The PlayBear Billionaire: A Bear Shifter Romance Read online

  Daphne accepted the glass of champagne, putting her empty glass on the tray the waiter offered and sipping her fresh beverage almost begrudgingly. “It’s a fun time for you,” she told him, a faint smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “For me it’s another night of work—only I get to drink and have some hors d’oeuvres while I do my job.”

  “You should loosen up; surely Amelia can’t expect you to sign people up tonight—you have at least until tomorrow to get your new recruits onboard.”

  Daphne shrugged. “I’ve gotten two people to be spokespersons for us since the evening started,” she said with what Alexander thought was pardonable pride. “I still don’t understand why you’re holding out so hard.”

  “Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself,” Alexander suggested, gesturing for Daphne to sit down in a convenient chair. He pulled an ottoman over and seated himself on it, facing her. He wanted more than anything to turn her attention off the cause she was clearly very passionate about, and onto the possibility of flirtation. “You must have graduated pretty recently.”

  Daphne’s dark eyes snapped with something akin to irritation. “I graduated two years ago and worked very successfully at a PR firm before coming here,” she told him, her voice barely civil.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you—you just look a little young. That can’t be a bad thing, can it?” Alexander turned his most charming smile onto her.

  “It can when it makes people who are only a couple years older than me refuse to take me seriously.” Alexander decided that his initial estimation of her had been right—she was not at all the person for him to try and lure back to his bed. He glanced around to see if there was anyone else worth talking to.

  “I think you might want to consider not taking yourself so seriously,” Alex said off-hand, barely glancing at Daphne as he tried to discover who had come to the event.

  “I’d rather take myself too seriously than have the kind of reputation that’s going to damage the company I work for,” she said tartly. Alexander felt his irritation rising.

  “My reputation is not going to do any harm at all to my family’s business,” he told her, setting his jaw. “I am a competent CEO and I have a proven record.”

  “You also have competition. When people start thinking you’re not a stable figurehead for your company, the competition will start trashing you—and then you’ll have to fight back.” Daphne shrugged. “Doing a little bit of reputation management right now would do you wonders down the line.”

  “Why are you so serious about getting me to become a spokesperson?” Daphne considered the question for a moment. She took a sip of her champagne, licking her lips in a way that sent a jolt through Alexander’s body—though he was fairly certain she didn’t know exactly what effect that little flash of her pink tongue had.

  “First of all,” Daphne said slowly, the veneer of charm and determination falling from her face, replaced by a sincere concern and interest, “I care a lot about the welfare of animals. Some of my friends think I’m a hypocrite because I still eat meat.” She shrugged. “I can’t really help that—I tried going Vegan and it was not good for my health.” Alexander smiled slowly; he could relate. He needed an omnivorous diet to maintain his health—the two parts of his essence took up a lot of energy, and both of his forms were omnivorous. Because he was wealthy and because he needed to appease the animal part of his essential nature, he preferred game—especially when he could hunt it himself.

  “Second of all,” Daphne continued, “I really love my job. I was lucky to get the job, even with my lack of experience. So I take it seriously. Third of all,” and she flashed him a grin that made Alexander think that perhaps she was not always so serious, “Amelia gave me a challenge. I don’t tend to back down from that.”

  “Amelia was probably messing with you,” Alexander said, remembering the other woman’s words to him before she brought him to meet her newest protégé. “She and I have been going back and forth about my unwillingness to become a spokesperson for over a year. You’re not likely to succeed where a year-long campaign failed. I think she just thought a pretty young face…” Alexander shrugged.

  “You can’t accuse me of not taking you seriously because you’re younger than I am when I didn’t take Amelia’s bait—she’s almost my mother’s age.”

  “Okay. So think about how much it would frustrate her then, if I was the one to convince you instead of her.” Daphne smiled slowly, taking a long sip of her champagne. “After all, if she’s messing with us, a bit of turnabout is only fair.” Alexander shook his head, unable to suppress the chuckle that rose up out of his chest.

