Then again, maybe he should get this interview over and done with as soon as possible. Might as well see if she was as good in person as she looked on paper.
Nero pushed the button on the intercom again. “Take her into my office, James.”
“Very good, Mr. de Santis.”
Nero lounged back in his chair, watching as James entered the sitting room, going over to where Phoebe Taylor sat. She gave him a pleasant smile, betraying no sign of impatience, all calm self-possession, as if she could have quite happily sat there for another couple of hours.
Fuck. Maybe he should let her. Maybe he should have tested her further, the way he did sometimes with people who intrigued him.
Ah, but there was plenty of time for that.
In the privacy of his control room, Nero bared his teeth as Phoebe disappeared through the sitting-room doorway, on her way to his office.
Looked like his day was just about to get interesting.
* * *
There were two chairs in Nero de Santis’s office. A huge black-leather executive chair that sat behind the dark oak monolith of his desk, and a much smaller, much more uncomfortable-looking one that sat in front of it.
Phoebe didn’t need to guess which one was meant for her. She walked straight toward the uncomfortable-looking one as soon as de Santis’s butler showed her into his office.
And, indeed, as she sat down, it was as uncomfortable as it looked.
Then again, she’d spent much of the last two years sitting around in many different sorts of uncomfortable chairs, so it wasn’t anything she wasn’t used to.
She was used to waiting, too.
The office was deathly silent, not even the noise from the city penetrating from outside.
Phoebe folded her hands in her lap, resolutely ignoring the flutter of nervousness in her stomach. Just like she resolutely ignored the doubt that was also sitting there.
Before she’d gotten the interview for the job, she’d asked around the few job contacts she had left, trying to get what information she could about New York’s most reclusive billionaire and the position she’d seen advertised on an online job site. A position with a salary that seemed almost . . . obscene.
And then her friends had told her why the money was obscene. Because Nero de Santis was the biggest bastard to walk the earth and no one wanted to work with him. “Run and run far, far away” had been the opinion of her contacts
Unfortunately, though, Phoebe was not in a position to run far, far away.
She needed money, and she needed obscene amounts of it. Fast. And the position of Nero de Santis’s personal assistant seemed the best and easiest way of getting it. Certainly, much easier than stripping, which had been one brief thought that had occurred to her at 2 A.M. the previous night.
No, she didn’t really want to do that, nor did she want to do any of the other seedy-sounding jobs that had also been on that same job website, offering the same kind of money and making Nero de Santis’s job offer look like a ticket to paradise.
Phoebe gave a small inward sigh, resisting the urge to check her phone just in case there had been any updates on Charles. He’d contracted an infection recently, which was worrying since the immune systems of coma patients weren’t exactly robust. Then again, the doctors had told her they’d contact her if there was any change in his condition, and they hadn’t, so presumably everything was fine.
Didn’t stop the worry though, which was not what she needed right now.
Ruthlessly pushing aside her anxiety, Phoebe looked around the room instead, trying to distract herself.
She’d tried to do some research on Nero de Santis, but surprisingly hadn’t managed to find much. He was some kind of computer genius and managed the tech arm of DS Corp, one of the U.S.’s biggest weapons companies. He was also reputed to be a recluse, never leaving his Upper East Side mansion, and was infamous for treating his staff very, very poorly indeed.
He’d also clearly designed his office to intimidate anyone sitting in it.
The walls were dark green, half paneled in dark oak, and lined with heavy oak bookshelves, all stuffed full of officious looking leather bound tomes. There was a huge stag’s head hung on the wall behind the desk, the antlers gleaming lethally in the dim light coming through the windows, the animal’s glass eyes directed on the chair she was currently sitting in, which was unnerving.
The desk itself was massive, looking like it had been carved out of a single tree, the chair behind it as imposing as a throne. There was nothing on desk itself but a slim, black computer screen.
Phoebe frowned at the room in general. It definitely wasn’t comfortable, like the sitting room she’d just left. There was a chill in the air and a dark heaviness to the atmosphere that was . . . oppressive. And it might have gotten to her if she hadn’t spent the last two years in different hospital waiting rooms, dealing with officious and self-important medical staff.
