Hypnotic Seduction (The Seduction Series) (2 page)

“That’s not what I meant,” she explained. You’re very handsome for—”

“I understand.” He squeezed her arm. “You just don’t see me as a prospective admirer.”

She envied women who could relax around the opposite sex. After years of living in her centerfold/actress mother’s shadow, Hannah’s matronly
figure
and short stature made her feel as desirable as a fire hydrant. Not surprising, seeing as Cotton Candy Oliver’s X-rated body and beautiful face could make even a NFL cheerleader feel plain and frumpy.

“You know—” Edward cocked one bushy white eyebrow. “—my grandson works here and has been looking for a new assistant. I could probably get you an interview this afternoon.”

“You’re kidding? That’d be great!” Now that she was paying the rent on her own, she needed to find a job fast—
as in yesterday
. Her dentist would just have to understand if she had to cancel. She pressed the bag with the two remaining cookies into Edward’s hand. “Have these, too. You deserve them.”

“I’m glad to help. You’re exactly the kind of assistant Jordan needs.” As he folded her résumé and stood, the top of his head brushed the canopy of blossoms. “Let’s go.”

Even with pink flower petals scattered in his hair, the distinguished old man still looked virile and debonair. Hannah waited while he tapped the ashes out of his pipe and stowed it in the pocket of his pale blue sport shirt with the cookies.

She followed the aromatic scent of tobacco clinging to him into the lobby where the uniformed guard at the reception desk snapped to attention. “How are you today, Sir?”

“You signed Miss Oliver in earlier. I’m taking her up to meet my grandson.”

“Sure thing.” The redheaded man handed her another visitor’s pass. “Good luck.” His conspiratorial wink seemed to include more than his best wishes.

“Thanks,” Hannah responded. While crossing the lobby, their clicking footsteps echoed off the glass atrium’s marble floor. Glancing sideways at Edward, she whispered, “You must visit pretty often.”

“Actually, I worked here until I retired ten months ago.”

“Oh.” She tipped her head and studied him while they waited for the elevator. “Has anyone ever mentioned you look a lot like Sean Connery when he made
Hunt for Red October
?”

“Dozens of people. And I’m insulted every time.”

“Why? I’d think you’d be flattered.
People
magazine once named him the Sexiest Man Alive.”

“For one, I don’t lisp. And I’m much better looking than Mr. Connery.” Edward smiled, patting his head. “I still have most of my hair.” He guided her into the elevator and punched the button marked twelve.

“Your grandson must be pretty high in the pecking order to have an office on the top floor.”

“He is.” Edward opened his mouth as if he were about to say more and then clamped it shut a moment. “Uhh—don’t let Jordan intimidate you. He’s a bit overbearing at times, but deep down he’s a softie.”

“Does he look like James Bond, too?”

“Only if you have a younger Pierce Brosnan in mind.”

Even better. As a teenager, she’d developed a crush on the gorgeous actor on the only occasion her mother took her to see a movie, which had been
Tomorrow Never Dies
. Of course, considering Hannah’s last reckless relationship, if she ever agreed to work for a movie star, she’d be smart to stick with someone like Woody Allen.

“Unfortunately, Jordan makes 007 seem like an amateur with the ladies.”

Great. Just what she needed—working for another skirt-
chaser.
“Did I happen to mention my worm of an ex-fiancé was also my last boss?”

“Don’t worry. My grandson may be a womanizer, but I promise he never mixes his love life with business. Anything you hear to the contrary is pure rumor.” Edward heaved a sigh. “Still, at the rate he’s going, I may never get any great-grandchildren.”

She understood how Edward felt. Since a woman’s fertility dropped drastically after thirty-five, time was running out on her white-picket-fence fantasy. If Mr. Right didn’t show up in the next year or so, she’d have
to seriously consider
artificial insemination.
Ick
.

She had no desire to engage in a
ménage à
trois
with a doctor and a sterile turkey
baster
. Not to mention, being illegitimate, she wanted her child to know his father and be part of the traditional family she’d always missed.

When the elevator slid open, a shapely
brunette
ran into Edward in her haste to board. Sobbing, she pointed a trembling finger at the double carved doors across the hall. “Don’t go in there unless you want to get your head bitten off.”

