by Simply BWWM
Nicole picked it up, wondering what it was for, as there didn’t seem to be any electronic devices in the room. She pressed the power button, and one of the tiles on the ceiling lowered as the lights in the room went off and the windows dimmed.
On the walls all around her, there was suddenly a projection of a tropical beach, with the ocean on one side and the beach and jungle all around her on the other, so that if she turned in a circle on the spot where she stood, it seemed like she was actually there.
Gasping in wonder, she looked at the remote and pressed the right arrow key. A desert appeared, taking the place of the beach, all around her in every direction. Another press, and she was looking at massive snow-capped mountains all around her, the Himalayas, if she was going to guess, as if she was sitting at the top of one of them. Another press, and she was sitting in the middle of a lake on a rock, and even on the floor, except for the image of a rock beneath her, there was water all around.
Seeing that there were up and down arrows, she pressed the down arrow and the lake view stayed, but the sun disappeared behind a cloud, and it began to rain all around her, on all of the walls, and the projection of the water on the floor began to ripple as if raindrops were really landing on it. Sounds of relaxing rain filled the room, and Nicole laughed softly in disbelief as she turned in a slow circle and gazed at it all.
She had never seen any office as incredible as the one she was in. She pressed the power button again, and it all went away. She placed the remote back on the counter again.
With one last look at the room, she gave her head a shake and walked out, knowing that she was going to love working in a place like the one she was in. She sipped her latte as she walked and gave Tia a smile as she passed her desk.
“Did you see Dane?” Tia asked her with piqued interest.
Nicole stopped in her step and frowned slightly. “No, why do you ask?”
Tia looked surprised. “Oh! Well, he was just here looking for you. He was going to introduce himself and check on you to see how your day was going so far. I told him that you went down the hall for a coffee, and he headed that way, but I guess he didn’t see you.” She looked a little disappointed.
Nicole shook her head. “No, I didn’t see him. I must have missed him.”
“You shouldn’t miss him; he looks great today, and he’s in an amazing mood. I mean, he’s usually in a good mood, but it’s like he won the lottery today. Anyway, you’ll catch up to him. In the meantime, here are your messages, and you got a call from the printer. They forgot to ask you a few things, and they need confirmation before they print all your things; business cards, stationery, pens, your coffee cup, and whatever else they’re making for you.
Also, the company masseuse will be by this afternoon to introduce herself to you. She’s great. Actually, there are two of them, and they are a husband and wife team, but she will be ours unless you really need someone with muscles to dig into you, and then you ask for him.” Tia stopped herself, looking like she had just realized that she was going off on a tangent.
“Thanks, Tia, I really appreciate it.” Nicole grinned at her and headed into her office to get back to work.
By eleven in the morning, she was famished, and coffee wasn’t going to do it. She came out and saw that Tia was gone, so she left her a quickly scribbled note. ‘Left for lunch, be back soon.’ She smiled and left the message on Tia’s keyboard. Then, she headed to the elevator and went down to the street level.
It was nice to get out of the building and walk along the streets in the sunshine, breathing in the fresh air. She only went two blocks before she ran into a street vendor who was talking with just about everyone who was around his fancy cart. He saw her as she glanced at him, and he waved her over.
“Hey there! New lady! Come over and have lunch!” He gave her a big grin, and she felt like he should be on the Hawaiian welcome mat, welcoming all new people to the islands. He was a big Polynesian man with an even bigger smile.
She felt her cheeks warm as she walked toward his cart and the six or seven people standing around it, eating and talking. More than half of them had waved her over. “You have to eat here!” one of them told her earnestly.
“Best spot downtown! Best food!” another added.
“Best lunch, braddah!” another patron threw in with an air punch toward the big man cooking and serving the food.
Nicole laughed and nodded. “I better not pass it up then.”
“You new here? You working around here?” the big guy asked.
She nodded. “Yeah, it’s my first day actually. I just started. I work two blocks down.” She jerked her thumb behind her.
“In the white building?” he asked, looking over her shoulder.
She nodded. “Yeah, that’s it.”
“Your first day? Your lunch is on me, but you have to come back!” He laughed, reaching his hand out to her. “I’m Sam. You can call me Sam, you can call me Braddah!”
“She’ll be back!” two of the patrons said between their bites.
“Hi Sam, I’m Nicole.” She grinned at him, finding herself falling in love with the islands again for more new reasons. It seemed like those reasons fell on her like soft rain, and she was soaking every one of them in.
“What do you like to eat today?” Sam asked eagerly.
She perused the menu, and the lady nearest her said, “It’s all good, honey.”
“Well, I’ve heard about the pulled pork, so let’s do that please.” She smiled up at him.
“You want it on bread or in a bowl?” he asked, his hand hovering in mid-air above the bin of pulled pork before him.
