Read Online Taken by the Pirate Tycoon by Daphne Clair - Free Book Online

“And working hard at hiding it.”
    Her laugh this time was meant to be a scornful negation, but came out a shade too high and definitely not natural.“That’s a weird thing to say. As if you thought I was one of your computer-generated holographs or something.”
    “Uh-uh, not mine.” Something new came into his eyes—something uncomfortably piercing, and he shook his head. “There are times, though, when I feel like Harrison Ford in Blade Runner .”
    In the film, Ford’s lead character fell in love with a convincingly “human” robot, Samantha recalled. She’d seen it twice and had fought tears at the scene where Ford proved to the girl that her so-called memories of her family, her childhood, were false and she herself was a “replicant.” Not a real person at all.
    Making her voice crisp and damning, Samantha said, “You spend too much time with computers. Your imagination is running away with you.”
    “Maybe.” But after a long, head-on-one-side, glinting look that engendered a defensiveness in her, he turned his attention back to the cost projection in front of them, apparently dismissing the unsettling exchange.
    “I’ll take it to the board,” she promised some time later, “but we don’t have unlimited cash to spend on expensive toys for boys.”
    Jase raised his dark brows.
    “I know—I’m being sexist,” she conceded. “But I’ve noticed how men’s eyes light up at the idea of a new piece of machinery. Sometimes the cost is way out of proportion to the darn thing’s usefulness. The more complicated it is, the more often it seems to break down. And once a sale’s made, too many firms don’t want to know.”
    “With me,” he said, “you’ll get an ironclad guarantee. Once I’m committed, I don’t walk away.”
     
    Predictably, the board was impressed, and with only two diehards against, voted a budget for the proposal that Jase presented to them in person during their meeting.
    After the others left, Jase said, “I’ll send you a contract, Samantha, and you can have your lawyers go over it.”
    “Yes. Thank you.” Her glance went to the photograph of Magnussen’s founder that hung above the conference table, looking indomitable and maybe disapproving. Unconsciously she chewed at her lower lip.
    “You have a problem?” Jase asked.
    “My father might not have agreed with this.”
    “Your father’s dead, isn’t he?”
    “Yes.” She couldn’t help a faint smile. No timeworn platitudes for Jase Moore. Not “passed on” or “gone.” Simply dead.
    “Did you always do what he wanted?”
    “No, but he wasn’t easy to challenge. He could never admit he might be wrong.” And he’d been especially annoyed when his own daughter disagreed with him.
    “What about your mother?”
    Her mother had seemed to live to please her father. A former photographic model with a unique ability to shine in company, she’d been an asset in her husband’s social and business life. Occasionally, with a winning smile and a light word or two, she’d poured delicately perfumed oil on waters he had ruffled, but always deferred to his opinions and his needs. The perfect mate for an autocratic man.
    “She never argued,” Samantha said simply. “Not that I remember. I suppose that’s why they seemed to have a happy marriage.”
    All the same, Ginette Magnussen had not been without her own ways of softening her husband on occasion, using herfemininity to advantage when nothing else worked. Something that came less naturally to Samantha. Aloud she said, “I guess I have too much of my father in me.”
    “You clashed?” Jase asked.
    “More so after I left university and tried working for him.
    A mistake on both our parts.”
    “So starting your own business was a way to assert your independence and show him what you could do.”
    That perilously accurate insight startled her. “It’s part of Magnussen’s now,” she said, “but operating independently. I try to implement some of