A deep voice bellowed inside, “Damn it! What the hell could she have done to it?”

All at once, Hannah’s postponed date with the dentist’s drill seemed almost appealing.

Edward opened one of the cherry doors. She swallowed hard, accompanying him into a posh office where two tall, raven-haired men leaned over a large reception workstation.

One had rolled up the sleeves on his pale blue dress shirt. The muscles in his sinewy forearms flexed from bracing himself against the polished mahogany desk.

“What’s the problem,
fellas
?” Edward asked.

The jacketless man scowled over his shoulder, his bright blue gaze blazing like the center of a flame. She gulped and stepped behind Edward, praying the man in the charcoal suit was his grandson.

“Hi, Gramps,” Mr. Sunshine muttered.

No such luck.

His companion smiled at Edward. “How’re you, Mr. Calder?”

“
Calder
?” she whispered, her throat rebelling as if she’d swallowed a cockroach. “As in
Calder Pharmaceutical
?”

~*~

Jordan Calder raked his fingers through his hair and gave thanks he had plenty to spare, seeing as he was about to yank out a handful. “I can’t figure out how the temp fouled this up.”

The ditzy woman had saved whatever she’d done to the document onto the network drive. Every time he opened the file, a bunch of hieroglyphics popped up.

“I assume that was her running out in tears?” Edward glanced back at the door.

Bryce Kendall, the Vice President of Operations, chuckled. “She got hysterical after JC blasted her.”

“Tell him the whole story.” Jordan scowled at his friend. “The woman is lucky I didn’t strangle her. In her first three hours, she transmitted a confidential e-mail to the entire company, jammed the copier, and spilled a cup of coffee in a filing cabinet drawer.” He waved toward the computer screen displaying the corrupted document. “Now this.”

Bryce slapped Jordan’s back. “I’m going back to work. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Sure, abandon me at my darkest hour.”

While Bryce strode out of the office, laughing, Edward scolded Jordan, “Regardless, you really shouldn’t shout at the employees.”

“Please. I don’t need a lecture on my managerial technique right now. If the FDA doesn’t have this protocol by Monday, it’ll hold up the approval process by at least a month. I have to call and see if IT Services can retrieve the original document from the system backup.”

“Before you bother them, why don’t you let Miss Oliver take a look at it?” Edward suggested. “She knows a little something about computers.”

A nondescript woman stepped from behind his grandfather and gawked at Jordan, wringing the straps on her purse while Edward prodded her forward.

Her dishwater brown hair
was scraped
back from her face, and she’d buttoned her lacy blouse up to her chin. Her top’s hem hung over a frothy skirt that ended below her knees, making her look as if she’d stepped off a
Little House on the Prairie
movie set. The only contradiction to her
schoolmarm
image was a pair of skyscraper sandals, showcasing a perfect set of raspberry pink toenails.

What was the old fox up to now?

“Are you familiar with Microsoft Word?” Jordan asked.

She nodded, her wide gray eyes reminding him of the sterling platters he
’d been sentenced
to shine whenever he misbehaved as a kid. The stark vulnerability in her gaze compelled him to break eye contact.

“Would you like to take a crack at figuring out what’s wrong with this document?”

She licked her trembling lips, her head bobbing again.

Edward squeezed her shoulder. “While you’re fixing that, I’ll talk to my grandson.”

Blowing out a breath of frustration, Jordan led the way into his office and shut the door. “Who is that woman?”

“Your new assistant.”

“
What
?” He did a double take. “Look, Gramps, I always defer to your judgment when it comes to decisions about the company, but I can hire my own help.”

Edward glanced pointedly at the chaos on the desk and smirked. “Yes, I see how much success you’ve had at that.” He handed Jordan the woman’s résumé. “That idiot Pulaski wrote her off without even interviewing her. If you’re unhappy with Hannah’s performance, you can always let her go after her thirty-day probation. But I doubt you will.”

“Does she speak?”

“Of course, she speaks.” Edward snorted. “She’s just nervous. Can you blame her after seeing the temp race out of here crying? Hannah reminds me of your grandmother.”

“With such an ancient name, I’m not surprised.”

“For your information, it’s become very popular again.”

