The American Earl (Elbia Series Book 4) Read online

“Monday morning we’ll leave for New York. You’ll need the weekend to familiarize yourself with the company’s products and the accounts we’ll be working on. I’ll want you in my office by noon today.”

  Abby covered the receiver and whispered, “I’m negotiating with Attila the Hun!”

  Dee chuckled. “Honey, aggression’s bred into ’em.”

  Not into every man, Abby thought. They weren’t all as arrogant and bent on having their own way as the entrepreneur aristocrat. Every instinct told her to say no. Just to spite the man. But by doing so she would hurt only herself. There were hundreds…thousands of young women who would leap at the chance to work for Smythe, travel the world and be paid far more than they were worth.

  Through the line she thought she could hear another voice. A woman’s. Abby’s ears perked up, but she couldn’t make out the exact words.

  Then Matt was back on the phone, his tone noticeably gentler. “If you accept the terms of our agreement and the salary suits you, Paula will be here at the office to brief you. She says just to let her know a convenient time, and she’ll make sure she’s available.” He sounded like a schoolboy who’d been taken to task by his teacher. So there was someone who had found a way to muffle his bark. Interesting, Abby thought.

  “I can’t leave my boss at the Cup and Saucer without any help,” she responded cautiously. “If I’m able to find someone today to fill in for me until a full-time replacement is hired, I’ll come to your office as soon as possible. If not, I’ll let you know when I can make it.”

  Matt hung up the phone and sat staring at it, considering the conversation he had just had. Abby had never actually said she was taking the job. She simply informed him she would come if and when she could. It was almost as if she was still wrestling with him for control. Control over what, though? He’d always thought that employer–employee relationships were pretty clear-cut. He was the one who was supposed to be the boss!

  After Paula left the room, he slid lower in the high-backed Scandinavian chair, clunked his heels on the polished teak desktop and thought about all of this before remembering a scene he’d witnessed recently while jogging through Lake Shore Park. He had been running his usual five miles when he spotted a toddler in a bathing suit, standing at the water’s edge. She was testing the temperature with the toes of one bare foot, giggling and running back from the lapping wavelets, then touching them again, and again—until she finally worked up the courage to wade in up to her ankles, then her knees, then finally to her waist. At which point she had turned and grinned triumphantly at her parents who were watching with amusement from the shore.

  Abby was eager to succeed, and bright, he had no doubt of that, but eternally wary.

  Caution was a foreign concept to him. Matt supposed his lack of fear came from never having to worry about failing. His family’s money had always provided an excellent safety net. No doubt his brothers felt it, too. When several million sat snugly in a London bank account with your name on it, you didn’t worry about making mistakes. What was the worst that could happen? Your latest business venture would flop. Then you’d have to try something different. But you’d bloody well still have a roof over your head and a meal on your plate the next day.

  What mattered most to him wasn’t making more money. Matt could take or leave that. He supposed the drive to succeed that had spurred him on had more to do with showing his father that he didn’t need him, his aristocratic fortune or the estate in the South of England that came with his title. Just as the earl of Suffolk had demonstrated time and again to his sons that he didn’t need them. Matt had come to America the first chance he got and made it on his own—totally on his own—leaving money, valuable social and business connections, and land behind.

  But Abby didn’t have scratch.

  He knew the type because Paula had been much like her—although somewhat older and with two sons—before she’d come to work for him. Paula used to buy groceries for a month at a time then squirrel them away, making the food last as long as possible. She paid her rent not a day early, keeping it in a savings account to capture those few extra pennies of interest. Nearly all of every paycheck was spent on bills and necessities. Paula had once confided in him that she had maxed out her credit cards months before he hired her.

  The idea of Abby ever being able to scrape up enough cash from her old job to start a business was ludicrous.

