Chapter Three
From Natalie’s rules for Foster Boyd, v2
Rule #4: You think private rooms in public places are private, which is hilarious. Is there waitstaff? Other help present? This is not privacy, it is the very expensive illusion of privacy. Stop holding private meetings in insecure public locations.
Natalie wasn’t sure why Foster Boyd picked one of the most expensive restaurants in the city for their lunch meeting, but she was willing to humor him. Especially since he was buying. Her shoes were last season, her navy pleated chiffon trapeze dress and lightweight jacket from the season before that, but she mostly fit in with the glitzy lunch crowd at the posh setting. The ones who were actually wealthy recognized her as the help; the ones who were tourists to the glam life wouldn’t know the difference. All in all, it was a comfortable situation so far as she was concerned.
She’d had a lot of practice at being just a little out of fashion, after all.
The concierge recognized her, and his brow raised a fraction of an inch. Likely, he was aware of the gossip surrounding her name and was prepared to show her to the door if she acted out of the expected boundaries—no throwing fits because you were kicked out of rich kid club was, like, rule number 4,876 in the wealthy people rules handbook.
But she was there for a work lunch. With two of the sexiest men in America. Shit, what had she signed herself up for? Her voice didn’t warble, which was a good sign, as she said, “I’m here to meet Foster Boyd.”
The concierge didn’t look like he entirely believed her, and she saw why over his shoulder. Margo Welles was having lunch, daughter in tow, because although the press was carving her like a Thanksgiving turkey, she was still one of them.
The elite. The special ones. Even when they colored outside the lines, they still got to color. But the help? Yeah, they got blamed for the failings of the rich and paid a price.
In this case, the price had been Natalie’s entire client list, but she wasn’t there to face off with the model turned actress who stomped out her career like a cigarette butt under the heel of her Louis Vuittons.
She was here to tell Connor that Foster hired her and somehow, magically, distract him.
Ha.
Like that was going to work.
But the concierge took her at her word and showed her to the back of the establishment. Apparently, the Boyd brothers had a private room, and both men rose to greet her as she entered.
“Good afternoon,” she said.
“Ms. Stolen, thanks so much for agreeing to meet with us,” Foster began.
“Pleasure to meet you. If you’ll excuse me, I have business elsewhere. Foster.” The younger Boyd twin gave Foster a quick nod before escaping out the door Natalie just entered.
Once the door closed behind him, she turned to face Foster. “Well, that didn’t work very well,” she said.
“No, actually, it worked perfectly. It also proved my point, about how distracted my brother has been lately. He’s just not focused on anything to do with work… Please, be seated,” Foster said. He’d moved to the vacant chair across from his and held the back expectantly.
She decided to go with the flow and sat, surprised when he pushed her in with a gentlemanly flourish. “How is it perfect when our prey just escaped the minute he saw me?”
“He doesn’t like that I hired an image consultant, and he hardly looked at you.” Foster smiled, his gray eyes sucking Natalie in like a vortex. When he smiled like that, a little hint of a dimple teased out of the manly scruff on his chin. He was too sexy for his own good.
“Okay, that sounds like failure, Mr. Boyd. Please explain.”
He didn’t right away, as if considering his response carefully. “Like I said, he’s not paying as much attention to work as he should be. Which, apparently, includes ignoring my mention of the importance of your new position. I took the liberty of ordering lunch already,” he finally said. “I figured, with the role you’re playing, Connor would think it odd if I didn’t treat you well.”
She sipped the water at her setting to avoid pointing out that he had better treat her well, regardless of his reasoning, or she’d quit and be no worse off than she was the day before.
“I think you need a better understanding of my brother and myself to do your job well,” Foster began. “And, although you’re the image consultant, I would like to give you some tips and tricks to really get under his skin.”
“I can’t get under his skin if he isn’t here,” she pointed out, leaning back when the waitstaff placed a plate in front of her.
“That’s scallops with caramelized cauliflower, in a caper-raisin emulsion,” Foster explained, gesturing to the dish. “I didn’t ask, but do you like seafood?”
She sipped her water again, trying to put as much consideration into her words as he seemed to put into his. Sadly, spending that much time thinking over every word just wasn’t her way, so she finally shrugged and snarked, “What would you do if I didn’t?”
His smile was slow, and he pointed at his own plate. “I would offer to trade you. I got the pork trio, just in case.”
