“Your father’s right,” said Sue. “Go and have a drink with him. We’ll meet you afterwards. It’s silly to close doors before you—”
“Oh my God.” Sasha interrupted her, pulling her off the street into a Starbucks. There was Jackson, kissing a young, blonde coed on the other side of the street. And not just kissing. His hands were everywhere. “Look at him! That’s disgusting.”
Sue and Don Miller exchanged glances. How long was Sasha’s anti-men phase going to last? She hadn’t had a boyfriend in years.
“He’s very good looking,” said Sue.
“He’s a letch.”
“I thought you wanted to be a businesswoman?” said Don. “That you were selling your services to the highest bidder?”
“I am.”
“Then stop being so daft and go and meet him. Let him bid.”
Sasha opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again.
Fine. I’ll go. But it’ll be a cold day in hell before I work for Jackson Dupree.
At eight on the dot, Sasha walked into the bar at the Ritz Carlton. Jackson was nowhere to be seen. I’ll give him two minutes, she thought crossly. I’m not hanging around for that vain, self-important…
“You came.” In the twenty minutes since she’d last seen him, Jackson had showered, shaved, and changed into a pair of cream linen Armani pants and a coffee-colored Interno 8 shirt that perfectly offset his butterscotch tan. For a split second his handsomeness, combined with his broad, apparently genuine smile, disarmed her.
“I can only stay for a drink. It’s my parents’ last night in town. But I figured I’d hear what you have to say.”
Jackson frowned. He’d been planning on getting her tipsy in the bar, excited about Wrexall over dinner, then sealing the deal in bed. Now he would have to move straight to phase three. Languidly stretching out his arm, he stroked Sasha’s hair.
“Let’s cut to the chase, darling, shall we? I can tell you about Wrexall when you have more time. There’s a job for you with us if you want it. But right now I think we both know it’s not the job you want.”
Before Sasha had a moment to protest, Jackson swooped in and kissed her passionately on the mouth. He smelled of lemons and soap and toothpaste. Feeling his body pressed against hers, for a moment Sasha felt a stab of longing. Old feelings flooded her body, familiar yet strange, like a frozen river cracking in the first spring thaw. Then, out of nowhere, an image of Theo Dexter naked and making love to her popped into Sasha’s mind. She pushed Jackson violently away.
“Get off me! Are you out of your mind?”
“I don’t think so.” Jackson was maddeningly unperturbed. “I want you. You want me. We’re both adults. You’re not attached, are you?”
“That has nothing to do with it!” said Sasha furiously.
“Good. Neither am I.” He leaned in for another kiss.
“Stop it! What are you, some kind of sex pest? I saw you on the street half an hour ago. With the blonde? So for one thing, you are attached.”
Jackson grinned. “Ah. You’re jealous.”
“I am not jealous. I came here to talk about a job, you jerk. Clearly I made a huge error of judgment.”
“Look me in the eye and tell me you’re not attracted to me. That when I kissed you just now you weren’t imagining the two of us in bed together.”
“You’re deranged.” Sasha turned on her heel and stormed out of the hotel. As she came out of the revolving doors onto Newbury Street, she saw Jackson’s blonde. Clearly the girl couldn’t keep away from him. “Excuse me,” said Sasha on impulse. “I’m sorry to intrude. But are you the girl dating Jackson Dupree?”
A look of pride spread over the blonde’s face.
“That’s right.” She smiled. “I’m Rachel Cooper. Do you know Jackson?”
“Not at all,” said Sasha. “But that didn’t stop him trying to get me into bed right now. He asked me here to talk about a job with his company, then he stuck his tongue down my throat and begged me to sleep with him.” Color drained from the blonde’s face. “Look, I’m sorry to be so blunt. But you seem like a nice girl. You can do a lot better than that arsehole.”
Don and Sue Miller couldn’t believe it.
“You should report him. That’s sexual harassment.”
“It’s worse than that. He kissed her. That’s sexual assault.”
Sasha thought back to Jackson’s kiss and her own response. She hadn’t exactly slapped him round the face. Not for the first few seconds anyway. Sexual assault was probably pushing it.
