Taming a bad boy, p.1
Taming a Bad Boy, page 1
Taming a Bad Boy
The McKnight Boys
V.L. Silva
Contents
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Synopsis
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
To Be Continued!
Savage King: A Bad Boy College Romance
Dirty Possession
Lost Without You
Cold-Hearted: An Enemies to Lovers Romance
Demons are a Girl’s Best Friend
The Fighter: Love’s Trauma
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Synopsis
Ireland Steinburgen is absolutely determined to never love again. Happy endings only exist in fairytales, and she’s tired of being let down over, and over, and over again. The one common denominator?
Men.
Now that she’s moved her life from her small, Southern hometown all the way to the big city of San Francisco, she’s convinced she can make it in life, blissfully happy in her singledom. Of course, she’d be an awful lot happier if she could get a handle on her temper and hold down a job.
Which is how she ends up interviewing to be the assistant to the CEO of Knight Industries.
But when Zach Knight, billionaire playboy extraordinaire, steps through his office door and straight into her rollercoaster of a life, Ireland’s faced with the biggest challenge of her lifetime: resisting the charms of a talented bedfellow, well versed in the art of unclothing beautiful women.
She’s strong, a born and bred Southern Belle. She can be the perfect assistant to Mr. Knight and keep him firmly in his place and out of her bed.
Right?
One
Zach
Cartoon sounds would have been a perfect addition to what was on my computer screen at the moment.
A green line with jagged edges against a black screen, with difficult-to-understand numbers on the X and Y axes. But I didn’t need to be a math genius to get the general gist of what was happening.
Our stocks were crashing.
Big time.
Crashing in a way they’d never crashed before.
Modern technology was a wondrous innovation, something that had allowed our company to expand enormously, and reach all sorts of different “patrons,” as my dad had dubbed them.
But modern technology had also, effectively, been the death of a model my father had relied on for over three decades. A model built on genuine, human connection through radio, television, and in-person entertainment. Things like YouTube and Netflix had made so many of our innovations almost obsolete. Why would someone pay two hundred dollars to go see a live ice show when they could Google it and find a thousand different videos of the full performance, all for free?
Morals might stop the fair few from doing that, but the truth was that the majority of people didn’t give a rat’s ass if they were pulling from the profits of a major corporation like Knight Industries, ruining our stock and the value of the company, and making me seem like the most incompetent CEO we’d ever had.
Of course, I was only the second-ever CEO, so hopefully there was time for my successor to knock me off of that top slot.
The green line went down even further.
“How is that possible?” I demanded to my empty office.
I looked around at the imposing brown bookshelves, filled with enormous volumes that I’d never read, all about running a business, as well as a hundred other literary classics that I had also never read. Those books were merely there to intimidate all of the men, and the occasional women, who wandered into my office. I was the CEO of Knight Industries. I needed to appear as smart and powerful as possible, and there was nothing more nerve-wracking than walking into the office of a man who seemed extremely well-read.
Except it was pretty hard to appear so powerful when my company’s stock had just fallen two points farther within the span of an hour.
People were selling like crazy, fleeing the Titanic for the life rafts as fast as they could before they sunk themselves with us.
This stock had made people millionaires. It had taken our early investors from rags to riches in the span of five years. It had represented a complete innovation in the world of entertainment, with television, movies, music, theme parks, cruises, themed restaurants, merchandise, you name it. We had become a giant in the 1950s, and a monolith by the time the twenty-first century had rolled around.
And now, here we were, desperately clinging onto a price of four hundred dollars per share.
The knock on the frosted glass door of my office startled me so badly I nearly tipped back in my leather chair, specially made in Italy and shipped over first class.
“What?” I barked, not in the mood to be disturbed but also knowing I had to put on a brave face for my company.
“Sorry,” Ethan, my skinny little assistant, muttered as he pushed open the door.
I’d hired Ethan six months ago, fresh out of U.C. Berkley’s business school, hoping I’d get a younger perspective of the failings of my father’s company. Instead, I’d gotten a yes man who seemed terrified to even do his job.
“Don’t apologize, Ethan,” I snapped. “Just talk.”
“Uh—okay—um—well…there’s a woman here and I told her—”
“Did you tell her that I wasn’t seeing anyone today?” I demanded. “I thought I told you to cancel all of my meetings.”
“I did,” Ethan insisted, sticking half of his body behind the door as if it could act as a shield for him. “She didn’t have a meeting.”
