by Eve Devon
In that split second before the real world got its grappling hook into him—reminding him he was in his private lab in the basement of Steel Hawk Headquarters—every atom of his being wanted back in dreamland. On that fantasy planet with its seven suns and one very beautiful, sexy siren saying his name like she needed everything he could give.
His eyes squeezed themselves shut until tiny white dots danced beneath his closed lids. When he reopened them, his retinas relayed the somewhat blurry but unmistakable hourglass form of his personal assistant, Honeysuckle Hawk…the siren that had held him so enslaved on that fantasy planet with its seven suns.
Jesus.
Adam scrubbed a hand over his face.
Mind-bending was right.
Talk about all the things excruciatingly wrong.
What the hell was Honeysuckle Hawk doing being all in his head like that?
He must have been really out of it not to have even heard her enter the lab. Glancing down, he noticed she wasn’t wearing her usual custom-made killer heels. Now she decided to take them off before entering? Like the sealed white floor of his lab wasn’t already covered in the tiny pit marks of her spikes from the countless other times she had ignored his request.
No wonder he hadn’t heard her.
His gaze shifted from her pretty feet to the heels dangling sexily from her hand, and in need of a little recovery distance, he rolled his chair across the vast basement room until he sat in front of his moveable wall of computer screens. A restless heat and edginess followed him, determined to make him revisit the image in his head of him and his personal assistant wrapped around each other like they were just getting started on each other.
Possibly he needed to get his head checked out, because Honeysuckle Hawk ran his office efficiently, discreetly smoothing the ruffled feathers his single-mindedness often left in his wake, and that was the box he’d had no trouble keeping her in.
Until she’d told him she wanted to leave him.
Leave Steel Hawk, he corrected as he stared hard at the latest batch of analytics that had come through while he had been asleep. It would help if he could see them properly, but he hardly ever wore his contacts. All the better to sleep, he thought ironically, putting his steadfast focus to good effect and shaking off the last vestiges of his dream.
“So you have the thing,” Honeysuckle said without preamble, following him over to the data station and holding his glasses out to him.
Without his glasses on, his other senses compensated, and paranoia that she might have even one iota of awareness over her recent starring role tied itself to the mast of his Holy-Hell-Sci-Fi-Fantasy.
A fantasy that had surely only come about as some sort of warped punishment for being pissed at her. Because with three short, precise paragraphs of a resignation letter, Honeysuckle had changed the entire dynamic between them, and he wasn’t about to cut her any slack for it.
He hated that his reaction to her news was completely disproportional, and was mad as hell that she thought she could lie to him about why she wanted to leave.
So yeah, that the dream equaled warped punishment sounded highly plausible to him.
That was what he would go with if she even hinted that she knew she’d been in his head.
And getting under his skin.
“Ten minutes. The thing,” Honeysuckle restated, as if her usual patience with him wasn’t needed now she was under the impression she had resigned from her position. “In your office—you know, the place where you promised you’d spend at least some of your working week when you took over as head of R and D?”
Adam winced. Reaching out, he grabbed the glasses she’d been holding out to him and put them on.
When he’d taken over from his father as head of Steel Hawk Research and Development eighteen months ago, it was on the understanding he wouldn’t shy away from the corporate meet-and-greets.
Huh.
These days, buyers seemed to want some sort of Tony Stark fanfare deal at every stage of a bid, whereas Adam preferred to let Steel Hawk designs speak for themselves.
Okay, so, the fact that he could hardly be described as a people person might contribute to him taking every opportunity to bypass the showmanship expected of him, but recently he’d had to acknowledge that maybe if he’d spent less time behind the scenes, driving the innovation, then Steel Hawk wouldn’t have lost two major contracts to competitors.
The failure to get either contract, one to provide all the high-end secure casings and cabinets for the new state museum, the other to supply safety-deposit boxes for a global bank chain, so soon into Adam’s tenure had bitten into him hard. Its rabid teeth had taken hold and sunk straight to the wound of his only other failure and ripped it wide open again.
Wasn’t like he hadn’t learned the biggest lesson from that first experience, though, which, in short, was never to let anyone get that close again.
Yeah, he thought, running a hand through his sandy-brown hair, whether he could be accused of taking it too personally or not, failure burned like nothing else. Only this time, he wasn’t a naïve seventeen-year-old who could afford to go to ground until the humiliation at being taken in by a beautiful liar dulled. This time he had a twenty-strong department to run. This time he had Steel Hawk’s reputation to uphold.
His focus shifted back to the batch of analytics on the screens before him. He frowned, finding it hard to accept the results before his eyes. There had to be something he was overlooking. The nanotechnology embedded in the glass was working. He’d retested every part of the process until he couldn’t see straight.
Maybe that was part of the problem, he conceded. Well, if it was, there wasn’t time to take a break. The sooner Steel Hawk distanced itself from its recent failures, the happier Adam would be. He owed everything he’d made of himself to Steel Hawk, and after months of hard work getting this particular design past the proof-of-concept stage, he knew he had the product to regain the company’s top position in the market—knew it in his bones.
