The CEO's Dilemma ; Undeniable Passion Page 3

  If that was how his father felt running the multibillion-dollar construction corporation he’d founded, no wonder the man had been practically chained to his desk twenty-four hours a day. Being in control of this powerful beast was a high like no other Roman had ever experienced.

  He cursed.

  “Carolyn.” He opened a line to his assistant through the speakerphone. “The Briggs contract looks sound but I want to talk to both brothers before we finalize anything.”

  “Your father usually lets his lawyer handle that,” Carolyn said with disapproval in her voice.

  She’d been doing the same thing all week and four days of her nonsense didn’t make him take any more kindly to it. Roman firmed his voice. “Make the appointment with the Briggs brothers, Carolyn. Please. You have my calendar.”

  A pause. “Very well, Mr. Sykes.”

  “Thank you.” Jaw working in annoyance, he ended the call.

  He wasn’t the only one who had to accept that his father was dead and there was a new CEO in charge. Even if it was temporary. Roman only planned on being behind the CEO’s desk for as long as it took to transition his brother, Lance, to the job. Otherwise he’d hire a new assistant and tell Carolyn to take her objections to Roman and his methods far away from Sykes Global.

  But just for the few weeks or months of his time behind the big desk, it wasn’t worth the trouble, especially if his brother would only turn around and hire his own assistant.

  “I want to see him right now!”

  A commotion just outside his office door jerked his attention away from his thoughts. Suddenly his office door burst open and a woman blew in, a whirlwind in a green dress. Behind her, Carolyn sat at her desk, watching with a cool expression. It didn’t look like she’d done much to stop the woman from barging into his office.

  Roman’s jaw clenched. He stood. “Can I help you, miss?”

  The woman drew closer to his desk, giving Roman his first good look at her. He took a rough breath, realizing several things at once. The woman who stood aggressively in his office looked barely out of college. Her hair, thick and natural and blooming around her face, was like the petals of a dark flower. He also realized he’d seen this woman before.

  She stumbled to a halt in front of his desk, her eyes wide. “You!” Before Roman could respond to that non-question, she yanked a piece of paper from her purse and slammed it down on his desk with the sound of a shot. He noticed her five slender fingers and six tiny gold rings. “I don’t care how hot you are, you can’t do this to me.”

  The door behind her gaped wide open and his assistant didn’t seem in any hurry to close it or to usher the woman from his office.

  “What exactly is going on here?” Because his legs couldn’t exactly support him anymore, Roman sat behind his desk.

  It was her. The woman—the girl—from the coffee shop. The why and how of it spun in his head for a few seconds before he could focus on what she was talking about.

  “I won the Sykes Prize. You know, to design the building the CEO wanted.” Hands on her hips, she stared him down, then her eyes darted between the plaque on the desk with Roman’s name and the mysterious letter she’d slammed down. “And I’ve seen him before. You’re not him. You’re so not him.”

  He plucked up the letter and quickly read it. His mouth tightened. Ah, yes.

  How could he forget?

  Every three years the company—through the Sylvia Sykes Foundation—sponsored a prize open to architects worldwide. In the beginning it had been a ploy of his father’s to attract and potentially employ some of the best architects with vision and promise to help visually spread the Sykes Global Corporation’s footprint all over the world. This year had been special because it was a building his father had planned to put up right here in Atlanta and in so-called honor of his late wife.

  By the time this “honor” occurred to him, she’d already been dead a year.

  Emotionally unable to sprinkle his wife’s ashes out in the woods like Sylvia Sykes had requested, his father had kept the ashes in a silver urn in his bedroom. Under lock and key.

  Roman had asked his father again and again to let his mother’s ashes go, but his father wouldn’t listen. Even though Langston Sykes hadn’t loved his wife enough in life to spend time with her the way she’d always asked and deserved, he’d been selfish in her death. His possession of Sylvia’s ashes wasn’t something he allowed anyone to question.

  And finally, finally, when his father had decided to let his mother’s ashes go, the bastard had commissioned a damn skyscraper of a library in midtown with a statue of Sylvia Sykes on its roof, her ashes enshrined in the statue’s belly. It was obscene.

  It was like seeing his mother still trapped by Langston Sykes’s idea of what a wife should be.

  Roman had been in India when he’d first heard of his father’s plan. And had vehemently opposed it.

  How dare he build this mausoleum for his mother who’d only wanted to live in the world and drink it all up? She would have hated for her ashes to be entombed in another one of his father’s monuments to his wealth. The building he’d planned was not about her. Nothing his father had ever done was done with his mother in mind. She died knowing that, and back then Roman thought he’d had to live with it. His father was the CEO and what he decided was law.

  But not anymore.

  A flare of renewed rage at his father heated his spine, but he tamped it down and released yet another calming breath. At this rate, he’d be hyperventilating before the day was through. He leaned back in the too comfortable leather chair and rested his linked fingers on the desk. The woman who stood above him, Aisha Clark, according to the letter he’d just read, stood with her full mouth pulled tight and her hands shoved in the pockets of her dress. Her dark eyes snapped with anger.