  There were thousands of single people like Paula and Abby—living on the edge but still cherishing their dreams of being out of debt, maybe even owning their own home someday. He didn’t think of himself as a philanthropist, but he liked to believe he was giving the men and women he hired a chance to turn their lives around. Some did. Others failed to take advantage of all he was offering them.

  Which would it be for Abby?

  Matt tossed two files into his briefcase, ordered his car to be brought around, then returned two important calls. As he strode through the reception area, Paula looked up from her desk.

  “Your new gal-Friday called. You were on your line so I took the message. She said she’d be here around two o’clock.”

  “Good. You’ll brief her as we discussed?”

  Paula nodded, but gave him a strange look. “You won’t be here when she arrives?”

  “I have no idea when I’ll be back from my appointments. You can do the honors.”

  He hesitated before stepping into the hallway. “Thank you, Paula, for coming in on a Saturday. Will you still have some time to spend with your boys this weekend?”

  She laughed at him. “Saturdays, young men have their own agendas. Or don’t you remember the other side of twenty? Tomorrow, though, they’ll take me out for brunch. We splurge on double-yolk omelets once a month.”

  Matt smiled, glad to see her beaming with pride. Before too many years, the boys would be applying to colleges. He’d have to look into scholarship possibilities then, or maybe a private grant.

  “Have fun tomorrow then. You can leave as soon as you’ve given Abby the lowdown. Tell her to wait for me. She can keep herself busy reading clients’ files until I get here.”

  As Matt waited for the elevator, he thought again about Abby. Or maybe it was just a continuation of one long thought that had extended over nearly two days. He would probably be back in the office by five o’clock. By then he would have to come up with a safe method of relating to her. Last night, as he had drifted off to sleep, she had come to him. Those lovely limbs, mocha eyes, the tumble of red hair curling down over her shoulders…amazing.

  Now he firmly assured himself that, once they buckled down to a regular work schedule, he would discover enough irritating things about her to shut down his rogue hormones. Then he’d have no more of those thoughts.

  Abby was a little surprised that Wanda Evans, her boss at the Cup and Saucer, took her sudden resignation as calmly as she did. “Don’t you worry, dear, I have everything covered here. This sounds like a wonderful opportunity. Good luck.” And that was that.

  Her arrival at Smythe International was unremarkable, too. She was met by Paula Shapiro, the woman she’d seen with Matt the day before. Paula introduced herself, with a twinkle in her eyes. “My official title is executive assistant. Plain old secretary would be fine by me. My real job is to keep the man from killing himself and the rest of us with work.”

  Abby laughed a little nervously. “He does seem to like getting things done fast…and his own way.”

  “Oh, he knows his own mind, that’s for sure. And there’s both heaven and hell to pay when he doesn’t get it. But let me tell you,” Paula whispered confidentially as she took Abby’s arm and guided her past two empty offices then into a quiet conference room, “the best way to handle the man is not to let him think you’re afraid of him. He knows enough not to mess with me, but he scared off his last four hostesses without even realizing he was doing it. Before that, one fell in love with him and, of course, that was the kiss of death as far as Matt is concerned. He keeps business s
trictly separate from his social life. And the one before that, she got herself engaged to one of his clients and flew off to Paris with him.”

  Abby shook her head. This didn’t sound encouraging at all. “I’m curious…how long has each of his hostesses before me lasted?”

  “The longest was a year. The shortest, two weeks. I’m hoping you’ll hang in with us a while.” Paula squeezed her arm and waved toward a seat at the long mahogany table piled with tabbed folders. “We could use some stability around here. It’s hard having to work with new people all the time.”

  Abby smiled with more confidence than she felt. “I may take my time making a decision, but I don’t scare easily.”

  “Good, then let’s get to work. I’ll start by filling you in on the people you’ll be meeting in New York.”

  They reviewed several files then moved on to basic information about the company’s other offices and details of her job. At four-thirty Paula looked at her watch. “I have to go now, but Matthew asked that you wait for him. You might want to start reading through the correspondence in the Miller and Capshaw files.”