“In a bowl,” she answered. He went straight to work, filling a bowl with the incredible smelling meat and adding some freshly sautéed vegetables. The scent of it all was enough to make her even hungrier.
He gave her the bowl a minute later with a flourish and topped it off with a chunk of grilled pineapple. “I give it to you free on your birthday, too, Sistah,” he announced as she took it from him and thanked him.
Everyone around her, including Sam, waited as she dipped her plastic fork into the meat in the bowl and lifted some out for her first bite. It was so good that she closed her eyes and didn’t even chew it for a second. She just savored it. When she swallowed it, she looked back at him in awe.
“That was the best meat I’ve ever had. Ever. Anywhere.” She grinned at him. “I’ll be back all the time.”
The other office people around her who were all holding their own food and eating alongside her all cheered, some of them adding comments that it was the best place to be and that it was growing so much that Sam needed to open his own restaurant so they could sit and eat, but he told them that he couldn’t see them and talk to them if he was in a kitchen.
She finished her lunch and got to know some of the other office people from the area, and then bid them all a good day, thanked Sam, and headed back to the tall white building where her office was, thinking that she had literally stumbled upon a beautiful island treasure. She had no doubt that there would be many more fantastic surprises on the island, just waiting for her to discover them.
When she walked back toward her office, Tia stopped her. “You did it again,” Tia said, looking partly amused and partly disappointed.
“I did what?” Nicole asked in confusion, wondering what she had done more than once on her first day there.
“You missed Dane. I was down the hall getting coffee when you left your note on my desk and headed out. I came back, and he showed up not a minute later, asking if you were here so he could take you out to lunch to celebrate your hire and get to know you. I had to tell him that he missed you again.” She looked confounded.
“Let me guess, I’ll run into him eventually?” Nicole half laughed, and Tia nodded and did the same.
“Yes, eventually you will.” She shrugged and turned back to her computer with a big smile.
Nicole went into her office and got back to the job of settling in. At twelve t
hirty, Tia reminded her that she had a meeting at one in the conference room, and she went up a few minutes early, thinking that it would be a good time to meet Dane, but when she walked into the conference room, she found Ed along with two men and two women who were there from the company that they wanted to partner with, at least partially, on some of their expansion work.
Tia looked at Ed in confusion. “Where’s Dane?” she asked curiously.
Ed shrugged. “No idea. He’ll turn up. He brought these fine people in, so I’m sure he’ll be around here soon enough, though he is running a bit late, and that’s not like him.” He pointed to the seat on his left. “Why don’t you sit by me,” he suggested in a friendly tone.
She took the seat, and her back was to the glass wall that faced the rest of the office. Ed had Rose pour drinks for everyone, coffee, water, and tea per their requests, and Nicole gladly took a tea from her, and just as Ed was beginning to look uncomfortable that Dane wasn’t there, the door opened and everyone in the room stood up from their chairs and smiled at the man who walked in.
Everyone except Nicole. Her smile faded the instant that she saw Dane. One word escaped her lips.
“Alexander…” she trailed off in a whisper, and Ed turned and blinked at her in surprise.
“Oh, no. This is Dane. I guess you two haven’t met yet. Dane, this is Nicole Hamilton.” Ed looked pleased as punch, and Dane looked as if he had been punched right in the gut.
He looked every inch the same as if someone had just knocked the breath out of him, and Nicole stood there feeling as if someone had knocked the breath out of her. She blinked. She could not believe that she was looking at her new boss, who had fourteen hours before had both his tongue and his thick erection buried in the depths between her thighs.
She held out a slightly trembling hand to him, as everything in her stopped totally short. “It’s nice to meet you, Dane. I’m sorry we’ve been missing each other all day; it would have been nice to meet you somewhere else.”
He swallowed as he stared into her eyes, and she felt his hand close firmly around hers. That same hand had cupped her breasts the night before and touched her so incredibly that he had brought her to an orgasm with it.
“It’s nice to meet you too, Nicole,” he said woodenly. Then, he seemed to snap out of his reverie, and he pulled his gaze from her and forced himself to look around the room at everyone else. “I’m so sorry I’m late; I was looking for someone downstairs, but I seem to have missed them again.” He didn’t say it was her, but she knew by what he said that it was her. He had probably gone down to introduce himself to her and walk her to the meeting where they both were. She wished it had happened. She’d rather have had the shock of her life in private than in front of a room mostly filled with strangers.
Everyone shook his hand except Ed, who gave him a hearty pat on the shoulder and smiled as Dane took his seat on Ed’s right hand side.
They were facing each other across the table, but neither one of them looked at each other for the full first half of the meeting. When the tension in the room had lessened some and everyone else was focused on the topic at hand, Nicole felt his eyes on her, and she glanced at him. His brown gaze was smoldering hot, and she knew that he was thinking about the night before and not at all about the meeting that was going on around him.
