by Gem Frost
FROZEN HEART
By Gem Frost
FROZEN HEART published by Gem Frost. Copyright 2018, Gem Frost. Cover design copyright 2018 by Natasha Snow Designs.
All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, character, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, Gem Frost.
Chapter One
Nash
“Goddamnit, Lawson. Get it together and work faster, or I’m going to fire you.”
Alexander Rutherford Snow III blew past me like an Arctic wind, tossing a huge stack of binders onto my desk and disappearing into his office without another word. I looked at the enormous quantity of paperwork and sighed.
I’d worked for Snow and Associates a whole week, and it had easily been the most nerve-wracking week of my life. I’d been hired as a low-level administrative assistant—which, considering the ink wasn’t yet dry on my bachelor’s degree, wasn’t a bad place to start—but apparently Mr. Snow’s assistant had developed some long-term illness, and almost before I’d started, I’d found myself working as personal assistant to the big man himself. The CEO of Snow and Associates.
The only problem was, he had ice where his heart ought to be.
Rumor had it that he was a snow king. Not just cold himself, but somehow freezing everything and everyone around him, too. A King Midas who turned everything he touched, not into gold, but into ice. And the first day I walked into the enormous Snow Tower—thirty weirdly modern stories of reflective blue windows in Chiswick, Virginia, its jagged lines making it look like it might just have been chopped haphazardly out of a glacier—I couldn’t help but wonder if it was more than just a rumor.
A week later, I was pretty sure it was no rumor, but stark truth. Mr. Snow was every bit as warm and soft as an icicle. At thirty-one, nine years older than yours truly, he was undeniably an incredibly handsome guy—a few inches over six feet, with broad shoulders and no hint of a spare tire—but his cocoa-brown hair was frosted prematurely with silver, and his eyes were the chilly pale blue of the winter sky.
His manner was just as cold as his eyes. His interactions with me consisted solely of sentences like “Get it done in the next half hour, Lawson, or I’ll fire you” and “If you expect to keep your job, Lawson, my coffee had damn well better be on my desk in the next thirty seconds.” Friendly and caring, he was not. In fact, he’d threatened to fire me at least thirty times in the past week.
Through some miracle, I’d managed to hold onto my job for a whole seven days, but I was terrifyingly aware that my continued employment was dangling by a very thin thread. And I really needed to keep my job, since I’d rented an apartment here in the city, and didn’t want to be forced into crawling back home to my parents in Charlottesville.
The weird thing was, it wasn’t just me Mr. Snow treated that way. It was everyone, and as a result the whole company seemed to exist in a dark, cold, never-ending winter. When I had to hand-deliver papers for him, I saw no smiles on the faces I passed. There were no friendly greetings, no cheerfully cheesy calls of working hard or hardly working?, and no one seemed to dare to stand around the water cooler gossiping. These people looked miserable.
And with a boss like Mr. Snow, maybe it was no wonder.
I put my unhappiness aside and began looking through the documents he’d tossed onto my desk, trying to figure out what needed doing first. I glanced at the clock on my computer, and heaved a sigh.
It looked like I’d be working straight through lunch again.
✽✽✽
I’d learned to stash candy bars in my desk, since Mr. Snow apparently considered lunch breaks to be optional, but by the time I got off work (an hour and a half later than I was supposed to), I was totally famished.
I walked (or staggered, rather) toward the elevator, glumly considering my options. Since Snow Tower was in the business part of downtown, there weren’t a lot of McDonald’s or similar places to choose from. Most of the local restaurants catered to an executive clientele, which meant they were pricey as hell.
My salary didn’t allow me to eat at better places regularly. And given my uncomfortable awareness that I might lose my job at any moment, I didn’t dare splurge. The absolute last thing I wanted to do was have to borrow from my parents, or worse yet, have to slink home with my tail between my legs and ask them to support me. They’d spent an awful lot of their savings to get me through college, and now it was time for them to save toward their own retirement. I was going to make it as an adult on my own, damn it.
My stomach grumbled, and I sighed, deciding that I’d just get in my little black Chevrolet and drive toward the tiny apartment I now called home. There was a KFC on the way, and a Taco Bell too. I could probably survive fifteen minutes more of starvation, even if it did feel like my navel was pressing against my spine at this point.
The plush burgundy carpeting muffled any sound of footsteps, and the first I knew of anyone nearby was when Mr. Snow loomed up beside me. Today he wore an iron-gray suit with a blue tie, and he looked as warm and approachable as ever.
As warm and approachable as an ice cube, that is.
Don’t get me wrong—he was undeniably gorgeous. His silver-streaked hair was perfectly combed, his three-piece suit was miraculously wrinkle-free despite the eleven-hour day he’d put in, and his face… well, a multitude of angels really should be following him around, singing joyful hosannas over the perfection of his face. He was easily the most attractive man I’d ever seen, and that included Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and other classic examples of masculine Hollywood good looks. His was the type of beauty that could bring anyone to their knees.