“Forget it. He’s a moron, but I’ll never have to see him again. Besides,” she smiled, “I think I’ve already ruined his evening.”
“Come on, Rach. You’re being ridiculous!”
“So you didn’t try to sleep with her? She’s lying, is that what you’re saying?”
The entire bar, restaurant, and lobby had turned to tune in to the screaming match between Jackson Dupree and the gorgeous blonde girl. So far it was blonde fifteen, Jackson love.
“I don’t try to sleep with anyone,” said Jackson coldly. “If I want to sleep with a woman, I do.”
Fifteen all.
“Do you want to sleep with me?”
A slow smile spread over Jackson’s face. “Of course I do, angel. That’s why I’m here. Let’s not let a silly misunderstanding spoil our vacation, OK?”
Rachel turned sweetly to a woman at the bar. “Could I borrow that for a second?” Picking up the woman’s ice-cold vodka tonic, she threw it in Jackson’s face.
“Well you can’t. Not now, not ever, you lying son of a bitch.”
Game, set, and match blonde.
It was too late to get a flight back to New York that night. Lying in bed alone, staring at the ceiling in his palatial hotel suite, Jackson was too angry to sleep.
How dare Sasha Miller rat him out to Rachel? He knew damn well she’d been attracted to him. He could see it in her eyes. If there was one thing Jackson Dupree knew how to do, it was to spot desire in a woman. All that feminist anger, it was just a way of acting out. She was angry at herself. She knew she didn’t come because of the job and it killed her.
The irony was, he didn’t even want her that badly. Sasha Miller was pretty, more than pretty, but she was pricklier than a porcupine’s hide. Rachel, dear, sweet, uncomplicated, teenage Rachel. She was much more Jackson’s type. He’d only gone for Sasha because she presented a mild challenge and a little variety. Jackson did like variety. What he did not like was rejection.
Fuck it. Tomorrow he’d go back to the city and bang a few models to restore his equilibrium. Harvard girls are more trouble than they’re worth.
The next morning, Sasha opened her college mail to find a handwritten letter in a Ritz Carlton envelope.
An apology. Better late than never, I suppose.
Inside was a two-line note. “You start as an Associate Vice President. $750,000 p/a plus bonus. JD.” There was a phone number at the end.
Sasha leaned unsteadily against the wall. Seven hundred fifty thousand dollars. Base! Merrill had offered her two hundred fifty thousand, which was a third more than all the other banks. She thought about Jackson Dupree and how much she loathed him. Then she thought about Theo Dexter and everything that he’d taken from her. She called the number.
“I won’t report to you directly.”
“Fine.”
“I need to be in a different division altogether.”
“That can be arranged.”
“I can’t start for two weeks.”
“Don’t push it, Sasha. You start on Monday.”
The line went dead.
Sasha looked at the note again and laughed out loud. Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars! Jackson Dupree must want to sleep with her very badly indeed.
CHAPTER TEN
JACKSON DUPREE DID not want to sleep with Sasha Miller. Right at this moment he did not want to talk to her, see her, hear her, or be forced to acknowledge her existence in any way.
Sasha had just lost them a huge deal, and Jackson was furious.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he exploded. “Do you know how valuable Morgan Graham’s business is to us? You can’t even be polite.”
“Oh, I can be polite.” Strutting down Wall Street in a severely cut black Donna Karan suit and power heels, Sasha was equally angry. “What I can’t be is coquettish and fawning and flutter my eyelashes like Bambi just because Graham needs his dick massaged.”
“Jesus Christ. It was an anecdote. A funny story.”
“That story wasn’t funny. It was cruel. He screws his poor wife over and I’m supposed to laugh at that? I’m supposed to be impressed?”
“You called him a prick, Sasha. To his face. You called the head of Goldman Sachs Private Equity Group a prick, and you blew up a joint venture that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars to this firm.”
Sasha shrugged. “He is a prick.”
“Yeah? Well so are you,” snarled Jackson. They glared at each other.
