He slammed a mental door on his errant fantasy.
“Because she isn’t your type at all. She’s too … stuffy,” Maddy said.
Lily’s head whipped around, brown eyes wide, full lips pinched. He swore and punched the speaker button off. “Enjoy Switzerland, Maddy. Let me handle the rest.”
He snapped the phone shut. Lily was looking away again, her focus very firmly on the scenery out the window.
He wanted to touch her. To see if he could make her melt. To see what it would take to get her to loosen her hair, to get her to unbutton a little bit. Or all the way. It was easy for him to picture her naked, her perfect, petite body on display for him. She was so pale … the thought of all that milky white skin contrasting against his black sheets was the most erotic fantasy his subconscious had ever created for him.
Two things kept him from exploring the fantasy. First, she was an employee, and that was a no-go as far as he was concerned. Second, she had serious written all over her. He didn’t do serious. Not in his sexual relationships. He’d done serious. Not in romantic relationships, but his entire childhood and young adult years had been nothing but responsibility.
His mother had done okay raising him to a point, but Maddy had been a late-in-life surprise, and his mother hadn’t been willing to miss more years on the job to raise a child she hadn’t wanted. His father had always put his career first and had even less time for Maddy. And that left him. He was fifteen years older and more than capable of caring for her.
When he was twenty-five, just out of college and making his first million in property development, Maddy had called and told him it had been three days since anyone had been home, and she hadn’t had anything to eat. He’d gone to get her and she’d lived with him from the age of ten until she’d gone to college. That was a lot of serious for a confirmed bachelor who had his own career to try and build. Fortunately, he’d had a network of good friends that had helped him try to balance work and what basically amounted to sudden parenthood.
He didn’t resent it and he would never have given it up for anything, but he was done with that. In his estimation, he’d raised a child, when he’d been much too young to do it, and he had no intention of going there again. He’d already dealt with the angst of a teenage girl’s first crush, threatened her dates with bodily harm if they laid a hand on her, helped her find a dress for prom, then seen her off to college.
And despite the fact that Lily certainly didn’t seem like the kind of woman who had a biological clock ticking, she still read serious. She didn’t date very often and she was probably the kind of woman that took a certain amount of seduction before she engaged in a physical relationship.
He preferred women who were fun and uncomplicated, and if that made him shallow in the eyes of the press, that was fine with him. He was the one who had to live his life, and as long as he was happy with it, he didn’t concern himself with the opinions of others.
Except when it came to Maddy.
“So, now what? We have to go to galas together?” Lily asked, her voice dry. What Maddy had said bothered her that was obvious. And if she hadn’t been so very off-limits he would have offered comfort. But he only knew two ways to do that. One was parental, and one was decidedly not. He imagined neither would be welcome.
“I was thinking a romantic getaway,” he said, enjoying the way her lips tightened further. He wasn’t used to seeing Lily flustered, but she was exactly that about the whole situation.
“And what about our jobs?”
“It will be a working getaway of course. I was planning on going to Thailand to check on the resort progress sometime in the next week. And now seems like a perfect time. Maddy’s in Switzerland until the story blows over, and she’ll be at one of my resorts, so the security will be tight, and with that taken care of, we can get publicity for the resort.”
“And for us,” Lily returned dryly.
“Doesn’t hurt.”
Lily’s heart beat faster. Curse the man. “If Maddy is taken care of …”
“We still have to see this through. If you’re caught lying so blatantly, your credibility will be destroyed. Along with the rest of your career.”
And curse him again, he was right. That was always the risk with this job. There was a fine line between bending the truth and outright lies. She avoided lies whenever she could, but ultimately, her client’s image—or in this case, his sister’s—was her concern. But if she was caught being … economical … with the truth, the media would never take her seriously again. Credibility, once it was damaged like that, was not an easy thing to repair.