But all that beauty was marred by the cold reserve of his manner. It was like looking at a marble statue—you might marvel at its craftsmanship, but you sure as hell didn’t want to talk to it.
The problem was, he was my boss, so I couldn’t very well give him the cold shoulder. My job status was precarious enough as it was, so I had to say something. I drew in a breath, steeling myself, and spoke as politely as I could manage.
“Good evening, sir.”
He grunted.
Typical, I thought. A people person, he was not. In fact I had some doubts as to whether he was actually a person at all. He didn’t seem human. Maybe he was one of those really fancy Japanese androids.
Nah, because those showed expression on their faces, and Mr. Snow didn’t.
We stopped at the elevator, and I reached out and pressed the down button. Some perversely mischievous impulse made me keep talking.
“Going home for dinner, sir?”
He grunted again.
“Me too,” I said cheerfully, as if he’d responded with a detailed itinerary of his evening plans. “Going to grab some tacos, I think. Then I’m going to go home and chill out, maybe watch a little Brooklyn 99. How about you?”
He stared down at me through icy blue eyes.
And grunted.
The elevator announced its presence with a ding!, and the doors slid open. The two of us stepped inside, and I pushed the button that would take us to the garage level.
Great, I thought. A whole minute alone in the elevator with the Human Ice Cube. Wonderful. A minute was, I felt, about fifty-nine seconds too long. I refrained from trying to get him to talk again, just stared straight at the doors, willing them to hurry up and open.
Forty-one seconds later, the elevator ground to a shuddering halt.
The doors didn’t open.
I reached out and punched the floor button again, and then t
he open doors button, but nothing happened. The doors remained closed, and the elevator refused to move as much as an inch.
Great. Just great.
I was stuck in an elevator with Alexander Rutherford Snow III.
Chapter Two
Alex
Being trapped in an elevator was not the way I’d intended to spend my evening.
Don’t get me wrong—there were definitely worse things than being trapped in a small space with the young man who was currently working as my personal assistant. When Barbara Stone, who’d worked for me for most of a decade, had fallen ill, I’d chosen him as my assistant even though he was brand new to the company—not for his looks, but because his résumé had impressed the hell out of me. He’d graduated from Chiswick University’s well-regarded business program with honors, and had spent every summer working various internships with local companies. He was, as my late father would have said, a real go-getter.
I had to admit, though, that the young man’s looks were definitely a perk. He was handsome and well-built, if not too tall, and his fiery red hair and amber eyes made me think of sunshine.
Sunshine was something I’d been sorely in need of for the past few years.
He didn’t seem especially sunshiny about being stuck here with me, though. He punched the buttons repeatedly, glaring at them as if they’d done him a personal wrong. But the elevator stubbornly refused to move.
“Damn it,” he muttered, and I heard his stomach rumble audibly.
An unexpected touch of sympathy unfurled inside me. I was hungry, too. I wanted to reassure him, to tell him, Don’t worry, help will be here shortly. But I hadn’t become even more successful than my father by coddling my employees, or engaging in small talk with them. Instead I pulled out my cell phone and called building security, telling them in a few curt words that we were trapped.
“Fifteen minutes,” I said when I punched the disconnect button.
“Great,” he answered, and sank to the floor in a disconsolate heap.
I remained standing—because I wasn’t about to sit on the floor in my custom-made Dormeuil suit, and because the CEO of a company must maintain a certain dignity and reserve at all times. At least that was what my father had always told me. He brought me up to be cool, almost cold, and I had learned those lessons well. I’d always maintained a certain distance from everyone in my life, even my wife.
Which was probably why she’d divorced me.
Even so, the sight of this young man on the floor, only a couple of feet away, did strange things to my insides. I couldn’t help but imagine him rising to his knees, unbuckling my belt and unzipping my pants, and then—
No, I told myself firmly. When Lydia left me, I’d promised myself…
The honest truth was that my wife hadn’t dumped me solely because I was reserved—though she did throw the words you ice-cold bastard at me more than once in our last acrimonious conversation. The impetus for our separation was that she’d found some gay porn on my computer, and had reacted with—well, with disgust and revulsion. I’d explained that I was bi, but that it didn’t mean I was having sex with men on the side, or that I’d ever even consider such a thing.
But the damage was done. She was grimly convinced that if I liked men as well as women, then I must be gay and simply hadn’t accepted it fully yet. And sooner or later, she was sure that I would leave her for a man.
Which was not in the least true. I had kept my sexuality a closely guarded secret since adolescence, but the fact was that I’d always liked to look at men and women. Though I had to admit that I’d encountered very few men as attractive as the one who was currently huddled on the floor of the elevator, looking like he might pass out from starvation any moment now.
Even so, when Lydia had divorced me, I’d felt guilty, as if it were entirely my fault, and had promised myself that I wouldn’t ever explore that aspect of my sexuality. At any rate, though the world had come a long way in the past decade, and my father was no longer around to be horrified by my sexual orientation, it was still much easier to be straight—or pass as straight, anyway. So I dated women, and only women, and refrained from even looking at gay porn.
Well, mostly.
