Her breath hitches and she jerks her face away. “Unfortunately for you, so do I.”
The elevator doors open then, and she stalks away. I watch her go, admiring the round curve of her ass in that fucking dress until the elevator doors close again.
Evangeline Rutherford.
She’s not just a pretty face. She’s also strong. Authoritative. Intriguing. Bossy. Definitely not my type.
But maybe I never really knew my type at all.
Chapter Three
Evangeline
That night, I come home alone to my empty apartment on River Street. I don’t bother turning on any lights as I walk back to my bedroom, my heels dangling from one hand as my other hand loosens the bobby pins holding my hair. I admire myself in the closet mirror one more time before unzipping the dress and letting it pool around my bare feet.
Agnes was right.
Not that I will ever tell her that.
But the best decision I ever made was to walk into that club in this dress and wield my womanhood like a weapon. I’ve spent years trying to hide from my femininity and prove myself in a man’s world. Being a woman was a weakness, something for them to take advantage of. But not tonight.
Tonight, I’d had the upper hand. Using my differences to my own advantage had never occurred to me. Those boys hadn’t been expecting me, and even though I wasn’t exactly successful, I at least got a good glimpse of what I was up against.
And a glimpse of Losev Turgenev.
Holy shit.
That man is hot enough to make my panties melt. With his dark, close-cropped hair and sharp, well-defined features. The way his strong jaw tightens when he looks at me. His strong, muscled chest and arms in his perfectly tailored suit jacket. The unmistakable bulge in his pants when he stood in front of me on the elevator. I swear when he touched me, my skin ignited. The sudden desire to strip and climb him like a tree was more than just physical attraction. It was something deep and visceral. It didn’t matter that he was an arrogant asshole. My body reacted to him on an instinctual level.
I desire you, Ms. Rutherford, and I have a way of always getting what I want.
As I stand in my tiled shower, letting the hot water run over my shoulders, I close my eyes and can hear his words and the deep rumble of his voice as clearly as if he were standing in front of me. Not just hear it, but feel it down into my core. I imagine Losev behind me, his chest pressed against my back, his lips on my neck where he touched me. My hand dips between my legs and I touch my aching clit, swirling languid circles over it. My other hand squeezes one of my breasts, pinching the tight nipple.
What would it be like to be with him? To let him take control?
I bring myself quickly to orgasm, and when I come, it’s his name that echoes through my large, empty bathroom.
♦ ♦ ♦
“So.” Anna sits in the chair across from me and lowers her tablet. “How was it?”
“A disaster,” I answer truthfully. I can’t believe I let Losev have that effect on me. It’s embarrassing, really, and I flush as I think about my late-night shower activities.
Anna’s mouth twists in disappointment. “That bad?”
I sigh and turn away from my computer screen. “No, not really. They were not receptive, as I expected, but at least I got their attention.” Remembering what Andrej Novak said, I add, “I think if I can get a membership to the rich-boy’s club, they’ll do business with me.”
“You mean the Oakwood Club?”
I nod.
“It’s men only. It’s always been that way.”
“Seems to me it’s time to shake things up.” A plan forms in my mind as I say, “Forget whatever else you’re doing today. Instead, I want you to find out everything you can about the club. Find me a way in.”
I’m not going to back down. There are people counting on me. RGM employs hundreds of people in the city alone, and thousands nationally. A new market will open up dozens of jobs, if not hundreds once we expand. Creating those opportunities is important to me, too.
I grew up with a single mother who barely had two dimes to rub together. We ate ramen noodles and canned beans for weeks on end sometimes while my mom saved to buy the small market in the building on the corner. The first thing she did when she could finally afford it was hire another single mom who had been living on the streets.
It may be hard for the Oakwood Boys to understand, but that’s what Rutherford Global Markets is all about.
Not the money.
But its people.
And the more I expand, the more people I help. If I can save just a few kids from growing up on the streets, that’s a win. That’s why I can’t give up on this. Well, that and now I want to see the Oakwood Boys eat their words.
I try to be productive for the rest of the day. Gina accepts her new position as head of HR. I meet with the board before lunch and field a bunch of questions about the City Center project, or lack thereof. Then I travel to one of our building sites in Sugar Hill to meet with the contractors.
When I get back to the office, Anna is waiting for me. “You won’t believe what I found.”
“What?” I take off my suit jacket and sit, glad to get off my feet. I love all my shoes, but walking around a construction site in my Jimmy Choo pointy-toe pumps maybe wasn’t the best decision.
“The Oakwood Club is owned by a group called City Entertainment,” she says, studying her tablet. “They own a couple nightclubs and that new movie theater that opened in the Grove. Anyway, after some digging, it turns out City Entertainment is owned by…” She trails off and looks up at me. “I’ll give you one guess.”
It can’t be. “Turgenev Holdings.”
“Ding, ding, ding.”
I sigh and lean back in my chair. Losev fucking Turgenev literally holds the keys to everything I need right now, and there’s no way he’ll give anything up willingly.
“So, once I found that out, I figured you would want some more information on our boy.” She looks back down at the tablet. “He’s pretty clean, but I tracked down someone who knows his assistant, and he did tell me a couple interesting things.”
“Anna, you sneak.”
She shrugs but smiles, pleased with herself. “We have to watch out for each other, you know?”
“What interesting things?” I prod.
She rattles off facts about his family and his connections to the Royal Underground, none of which particularly interest me. He has a house on River Street, which doesn’t surprise me, though the fact that she knows his address and the value and square footage of the house is a little disturbing. She knows which office is his inside the Turgenev building, and she knows that every day around eight o’clock, he personally goes to the Mug Shot Cafe around the corner for his morning pick-me-up.
“He collects cars,” she says at one point, catching my attention.
I don’t have a lot of splurges, but I have a weakness for nice cars stemming from a childhood spent in my neighbor’s garage, drinking orange soda and watching him tinker under the hoods of various cars until my mom got home. I’d called him Uncle Andy and he was the only father figure I had even though he was no relation to me, and he and my mom were never more than friends.
“Patience, perseverance, and hard work can solve a lot of your problems,” he’d tell me, showing me how to check the oil and change a tire and do other minor repairs.