“Ethan,” I sighed, rubbing my forehead in a poor effort to stave off the headache gathering behind my eyes. “How many times do I have to tell you? If they don’t have a meeting, they don’t come in. Got it?”
“Yes, sir, but—”
Before Ethan could even finish whatever bumbling excuse he was about to form, a very familiar figure rounded him, shoving him out of the way, and made its way into my office.
“Well, well, well, I love what you’ve done with the place.”
It wasn’t the dripping sarcasm that I recognized, nor was it the caramel sweet notes in her voice, acting as a decoy to try and hide the snake-like hiss underneath. It also wasn’t the luscious curves that could have fooled most men into thinking she was attempting to seduce them, or the flowing, perfectly styled brown hair that told me who had just made her way into the office.
It was the pure, bold audacity of her movements. The way she didn’t seem to have a care in the world as she strode across my plush tan carpeting, her stiletto heels sinking into it like knives, and leaned over my desk, tapping one perfectly done, red acrylic nail on the top of my Mac computer.
“Your stock prices are looking so sad this morning, Zachy.” She pouted, using the nickname she’d given me when we were nothing more than gangly teenagers hanging out at benefits and galas while our parents talked business in the corner.
“You shouldn’t pout like that, Lori,” I told her casually, leaning back in my chair and taking up as much space as I possibly could. It was a power move, one I knew she recognized well. “I can see every droplet of Juvederm in those massive lips of yours.”
Lori’s hazel eyes widened for a split second, allowing me to see a flash of anger, an emotion she normally kept so well hidden a person might almost think that she was a robot.
But I knew better. Lori was the exact opposite of a robot. Her emotions hung on a pendulum, and it only took a tiny bit of force to set them in motion, tossing her on a wild rollercoaster ride of anger and sadness and self-hatred.
There was a time when I thought I’d never touch that pendulum except to freeze it. That was a long time ago, though, when I was nothing but a stupid kid.
Lori had still been a conniving bitch, of course. I’d just been too blind to see it.
“Your insults lack substance,” Lori sighed, injecting a bored tone into her voice.
I could hear the edge to her words, though, and knew I had my thumb on a button. All I needed to do was press down.
“I’m sure you have a thousand other things to do today, Lor,” I told her, picking up a pen and flicking it through my fingers, pretending to be completely disinterested in our conversation. “Future Media doesn’t run itself. Unless you’ve figured out how to detach from that, too?”
“Someone’s rewriting history,” Lori grinned, letting her words take on a musical lilt. “But you’re right, I have
My entire innards bristled at the nonchalant way she wrote off the work I did every day, and the success of my father’s company, but I forced myself not to let it get to me. Lori was a master manipulator, and if I let the anger fester every time she chose her words perfectly, I’d fall right into her trap.
“I do, actually,” I snapped from between my gritted pearly whites. “More than you, seeing as I haven’t given into the trap of modern technology. Do your customers like calling in to find a robot on the other end?”
“My customers love everything I’ve done with my father’s legacy,” she replied, perching her perky, Brazilian-lifted butt behind on my desk and leaning over the mahogany so I could see right down her shirt.
I used to drool over those breasts, but luckily for me, they no longer held the power Lori was attempting to exercise.
Ethan, on the other hand, was a completely different story. I could practically hear the kid grow a boner as he watched Lori attempt to work her magic.
“Ethan, take a hike,” I snapped.
Disappointment crossed his face, and he took one last look at Lori’s perfect butt before he hightailed it out of the office.
“Alone at last,” she whispered, slipping over the desk and trying to fall right into my lap, not caring that she was disturbing all of the paperwork I was supposed to be doing.
Not that I was able to concentrate with our rapidly falling stock prices.
“What do you want, Lori?” I demanded, standing up to distance myself from her aggressive seduction. “I haven’t seen you in six years, and you waltz into my office like you own the place. I know you. So, spit it out.”
“I want to own the place, darling,” Lori replied with a casual shrug as she planted herself in the chair I had just vacated.
I’m sure that, in most other instances, such a brash and assuming offer from a company’s biggest competition would be met with a holler, possibly a call to security, and likely a detailed exposé in the San Francisco Chronicle telling everyone in the Bay Area what an absolute loon Lori Hatfield was.