But I couldn’t completely control my wayward thoughts, which is why I was still imagining this young man—Lawson—kneeling at my feet, doing wicked things to me with his tongue, and then sucking my hard, throbbing cock into the hot depths of his mouth and—
“Ughhhhhh,” he groaned, clutching his stomach dramatically. “I’m going to die if I don’t get some food soon.”
My fantasy instantly ground to a screeching halt, and I almost cracked a smile at his theatrics. To cover it, I frowned down at him.
“If you’re going to be my personal assistant, Lawson, you’d best accustom yourself to working long hours.”
“But I didn’t even have lunch today,” he whined in a pitiful voice. “Just a candy bar.”
With a touch of shame, I recalled myself tossing a giant stack of folders on his desk at 11:45 and barking out my customary threat to fire him. Of course the poor kid had worked through lunch. He’d probably figured he had to. In point of fact he was doing a very good job as my personal assistant. He wasn’t quite as fast and efficient as Barbara had been, but then she had a decade’s worth of experience on him. He was doing fine work, and I should probably quit trying to cow him.
But that was the way my father had always motivated his employees.
Maybe Father was wrong, I reflected, not for the first time.
As always, I instantly quashed that unwelcome thought. My father had been a great man. He’d built this business from the ground up, turning it from a mere production facility into a multinational company with vast, far-flung holdings. The world had respected him, and so did I. And when he’d died seven years ago, he’d left a vacuum at this company, a vacuum I’d striven to fill every day since.
And more importantly, the methods I’d learned at my father’s knee were working. The company was making money hand over fist, after all. The fact that we had a bit of a turnover problem, and that many of my employees didn’t seem altogether happy in their jobs, was a minor issue, in the grand scheme of things.
Even so, I couldn’t help feeling sympathy for Lawson as I looked down at his messy red hair. He really did look like he was melting into the carpet. Words I had no intention of saying leapt from my mouth.
“When we get out of here,” I said, “I’ll take you by Le Château. It’s only a block away, and we can get some food. All right?”
He looked up at me, and for the first time I noticed he had pale ginger freckles, scattered across his nose and cheekbones. They were cute.
He was cute.
And something must be terribly wrong with me, for me to be using words like cute (even inside the privacy of my own head). Obviously I was hungrier than I’d thought. I must be becoming light-headed.
“I… I really can’t afford…”
“I’ll pay for it,” I said, as curtly as I could manage with those huge amber eyes gazing up at me. “It’s the least I can do, considering you worked through lunch to get that paperwork done for me.”
He hesitated a moment longer, then offered me his warmest, brightest smile. It hit me in the gut with the force of a fist, and I almost staggered from the impact.
“Okay,” he agreed.
✽✽✽
For a small guy, Lawson packed away food like a linebacker.
He’d allowed me to order for him (“I don’t speak French,” he’d muttered with a self-conscious blush), and he seemed to approve of the salad, the French onion soup, and the boeuf bourguignon I’d selected. I’d suspected he didn’t eat French cuisine often, if ever, so I’d picked out the most basic items on the menu, and he seemed to like them, judging from the way he’d gobbled down his food. In fact he went at his food with such enthusiasm that I was a little relieved that he hadn’t accidentally devoured the china and silverware while he was at it.
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Le Château was the hot restaurant in Chiswick at the moment, and in the crowded room filled with perfectly dressed executives, Lawson and his cheap polyester-blend clothing stuck out like a sore thumb. But even in his awful suit and tie, he drew admiring glances. His hair was spiky and disheveled, in what I assumed was a deliberate coiffure, though it looked like he didn’t know how to use a comb. And it was extremely (one could say glaringly) red. Combined with his delicate features, which made it perhaps more accurate to call him beautiful rather than handsome, and the warm sweetness that shone from his golden-brown eyes, it was actually surprisingly difficult to look away from him.
Not that I was staring. Because I most certainly was not.
“Thank God we didn’t wind up stuck in that elevator all night,” he mumbled through his last mouthful of stew. “I don’t think I could’ve survived another hour without food.”
“There was never any danger of that,” I informed him. “The building is staffed with security and maintenance personnel at all hours.”
“Still, it was scary. What if the elevator cable had, like, snapped or something, like they do in the movies? Imagine that. Like…” He raised his arms over his head, made a whistling sound, and lowered his hands abruptly. “Boom!”
I assumed this was meant to suggest an elevator falling thirty stories and smashing to smithereens at the bottom of its shaft. Dramatic, but highly unlikely.
“For a young man who majored in business,” I said, “you seem to have a penchant for drama.”
He grinned at me. “At least I have you talking now,” he answered.
I recalled (again with a touch of shame) the way I’d refused to respond to his conversational overtures when I’d encountered him at the elevator. Despite my awareness that I’d behaved poorly, I felt compelled to defend myself.
“I have never been one for small talk.”
“No kidding. Geez, for a while I thought maybe you were just an android who was programmed to threaten to fire me every hour.” He laughed, a warm, silvery sound. “But you eat, so I guess you’re not an android.”