Queen for a Day (BBW Billionaire Romance) (3 page)

"Yeah," I growled. "That's what Roland Stump said."

His grimace magnified and traveled through his body with a deep shudder. "Was The Stump supposed to be one of your angel investors?"

He was and everything had almost ground to a halt after that particular meeting.

"He made an offer I couldn't accept," I said.

"Tell me, Nadine," Parisi asked, his hand smoothing up as he shifted his grip from my wrist to my elbow. "I don't want to make the same mistake."

My tongue crawled inside my mouth with the same squirmy disgust as if I'd just bit into a big juicy burger and found it loaded with maggots.

"He loved it," I started before I choked on the sensation and the memory that produced it. "Loved the clothes, the make up, the story about me and my mom, her ties to the fashion world and my dad's career as an Egyptologist."

Sucking in a hard breath, I recounted the sucker punch Stump had delivered to me. "He just wanted a white chick to sell it, said the market would marginalize the products if the line was perceived as being for women of color."

He released my arm to slap at his own leg, his response issuing in a vehement torrent.

"
Cazzo di merda
!"

"Uhm...that might have matched my reply," I politely laughed although I had no idea what he had just said. "What was that?"

His cheeks colored for a second until a contrite grin erased the pink. "I plan on teaching you a lot of Italian,
bella
, but not those words."

Clearing his throat, he stood, pulled one of the side chairs in front of me and sat down. We faced one another without our bodies touching. His hands wrapped around his knees and he leaned forward. "We are going to take your line global. Three quarters of the earth's women are women of color. And unlike whatever anorexic stick The Stump was going to use as a mouthpiece, you're far more representative of our average customer in ways that go beyond skin tone."

I tried to smile, but his saying that I was average popped my enthusiasm bubble. I was pitching old world beauty with a modern twist. Mystique and elegance -- not won't eat her cauliflower and hates the gym. And I had tried to look the part, as best as I could, both before and after the costume change he had demanded.

His fingers slid from his knees to lightly brush against mine. Leaning in even closer, his voice dropped low. "I would very much like to invest in your company Nadine - if you'll agree to my terms."

"Your terms?" I barely got the question out. My voice wavered, my knees would have knocked together if he wasn't touching them. None of the discussions with the other investors had gone anything like this. Some of them couldn't be bothered to look up from their computers, some of them, like Roland Stump, tried to bully me if they were the least bit interested. Not one of them had touched me beyond a handshake at most. Each exchange this evening with Parisi seemed dipped in intimacy with an undercurrent of more to come.

"I'll invest three million--"

I shook my head and pushed his hands away. I knew where this was going, he wanted a controlling share. I wasn't going to give it. Delaying my dream was the lesser evil compared to handing it over for someone else to achieve.

"If you think I'm going to agree to slicing off a bigger split--"

He placed a finger lightly against my lips. "Same split,
cara.
"

I turned my head. I didn't understand and I told him so. "I don't have more money to put in...my sixty percent is based--"

I stopped with a growl. This didn't make sense! All the other investors had talked down the value of my contributions if they even made a tentative offer to buy. Parisi's number inflated them!

What was I missing? I looked at him for clues but quickly had to look away. He was too intense, too close. He was no longer touching me, but he hadn't retreated from my personal space. He had one hand placed on the cushion next to my leg and the other on the armrest so that I was caged in.

"Where are you assigning the extra equity?" I asked. The question was the closest I could get without making an accusation that there was something very indecent about his proposal. The phrasing also kept me from embarrassing myself by suggesting the impossible -- he wanted something very personal from me.

"Until you arrived here today," Parisi began. "You've tried to keep you out of the equation -- emails, files, numbers, projections. But this is fashion, Nadine. You're selling yourself as well. You can't play at this level as a designer and not attract public attention. You can't show up in sensible shoes and department store pants. You're going to have to be out front. You shouldn't have arrived at the island in anything other than your own designs."