“You like to think ahead, yet you invited me to lunch with your brother and didn’t manage to foresee him leaving the minute I entered the room.” She dipped a fork in the emulsion and tasted it. Flavor exploded on her tongue, and she barely resisted rolling her eyes back in pleasure. It was good, especially since she had skipped breakfast to research the Boyd brothers and their holdings a bit more. “This will do nicely, thank you,” she said.
“I anticipated him leaving,” Foster admitted. “I also anticipated that he wouldn’t take much note of you on the first encounter. Which is why the first few are going to be like this. He’s going to see you, preferably with me, at least four or five times, if I get my way.”
She furrowed her brow as she cut a scallop in half. “Care to explain why we’re doing that?”
“Sure,” he said agreeably. “But eat up while it’s hot. Scallops taste better right off the heat, in my opinion. They lose flavor as they cool.”
She didn’t point out that he was bossy and overbearing. She thought about his dog, and made the unsavory comparison to everyone in Foster Boyd’s life and the animal. He expected things to be there at his convenience, to wait for his precious attention. It was a common enough behavior, based on her experience with the super wealthy, but it grated on her nerves a little anyway.
A basic understanding of psychology was probably the most important skill for an image consultant to have, in Natalie’s experience, and she prided herself on being able to get a read on people pretty quickly. In the case of Foster Boyd, she wasn’t fully clear on his motivations, other than those he outright stated.
And he didn’t look at her as she would expect a client to. Then again, she could just as easily be projecting her own attraction onto him. Something about him hit all the right buttons for her. Self-defense required distance.
Recognizing her own behaviors and controlling them were two different things, sadly.
“They’re delicious. Please explain why we’re going to dangle me like— Oh,” she said, putting the pieces together rather quickly. “I’m bait. Attempting to intrigue him without shoving me in his face so he thinks being distracted by me is his own idea.”
Foster pointed his fork at her. “Bingo.”
“But if he knows what my job is, how will that work?”
“The next part is tricky. Eat up,” he suggested again.
Shoving her plate a bit away, she replaced her napkin on the table. “You’re stalling.”
“People who have eaten are generally in a better mood and more likely to cooperate,” he said. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking about who I was talking to and that you’d see through it that fast. My mistake.”
“Do you usually try to manipulate people over lunch?”
His smile was whiplash fast and charming as hell. “I don’t reserve my skills for just lunchtime.”
“Save it, Mr. Boyd,” she said.
He shook his head. “Foster.”
“Pardon me?” She put the napkin back in her lap and grabbed another forkful of the scallops. She hated to admit he was right, but he was. She wanted to eat them while they were still warm and buttery and perfect, a delicious counterpoint to the emulsion, which had a bite of sour, and the unexpected sweetness of the cauliflower.
“If he’s going to think he’s stealing you from me, he needs to think we’re at least on the road to becoming intimate. Which means you really must call me by my first name, Natalie.”
She choked on the excellent scallop and noted it didn’t taste nearly as wonderful when lodged in her windpipe.
…
After thumping on her back, Foster resumed his seat. At least she hadn’t run out of the restaurant altogether. “I take it you didn’t anticipate that I hoped he’d assume we were more than associates, hence your statement.”
“Do you always have to talk like a dictionary? And not even a good dictionary. You’re, like, Chaucer’s dictionary,” she grumbled. Taking a sip of water, she likely had no idea the sensual picture she made. It was a miracle Conner hadn’t paid more attention to her.
She wore some delicate, floaty dress in dark blue under a tailored jacket. Keeping it casual for daytime, she’d worn flat shoes, and her hair was pulled in a messy cluster of untamable waves on top of her head. The up-do made her neck look longer, more elegant, so that even while choking, she’d looked stunning.
That was talent. The woman managed to look good while inhaling a scallop.
“What is a good dictionary?” he asked, amused at her frustration.
“I don’t know. But it’s super annoying. Can you talk normal?”
He didn’t point out to her that he’d traveled extensively and English wasn’t even his first language—Japanese was, ironically, since his parents were mostly working out of Tokyo around his birth. He didn’t mention that between school and the help, he would have paid dearly for speaking in anything less than a proper fashion for years, so although her comfortable use of slang and local vernacular might be natural to her, it was foreign to him. Instead, he simply said, “For you, I’ll try.”
She smiled, rewarding him for the words rather instantly. Spending time with her was dangerous, in ways he hadn’t calculated, but the same traits that tempted him should drive his brother into reckless choices.
Which was the goal.
