Wrong Brother, Right Man. Kat Cantrell
the right places—wrong places—as he reached behind him to open the door. Scrambling backward, she landed in the center of his spacious office. Her pulse raced as if she’d recently lapped the building, but why she couldn’t fathom. He was just a man.
He called out through the open door to his admin, asked her to gather together the staff that reported to him and swung the door wide. The cloak of awareness eased a bit, and she dragged air into her lungs. Val strode past her to take a seat at the desk again.
As people began to file into the room, his expression hardened into something more suited to a CEO. Where had that come from? Fascinated, she edged toward the back wall as LeBlanc’s vice-presidents ringed the desk.
“Thanks for joining me on short notice,” Val told the eight men and women who had answered the summons, meeting each one’s gaze in exactly the same manner that she would have advised him to if he’d asked. “We’re in for an interesting ride over the next few months. I’m not Xavier, nor do I pretend to be, but I will keep this company afloat. I hope you’ll all stick around to see how it plays out. If not, there’s the door.”
As Val jerked his head toward it, Sabrina’s pulse faltered for an entirely different reason. Val had morphed before her eyes into a force to be reckoned with.
He’d been toying with her. Throat tight, she watched him lay down his authority with the people he needed most to have his back, struggling to rearrange everything she’d learned about him today.
Valentino LeBlanc’s middle name might well be chameleon. Which made him dangerous in more ways than one. She could not trust him, that much was clear and, come hell or high water, she had to stop letting him blindside her.
The next morning, Val arrived at LeBlanc shortly after six. No one else had arrived yet, which had been his goal. Gave him time to acclimate, which had been the number one necessity he’d gleaned from Sabrina yesterday.
As he settled into the CEO’s chair with a cup of coffee—which he’d bet half his inheritance was not Fair Trade or even very good—from the executive suite’s breakroom, he had to hand it to Ms. Corbin. Acclimation was indeed a great first step.
Now, if only she could keep up a string of next steps, he’d be golden.
The office was still soulless, which he’d long attributed to the fact that his father didn’t have one, but Xavier seemed to have followed in Edward LeBlanc’s footsteps in more ways than one. Now that Val was firmly in the CEO’s chair, he’d started to wonder if it wasn’t the other way around: the corporation had sucked the heart from both father and brother, as opposed to the corporation being a reflection of the men.
That wasn’t going to happen to Val. He still felt like crap for his dictatorial throwdown to the executive staff yesterday. It had been easier to channel his father than he’d liked to admit. All he’d had to do was envision the hundreds of times he’d been called to appear before Edward LeBlanc to explain whatever debacle his father had caught wind of and been disappointed by this time.
So that was the trick? Just act like a conscienceless jerk and profits flowed? Totally not worth the gutting. It weighed on him that he’d conformed, falling into the mold that seemed to be what everyone expected from him, including Sabrina. That wasn’t how he wanted to do things nor the kind of man he was. But what if that was the point of the will—to show Val once and for all that he didn’t belong in the LeBlanc family?
If so, Val hoped his father had a front-row seat in hell for the fireworks.
He’d brought in a sweet potato plant from home that he’d grown himself, and the green spade-shaped leaves made him smile. The potato had rolled from a bulk bag at LBC and, by the time he’d found it behind a pallet of dried fruit, it had already sprouted. It was a crime to waste food in Val’s book, so now it had new life as his one and only office decoration.
For about an hour, Val fought with his laptop, eventually managing to figure out how to log in and set up email without breaking anything, all while resisting the urge to check in on LBC. Then Xavier blew through the door.
He stopped short when he spied Val ensconced in his chair. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here so early.”
“Surprise,” Val said mildly. “I could say the same, only with an at all at the end. Don’t you have a food bank to run?”
His brother’s expression left little doubt as to his opinion about the switch. “I left in a rush yesterday and forgot some paperwork.”
Xavier stood inside the door of his office, running a hand over his unshaven jaw, halfway between his old world and the portal to his new one. It was the first time in Val’s recent memory that his brother had let his appearance go. They didn’t see each other all that often—by design—but Val would bet that Xavier always shaved before coming to LeBlanc. What did it say that he’d change his habits to take Val’s place?
“I’ll take care of any paperwork that has to do with LeBlanc,” Val advised him. “Just point it out. My job now.”
Xavier frowned. “Temporarily. Besides, the will didn’t say it was against the rules to check in.”
Check in equaled checking up on Val, no doubt.
“No. And I’m not arguing that point.” Easing back in his chair, Val tamped down his rising temper. “But this is mine, for better or worse, for the next six months. If you have an issue, why not let me handle it?”
Thank you, Sabrina. She was going to be far more valuable than he’d dreamed and, as his first act toward conquering the task laid out in the will, hiring her had been a good one.
“Fine.” Xavier strode to the bookcase along the south wall and pulled open the glass door, extracted a binder that was a good four inches thick and dropped it onto the desk with a thud. “These are printed copies of contracts we’re—you’re—negotiating with the government of Botswana to purchase interests in diamond exploration. Good luck.”
Val’s head immediately began to swim. “You purchase interests in exploration?”
“You do,” Xavier emphasized, heavy on the sarcasm. “Baptism by fire, my brother.”
“Wait.” Val quelled the urge to massage his temples as he sorted through how helpless it would sound if he admitted that he couldn’t handle this. “Can you tell me who’s the best person on your staff to advise me about negotiating with an African government?”
“That would be me.” Xavier’s gaze glittered as he crossed his arms and stared at Val. “I always handle the African government because it requires delicacy. And experience. The politics there are beyond anything I’ve seen anywhere else in the world, especially if you want to keep LeBlanc far away from the blood-diamond regions. Hint—you do.”
Great. So Val’s initial thought about being set up for failure had been dead-on. Not only did it extend from beyond the grave but his brother was planning to perpetuate what their old man had started. “No problem. I’m not above a little research. Are there other contracts of a similar nature in that bookcase?”
Xavier nodded once, a curt move that said he didn’t like giving up information but liked the idea of Val taking LeBlanc down even less. “Anything I need to know about LBC before I go?”
“Just that you can’t treat my people like you do the ones here,” Val said easily, not that he was worried about anyone on his staff getting bent out of shape. He’d debriefed them all a few days ago, begged them to give Xavier a chance and told them if it seemed like he wasn’t getting it to carry on in Val’s stead until he could return to the fold.
LBC had stellar, committed people on board, who cared about making life better for those who needed help. They’d keep on doing that whether or not they had the necessary donations