  “Okay! Okay, fine, you’ve convinced me. It will rehabilitate my image, make me a respectable member of the international community, and it will shut Amelia up on the subject. Where do I sign up?” Daphne’s smile spread, reaching up to her flashing eyes, and Alexander thought that it was almost as good as the look she might give if he managed to convince her to go home with him—almost as good. But he also knew better than to pursue that particular line of thought. Daphne was too intense for him; she would never just let him have a one-night stand.

  “Right this way, Mr. Oberon,” she said, gesturing for him to follow her to a table a few yards away, where a few other people were filling out some kind of form. Amelia was standing there, talking to someone else who was filling out the contract to become a spokesperson for the organization; Alexander thought he recognized the man as an actor, though he couldn’t think of any of the movies he might have been in off the top of his head.

  When he and Daphne came up to the table, Amelia glanced over—and Alexander had to suppress the laugh that threatened to come out of him at the shock in her eyes. She had never really believed that Daphne would succeed where she had failed; she had just wanted to mess with him, distract him with a pretty girl and then lay into him later with her own attempts to persuade.

  Daphne was picking up a contract and explaining it to him, and Alexander turned his attention onto her, smiling to himself. What could it hurt? He was already donating a sizeable amount to the nonprofit. The amount of his time that would be taken up by spokesman duties was likely to be minimal. Once he finished up his obligation with Daphne, he would be free to see who might be willing to spend the night with him.

  He had the sneaking suspicion that if he didn’t sign up, Daphne would continue chasing him around the room until he did, ruining his chances with any of the women at the gala.

  *

  Daphne hurried to her desk with her eyes half-closed, wincing at the bright, high-efficiency lights that seemed designed to poke daggers into her brain. She knew she’d had too much champagne the night before; she knew it by the time she was on her third or fourth glass, after Alexander Oberon had wandered off after signing his contract. Why she had let someone talk her into a fifth glass, she wasn’t sure.

  She had barely managed to strip out of the gown she’d worn and into a nightgown before she tumbled unsteadily into bed, and when her alarm had gone off at seven in the morning, she buried her face in her pillows as the normally soothing sound she had set for it grated on her ears. Maybe just this once I can call in sick, she had thought to herself, feeling the roiling discontent of her stomach and blindly turning off the alarm by touch.

  But if she called in the night after the gala, everyone would know that it was because she’d overindulged. So instead of hitting the snooze button the way she normally did, Daphne pulled herself out of bed through sheer willpower and forced herself into the shower.

  The shower didn’t do very much, but it finished off the last of her makeup, leaving her fresh-faced—though red-eyed—and at least smelling clean. Daphne made herself a smoothie, packing as much fruit as she possibly could into the cup, and downed a large glass of water with a couple of aspirin and a Pepto-Bismol tablet.. She skipped her usual coffee, not wanting to challenge an already upset stomach, and drank down the smoothie instead.

  By th
e time she got off the train and made her way to the office building, she was feeling slightly more human; though her head was still foggy and aching, she didn’t think she would hurl on anyone. “Hey, Jackson,” someone called to her. “Amelia wants you in her office as soon as you’re up and running.”

  Daphne nodded, gesturing blankly that she understood. She set down her purse and took a deep breath, turning on her computer and trying to shake off the last of her hangover. She had to smile to herself. In spite of her aching head and rocky stomach, she had to feel more than a little proud of the fact that she had managed to catch her first “whale,” Alexander Oberon.

  When Amelia had brought Oberon over to her, Daphne had suspected that it was a lost cause situation, that it was one of those opportunities to “sharpen her claws” as Amelia put it. She knew that her boss had never dreamed in a million years that Daphne would be able to convince a veteran of the turn-down like Oberon to actually become a spokesperson for the organization; it was just an excuse to work on her pitch and refine it.