Clearing his throat, he added, “But you need to lose the jacket.”
Her eyes widened. “Excuse me?”
“The jacket. You’re supposed to be a distraction. Which means we need you to look a bit more feminine. It will trip his trigger,” Foster said.
“Okay, I lied,” Natalie said.
“About what?” Foster asked.
“Don’t try to talk normal. It sounds weird when you do it. All stilted and awkward.” Natalie nibbled another bite of scallop before she returned to the topic with, “Let’s go back to the beginning. You say you and your brother have the same taste in women, is that accurate?”
“Yes.” Connor was dangerous, brave, and somehow cocky in a way that women tended to find irresistible. He had problems with his temper, but women tended to find that kind of explosive passionate outburst sexy rather than off-putting. Although Foster was better known by the media as being popular with the ladies, the fact was that his brother tended to compete with him in that arena.
Or compete with him in everything. When they were kids, Connor would try to take preferred toys away. As a man, he liked the thrill of trying to steal women Foster expressed an interest in.
It was just the way things were. Which was why he felt that Connor seeing them together a few times would be enough to pique his interest.
“Can you clarify?” she asked, pushing her plate away.
It satisfied him to see she’d eaten it all, and with relish. He’d chosen well, and feeding her pleased him on some primal male level. “We’re very competitive. You probably know we’re twins…”
“Everyone knows you’re twins,” she pointed out.
He shrugged. “I’m older. By a few minutes, but still older. Connor was always the baby, the adorable one—”
She was going to get a headache if she kept rolling her eyes at him. “You’re three minutes older, according to the internet. You were both the baby at the same time.”
“It’s a twin thing,” he tried to explain. “I don’t know if this is true with all brothers, but Connor is my best friend and my arch nemesis, all rolled into one package.”
“Can you read each other’s minds?” Natalie asked.
He sighed. People always thought being a twin was magical.
“No,” he said. For her, he would share the tidbit he didn’t usually admit to, just because he wanted her to understand them. He didn’t hate Connor, but he wanted to beat him. It was complicated. “Once, Connor broke his arm, and I wasn’t there, but I couldn’t use my arm that day. Thought I was having a stroke or something. Weirdest thing that ever happened to me, to be honest. It is pretty much the only thing that has ever happened that was even slightly a ‘weird twin’ kind of thing. Best I could say was that we shared his pain.”
“That is weird. So, your plan is that I’ll call you by your first name, not wear a jacket, and magically Connor will try to steal your image consultant away?”
When she said it like that, it lacked the brilliance it had in his head. “Do you think it’s a bad plan?”
“Do I think…? Pfft,” she said. Standing, she slid out of her jacket. The dress was gathered at her neck and fell in neat folds around her. The fabric was so flimsy, he imagined dragging his hands up her sides and having her nearly naked in all of a second. “Look at me, dude. This is not the package to distract your brother.”
But the thing was…she was. Ever since he’d met her, Foster had fought off random waves of desire at the most banal of things. He’d like nothing more than to stride across the few steps separating them and drag her close for a kiss hot enough to make her realize the power she held over him.
And she would have that same mystical something over Connor, too, when the moment was right. He was gambling the entire company on his belief in that fact.
Clearing his throat, Foster only said, “You’ll do nicely. But, yes, no more jackets. They look too businesslike. And just talk like you normally do, because intelligence is sexy.”
She blinked at him, leaning her hip on the table. “I think that was a compliment. Maybe.”
He shrugged. She knew she was an intelligent woman, or she wouldn’t be confident in the work she’d done nearly single-handedly for years. “So, yes, just do what you normally do—image consultant–wise—and be overly informal with me. Maybe even flirt a little.”
Why did he say that? He didn’t mean it. If she was a temptation just being frustrated with him, how much more appealing could she be if she intentionally set out to seduce?
She’d kill him. But, damn if he wouldn’t die happy.
Biting her lip slowly, she swung the jacket across her shoulder and crossed the short distance separating them. Once she got close, he remembered his manners and stood.
She looked up at him from beneath her lashes, and he held his breath. What was she up to?
Walking her fingertips up his tie, she licked her lips slowly while meeting his hungry gaze.
“Whatever you want…Foster.” She ended her words with her fingertips just touching his lips. He bit her fingertip and that pulse at the base of her neck picked up speed. Her eyes narrowed, and she took her finger back. “See you in an hour at the office, boss,” she said, leaving the room without another word.