Couldn't he understand, especially after what I told him about Stump, that I had tried that? I had tried it all the way up to Stump and, after that jerk, I'd gone home, had a pint of Rocky Road and a tub of Cool Whip and minimized the in-person pitches to the other investors. I would have done the same with Parisi but he insisted on my coming to meet him, at his expense.

"Fine," I relented, my body wiggling with the sensation of thousands of ants crawling over my skin because Parisi hadn't retreated to his own personal space. "But this amount..."

His mouth pursed, twisted, a smile playing around the edges as he mulled over the bombshell he was about to drop between us.

"I intend to see if you can live the role you want to sell other women. The three million is the value you've already demonstrated, plus the value you're promising to deliver by stepping up your roll, and then hazard pay for running a gauntlet of tests before I fund anything."

"What -- what role do you think I'm selling?" I didn't like where this was headed, didn't like how close we were. I didn't think it was possible for a woman my age -- any age -- with so much as a whisper of a libido to be mere inches from Parisi in a darkened room, his voice like a panther's purr, and not think about fucking.

"You're going to give yourself over tonight, completely. You're going to open every hole. You're going to sense and feel and experience without analysis."

"Sex?" I asked, my brain shocked but not so shocked I couldn't speak. "That's the role?"

His gaze dropped, the eyelids almost shut. A soft smile pushed the corners of his mouth outward. "Outside of academia, even within it, you cannot separate the great queens from their sexuality. As Akhenaten's Great Royal Wife, Nefertiti was Isis on earth and Isis is Venus, Inanna, Astarte. And Cleopatra, well--"

He shook his head, the soft smile sharpening toward lecherous approval in a way that made all the weight of my body center hard atop the juncture of my thighs.

"No, this ... I won't..." My hands came up, waving away the possibility that what he wanted had the remotest chance of occurring. "I'm not even going to get into whether I want to sleep with you. No one in business would ever take me seriously if I secured funding that way!"

"Your reputation will be safe. No cameras, no gossip."

"Stop!" I ordered, my hands repeating the command as I held them palms forward and ready to push him away if necessary. "I don't care how tight a lid you think you can keep on people like Anders--"

He touched my knees again and then his fingers surfed under the hem of my dress to tie my tongue in knots.

"Anders and the rest of the staff are gone for the night. The men who touch you--"

"Whoa-whoa-whoa." My legs were slow to snap together, but they closed like a vise when he said "men."

Clutching the shoulders of his jacket for leverage, I pulled myself up. His hands moved higher under my skirt. I did nothing to restrain them, my focus instead on getting out of the room. I had studied enough battles as a history major to know that they only way out of an ambush was through it. And if I had to physically go through Parisi to get to the door, I would.

"You intended to build a monument to your mother," Parisi whispered, his voice barely audible over the anxious, roaring pulse of blood through my body. "Are you really going to give up that easily? And over what? What fear is driving your refusal?"

I glared down at him, my eyes burning with frustration. "You don't get it. Women can't behave like this!"

Not just in business, I thought, but everywhere else. A woman could not own her sexuality without repercussions that echoed the rest of her life. What happened when she had children and their teachers found out? What happened when her future husband found out?

The bastard just shrugged his shoulders and laughed. "Then maybe only men should be the CEOs of real companies."

No longer touching me, Parisi gestured at the open door to his office with a tilt of his chin. "Go home,
cara.
Go run some little store and tell yourself that five years from now it will be national."

He stood and approached the bag Anders had brought from the guest room. Tucked down at the very bottom, I had placed the ancient Egyptian version of a negligee -- a split skirt comprised of six panels of semi-transparent scarves and a cup-less bustier that was only good for holding the breasts up instead of concealing them. He pulled them out and draped them over the bag.

"Then tell yourself again five more years after that. Or sell your designs to Gucci or Versace and let all the achievements be theirs while your mother molders in her grave."