  She was just as tempting as he remembered. But he couldn’t afford that kind of temptation.

  “My father is dead. He was the CEO you met.”

  “Oh! I’m—I’m sorry to hear that.” She drew back, her teeth pressing into her lower lip, the aggression in her stance turning to contrition. “I didn’t know.” Her lashes fell low to brush her cheeks and she blinked, looking away from him. “I should have known, though. Damn.”

  Roman dismissed her self-flagellation. “It’s just a fact. I’m not telling you to get your sympathy or make you kick yourself. His death was...expected.” A man couldn’t work himself to death and arrive at that death with anyone being surprised. “He’s been mourned and we’re moving on.”

  Two heart attacks, consistently high blood pressure and the refusal to change his lifestyle gave the family enough warning that Langston Sykes wouldn’t live forever. He’d held on longer than anyone thought, though, by all appearances as strong as a bull until he’d fallen over at his desk late one night.

  The announcement of his father’s death had been handled with discretion, but because of the size of the company, it had flared briefly in the news before being quietly snuffed out by the company’s PR team. Sykes Global was privately held, with most of its board members being family or close friends of his father’s who’d invested in the company early on and stayed on to reap the benefits of its success. There had been some panic with his father’s passing, till Roman quelled it.

  Everyone knew Roman wasn’t interested in the business and Lance, though he very much wanted to run the company, was the younger son. Things had to pass through Roman’s hands first.

  “Wow. Okay, then.” Aisha shifted her stance to look down at him again. “I guess you’re not that broken up about it. Especially since you’re trying to erase one of his big decisions now that he’s no longer behind that desk. How very Trump of you.”

  Roman felt his eyebrows jerk up. “This has nothing to do with trying to erase anything about my father. The letter states it very clearly. The building my father intended is nothing my
mother would have wanted built to honor her. I apologize again for the error and that my father’s judgment is negatively impacting you.”

  Even just talking about the building made his stomach muscles tighten.

  “No. This is your judgment impacting me. You’re the one who’s done this. You can change it if you want to.”

  “I’ve already made up my mind, Ms. Sykes. Again, I apologize, but nothing you say will change my stance.” He hadn’t yet made an official announcement canceling the year’s prize along with the construction of the building itself, but it was on his to-do list.

  “Your apology is not worth the air you took to say it.” She blinked hard and jerked her gaze toward the windows behind him. For a horrific moment, Roman thought she would cry, but Aisha drew herself up to her full height on already high heels and visibly clenched her teeth. “You may be doing this just to spite your old man, but you’re also screwing over someone else. Me. It’s not fair what you’re doing. I—I worked hard on that design and I was the top choice. I won’t let you erase my career the way you’re obviously intent on erasing your father.”

  Every word she spoke was like a punch to his gut.

  “Ms. Clark, this decision is not about you, so please don’t take it personally.”

  Those words came easily to his mouth but Roman couldn’t stop the pulse of sympathy, of regret, that threatened to turn his lunch against him. Sorry as he was, he wouldn’t change his mind. He wouldn’t allow his father to trap his mother in death the way he had in life.

  “How can I do anything but take this personally, Mr. CEO?” Her words were scornful.

  Distantly, Roman heard the outer office door open and a low voice talking to his assistant. Aisha looked over her shoulder through the open door and seemed to gather herself. Her tongue wiped over her lower lip and Roman’s stomach dipped as he stared, unable to look away. She grabbed the letter on his desk, neatly folded it and put it back in her purse. She looked at him one last time before sailing out of his office, her heels stabbing the floors with each step.

  “Whoa!” His brother Lance, dressed in khakis and an untucked dress shirt the color of a clear sky, quickly moved to the side to avoid clipping Aisha’s shoulder with his.

  “Excuse me!” Aisha kept going until she was past Roman’s useless assistant and yanking open the outer door. The rapid sounds of her high heels were loud accusations aimed firmly at Roman’s conscience.

  “The first week and already you have drama.” Chuckling, Lance closed the office door. He jerked a thumb behind him. “What’s up with her?”

  Roman drew in a breath of badly needed air. “Nothing you need to concern yourself with. Have a seat. I have a few things to go over with you.”

  Very deliberately, he didn’t think about Aisha and the deep ache she’d left in his conscience. And in other places.

  Chapter 4

  “Thanks for taking the time to see me, Roman.” Avery Betts, a partner in the law firm that had been handling the Sykes’s family business for decades, waved Roman to the thick leather sofa in his office.

  “I could hardly say no,” Roman replied, undoing the single button of his suit jacket and taking a seat. “However, your message did come at the perfect time. There’s something I want to discuss with you, as well.”

  “Good.” Avery got up from behind his desk and took a seat in the wingback chair adjacent to the sofa. His reddish hair and mustache along with his pale brown eyes captured bits of the late afternoon sun.

  If Roman let his imagination get away from him, he would think the large office smelled like generational wealth and rich old men wagging their fingers from the grave. Like his father was about to do once Roman told Avery what he wanted.

