Page 12 of Her Brother's Billionaire Best Friend

“Odd that you’d have your PA work in your house, then,” said Laura.

I narrowed my eyes. “Two weeks probation,” I growled. I stepped out of the office, and slammed the door behind me.

Chapter 5

Laura

Most people would have blanched after a job interview like that. If you even could call it a job interview.

For a start, Lucien had barely asked me a single thing about myself—about my skills, about the place I’d worked, about the people I worked with. I had an uncanny feeling, as we stood in his office, that he’d already judged me. Here was a man who thought he knew everything about me, who was rude, intolerant.

But that was exactly why I took the job.

After all, people had been judging me my whole life. I'd been judged during my time in the mailroom at the Post. People thought I was uneducated and holding down a job out of financial insecurity. David thought that I didn’t care about my family. And worst of all, I knew in my heart that Kyle was wondering if I really cared about him. Or why would I have moved him all the way here to a strange town in the middle of nowhere? I had a lot to prove, and it was like starting at Square One. I knew that if I could prove a man like Lucien Barnes wrong, then I could prove everybody wrong.

But there was more to it than that. I couldn’t help feeling a little drawn to Lucien. Even if I tried not to let it show. On my first day, I came into his office, which was connected to mine by an old oak door that always remained shut. Even when I tried to leave it open, he would get up from his desk and close it behind me. But I kept on walking through to him, watching him as he elegantly worked away at his desk, with a few computer screens ahead of him, crunching numbers, calculating, advising, calling.

“I’ve finished organizing the files,” I said.

“What?” he growled. “I just asked you to do that?”

“And I’ve done it,” I replied sweetly. “Come and have a look if you’re not busy.”

“I am,” he huffed, and returned to reading the stock market. But a few minutes later, he drifted into the office, and stared at the shelves where I’d categorized and alphabetized everything.

He took a file off the wall from a random section and opened it.

“Happy?” I said.

“Sure,” he grunted, and went back into his office. “But I don’t like it this way. Redo it based on company indexes. That way I can find what I’m looking for quicker.”

Before I could even protest, he’d strode back into his office and slammed the door shut.

Who does he think he is?

I resisted the urge to follow him. That was what Lucien wanted. He was looking for an excuse to get rid of me. And I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

An hour later, I’d finished for the second time, and updated the software so that I could answer queries easily. I’d also cleared the PA mailbox, which had been flooding all morning with inquiries. Most people just wanted to book Lucien’s time out for them. My hours ran from 8 in the morning until 4 in the evening. But Lucien worked non-stop. He was at his desk long before I arrived, and his calendar had appointments that sometimes stretched until 9 pm.

How did he fit it all in? When did he sleep? When did he find time for his strenuous workouts? More than once, I took my lunch in the enormous, utilitarian kitchen in his house and returned to find him emerging from the shower, breathing hard, his face still red from whatever powerlifting schedule he was on to maintain his thick arms, his ripped stomach and chest which stood out under his t-shirts.

“What do you bench?” I asked him jokily one day, when I saw him return from his private gym in the afternoon. Soaked with sweat, he rolled his eyes and strode past me.

“I benchpress motorcycles,” he said flatly.

My eyes widened. “No way,” I said. “You lift motorcycles?”

But then, Lucien grinned and rolled his eyes. “Of course not,” he said. “But I bench 300 pounds. It’s about the weight of a motorcycle.”

I paused, and then I laughed. But all the same, I could totally imagine Lucien benchpressing Harley Davidsons. “I see,” I said. “Wow. That’s really imp—”

But before I could even finish complimenting him, he’d jogged up the stairs.

And apart from what I could see, I didn’t know a thing about him. True to his word, Lucien never told me anything. When I returned from work, David would quiz me about him now and then.

“What’s he like?” David asked me one night, while I was heading out to pick up Kyle. He’d been on the swim team at his High School, and the first thing David had done was to enroll him at the local pool where he could practice.

“A jerk, honestly,” I said.