She found herself with the same problem, though she was trying with everything in her to divert all of her attention that she could to the four guests they had and to Ed, hoping that she appeared to be much more in tune to what they were talking about than she really was.
It took all that she had to focus on the meeting and keep her cool, as if everything was fine, as if there was nothing at all wrong in the whole world. The moments felt like centuries, adding up, piling on top of one another, and weighing down on her, crushing everything out of her, but finally the moments that seemed to last forever were done, and the meeting came to a close. She had never been so grateful in her life to have a meeting end.
Giving Ed a smile while Dane stared at her from behind his shoulder with stormy eyes, she made a swift exit, saying that she had a lot to finish up in her office, and she turned and walked as fast as she could without looking like she was trying to escape.
She didn’t stop until she reached Tia’s desk, and then she only paused a moment, breathing sharp and shallow. Tia looked up at her and beamed.
“Did you finally meet Dane? He was down here looking for you to walk with you to the meeting. I’ve never seen him so many times in one day. I could get used to this!” She laughed lightly.
Nicole nodded slightly. “I did meet him. I have a phone call to make; please see that I am not disturbed by anyone. I don’t care who it is; no one comes through my door for the rest of the afternoon, not even you.”
Tia gave her a serious nod. “Will do, Captain.” She said it with a serious tone, and Nicole knew that she meant it. Seconds later, Nicole closed her office door behind her and wished with everything in her that she could just sink right down into the floor below her and disappear forever.
Heading for her desk, she picked up her purse and dug her personal cell phone out of it. With a swipe of her finger, she could hear Jeffrey’s phone ringing, and she sank into her chair, burying her forehead in the palm of her free hand.
He answered with a light and happy voice. “How is your day going, my lovely little exec?”
She felt emotion choke her, and she swallowed hard and closed her eyes. Struggling, she finally managed to answer him, and her voice could not have been tighter. “I just had the worst day of my life.”
Before he could reply, there was a thump, and Nicole jerked her head up to see Dane standing in her doorway looking flushed, his eyes wide and his lungs heaving, breathless, as he held her door open while Tia pulled on his other elbow.
“You can’t go in there! She isn’t to be disturbed!” Tia insisted in frustration.
Dane didn’t budge. “She’ll see me,” he said in a stern voice.
“What’s going on? Who’s that? Are you all right?” Jeffrey asked on the other end of the phone, panic ringing in his voice.
Everything inside Nicole came to a screeching halt. “I’m going to have to call you back,” she told Jeffrey in an even tone that came from nowhere.
She set her phone down and stood up, looking only at Dane. “I guess I’ll have to see him, Tia. Thank you for trying.”
Tia scowled slightly, and Dane closed the door behind him. When it was shut, he slowly slid his hands down into the pockets of his tailored suit pants. There was a strained silence between them for a long dreadful minute, and then he spoke.
“I really can’t believe this,” he said quietly.
“I can’t believe it either,” she replied, staring at his face and shaking her head.
There was another momentary silence. “I’m not at all sure what to do about it. I’ve never been so confused in my whole life,” he told her earnestly.
She stood there, still stunned, but somehow in the back of her mind, gears started turning and wheels spun, and her logic kicked in.
“We’re… we’re going to put last night behind us and pretend it didn’t happen. We’re going to move forward with a business relationship, and we can pretend that we met today. No one knows any different. So, we move forward as employer and employee, and that’s that,” she stated as matter-of-factly as she could.
He blinked and walked toward her, pulling his hands out of his pockets. She thought that he might reach for her, but he stopped short of her, his face contorted slightly in what might have been desperation. “Can you actually do that? Really? Is that what you want?” he asked with a tone of utter disbelief.
She drew in a deep breath and nodded curtly, steeling herself against the tide of emotions that were sweeping through her inside. “Yes, of course. We don’t have another choice. We had a strange case of really… really bad luck, and now we just have to… we have to get past it and move forward.”
&nb
sp; He stared at her, and his tone grew deeper. “Bad luck?” he asked in a challenging tone. “Is that what it was to you? Bad luck? Now you just want to pretend it didn’t happen and act like everything is vanilla around here?”
Dane took another step toward her, and she held her ground, but she wanted to back away from him. She didn’t want him anywhere near her; it was difficult enough to make herself strong against him. She nodded. “Yes, that’s what I want. That should be what you want too. We have to think of the business first, and of our partners and coworkers, of our business associates, of the future of this business, and in thinking of all of that, there isn’t room for awkwardness about a night that we shared together. It was one night, it’s done, we go forward and forget about it. That’s all there is to it.”
She hoped that she sounded like she meant what she said, because she didn’t feel like she meant what she said. She was fighting herself internally to keep her thoughts from going to the night before, to visions of him without a shirt, visions of him nude before her, beneath her, with his mouth moving against her breasts, and lower, against her core. She fought hard to keep those thoughts from the forefront of her mind. She could not afford to let them in.