by Eve Devon
Rufus’s eyes narrowed in thought. “You make an excellent point.”
“Besides, he is with the Hawk girl,” she added in one last desperate bid to convince him.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I think she is his girlfriend,” she tried, thinking of how she had seen him take her home a few times this week, presumably to evade the paparazzi camped outside the offices now that the world had discovered her sordid little secret.
“Think? Or know?” Rufus demanded.
“Know,” she said, forming the lie into a truth in her head. Using the trick she had learned to survive.
Rufus looked at her as if he could tell she had lied. But then he smiled. As if the notion that she would ever risk lying to him was preposterous.
“Interesting. Yes. This is better. Shake her up—shake him up. Hurt her—hurt him. Keep every single one of them on edge. All the time. Until I finish setting the stage.”
Monique’s brain worked frantically. What to say that would be cruel enough but not violent? She was alone in this city. If anything went wrong she was on her own. Rufus would disown her and without him, what was she?
“I could start following her, make her feel…uncertain. Paranoid. I could move things around her apartment. Then commit a home invasion. Scare her. She will run to him. You already have him under pressure, keeping his secret from his precious Steel Hawk.”
“That’s very good.” Rufus smiled. “A fun new element to the game. I like it. Now,” he settled back in his leather armchair, business concluded, “unbutton your blouse. Slowly.”
Her body trained to do his bidding, Monique felt her nipples tighten. There was no room to recognize the shame that whispered under her skin. She was too taken away with needing what he provided. She didn’t care. Out here, away from him, permanently worried he would find somebody else, she was doing what she could to survive.
Chapter Five
Steel Hawk Headquarters
Adam hovered in the open reception area of his office, surprised to find Honeysuckle still at her desk at a quarter after nine p.m. “Friday night and no hot date?”
Honeysuckle’s head snapped up at his question, and he could have kicked himself. Like it was any of his business if she did have a date.
“No, no hot date,” she answered, and in the quiet of the Steel Hawk premises, her voice seemed to him even more husky.
The book had been out five days and although he’d been caught up with preparing his new design for Zarrenburg, he’d noticed she had been quieter.
Understandable. But he missed her spark.
It hadn’t taken the press long to gather outside Steel Hawk premises. At first, they had wanted a reaction to the news about the company’s cofounder. When all they had received was an official Steel Hawk statement confirming that an investigation into the allegations was underway, they hadn’t been satisfied. The greedy press had done exactly what Edward had said they’d do. They’d jumped straight on to Honeysuckle and tried to feast.
She had to be doing it tough and, yet, to his knowledge, she hadn’t once complained. Which was impressive as hell, but the closer attention he paid, he didn’t like that the experience was taking the warmth from her eyes.
And now he worried he had been expecting too much from her the last few days. Amongst all the preparations for Zarrenburg, his anger over her being less than truthful about her work experience had dissipated, leaving him more intrigued by how much she had achieved in her eighteen months at Steel Hawk.
“Too much work to get done to leave on time?” he asked.
“I can manage,” she said with a tight smile.
Well, of course she could. “Have you eaten?” he tried.
She got out of her seat, then walked over to the printer, her hand pointing distractedly behind her at the opened tray of sushi rolls left on her desk.
“Was that lunch, or dinner?”
“Oh my God, it’s like you don’t ask any questions in all the time I’ve been working for you, and now you want to know who I’m dating, when I’m eating… Are you really sure you want to show such interest?”
He shoved his hands into his jeans’ pockets. Ever since he’d found out about the dancing—okay, if he was being honest, from the moment she’d surprised the hell out of him with wanting to resign—a brutal curiosity for her had gotten a serious hold of him.
“You’re going to give a girl the wrong idea,” she chastised as she bent to retrieve some papers from the printer.
He watched the way the material of her gray skirt clung in all the right places, and thought, if he wasn’t careful, he was going to give away all sorts of wrong ideas. He whipped his gaze away as she stood.
This looking-at-her thing that his eyes had going on was supposed to have stopped the minute she had agreed to stay, but it was like his brain had now connected dreaming about her with the dancing and the nakedness.
He frowned. There had to be a way to stop that, right?
“I guess I was surprised to see you still here,” he said as she turned to face him.
Honeysuckle marched back to her desk, casting a swift glance to the outsized retro station clock hanging from an ornate steel bracket against the brick wall. Adam saw her wince slightly, and he realized she knew exactly what the time was.
Suddenly he thought he understood exactly why she was hanging around. “They’re still camped outside?” he asked, referring to the more dogged reporters and paparazzi who seemed to be forming a permanent fixture.
“Last I checked, fifteen minutes ago.”
He remembered she usually walked or took the bus. “Okay. Give me five minutes to grab my stuff, and then we’re out of here.” A small way he could make up for not being around much the last couple of days.
“You really don’t have to. I know you were planning on working late again tonight. I’ll be fine.”
