that fact took her out of the general pool that merited his disdain and elevated her to a higher plateau.
It didn’t. Electric-blue eyes nearly disappeared into small, darkly lashed slits. “All right, then go investigate something.”
The growled order only had her stiffening her backbone. She met him on his own battlefield, smiling sweetly. “I am. You.”
“The hell you are.” He reached past her to press the elevator release button only to have her hit the red stop button again. Stunned, he glared at her. “You will stop doing that.” It was a command, brooking no disobedience, no dissent.
Her smile never faltered as she met his words with a condition. “I will if you promise to answer a few questions for me.”
Mrs. Farley had pleaded with him to take on a bodyguard. Had even gone so far as to line up several for him to interview, but he’d then refused flatly, thinking it a waste. Now he wasn’t all that sure. At least bodyguards would keep annoying reporters where they belonged. Away.
“I never make promises I have no intention of keeping.” Again he pushed the button to restart the elevator and again she stopped it. “Look, lady—Mrs. Campbell—” he amended, exasperation evaporating the very air in his lungs.
“Right in the first place, wrong in the second,” she informed him cheerfully, then suggested, “Why not just Sherry?”
She didn’t think it possible, but his dark expression darkened even more.
“Because, ‘just Sherry,’ I don’t intend to get that friendly with you.” He hit the release button and the elevator made it to another floor before she abruptly halted it with a counterpunch. “You keep this up and the cable’s liable to break. We’ll wind up free-falling the rest of the way. That might be on your agenda, ‘just Sherry,’ but it’s not on mine.”
The glare he shot her bordered on filleting her nerves. She could see his underlings scattering and running for cover like so many Disney mice before the villainous cat in Cinderella. The thought did a lot to calm her nerves and made it difficult for her not to grin.
Sin-Jin’s eyes slid to her belly. “Are you even pregnant?” It could have been a ruse used to allow her to gain access to his floor. In his experience, reporters were capable of all sorts of devious deceptions.
She surprised him by taking his hand and placing it on her distended abdomen. “Most definitely.”
As if burned, Sin-Jin pulled his hand back. Although not soon enough. He’d felt the stirrings of new life beneath his palm. The child she was carrying had moved—probably on cue, he thought cynically.
What was a pregnant reporter doing here, lying in wait for him? He thought of the meeting he’d just left. “If this is about the Marconi merger—”
Sherry cut him short. “It’s not,” she told him. Raising her eyes to his face, she dug up all the charm she could muster. “It’s about you.”
Suspicion entered his eyes. He’d never had any use for reporters, feeding off the misery of others for their own ends. “What about me?”
“That’s exactly what I want to find out. What about you? Nobody knows anything about Darth Vader, the Corporate Raider.”
He winced inwardly at the label. If it was meant to flatter him, it missed its mark by a country mile. The limelight had never meant anything to him. Sin-Jin didn’t do what he did for any sort of recognition. He did it because he was good at it, good at trimming fat off selected businesses and getting them to run more efficiently. Once he accomplished what he set out to do and the businesses were running at their maximum peak, he grew bored with them, selling them off to other corporations while he turned his attention to something else.
That this sort of thing attracted a great deal of attention and generated an almost obscene amount of money was without question. But it was never about the money. It never had been, perhaps because there’d always been so much of it when he was growing up. Every movement he’d ever made had been cushioned in it, as if somehow money could take the place of everything else that was deemed important in life. Like parental love and warm memories to draw on when things became difficult.
He’d had the best upbringing that money could buy. All needs taken care of, everything done in a utilitarian fashion. It was the kind of upbringing that could have produced an emotional robot, which was what his enemies had accused him of being.
If no one knew anything about him, it was for a reason. Because he wanted it like that. “And it’s going to remain that way,” he informed her.
As he reached to bring the elevator back to life, she moved to block his access. “Why?”
For just the smallest second, he almost forgot that they were stuck, suspended between the eighth and ninth floor like a yo-yo that had gotten tangled in its own string. The annoying woman who kept insisting on getting into his face had eyes that were probably the deepest shade of blue he’d ever seen. Undoubtedly, she used that to her advantage, just as she used her present condition.
“Does the word privacy mean anything to you?” he demanded. “Or is that particular term missing from the lexicon distributed to the ignoble fourth estate?”
“Ouch, they weren’t kidding when they said you could fillet a person at ten paces with just your tongue.”
“No,” he informed her tersely, “they weren’t.”
But rather than take offense at his words, she smiled, her face lighting up as if he’d just given her a ten-carat diamond instead of an insult.
She probably saw it as a challenge. He supposed he could relate to that. Challenges were what he responded to himself. The harder something was to obtain, the more he wanted to secure possession.
Somewhere in the back of his mind a question crept forward. How difficult would it be to possess the woman crowding him in the elevator?
The next instant Sin-Jin blanketed the thought, smothering it. She was someone else’s wife or at the very least, someone’s significant other. And unlike his father who reveled in it, he didn’t poach on another man’s land or try to win another man’s woman if she captured his attention.
Satisfied that the verbal duel was over, Sin-Jin pressed the release button on the keypad only to have her reach for it again. The high school physics assurance that for every action there was a reaction teased his brain. Mr. Harris would have been happy that he’d come away with something from his class, he thought.
Rather than allow the annoying woman to bring the elevator to yet another teeth-jarring stop, Sin-Jin caught her by the wrist and held on tightly.
“The game is over.”
Sherry raised her chin. The look in her eyes told him that she wasn’t intimidated. He realized with a jolt that he found it arousing.
Man does not live by bread alone. Or, in his case, by corporate takeovers, he thought. Maybe it was time he got out a little instead of burning the midnight oil.
“What are you hiding, Mr. Adair?” Sherry wanted to know. Anyone so secretive had to have something he didn’t want revealed. She felt her curiosity climbing. “What are you afraid of?”
Sin-Jin
