Gwyneth Bolton - If Only You Knew

Had he known that he would become automatically irritated by what he heard, maybe he would have kept walking.

As he made his way through the fairly empty corridors of Harrington Enterprise, two of his employees stopped him.

“Hey, Mr. Harrington, do you want to come to Soka’s with us? A few of us hang out there on Fridays to unwind after a long week.”

Carlton glanced up and noticed Stan Carter and Juan Esperanzo standing in front of the elevator. Before he could answer Stan’s inquiry, Juan spoke.

“Hey, Jeff, is she coming?”

Carlton turned and saw Jeff Weatherby trotting down the hall.

“No, she says she has work to do,” Jeff responded.

Carlton expelled a breath of air he didn’t even know he was holding as he moved to face Stan and Juan.

“I told you she wasn’t going to come. Face it, man, your skills are lost on this one. That’s a serious sistah and she is not checking for you, Jeff. Give it up.” Stan let out a chuckle as he pressed the button for the elevator. He glanced over at Carlton. “So, would you like to come hang out?”

Carlton considered it briefly and decided to decline the outing with his employees. He already had plans to meet up with friends at Soka’s later. “No, I’ll take a rain check this time.”

The elevator came and the trio of men stepped on.

“Just so you know, Ms. Latonya Stevens will be mine by the end of the year. I’m wearing her down. She won’t be able to resist much longer. I can already see that she is falling for me—” Jeff’s words and Stan and Juan’s laughter were cut off by the elevator.

Like hell! Carlton thought as he listened to Jeff’s boasting. Shocked that he even cared what went on between Jeff and Latonya Stevens, he continued on to the copy room. He had to make a copy of some paperwork from the Biltmore account and mail it to the Bahamas office.

It was hard to imagine that the small storefront business his great-great-grandfather had started back when he’d first moved to Miami from the Bahamas had become a huge import-export business. The company dealt mostly in cement and oil refining. Harrington Enterprise had two large main offices: one in Miami and the other in the city of Nassau in the Bahamas. They had several more satellite offices throughout the Caribbean.

As the sheets filtered though the copy machine, Carlton noticed that several key pieces of information were missing. He would have to go back to his office and add the information before sending the report. This meant he would be late meeting his friends.

On his way back down the hall, he stopped at Latonya Stevens’s door. He couldn’t figure out what it was about the woman that triggered the uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, but he hoped he knew enough to stay away from her. He realized that if he had any sense he wouldn’t have been standing in front of her door.

He was about to turn away when she looked up from the paperwork on her desk. His stomach turned over and he almost smiled. However, the look on her face turned quickly into a frown when she saw him standing there. Before he could talk any sense into himself, his feet were heading directly into her office.

Latonya gritted her teeth. After weeks of managing to avoid prolonged contact with Carlton Harrington III, he’d just come barging into her office. When she heard footsteps in the hallway, she thought it might have been Jeff coming back to try to convince her to come with them to Soka’s again. Flirting playboys, she could handle. Brooding, sexy bosses, she needed help with. Her immunity to men didn’t seem to work at all with Carlton.

She had been with Harrington Enterprise for almost a year when the boss’s grandson, Carlton Harrington III, had temporarily taken over her division. He had just returned from heading up an expansion project that pushed the Bahamas and Miami-based company farther into the Caribbean and seemed intent on making changes and making his mark.

The first Monday that she worked with Carlton she realized that she had several reasons to be nervous. The most unsettling were his ruggedly handsome looks and the powerful sensuality that she swore dripped from his pores. She had never seen a man so fine in all her life. His custom-made business suits, starched-shirts and silk ties draped his perfect form in a manner that proved the man made the clothes. She couldn’t imagine any other man exuding a tenth of the cool, suave confidence he did in those suits.

The perfect combination of smooth dark chocolate with just barely a hint of milk, he had broad shoulders and well-defined muscles. His lush lips appeared soft to the touch. Although he never smiled at her, when she saw him smile at others, she had to admit that the perfect teeth along with those lips made for one delightful grin.

His eyes called to mind deep, dark pools of water; they were liquid fire and full of expression. The only problem was, from the time he first laid eyes on her, she felt as if all his eyes could express were irritation and dissatisfaction. His perfectly squared jaw-line and sweet lips were always set in a frown whenever Latonya entered the room.

She couldn’t seem to do anything right for the grumpy man. He never managed more than grunts toward her, but with others he seemed cordial, even friendly. She told herself by the end of their first week working together that she really could not stand the man, no matter how handsome he was.

If only that were true. Honestly, for the first time in her young life she was finding herself intensely attracted to a man. She got heart palpitations whenever she was in the same room with him. She had to think of increasingly creative ways to maintain a façade of calm.

Finishing up a report that wasn’t due until the following week, she tried to still her rapidly beating heart at the sight of Carlton. Everyone else had long since clocked out, but she was staying late as she usually did, going above and beyond the call of duty because she needed to get a promotion.

“What the hell do you call this?” Carlton threw several pages held together by a gold paper clip onto her desk.

She watched the papers fall and took several breaths to compose herself before she picked them up. Before responding to the rude and insufferable man, Latonya noted that it wasn’t even her report. She peered up at him and blinked, startled by how handsome he managed to look even when brooding. She squinted, took a deep breath, and reminded herself that the man was her boss.

She pursed her lips a moment and then spoke, trying to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “This is Jeff Weatherby’s report on the Biltmore project.”

The scowl on his face told her right away that she’d sounded sarcastic, anyway. Sighing, she reasoned her long week—the younger Harrington being the biggest contributor to its length—was almost over.

His eyes narrowed in on her. “No kidding! I know what it is. I want to know why it’s incomplete!”

“Did you ask Jeff?” Latonya’s sarcasm refused to be contained.

“I’m asking you.”

“Well, I don’t know.” Shut up while you still have a job, girl! She never listened to her inner voice when she should.

“Get him on the phone and ask him.”

She took a deep breath, rolled her eyes and picked up the phone. She knew Jeff wasn’t home. Rather than telling Harrington, she looked up the number and dialed it, anyway. When Jeff didn’t answer, she left a detailed message, and then turned to face Carlton. Her pleasant smile dropped as soon as she noticed him glaring at her as if she were the bane of his existence.

His right eyebrow slanted and a smirk spread across his face. “Since you can’t get in touch with Weatherby, you can fill in the missing facts. I need this before the end of the evening.”