“You wanted more responsibility,” he said to Honeysuckle, referring to her statement in her resignation letter. “Deal with whatever ‘the thing’ is for me, would you?” Swinging his head to look at the glass cage in the center of the room, he winced again as tight muscles let him know he was coming off the back of pulling his second all-nighter. He was so close to getting the data captured from the specially formed glass to display itself in the program he’d designed. Maybe he needed to recalibrate the metal plate at the bottom of the glass cage so that it registered a heavier object and activated the cameras. Caught up in his line of thought, he turned back to his data wall, located a keyboard on the tabletop nearby, picked it up, and punched in a new set of instructions, his agile fingers moving over the keyboard in rhythm.
He felt rather than heard Honeysuckle move to stand right behind him. She bent so that her mouth was close to his ear, and the series of numbers he’d been holding in his head scrambled and then disappeared. Damn it. It was completely illogical that this new awareness of her was the way his body had decided to react to her announcement.
Eyes rolled in her reflection on the screens in front of him.
“No, I will not deal with it for you,” she said. “It’s bad enough I have to come down here and get you. You definitely do not pay me enough to deal with a pissed-off Edward Long.”
“Edward’s default mode is pissed off,” Adam responded, wondering if Steel Hawk’s company lawyer was having a problem pushing through the patent application for his prototype, because Adam definitely wasn’t in the mood to hear that right now.
With a sigh, he started backing up his files to the secure network before shutting down his computer. He supposed he’d better go see what had Edward so annoyed this time. He rose from his chair and then stretched, groaning deeply as vertebrae that supported his six-foot-two frame popped back into alignment. He w
ent to whip off his lab coat when he caught Honeysuckle staring. Her gaze shot up to meet his and then away again before bouncing back. When it did, her eyes were clear.
A muscle in his jaw twitched.
Damned if he knew a way around this new weirdness between them.
Other than her rescinding her resignation so that everything could go back to normal, that was.
He slung his lab coat over his chair, bending to search its pockets for his black leather design notebook. Coming up dry, he ran his gaze over every available surface of the wall-to-wall wraparound desk before finding it on a workbench near the glass cage.
“It’s only Edward I’m meeting with?” he double-checked, realizing he’d been wearing the faded Metallica T-shirt, jeans, and Converse trainers since yesterday.
“Affirmative,” Honeysuckle said with a small smile, obviously picturing Edward-of-the-sharp-lawyerly-suits’s reaction to seeing Adam dressed in his usual work uniform. “Rumor has it he’s already met with Max and co.”
Adam’s radar went off. Max was his older brother and the CEO of Steel Hawk. Edward had already met with him and the other heads of department?
Standing in front of his private safe, he leaned forward for a retinal scan. The safe door popped open, and he placed his design notebook into one of the two paper trays. His gaze was drawn to the sole document resting in the other paper tray.
“Fair warning, Edward seems particularly pissed off this morning,” Honeysuckle imparted.
“Great.” Edward and him both, he thought with a final glance at the resignation letter residing atop his second paper tray. He closed the safe and at the same time mentally closed the lid on the box in his head marked “Honeysuckle”, then turned and strode across his workshop.
As a teenager, he’d helped his father knock through wall after wall to widen the space before helping to install the most up-to-date equipment necessary to ensure Steel Hawk remained the pinnacle of innovation for its industry. These days, the R and D Department took up the middle floor of the Steel Hawk building. But this was his private playground. Very different from the rest of the original building, which dated back to the 1850s and over the decades had had various wings added to its brickwork-and-steel frame. The latest addition to the premises included purchasing and remodeling the building behind this one and constructing a walkway between the two. Adam was getting his own glassworks factory so that Steel Hawk could control the custom build of his new glass formula into sheet glass.
That was how much faith the company had in him. A muscle in Adam’s jaw danced double time because it appeared his personal assistant didn’t share the same faith. Why else would she want to leave?
“Hey.” Honeysuckle paused, and Adam steeled himself against the hesitant husky note in her voice. “Is something weird going on? Walking through Steel Hawk this morning—well, it felt like something was in the air. And now you have this meeting with Edward.”
“I have been known to have meetings with Edward.”
“You know what I mean. Something feels off.”
He stared because she was saying what he’d been thinking for a while. More than once over the last twelve months, as little errors crept in, Adam had caught himself feeling like there was some sort of underlying divisiveness coming from an invisible source within Steel Hawk. He’d even convinced his brother to conduct an audit of the entire company.
When everything had checked out, Adam had expected a lecture from Max on his overreaction to failing to get the last two contracts, or, at the very least, for his brother to imply he had an overcautious attitude.
Max hadn’t done either. He was just as unsettled as Adam, but Honeysuckle was the first person outside of him and his brother to actually say something aloud.
Was this why she wanted to leave? Truth to tell, he had never questioned whether she was the type to cut and run, but, then, what had he ever allowed himself to know about her, really?