  “Can I get you anything?” Avery asked. “Coffee? Mineral water? Whiskey?”

  Roman almost laughed. This was the kind of life he was living now. Being offered a stiff drink before five o’clock on a Friday afternoon.

  “Room temperature bottled water, if you have it,” he said.

  A woman appeared a few seconds later with a bottle of Voss and a glass on a small tray. She poured the water for him then slipped from the office, gently closing the door behind her.

  A little creepy, but okay.

  He took a sip from the glass then, after putting aside the water on the nearby table, sat back in the sofa. The leather was warm and firm under him.

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind first, Roman?” Avery sat ramrod-straight with a manila folder and blank legal notepad balanced on top of a crossed knee.

  The lawyer was probably at least five years younger than Roman’s thirty-seven years but carried himself like an octogenarian. It wasn’t as though he was physically weak but instead seemed like a man who’d seen and heard too much and now just wanted to cut through the bull. Ever since their first meeting ten years ago, he’d always been up-front with Roman and now Roman wanted to return the courtesy.

  “I don’t want this thing,” Roman said baldly. “And I think you know that.”

  He appreciated that Avery didn’t pretend to not know what Roman was talking about.

  “You’re the one your father wanted at the helm of Sykes Global, Roman.”

  “But that’s not what I want.”

  “All right, then what exactly is it that you do want?” Avery asked.

  Roman barely stopped himself from blowing out a sigh of frustration. The past week behind his father’s big desk had been full of more responsibility than he’d ever known, and also more success than he’d previously challenged himself to attain. It was addictive. Potent.

  After having a taste of what his father had long threatened him with, he only wanted more. Which was another reason why he had to step away from the feast and leave the CEO position behind.

  “Lance should have the company,” Roman said. “That’s why I’m here. I want you to draw up the papers to transfer the CEO position to him.” It was the right thing to do. For everyone.

  “Okay. I can do that for you, but let me be transparent with you first.” Avery’s narrow features became pinched. “There are conditions to what you’re asking.”

  Of course there were. “Tell me.”

  Once his father died, there had been a rush to make sure Sykes Global didn’t suffer a single financial loss during the transfer of power. And as much as Roman bucked against taking over the company, his father had groomed him well enough all his life that it had been a relatively seamless transition.

  Avery rested his hand flat on top of the legal pad and folder on his knee, his narrow face becoming even sterner, something Roman never thought was possible. “If you give up the CEO position now, your brother will get nothing.”

  Roman jerked in surprise. “Excuse me? He’s the one I’ll be passing on the position to.”

  “Listen, Roman.” Avery paused as if searching for the right words to explain his remark. “Your father had some rather firm stipulations in his will regarding the business.”

  The will had been read a few days before and held few surprises. Roman received half his father’s estate along with control of the company. Lance had been given the other half of the estate along with the family house he currently lived in, which had been in the Sykes family for four generations. Roman had never cared for his father’s ostentatious style, nor had he cared to live so close to the man himself. Once he’d been able to be on his own, he’d bought a simple four-bedroom bungalow in Virginia–Highland.

  “What stipulations?”

  Wordlessly, Avery passed Roman the manila folder. Inside were three typed legal pages, all in Langston Sykes’s distinctive voice. Each word Roman read stiffened his spine and threw gasoline on the anger that already raged in him against his father. The pages were signed and witnessed by both partners in the law firm.

  “If you don’t keep the CEO position of Sykes Glob
al for at least a year, all of your brother’s material wealth, including the home he lives in now, will go to charity.” Avery summed up what Roman read, his voice coolly neutral. “It’s a charity that your father clearly stipulated in the attached documents.”

  He made the unspoken clear. Roman couldn’t create a nonprofit to be the beneficiary, a nonprofit that would also happen to be run by Lance.

  With each word Avery spoke, Roman felt the noose around his neck getting tighter. “Does Lance know anything about this?” He finished reading, tucked the papers back in the folder and passed it back to the lawyer.

  “No, he doesn’t.” Avery collected the folder and positioned it back on his raised knee, once again under the blank notepad. “Nothing will change if you tell him, so it’s your decision whether or not to share that information.”

  Roman cursed. Ever since his brother could talk, he’d wanted to run the company. Between his affairs with models and minor actresses, he’d gone to business school and even had some future plans for the company he’d been keeping to himself, saying that Roman would find out when it was time. In Lance’s mind, Sykes Global was already his.

  Roman had been all set to make that a reality. Now, though... “An entire year, huh?” He’d read the words in the folder himself but still had to ask.

  “At minimum,” Avery said firmly.

  Roman cursed again, grabbed the glass of water and finished it all in a few gulps. “Lance isn’t going to like this.”

  The day before when Lance walked into the office, he’d come in like it already belonged to him. And why not since Roman had essentially promised that it would soon be?

  “Lance’s feelings weren’t your father’s main concern. He wanted the company to last past your generation, not die shortly after he does.”

  “What does that mean? My brother will take care of Sykes Global. He’s been preparing for this job his entire life.”