Scandalizing the CEO by Katherine Garbera

mum to agree, but someone is going to have to go to Berne to interview her. Her work is entering a critical stage and I know she won’t leave.”
    “Should I go there and ask her?”
    “It might help.”
    “Okay. I’ll work that out. I guess that’s all for now.”
    “I suppose that is. I can’t wait to kiss you again,” he said.
    “Me, too,” she said, preparing to disconnect before he could say anything else.
    “Are you available for dinner tonight?” he asked.
    “No. I think we’ll have to wait until we’re back in London,” she said.
    He agreed and hung up. She thought that she’d dodged a bullet. She was cool and confident when it came to business, but the personal aspect of her relationship with Steven scared her.
     
    Steven left a message for his mother with Roman, his mother’s lab partner and assistant, to alert her that Ainsley would be calling. Roman had been working with Lynn for the last fifteen years. Steven actually liked the man; he was funny.
    “How are you, Steven? Your mum mentioned that you were running Malcolm’s business now.”
    She would put it that way. Either she didn’t listen to what he’d said or she simply assumed that he’d won the competition that Malcolm had set up for all his heirs.
    “It’s going well. I’m not running the show yet, but I’ve been here less than a week.”
    Roman laughed. “I’ll give you one more week to get everything in order.”
    “That should just about do it. Will you let my mum know I need to speak to her?”
    “Of course I will. She’s spending most of her nights in the lab, so if you try after nine, you can probably reach her there.”
    “Thanks,” Steven said. Thinking back he realizedthat he’d always learned what his mother was doing from Roman. It had been that way his entire life.
    “I’ll call back later.”
    Steven had a lot of information to go through and he spent the rest of the day running numbers. He was happy when Geoff called and invited him to join him for dinner.
    Steven often wondered if his life would have been different had he and Geoff met when they were boys. Steven had used Malcolm’s name to gain entrance to Eton. The prestigious school the young princes had attended was extremely hard to get into. And Geoff’s mother’s family had been going there for generations. But at the last moment Geoff had been sent to a school in the States.
    Steven had always believed it was because of the publicity that had surrounded the enrollment of two of the Devonshire bastards. That had been the first time that he had become aware of how many people were interested in the circumstances of his birth.
    It had been a bit overwhelming—he’d almost asked his mother to withdraw him, but she’d been called to a meeting in Switzerland and he’d had no choice but to go to school as scheduled.
    He shook his head. He had forgotten what it had been like to be that boy. He’d been scared and had felt out of place there. He wasn’t a boy with the family background of the other boys who attended Eton. And he had quickly learned to fend for himself. He’d used his wits to survive and that had been his first lesson in how to succeed in this life.
    Geoff was waiting at the club when he got there. It didn’t surprise him. Geoff had struck him as someone who didn’t like to keep others waiting.
    “Thanks for agreeing to meet me.”
    “No problem. What’s up?”
    “I wanted to talk to you about the interviews that you agreed we’d do with Fashion Quarterly. ”
    “Of course. What’s the problem?”
    “My mum doesn’t really like publicity and the editor-in-chief has called her a couple of times. She has never talked about her affair with Malcolm and she moved on when she married my stepfather…she just doesn’t want to discuss the past.”
    “I understand that. I have no idea if my mum will agree to the interviews or not. I do know that Tiffany Malone agreed to do it. So she will be sharing her perspective on what