“Well, I guarantee it wasn’t back when she was born. She even dresses like Grammy, for crying out loud.”

“Maybe, but she still looks very professional,” Edward insisted. “And she’s got spunk.”

Not from what Jordan had seen. In fact, her eyes had an abandoned kitten look that completely unnerved him. “I guess she’s hiding all that spunk under that old-lady skirt.”

His grandfather crossed his arms over his chest. “You know, Jordan, in my time, women had a mystique about them. Nowadays, girls flaunt so much skin they don’t give a man’s imagination a chance. Where’s the excitement in that? You’ve had six beauty queen temps in the last month—each one more incompetent than the last.”

“Tell me about it. I think the temp agency’s recruiting their employees at the Barbizon School of Flakes.”

Edward chuckled. “Maybe you shouldn’t have been so quick to fire Renee.”

“You know she didn’t leave me a choice, damn it!” The image of his ex-assistant sprawled naked on his desk
had been burned
onto his retina. When he’d walked into his office, she’d stared at his fly and licked her lips.

“I wouldn’t have half the stress in my life if women would stop trying to seduce me.”

“Money and power are a potent aphrodisiac.” Edward shrugged. “Add to that good looks and a reputation as a stud—”

“I know. I could do with a lot less of all that.”

Jordan had been fending off horny women’s advances since he was fourteen. His best friend Bobby’s parents, Robert and Elaine—the live-in couple who worked for his grandparents—had invited their niece to visit that summer.

On her second night there, the hot-to-trot seventeen year-old girl caught Jordan and Bobby sneaking out for a late night swim. When Alicia noticed the crotch of Jordan’s swimsuit was tighter than most full-grown men’s, she chased her cousin back home to the caretaker’s cottage and trapped Jordan in the pool house.

Naturally, as a cherry adolescent, he was only too happy to let the older girl initiate him to sex. Unfortunately, he discovered his difficulty coming didn’t disappear when someone else was touching him, as he’d hoped it would. He merely became harder and that much more frustrated.

Alicia had been tickled by his delayed ejaculation problem, which on that particular night cursed him with a ninety-minute erection, causing the pressure in his lower half to build to such an excruciating level he feared his testicles would burst. Despite his agony, the insatiable girl refused to let him jump into the cold water.

“Considering all the sexual harassment rumors Renee has spread,” Jordan muttered to his grandfather, “I’m lucky she didn’t file false charges against me after I canned her.”

“In that case, Hannah’s perfect.” Edward jabbed a finger at the résumé Jordan held. “Especially with the reputation you’ve earned since your date mouthed off about you at the Christmas party.”

Most men would sell their souls to
be publicly proclaimed
a world-class stud.
Which simply made Jordan’s protests seem hollow and phony.
But other men didn’t share his dark, shameful past that, if ever exposed, would make him an even bigger laughingstock than he already was.

“Did you know Kurt Preston received a copy of that Calder Love Machine cartoon the employees were e-mailing to each other?” Edward asked.

“Great. So I guess the son of a bitch is trying to convince the rest of the board not to let me assume your seat as chairman next year?”

“Exactly. Having a sweet girl like Hannah sitting in your outer office will go a long way toward changing your image.”

As Jordan scanned the page listing Miss Oliver’s impeccable credentials, a needle of guilt pricked the sexist corner of his conscience. Her fashion sense had nothing to do with her administrative skills.

Still, what kind of idiot hired a woman his grandfather dragged in off the street? “Where’d you meet her, anyway?”

“Right outside in the garden.”

“Oh?” Jordan narrowed his gaze. “That explains it.”

“It wasn’t like that. She had no idea who I was.”

“And yet she convinced you to bring her up here.”

“She’s no gold-digger,” his grandfather insisted. “Most young women won’t even talk to an old codger like me, let alone share their goodies, which, incidentally, are better than your grandma’s.” He pulled a bag of cookies from his pocket and tossed it on the desk. “Try one.”

Whew! For a moment there, Jordan thought his grandfather had been speaking metaphorically about sampling the woman’s so-called
goodies
.

Whether the cookie-baking secretary was a
femme fatale
or not, his grandfather hadn’t been this enthralled with a female since they’d lost Jordan’s grandmother twenty years ago. It was good to see a spring back in the old boy’s step.