But, truth be told, the offer didn’t surprise me in the slightest. Lori had been hoping to acquire my company since the day my dad, Thomas Smith Knight, had stepped down to travel the world, do charity work, and make some attempt to atone for the fact that he’d become a multi-billionaire by capitalizing off of the working class and underpaying his employees.
I’d changed all of that when I’d come on board, though. A fact that had more than likely contributed to our current situation, which was not something I acknowledged lightly. Whoever said that you had to spend money to make money was full of shit.
“You’ve got balls the size of the goddamn Empire State Building,” I snapped. “No, Lori, I’m not selling my company to you.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, darling,” Lori sighed, once again using that idiotic pet name.
“I’m not your darling,” I growled.
The two of us locked eyes in a heated stare down that was so intense I was surprised the entire building didn’t go up in flames. She wasn’t budging, but neither was I.
There was a tiny voice in the back of my head that couldn’t help but wonder whether or not I was being an idiot. We were going under—there was no doubt about that. And it may still have been salvageable, but it might just as easily not have been. The plummeting stock prices were often the beginning of the end for companies. ABC, StubHub, 21st Century Fox, they’d all started in the stock market.
They were all products of a bygone era, companies that hadn’t quite managed to keep up with the status quo. And despite my best efforts, Knight Industries was in between a rock and a hard place.
“There you go, think it through.” Lori grinned, catlike, and glanced at the computer screen in front of her. “This just doesn’t look good, babe. And I can’t imagine it’s going to get much better. Not unless you go digital in some way. Disney Plus was successful. Maybe try that.”
“It’s already been done, and you damn well know it,” I snapped. I was about to yank her out of my chair and throw her out of my office in a dramatic move that would likely end up in the tabloids within minutes, but then I thought better of it.
Lori was here, in my office, and I held all the cards. I might as well milk my moment for everything I could.
Slowly, I wandered across the plush carpeting to stand behind the chair, making sure she couldn’t see me, and softly pressed my fingertips into the tanned skin of her shoulder, massaging her the way I used to when we were in high school and she’d had a hard day.
“What are you proposing, exactly?” I murmured, leaning in to make sure my smokey cologne wafted right over her. It was a scent I knew always sent her reeling.
“Well… I… uh,” she breathed heavily, attempting to regain control over herself. I had to stuff down a laugh before my little ruse was up too soon, enjoying the way I could still make her putty in my hands if I so chose. “Stop that.”
The jig was up sooner than I’d planned. Lori wrenched herself from my grasp, putting the desk squarely between us and giving me my chair back. With a victorious grin, I plopped back down while she worked out just what she wanted to say.
“An acquisition,” she finally said, finding her footing in the conversation again.
I leaned back, letting myself enjoy this moment where I got to watch her flounce about, searching for her words and making a rather poor attempt to properly express herself. If only the teenage version of myself, the one who had thought he might break his no marriage rule for this cold-hearted woman, could see me now.
“Go on,” I replied calmly.
“You would still maintain your position within the Knight Industries division, but you would merely be reporting to me,” she explained breathlessly, brushing a piece of hair out of her face. “We’ll take over all of the debts and pump a little bit of money into improving the business infrastructure but maintain the integrity of what you do here.”
“You wouldn’t even know integrity if it slapped you in the face.”
I couldn’t help myself. That word, coming off of her lips… it was like the devil suddenly talking about charity work and compassion. The two things just didn’t go together.
“Excuse me?” Lori snapped.
Whatever tense, nostalgic moment the two of us had been close to sharing was broken. Lori was too smart, she’d figured out I was the cat, and she was the mouse. We weren’t both going after the cheese. She was twitching her whiskers while I got ready to shred her with my sharp claws.
“I’m not making a deal with you, Lori,” I explained, the picture of complete calm. “You’re not buying us out like Disney bought Star Wars, so you can promise our patrons that you’ll maintain the integrity of the company while hiring J.J. Abrams to completely destroy it, and then spitting in their faces when they complain. No dice. Now get the hell out of my office.”
Anger rolled through her features, wild and uncontained. She leaned forward, turning my computer screen to face me head-on, practically forcing me to stare at that cursed green line.
It was even lower than it had been five minutes ago. How was that possible?
“You’re going under, Zach,” she breathed. “And you can keep your integrity and your pride if it means so much to you, but if you’re not careful, you’re going to be out of a job, along with two hundred thousand other people across this country. For a man who spouts so honorably about creating jobs to fuel the American economy, you’re pretty damn close to destroying a hell of a lot of lives.”