  Daphne herself had been startled by the fact that it hadn’t actually taken a huge effort to convince the man—she had thought on more than one occasion that he would just walk away and leave her sputtering. But she had managed to hit on the right combination of motives—and for that she blessed her PR training, which had led her to investigate the most important VIPs at the party a week in advance.

  Daphne gathered up the file that contained all of the contracts she’d managed to get signed the night before and straightened her shoulders, taking a final deep breath before she strode from her desk to Amelia’s office. It was likely that Amelia just wanted to debrief—to get a report on the number of spokesperson contracts she had set up, maybe even congratulate her on doing the impossible.

  Daphne knocked on Amelia’s door, smiling to herself. “Come in!” she heard from inside. Daphne opened the door and stepped in, letting it close behind her.

  “What’s up?” Daphne asked, stepping over to the chair on the other side of the desk and sitting down. Now that she was starting to recover from her hangover, she really wanted the coffee she’d forgone at home—maybe she’d have a chance to run across the street after her meeting with Amelia and get something from the café.

  “Great work on Alex Oberon last night,” Amelia said, smiling in a way that was both pleasant and strangely off-putting to Daphne. “I honestly didn’t think anyone could ever convince him. What did you do to get him to sign up?” Daphne shrugged, smiling back at her boss in spite of feeling as though she were in the hot seat.

  “Well, I pointed out that his reputation is on the iffy side right now, and that becoming a charity spokesperson could head that off at the pass,” she said. “It also gives him something to turn to when his business competition heats up a bit.” She thought better of telling her boss the final nail in the coffin—that signing up with her would annoy Amelia. Even as sluggish as her thoughts were, she knew better than that.

  “Well, I’m really impressed. I figured it’d be good practice for you, maybe toughen you up a bit more.” Amelia gestured for the file that Daphne had brought with her. “This is really great, Daph,” Daphne handed the file over and tried not to fidget in her seat. “These are some great recruits.” Amelia flipped through the spokesperson contracts for a moment. “There’s one thing.”

  “What’s that?” Daphne tried not to sound startled. She had signed the impossible recruit. She had gotten half a dozen people to sign up in total. What could there be?

  “Well, since you’re obviously the only one who can talk Alex into working with us, the higher-ups and I decided earlier this morning that you’ll be the one to work with him.” Daphne kept her smile firmly in place. This was not something that she was exactly ready for; she was outreach, she wasn’t spokesperson management. There was a whole staff of people at the organization who got spokespeople to participate in events and give them the talking points.

  “That seems like an… interesting addition to my responsibilities,” Daphne said as diplomatically as possible. She swallowed. As much as she had enjoyed the triumph of convincing Oberon, she didn’t think he liked her very much, and she didn’t look forward to taking time out of her normal work to track him down and convince him to attend events or do interviews.

  “Well, as you know, we all tend to wear multiple hats here,” Amelia said, with that pleasant-unpleasant smile on her face. “Of course, this project will give you an edge when it comes to moving up in the company.”

  Therefore, Daphne thought wryly, trying to turn it down and pass it off would make her look bad. “I look forward to the challenge,” she said, smiling as broadly as she could. “Do we have Mr. Oberon’s contact information on file?”

  “I have his card all ready for you.” Amelia handed her a long, heavy card; when Daphne looked at it, it was covered in details: address, business address, both personal and business email, business and personal phone number, on and on. Daphne felt her stomach starting to turn over inside of her again, and thought that as unsettled as she felt, in order to tackle the new challenge, she would definitely need some coffee.

  “I’ll check in with you later,” Amelia told her—an obvious dismissal. Daphne stood and left the office as quickly as possible. She definitely needed some coffee.