It was six months since Sasha Miller had joined Wrexall Dupree. Six months since Jackson had been deafened by the howls of protest from the board about her exorbitant salary. Six months since Sasha’s hostile, truculent little face had appeared in the doorway of Jackson’s office, demanding to see her contract and to be seated as far away from him as was feasibly possible within the confines of the building. In that time Jackson had grown to respect and dislike Sasha in equal measure. Her intellect was astonishing. Jackson was no slouch himself in the brains department, but he had never seen another human being assimilate information so quickly. Her math skills were outrageous.
“No way she’s a business major.” Jimmy Noakes, who ran Wrexall’s highly regarded modeling group, told Jackson in an awestruck voice. “She’s a quant. I’ve never seen anyone crunch numbers that fast and with that degree of accuracy. She should be working at NASA, not wasting her life here.”
The marketing department was equally impressed. “Clients love her. Seriously. John Walsh practically ate the girl up with a spoon. And it’s not just men. Angie Jameson called Bob Massey to tell him how impressed she was with Sasha. Angie Jameson!” A brilliant businesswoman and one-time knockout beauty, Angie Jameson famously loathed working with other women, especially pretty ones. Her entire company, Jameson Estates, was staffed by men, right down to the secretarial and catering staff. But somehow Sasha Miller had won Angie over, scoring her first big deal for Bob Massey’s commercial real estate division by selling Jameson Estates a chain of strip malls. Soon after that, the board stopped bitching about Sasha’s salary. For once, they agreed, Jackson had done well.
When he offered to take Sasha out to celebrate, she turned him down flat.
“Come on, now,” he said smoothly. “I know we got off to a bad start. But don’t you think it’s time to bury the hatchet? I was really proud of your work today. We all were.”
“Thank you,” said Sasha.
“So you’ll come out for a drink?”
Sasha smiled sweetly. “Absolutely not.”
She was never unprofessional or overtly rude. She avoided Jackson where possible, and where not possible worked alongside him with a cool detachment that would have made Henry Kissinger proud. But her distaste for the company of Wrexall’s heir apparent was not lost on anyone at the firm. Jackson couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being laughed at behind his back, and that it was all Sasha’s fault.
Lottie Grainger, a Yale graduate with short chestnut hair and an enchanting, freckled, pixie-like face, couldn’t understand Sasha’s continued hostility. One of the few other female executives at Wrexall and a rising star in the PR and communications group, Lottie considered Sasha a friend and confidante. But she also liked Jackson.
“Don’t you think you should give him a chance? Compared to a lot of the old farts on the board he’s a good guy, you know. And you have to admit he’s great at his job.”
“I never said he wasn’t.”
Over the last few years, Jackson had developed something of a specialization in high-end residential work, focusing on uber-wealthy private clients and developers. Sasha officially worked in the commercial group, under Bob Massey, which meant their paths rarely crossed. Recently, however, she’d been roped in to help with a potential joint venture in the hotel sector. The deal with Goldman Sachs Private Equity Group was Jackson’s baby. To Sasha’s surprise and irritation, he had specifically requested to have her work on it with him.
Lottie Grainger would have given her eyeteeth to have been Jackson’s right-hand woman and couldn’t understand Sasha’s bitching.
“I know Jackson’s a player and all that,” said Lottie.
“Quite the legend. In his own mind,” Sasha replied scathingly.
“But I’ve been here four years and he’s always respected the boundaries.” Lottie couldn’t entirely hide her disappointment. For some reason Jackson had made a pass at every attractive woman to walk through the doors at Wrexall…except her. “Besides, like it or not, Jackson Dupree’s going to run this place one day. If you want to make it to the top at Wrexall, you’re going to have to make peace with him at some point.”
This was true. It was one of the reasons that Sasha had no intention of making it to the top at Wrexall. Her plan was to learn all she could, take the firm for as much money as possible, then get out and start her own firm. There was a popular saying at HBS: “No one ever got rich on a salary.” Of course, that all depended on how one defined “rich.” But Sasha wasn’t interested in making a few million, the sort of money to keep her in big houses and couture clothes. She needed serious money. The kind that could buy and sell companies and make or break futures. The kind that could destroy a man.