  “Do you think he’ll be long?” Abby asked. Accustomed to early suppers, she was already feeling a little hungry.

  Paula shrugged. “He’s unpredictable, but I expect he’ll show up within an hour or so.”

  Abby nodded. An hour would be easy to kill. After her new boss dismissed her for the evening, she’d buy a pizza with everything on it and share it with Dee to celebrate her new job. Meanwhile, there was a lot to learn.

  Sometime later, Abby rubbed her tired eyes and looked up at the clock on the conference room wall. It was six forty-five. She started hunting through cabinets and drawers, hoping to find a forgotten Twinkie or apple, but there was nothing. Her stomach was rumbling impatiently. Abby considered raiding the bountifully stocked storage rooms, but feared there might be rules against employees snacking on the entertainment supplies. There were several restaurants nearby, but not the kind that delivered. Her orders had been to wait for her boss’s return. It would be just her luck for him to show up while she was out getting dinner. And so she waited, with growing irritation.

  By half past seven, she was starving, furious and wishing she had learned how to swear. Matt had a cell phone in his car. She’d seen it, damn it! All he had to do was pick it up and let her know she would be working through the dinner hour so she could run out and grab a sandwich. She searched Paula’s desktop for his phone number, but his assistant didn’t keep a Rolodex. The drawers were all locked. If her telephone list was on her computer, it would be secured by a password.

  Growing desperate, Abby put all the files away then let herself into Matt’s office. He must keep a record somewhere of his contact numbers, she reasoned. Flicking on a light, she walked in. There were no file cabinets in this room, just one enormous desk that looked as if it was made of an exotic type of wood with ebony inserts at the corners, a masculine style of chair and two visitors’ chairs shoved into corners of the room. The only other item in the room was an oriental carpet in rich golds and blues, covering the expanse of polished wood floor between door and desk. Smythe kept things simple but certainly wasn’t concerned with overspending.

  Abby walked over to his desk. On the leather blotter lay a neat stack of unopened mail and, alongside, an ivory-handled letter opener embossed with a family crest. His family’s?

  Idly, she flipped through the envelopes. One caught her eye. Or, at least, the name of the recipient printed on its front did. Lord Matthew Robert Smythe, seventh earl of Brighton.

  Abby brushed her fingertips across the creamy vellum.

  The return address was London, England. An attorney’s office, it appeared. She wondered why Matt had come to America to start and run his company, when all of his family ties were in Britain. He spoke with only a slight accent, and she’d sensed, more than once, that he didn’t like people to use his aristocratic title. It seemed so very strange, almost as if he was intentionally erasing his past. Why? she wondered. Was it just a privacy issue—or something more important?

  Abby shook her head, annoyed with herself. After all, there was no reason for her to care at all about her new boss’s personal quirks. Or was there? she wondered as she moved back out of his office. If he simply eliminated people and places that bothered him or were no longer of use to him, where did that leave her or any other employee?

  Maybe Paula hadn’t been entirely truthful about the women who had taken this job before her. Maybe they had left because Matt had done something to drive them away, or had fired them. If this was so, a few months from now she might end up the same way. Dropped in the middle of New York City, Los Angeles or Hong Kong, without a job or a way to get home to her safe, predictable Chicago.

  The thought chilled her, then infuriated her. Abby shot another glance at the clock. It was almost 8:00 p.m. Slinging her purse over one shoulder, she shut off the lights and locked the office door behind her. Why was she waiting around for a man who didn’t have the decency to consider his employees’ welfare?

  Matt strode into the marble-and-glass lobby and had started past the security guard when the man in the glass booth stopped him with a wave. “Hold up there, Lord Smythe. A young lady left a note for you.”

  “Young lady?” Matt had to think for a moment before deciding he could only mean Abby. He grabbed the slip of paper and kept on moving into the waiting elevator. Before he reached his floor, he had finished the note and cursed females everywhere. The elevator doors opened, he hit the Lobby button and rode back down to the foyer.