“I’m not Edward. Is that what this is?”
“What?” she spluttered.
Damn. He definitely should not have allowed that to slip out. “I saw him walk you out a couple of times this week. I figured he’s been giving you a lift home.”
“When our leaving happened to coincide, yes.”
Adam glanced to the corner office, which was in darkness. “He left early tonight?”
“As it happens, Edward has a hot date this evening,” she said, watching him carefully.
“Great. I mean for him, right? Might make him smile a bit more.”
She raised an eyebrow, and he thought it ridiculous all his hard-won social skills that had elevated him from total geekland years ago suddenly seemed so out of reach.
Feeling self-conscious, he took one hand out of his pocket to run it over the back of his head. “So, like I said. I’ll give you a lift home.”
“Are you going to drive me home, then turn your car around and drive back here to pull another all-nighter?”
“Does it really matter if I am?”
“No hot date, then?” she countered.
“No,” he answered slowly, wondering why the hell he wasn’t shutting down the move toward flirting. “No hot date.”
A ghost of a smile started to form on her lips. “Well, why is it the pissed-off guy who gets the date? What are we, the most boring people on the planet?”
He grinned. “I may well be. You, on the other hand…”
“Yeah.” She pursed her lips a little. “Boring isn’t exactly the adjective they’re using.”
Adam’s mouth tightened. “What are they saying? Do we need to get it stopped?”
She shrugged. “I figure the more they focus their attention on me, the less Max has to worry about from a business point of view. Until someone comes up with evidence to categorically disprove that Nathaniel Hawk was a jewel thief, the share price is going to keep creeping in the wrong dir
ection. I’m more tabloid fodder. Not particularly nice. But to the company, not as damaging as the rest of the book’s revelations.”
He noticed she hadn’t actually relayed what they were saying, but she wasn’t quite quick enough to hide the burr of hurt sitting under her skin. He wanted to bound out the doors and launch himself at the first tacky reporter to open their mouth.
Not much good to her after the fact, he thought angrily. He’d been too consumed with his work—had left her to the wolves.
Guilt had him demanding, “Whose bright idea was it to divert attention away from the body of the story and make you the sole target like this?”
He’d been under the impression the plan was not to react to the story breaking, but to stand tall and push through while they investigated the allegations, but now he frowned as he remembered Max telling him something about their request for an interview, with the so-called historian who wrote the book, being turned down. He clenched his hands in his pockets. When the hell were they going to catch a break on this?
“Adam, relax. Nobody has asked me to be a scapegoat. I just thought—”
“No.”
“Excuse me?” The delicately arched eyebrow made its second appearance of the night.
“I mean, no, as in no way am I letting you do this. This is the sort of thing that gets out of control. If we need to reposition ourselves in order for you to avoid taking the brunt of it, then that is what we do. I’ll talk to Max tonight.”
Seconds ticked by while she stared at him, and then very quietly she said, “You know, you really can be incredibly sweet sometimes.”
Adam blinked. He didn’t think he’d ever been called sweet in his life.
Her smile spanned sultry, straight through to angelic, and a sharp-tipped spear of lust drove itself straight into his solar plexus.
What the hell was she doing to him?
His reaction to her was getting worse, not better. “You’ll wait here while I get my jacket from the lab?”
“Unless some hot guy comes by to ask me out on a date, then naturally, I’m out of here.”
“Right,” he answered. Naturally. He turned around and jogged back down to the lab, and by the time he made it back up to the offices, she was packing a large tote with folders of work. When she caught him looking at them, she said, “Some research on the Great Exhibition of London. I sort of have this idea.”
“Yeah?”
“I was thinking that re-creating the same type of display as the original Zarrenburg one at the 1851 exhibition might be fun.”
She was so busy looking at him for confirmation that he took the opportunity to steer her away from the elevator and instead walked toward the stairs.
“Does the royal family still have the original casing Steel Hawk supplied?” he asked, immediately intrigued as he calculated whether he could attach his new casing to something that old.
“I think the original casing would be going too far,” she said, her voice rising above the echo of her stilettos clacking against the stairs. “Potentially not secure enough, and if we’re not going to show our latest design and technologies, we’d be missing a golden opportunity. But did you know that originally the Pasha Star and other jewels on display during the Great Exhibition were placed inside enormous aviaries? Back then the public had access to the display and could see through the bars of the cage but couldn’t get close enough to breach security. I saw this great picture, and I suddenly thought, visually, displaying some of the jewels in gilded birdcages would look fabulous. Anyway, I had Gustav—that’s the head-of-ceremonies guy—email me the dimensions and some pictures of the throne room where the display is going. I’m putting together a pack of information for you.”
At the back doors of the building, both reached out at the same time to press their hands against the fingerprint scanners either side of the doors. A click of recognition and the doors slid open. Pointing his key fob toward the only car still in the parking lot, Adam unlocked the car doors. Honeysuckle walked around to the passenger side and gracefully got in, placing her large bag on the seat behind her and her smaller purse on her lap.
