Man of the House: A Dark Bad Boy Romance(4)

Bruce shook his head, looking totally shocked. “This is insane, Carter, even for you.”

“Nothing insane about it. I’m sure more than a few of you in here have fallen for your secretary at some point. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am the victim of love.”

I was laying it on a little thick, but that was okay. These people didn’t care about subtlety, only about what was best for the company.

“How do you think this is going to help? The media will go crazy with this story,” Bruce said, shaking his head. “You’ve signed your own death warrant.”

“No, Bruce, I haven’t. The media is going to see a new version of me, a calm and professional version.” I smiled at him and I could tell he understood what that smile meant.

It meant that the professional version of me was going to slit his throat.

“This is more impulsive foolishness from you, Carter,” he said. “I hoped for more from you. This will never work.”

“You’re very wrong, Bruce. Evelyn and I are going to do a lot for this company, and the scandals are all behind me. This is the new era of Valor Tech.”

There was more murmuring and discussion of how to deal with the media fallout, but I didn’t stay for any of that. I said what I wanted to say, dropped the bomb I’d been so excited to drop, and so I left. I headed back toward my office, smiling to myself the whole way.

The look on Bruce’s face had been incredible. I wanted to bury that smug bastard, and couldn’t wait to begin putting the nails in his coffin.

The only problem that kept nagging at me was my new stepdaughter, Emily. I shouldn’t think of her as a stepdaughter, since she was barely ten years younger than me and gorgeous as hell. I knew I was going to have to exercise some serious self-restraint with her, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to.

And I wasn’t sure if she was going to play along. The last time we spoke, she was willing to help, but she was clearly reluctant. I didn’t know how long that was going to last, or if she was going to lash out. I trusted Evelyn, and she said that Emily would help, but I wasn’t so sure. I needed to keep an eye on her and be positive that she was going to play ball.

There were a lot of moving pieces and uncertainty with this plan, but that was okay. I worked best when I improvised, although I’d never had a distraction and a problem quite like Emily before.

I was going to need to learn some serious self-restraint over the next few months, or else I might not get what I wanted in the end.





3





Emily





Carter wasn’t joking when he said I could have an entire wing of the house to myself.

I followed a young housekeeper through large and spacious hallways into the east side of the house, which is usually reserved for guests, but had been converted into a living space for me. I had my own kitchen, my own living room, my own bedroom, and at least two bathrooms that I knew about. The kitchen was stocked with whatever I wanted and I had access to the outdoor pool and the indoor pool. My mother was staying in Carter’s room, though really she was in the room adjacent to his. As I unpacked and looked around my new living situation, I had to admit that I was a little blown away.

I knew that people like Carter lived this way, but I’d never really seen it before. My father left my mother when I was very young, and my mother never really found another partner after he was gone. She was a single mother raising a daughter on a secretary’s salary, and although Carter paid Mom very well, that wasn’t always the case with her bosses before him. There were times where we really struggled, but Mom managed to give me a comfortable life despite all that.

Still, I’d never seen luxury like Carter’s palatial mansion. He lived on the outskirts of San Francisco, up in the hills surrounded by natural wildlife and trees. He kept away from the other tech billionaires for reasons that I didn’t understand and wasn’t going to bother to ask him about. From what I could tell, there were three main wings in the house attached to a central hub. I had one wing, Carter and Mom had the other, and the third was being switched over to guest duty. Before, it had been some kind of recreational place. I wasn’t really sure what that meant and didn’t bother to ask.

I was too busy wandering around the grounds.

From what I understood, there were two pools, one indoor and one outdoor, plus a full gym, bar, and restaurant that was only open when guests were around. There were tennis courts, a basketball court, an indoor volleyball court, a bowling alley, two movie theaters, and something like two hundred computers. There was a machine shop and a robotics lab, plus an infirmary with in-house medical staff.

In short, it was more like a resort than a house, and I got lost immediately.

Not that I minded being lost. I came across housekeepers every once in awhile, but they basically just ignored me. I was too busy looking into rooms, staring at paintings, and basically trying to come to grips that a single person could afford all of this stuff. I knew Carter was rich, but I had no clue what that really meant.

It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that Carter Green really was the spoiled rich playboy that the media made him seem to be. His home was extravagant, like a resort for the insanely wealthy, except owned and operated for one man. He apparently had guests constantly, but I hadn’t seen anybody yet, and doubted I ever would. Even if people were staying there, the place was just too huge to stumble across someone.