  Matt was still fuming by the time he reached Abby’s apartment building in Chicago’s famous Loop area. A man with an armload of groceries had just buzzed himself in. Without breaking stride, Matt followed him through the door. The mailboxes were labeled with tenants’ names and apartment numbers. There was no elevator that he could see; he took the metal stairs in twos, his rage mounting with each flight. He found Apartment 4B and pounded a clenched fist on the door, knocking leaves from a dried floral wreath onto the floor.

  Abby cracked open the door and stared at him over the crust of a grilled cheese sandwich halfway into her mouth. “What are—”

  “Why are you here?” he interrupted with his own question. Not waiting to be asked in, he marched past her into the little apartment. “Can’t you understand a simple directive? ‘Wait for me until I return.’ Or wasn’t Paula clear on that?”

  Abby stood at the open doorway, staring at him as if he were a rogue moose that had just wandered in off the city street and into her living room. “You have atrocious manners.”

  “Never mind my etiquette,” he growled. “I intended to review some important material with you tonight.”

  “I stayed more than a reasonable length of time,” she retorted, kicking the door closed behind her. “It was well past normal work hours, and on a Saturday besides. I was starving, there was no food around and I had no way of contacting you. For all I knew, you’d totally forgotten about me. I might have been there all night.”

  Matt winced. Had he really been that thoughtless? He had planned on taking Abby out to a working dinner. He wasn’t accustomed to eating his last meal of the day until eight or nine o’clock in the evening, and it hadn’t occurred to him that her body clock might function differently than his. But he wasn’t about to let her off the hook so easily.

  “You’re on twenty-four-hour call for this job, Ms. Benton.”

  “No,” she said crisply, “I am not.” She took another bite, chewed and swallowed, all the while fixing him with a cool gaze. “I need my sleep, my meals and some order in my life. I’ll work hard for you, but I have to know what to expect so that I can take care of my personal requirements. I won’t sit around an empty office, twiddling my thumbs and starving while I wait on your beck and call.”

  Matt glared at her, feeling heat rise from beneath his collar. Not even Paula spoke to him like this—without the respect he was due as a British royal, a
man who had made millions, a man who—

  He blinked, shocked at the words that had tumbled through his mind. Whose voice had that been? Not his own. Respect—the old earl, his father, had gone on endlessly about it, all through Matt’s childhood.

  In fact, the family’s prominence in society had been so important to Matthew’s father, the earl of Suffolk had skirted convention. The accepted rules of peerage dictated that his eldest son should hold the next lower title to his own, that of viscount, leaving his two younger sons simply as lords. But generations of Smythes, by marrying with other aristocratic families, had collected a fine list of titles not, in the old earl’s opinion, to be wasted. He’d elected that his sons should also be honored as earls, though of regions of lesser historical importance than his own. Nobody had yet dared challenge the man since all the titles were legitimate. And so, incredibly, they were a family of four earls.

  Distant echoes of a troubled and lonely past washed over him. He was stunned. Of all the men in the world, the one he least wanted to emulate was the earl of Suffolk.

  Abby was still speaking. He tried to clear his mind and focus on her words.

  “…and after I finish eating, I’ll have to think a little more about accepting this job as your personal slave.” Her eyes flashed in challenge at him.

  He bit down on his lower lip to keep from laughing. Is that how he came off? The tyrannical slave-holder? Now that he gave it some thought, he had been rather inconsiderate not to at least call and make sure his plans suited her.

  “I, um, I apologize,” he said haltingly, watching her polish off the last nibble of her sandwich.

  “I should think so,” she agreed, licking buttery crumbs from her fingertips.

  “I tend to work from the moment I wake to the second my head hits the pillow, catching meals where I can. I suppose I assume others do the same.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I can work as fiercely as anyone. But I tend to fall apart if I don’t get a meal now and then.”