Adam got in the driver’s side and switched on the ignition.
“You hate the idea?” she asked quietly.
“It won’t be my decision.”
“But tell me if you think it won’t work. I can handle it.”
“It’s not that. I actually think if I saw a mock-up, I could make it work from the security angle, and the prince’s head of security would need to sign off on it, but you know it’s Prince Zoltan who gets final say.”
Honeysuckle smiled, and he realized she had already won the prince over with the idea. All the hours he’d been working this past week, she must have been doing the same. He could only hope it had given her a break from what was going on at the Steel Hawk gates every day.
Driving around to the front of the building, he said, “Show me the info pack on Monday, and I’ll let you know by lunchtime if we can handle the security side of it.” He swore under his breath at the number of paparazzi milling about, just waiting to catch a shot they could use in the tabloid press the following day. “This is what it’s been like every day?”
“I knew it,” Honeysuckle said. “You’ve been sleeping on that lumpy leather couch in your lab again.” She breathed out when he didn’t respond. “Would you believe interest has leveled off a little?”
“You should have come to me. I would have organized a car for you.”
“You have more than enough to think about. Besides, I’ve been handling it.”
She kept saying that, so she was obviously keen to make sure he believed her.
He maneuvered the car through the crowd, turned left, and after a short distance said, “I’ll need directions.”
“We’re on this road for a while. So, do you think the prototype will be ready in time?”
He cast a quick glance at her and then put his eyes back on the road. “In time for what?”
“Well, you are bringing it to Zarrenburg, aren’t you?”
“What gives you that idea?”
“Because I know you.”
“You don’t know me,” he automatically responded, unable to keep the edge of steel from creeping into his voice.
“Fine. Whatever. Just let me know what sort of transportation I need to organize. It’s not like we have a lot of time to get whatever you need over there.”
“I— Look, I don’t know whether it will be ready in time.”
“And you don’t trust me enough to tell me either way, right?”
“It’s not a question of trust.” Okay, yes, he was feeling even more protective of his work than usual. If something really was going on at Steel Hawk, the less anyone knew about how far he’d got with the prototype, the better.
“Right. It’s more about questions and how you hate anyone asking them.”
He tried not to think about how, for once, her knowing all the things he didn’t like didn’t feel as good as her knowing any one thing he did like. Or him knowing any one thing she liked.
“Do you really think no one has noticed that self-preservation thing you walk around with all day and how it’s unnaturally large and hypersensitive?”
Unexpected laughter burst out of him. “You’re telling me there’s something about me that’s unnaturally large and hypersensitive? What’s bad about that again?” He waited a heartbeat. “No comeback?”
“Oh, trust me, I had a comeback, until you went and shocked me with the laughter. That’s not exactly something one normally hears from… Oh”—she leaned forward slightly in her seat—“here …turn left here and head all the way down to the next set of lights. Then make a right, and my building’s halfway down on the left.”
With all the outrageous things she sometimes said to him to make sure he really was listening, had he not
ever once belly laughed in front of her? He pulled up outside her building, deep in thought. Damn. He kept winding himself tighter and tighter. How was that good for his work? He needed to chill out a little more.
To distract himself, he craned his neck to look at her apartment block through his window. Only a couple of units had lights on inside, and he noticed that in comparison to the other buildings on the block, this one had definitely seen better days.
Not where he had expected a Hawk to live.
“We do pay you at Steel Hawk, right?”
“Relax, there’s a pending work order to paint the outside. It looks worse than it is.”
Adam wasn’t convinced, and the next thing he knew, he was switching off the car’s engine.
Honeysuckle turned to look at him with a question in her eyes and, from the glow of the lamplight filtering in through the car’s windows, what he thought might be a blush forming on her cheeks.
Well, hell.
Anyone who was comfortable removing their clothes in front of an audience shouldn’t be able to blush so prettily.
“You absolutely do not need to see me to my door,” Honeysuckle insisted. “But thank you for the lift.”
Adam didn’t say a word. Instead, he reached into the backseat, grabbed hold of her tote, and opened his door. “What number are you?”
“Nineteen,” he heard her say as she exited the car. “But, Adam, you don’t have to do this.”
“Why are you making such a big deal out of it?”
She opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again, but not before he thought he detected a few choice words being muttered under her breath. She grudgingly produced a key from her purse and opened the lobby door, then held out her hand and waited for him to hand over the bag containing her work.
He merely smiled and preceded her through the door. “Nineteen, was it?” he asked, taking a look around at the paint peeling from the walls and the black lines left from bicycles being stored along the narrow entryway.
“Fine. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Warn me of what?”
She pointed to the elevator with what could only be construed as a triumphant grin on her face. “Shall we, then?”