Looking at Jackson’s furious face after today’s meeting, Sasha thought, Maybe I’ll have to bring the whole quitting Wrexall plan forward a few years. Morgan Graham, the big cheese from Goldman, had pissed her off royally with his self-aggrandizing, sexist bullshit. But deep down, Sasha realized she’d gone too far. Jackson had been working on this deal for six months. If he went to the board and told them what happened, they’d have every right to fire her.
Jackson stormed back into his office, slamming the door so hard that the framed photograph of his grandfather, Randall Dupree, crashed down off the wall. Lise, his secretary, knocked with trepidation.
“Can I, er…can I get you anything?”
“You can get me Sasha Miller’s head on a plate,” snarled Jackson. “Tell Bob Massey I need to talk to him. She’s gone too damn far this time. And get Lottie in here,” he added as an afterthought. “We need to figure out a damage-control strategy for the media. Everyone expected us to announce a deal this week. If we don’t put something convincing out there our share price is going to drop faster than Paris Hilton’s panties.”
“Yes, sir. Right away.”
Lise scuttled off. A few minutes later, Lottie Grainger walked in. In a simple, gray turtleneck sweater from J. Crew and Stella McCartney wool pants, with her face almost completely free of makeup, Lottie still managed to look radiant. She’s so lovely, thought Jackson, warmly. Seeing Lottie was often the highlight of Jackson’s working day. There was something pure and innocent and innately decent about her that had kept him from coming on to her. Not that he hadn’t thought about it. The girl had no idea how fabulous her figure was, with those gazelle legs and perfect little apple breasts. But Jackson knew that if he slept with Lottie, the easy friendship between them would be gone forever. He’d wind up hurting her—Jackson could no more “do” commitment than he could fly to Mars—and he didn’t want to be that guy, not with Lottie. Sasha, on the other hand, he would love to get into bed and then drop from a height. Boy did that chick think she was special.
“You wanted to see me?”
“Yes.” Jackson took a deep breath. Just being in Lottie’s presence seemed to calm him. “Sasha Miller just walked into Morgan Graham’s office and told the guy he was a prick and that she didn’
t blame his wife for leaving him.”
Lottie gasped. “She didn’t!”
“So I think it’s safe to say that our Goldman deal is well and truly dead.”
Lottie looked at Jackson’s clenched jaw and hunched, tension-filled shoulders and longed to walk over and touch him. I could make you better. I could make love to you so perfectly you wouldn’t stop smiling for a week.
Aloud, she said, “You want a damage-limitation strategy?”
Jackson nodded. “We need to get a statement out by tomorrow morning. Something the street will swallow, before Goldman puts their spin on it, or some trigger-happy equity analyst starts making shit up.”
Lottie grabbed a pen, her quick mind racing. “OK. This is what I suggest.”
Half an hour later, the press release was ready to go. “Should I send it out now?”
Jackson hesitated, looking at his watch. It was already six o’clock. He was due at the Met in half an hour, attending yet another fund-raiser, this time with a stunning French girl called Pascale. She was the new face of Chanel Mademoiselle, and she was new to New York, bless her.
“No. We’ll do it in the morning. I ought to sleep on it, anyway. Do you have plans tonight?”
For a moment, Lottie’s heart soared. “No! Not at all, I’m free as a bird. Why?”
“Oh, no reason,” said Jackson. “You did a great job today, Lottie. Unlike some people I could mention. Go home and get some sleep. You deserve it.”
Lottie watched him leave. It was as if someone had shut off the power to the building. Or at least to her heart. She knew she wouldn’t get much sleep tonight, whether she deserved it or not. Although she suspected she’d get more than poor Sasha. What on earth was she thinking?
Sasha sat on the couch in her poky Brooklyn apartment, eating Cherry Garcia Ben & Jerry’s out of the tub and feeling sorry for herself. On her salary, she could have afforded a much nicer place than the drab one-bedroom walk-up with its magnolia walls and dated, old-ladyish, avocado bathroom. But she preferred to invest her money in stocks, following a model she’d designed herself at Harvard. Everything was about making money, as much money as possible as fast as possible. Which was why Sasha was so disappointed with herself about today.