Apparently reading his silence as deliberate withholding, Honeysuckle looked hurt. “Well, if you’re not going to talk to me about this, then, after your thing with Edward”—she cleared her throat—“we should probably sit down and discuss the other thing.”
Adam’s hand paused above the fingerprint scanner beside the large sliding glass doors. “Wow.” He turned to look at her. “Finally ready to have the rats-and-ships discussion.”
Honeysuckle stared at him like she wanted to brain him. “And who exactly is the rat in this scenario? You honestly think I’m deserting you?”
Some of his own anger came out to match hers, and turning to fully face her, he asked tightly, “Tell me how, since starting this department together, I’ve mistreated you?”
Navy-blue eyes bruised with emotion he had no hope of understanding looked up at him. “You haven’t,” she whispered.
“Well, out with it, then, because saying you want to leave a company like Steel Hawk to pursue professional advancement is complete bullshit.”
The hurt in her eyes was replaced with an expression that said she’d withstand waterboarding torture before she ever said anything more than what was in that letter.
Honest to God, she really had the ability to be the most insanely annoying, troubling, puzzling personal assistant a person could have.
But she was his insanely annoying, troubling, puzzling personal assistant, and the thought of having to start working with someone new was enough to give him hives.
“I’ve short-listed five applicants,” Honeysuckle said, breathing in and seemingly counting to ten before breathing out. “I’m interviewing them on Monday morning.”
“Really?” Adam asked. “Because I could have sworn I just saw your resignation letter sitting in my safe. Still think you can get it out of there by Monday? Or are you going to actually surprise me with a reason for departing that I’ll believe?”
“You’re being ridiculously childish about this,” she said with a pout he had no business focusing on.
“And you’re being selfish,” he answered, placing his fingers on the scanner so that the doors automatically whooshed open. He ushered her out into the hallway before the doors could seal themselves shut behind them, and thought about how it really wasn’t right that just as he’d…gotten used to her, she was walking.
“I’m being selfish?” Her voice shot up an octave. “How the hell do you work that one out?”
She reached out and clasped his forearm, and he was transported back to dreamland—only to be tumbled straight back out of it when he realized she was only holding on to him for balance while she put her stilettos back on. Dragging his gaze from the sleek knot of her hair, he fought the need to see if holding those silken tresses in his fingers would feel like they had in his dream.
Feeling like an idiot, he turned right, in the direction of the main bank of stairs.
“No way,” Honeysuckle murmured, her voice back under control, her fingers clenching tighter to steer him back around. “You’re late as it is. We’re taking the elevator.”
Adam paused for a fraction of a second.
Obviously, he could do the elevator.
A cinch, right from the doors closing to the ding signaling they had arrived. Four floors to his office and in a shuttle essentially made up of three walls, a set of doors, a floor, a ceiling, and a state-of-the-art security camera that would only take him— Wait a minute…the camera fed back to the— Adam stopped abruptly, his brain shifting gears. Smacking his forehead with his palm, he turned around again. The problem wasn’t with the hardware. The problem was with the software. He needed to check his code.
“Adam?” Honeysuckle queried as she got into the elevator.
He turned back and, reaching in, depressed the Doors Close button for her. “Five minutes. Ten at the most. I’ll meet you up there,” he said as the doors swished shut.
He grinned as the elevator doors cut h
er off midtirade.
* * * * *
It was thirty minutes later when he walked up to the suite of offices Honeysuckle reigned over. He’d get this meeting out of the way and then head straight back to the lab. He should have the problem fixed by lunchtime, which would give him all afternoon to catch up with his staff and check the status of the various projects they were working on, and with any luck, finish the day up completing the hated paperwork that Honeysuckle had probably laid out on his desk.
He pulled up short when he spied Edward Long perched on the corner of Honeysuckle’s desk, giving her the full GQ effect. Honeysuckle was looking up at the tall, dark-haired lawyer with a warm smile on her face. She laughed. A sort of husky giggle.
Something unidentifiable skittered under Adam’s skin, and some of his good mood at fixing his code vanished.
“Edward,” he greeted, “sorry to keep you waiting.”
“No, you’re not.” Edward snorted, turning to acknowledge him. “But Honeysuckle at least had the grace to keep me amused while I waited.”
“Well then. It’s all worked out well.” Cool eyes assessed the lawyer, but when he turned them on his assistant and caught renewed displeasure for him in her gaze, he frowned. Was working for him really that bad?
She should have said so, he thought, annoyed. Wait—maybe she had and he hadn’t heard her. Too focused on his current project, no doubt.
Huh. Maybe if he cut her a break, she’d rethink and stay.
He had no idea he was staring until she jerked her head toward Edward with a look that clearly said, And he’s still waiting, because…?
Right. Turning back to Edward, he asked, “So, what’s up?”
Edward exhaled, and his face reset itself into expressing his usual dislike for the world. “Well. Let’s see. How shall I put it?” Rising from his position on Honeysuckle’s desk, he brought the two sides of his jacket together, closed the button with a practiced ease that annoyed Adam, and said, “I believe I’ll go with ‘a shitload of trouble is heading straight for us.’”