But she had. So she didn’t feel either oppressed by the atmosphere or intimidated. She only felt irritated at being kept waiting. Though she was starting to think that might be intentional, too, and given what she’d already heard about Nero de Santis, she wouldn’t be at all surprised.
To pass the time, she hummed under her breath, a song from Evita, one of her favorite musicals, and went over the last meeting she’d had with the manager of the private hospital Charles was currently staying in. The woman had given Phoebe a new fee schedule, which was pretty much going to bankrupt her if she wasn’t careful. In order to pay for his care, she’d already used up the money she and Charles had saved to buy their own home, and if she wanted to keep him where he was, getting the best treatment he could, she was going to have to find another way to pay for it.
This job in other words.
At that moment, a door behind the desk opened, and she nearly jumped because it had been half-hidden by one of those enormous bookcases, and she hadn’t noticed it before.
A man walked through it.
Phoebe blinked.
She hadn’t been able to find any images of Nero de Santis, so she had no preconceived ideas of what he looked like. But in some dim region of her brain, she’d constructed the impression of a small, nasty little man, because in her experience the most difficult men were always small and nasty.
Apparently, Nero was neither.
Her first impression was that he was big. Actually, no, not just big, he was giant. He towered over that monolithic desk like Godzilla over a tiny Japanese skyscraper, and she hadn’t missed the fact that his head had almost brushed the top of the doorframe as he’d walked through it.
And he wore a suit, which she found confusing since he wasn’t built like any businessman she’d ever worked with. In fact, he was built more like a pro-wrestler or heavyweight boxer than some tech genius, the dark gray suit jacket pulling tight over massive shoulders, insanely muscled arms, and a hard, broad chest.
She swallowed, her gaze roving helplessly over his impressive physique, trying to reconcile her hazy idea of small nastiness with the massive, muscled reality, before finally settling on his face.
She felt something kick hard inside her.
His features were rough, but there was a brutal sort of masculine charisma to them that she found almost mesmerizing. A hard blade of a nose, strong jawline, and broad, carved cheekbones. His eyes were as black as his shaggy hair, his gaze holding hers with an intensity that stole the breath from her lungs.
He stood there only a minute, staring at her, and then he was moving with the easy, loping stride of a wolf or a panther, coming straight toward her. And she found herself tensing up in her chair, bracing herself as if she was standing in the path of an avalanche and there was nowhere for her to run.
He stopped in front of her, standing between her and his huge desk, looming over her, making her feel like she was the size of an ant.
His eyes glittered and there was something feral in them, something that made her mouth go dry and fear curl up tightly in her chest. She could suddenly see why Mr. Nero de Santis had difficulty finding a personal assistant who lasted longer than a week.
“So,” he said without any niceties at all. “You want to be my assistant?” His voice was deep, harsh, with a gravelly quality to it that for some reason felt like a velvet cloth rubbed roughly against her skin.
She stiffened, not liking the sensation. In fact, she didn’t much like the punch-to-the-gut response to him, full stop. She rarely let people get under her skin, but she had a feeling that if she wasn’t careful, he could. It would pay to proceed with caution from here on out.
Controlling her instinctive irritation at his rudeness, Phoebe met his gaze calmly. “Yes, that’s the general idea.”
“Why?”
The abruptness of the question caught her off guard. “Why do I want to be your assistant, you mean?”
He folded his arms, the fabric of his jacket pulling tight across his massive shoulders, and stared at her with the same kind of unblinking intensity as a great cat would stare a deer it would quite like to eat. “That’s what I asked. Don’t make me repeat myself.”
She blinked at the roughness of his tone. Okay, so she was starting to get more of an idea of why this man was considered so difficult. He was rude. Then again, she’d dealt with rudeness before, quite frequently. In fact, she’d gotten quite a name for herself as being an assistant who could handle difficult people, so she was pretty sure she could handle Nero de Santis, despite whatever rumors there were about him.