay.”

A giggle almost burst free of its own free will. How was that for a nice reversal? The clerk probably thought he was the gold digger and she’d brought him here to get him clothed for her world. In that scenario, he’d definitely be trading sexual favors for the privilege.

“You’re also here for moral support,” he told her, and the clerk whisked him away to a fitting area to take his measurements, which no one seemed to expect her to participate in, thank God.

She took the reprieve and sank into one of the plush couches near the bay windows, phone in hand so she could read the slew of emails that had stormed her inbox in the hour since she’d last checked it. The joys of being a team of one. There was no assistant to take care of the minutiae, which normally she enjoyed since it meant she was the only person accountable for ensuring her success.