  *

  Alexander was seriously beginning to regret the impulse that had brought him to sign up to become a spokesperson for ARC. It would have been so much easier to cut himself some slack on his duties to the charity as a spokesperson if he had not been forced to work with Daphne. He had thought—when he signed up—that it would be the last real time that he would have to talk to her in any real capacity. Maybe they would exchange pleasantries at an event or two and he could breathe in the alluring scent of her pheromones, enjoy the view from the front and the back, but he would be paired with someone else in the organization, someone who would just be grateful that he was doing his part at all.

  Instead, the very day after the gala, when he was settling in to read some reports on the progress that one of his competitors had made in their foray into what Oberon Industrial had been doing for decades, his phone buzzed. “Mr. Oberon, Amelia Harkness from the Animal Rights Coalition is on line one for you.”

  Alexander smiled to himself; he fully anticipated some sour grapes from the woman in charge of spokesperson recruitment after she’d seen him let Daphne lead him to the sign-up table. He had long since given his assistant the notification that he would take Amelia’s calls at any time—it was amusing to him, and she rarely presumed, mostly calling to let him know when the next gala would be.

  He put the call on speaker. “Hey, Amelia, how are those grapes tasting?”

  “Well, I’m just pleased that someone was finally able to persuade you to help our cause in a larger way,” Amelia said over the phone. Alexander smirked; he could hear the annoyance that she was keeping out of her voice so carefully. “In fact, when I went in for the morning meeting with my bosses, they agreed that since Daphne was the one to break through to you, she should be the one to handle you.”

  Alexander paused in his half-hearted perusal of the documents in front of him, looking at the phone with a rising sense of irritation.

  “I didn’t think your recruiters usually handled spokespeople,” he said carefully.

  “Well, we didn’t want to risk losing you because you didn’t like who you were working with,” Amelia said sweetly. “You’re a very high profile addition to our list of committed spokespeople, Alex. We want to give you everything you could need for success.” Alex considered for a long moment.

  “And this way you can get back at Daphne for succeeding where you failed; if she loses me, it reflects poorly on her.”

  “Alex! I’m surprised that you’d think I’d be so petty.”

  Alexander rolled his eyes.

  “I don’t think it—you just confirmed it. Okay, I’ll work with her.” Alexander had managed to get Amelia off the phone bu
t his irritation was growing. He knew—based on how seriously she had brought her salesperson skills to bear on him—that Daphne would be just as serious about getting him to events and getting him to publicize his support.

  He was not mistaken; only an hour or two later, his secretary had buzzed him to let him know that Daphne had called for him, and Alex—feeling his own part in her difficult situation—had let the call through.

  If it were just phone calls, he would be able to deal with it; but when he brushed off her initial attempts to get him in front of a camera, she had shown up in his office. Alexander had been infuriated—he had been working on an ongoing situation with a competitor, reaching out to some clients who might be able to help him get the rival businessman off-track. When his assistant informed him that Daphne Jackson was waiting for him in the lobby, he had nearly told the woman at the desk to have Daphne escorted out.

  When she came into his office, though, Alexander had been able to scent her pheromones immediately. They bowled him over—his mind had gone totally blank for an instant at the spicy, warm smell that radiated from her, tinged with a more acrid touch of stress sweat. “What perfume do you wear?” he had asked her abruptly, instead of starting in on the harangue he had in mind.

  “I—it’s cedar wood and chamomile,” Daphne had said in confusion. “Is it too strong?” Alexander had been forced to give himself a shake to relieve his reaction to her scent.

  “No. I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath. “What gave you the idea that you could just show up in my office and take up my time?” Daphne strode confidently forward into the office and Alexander could only just discern the tiny uncertainty that her body language betrayed.

  “Well, you’ve been basically ignoring my calls for a week now and I really need you to do something as a spokesperson. If you weren’t going to actually fulfill your obligations, why would you sign up?” Alexander had smiled to himself at the anxiety in her voice.

  If he knew Amelia at all, the older woman was giving Daphne a hard time, but he also knew that Daphne was probably driving herself to accomplish something above and beyond the pressure that Amelia was giving her.