Leaving me, he stopped at the room's threshold and looked back one last time. "But if you don't want to spend the rest of your life playing it safe, open your bedroom door at midnight and step into a new life,
cara
."

********************

Back in the guest room, I paced and watched the clock. I packed and watched the clock. I stared into every nook and cranny the room had to offer and I watched the clock.

I talked to myself, too. First inside my head, then softly under my breath and then in a way I could no longer discern the actual volume of the words that escaped me. Was I really considering his offer? Could I live with myself if I so much as acknowledged the possibility that I might consider it?

With too many questions and zero answers, I went into the suite's bathroom a little before eleven. I felt dirty for the offer having been made and tried to wash the slimy sensation coating my skin and insides away with a brief, unforgiving shower.

Clean and wrapped in an oversized towel that barely contained my thick body, I stared at the long mirror above the sink. I stared at my face, looking for some hint of my mother in the features. I had my father's eyes, a bright aquamarine. Like my skin tone, my mouth was a combination of both parents. The overall width was narrow like my dad's, but the lips remained generous with a cupid's bow on top, the extreme arch creating a small gap at the center where my lips met that I had to consciously keep shut or look like I was begging for a kiss.

I dropped the towel and stared at my body, still looking for what parts of me came from my mother. Below the chin, I was all on my own. Both of my parents had been thin, my father a tall, pale reed who had to be reminded to eat on a daily basis, while my mother followed the dictates of her chosen profession with an iron will.

Snapping a hand towel from the folded pile next to the sink, I doused it with hot water and started wiping what makeup from my face the shower hadn't removed. As I rubbed furiously, I swore at Parisi then at myself over the thoughts stampeding through my head.

I thought I had accepted my body years ago, had learned to smile at the parts I could appreciate and ignore the ones I couldn't. Gazing into the mirror, all I saw was another reason why I had to stay inside the room and give up on making my dreams a reality any time soon.

Naked, my face scrubbed clean, I continued staring at the mirror. I could feel my father lightly tapping against the center of my forehead, his response to my insecurities always the same.

"This...this marvelous brain, that's the important thing," he had always said. "It will endure after everything else fades away."

My lips pushed together in an angry, ugly moue. I loved my father, but he was an academic who had fucked a fashion model then had to watch her walk out of his life and return to a world that had nothing to do with the mind. As temporal as my mother's world was, it lasted long after their relationship fell apart.

I stomped into the bedroom a raging, copper-skinned, overweight, growling woman, and grabbed all the cosmetics I had brought with me. Back in the bathroom, I slapped on primer and illuminators, liquid foundation and powders. I drew angry but symmetrically perfect lines around my eyes, my mouth, then contoured my cheeks.

With color and shading, I could fix the face, reduce its roundness, add more definition. Not so with my body.

I damned Silvio Parisi for making me look at myself like this! Not white, not black, not exotic enough, not thin, not even close, not beautiful but not ugly.

Was I worried what people would think if they found out about Parisi's deal, or was I really concerned what the men would think while they fucked me?

And just how many men was he proposing? He had mentioned Cleopatra -- or as the Greeks had so derisively called her,
Meriochane, she who gapes wide for ten thousand men.

"Doesn't matter, doesn't matter, doesn't matter. Not doing it, no fucking way."

I leaned over the sink, my forearms flat against the counter, and tried to breathe. My legs were locked, unbending and shaky. Spreading them wider, I felt the upward flow of air against my most sensitive area.

She who gapes wide...

Ten thousand men...

I wouldn't have to worry about midnight's approach. I would pass out before then, be unconscious through it, conveniently robbing myself of the responsibility of deciding. Whatever direction my thoughts swung on some future day, I would be able to lie to myself and say I would have done X if only I hadn't cracked my skull on the marble floor beneath my feet.

Head down, my brain trying to shut off all thought, I heard a sound in the distance. A bell, probably the same bell I had first heard when I was in Parisi's office then again on the hour every hour since I returned to the guest room.