He stood and leaned closer, slowly stroking my neck. I leaned into his hand.
“And if I text you? Will you come running?”
Again, he hesitated, studying my face, running a thumb along the line of my jaw. What did he see in my expression? His was like a mask.
“I doubt it,” he said finally.
“And?” I prodded.
“You’re coming home with me tonight.”
My stomach clenched at his tone, tight with desire. Yes, I wanted that, but could I continue to let him have his way so easily? Get away with his arrogant admissions? I lifted my chin, raised an eyebrow.
“So this, it’s going to happen your way, everything? You text. I run. You pick me up, drop me off … ”
“I like the way that sounds,” he agreed, a small smirk on his lips, as if he knew there was no way in hell I or any other woman would go for that.
“OK.”
He dropped his hand.
I amused myself. I really did. Of course I wasn’t fine with that sort of highhanded treatment, but agreeing was worth that look on his face.
“OK?”
“Sure. For now,” I said with a shrug, smiling inwardly. “But I’d better get back to work.”
And when he did text that afternoon, just as my workday was ending, I did exactly as he said. Took that long elevator ride to the top floor, nodded to Janine, who stared at me impassively, whatever judgments she might have hidden far behind her professional façade, and then entered Daniel’s office.
When I stepped inside, he was standing next to his desk, shuffling a stack of papers with no sign of stopping work for the day. He looked up, and that half smile of his struck me hard, just like it did every time I saw him. He met me halfway across the room, pulled me tight against him and I instinctively rose up on my toes to meet his kiss, breathed in the scent of his skin.
“I still smell of you,” I said softly as I broke away, lowered down to my heels. “All day.”
He touched my hair, stroked my neck, and my world became the place where his skin connected with mine. “Like I’ve marked you.”
“How territorial,” I managed to say lightly, teasingly. But he had marked me. Was marking me.
And after that, the week was one long game of hide and go sex. I started carrying condoms in my purse after all because I never knew when or where. Well, if it was during the workday, it was the thirtieth floor. But there was also the time in his Porsche and a rather quick encounter bent over the kitchen counter on the third floor during lunch hour. And three nights in a row I slept over at his house, read through Hemingway’s newspaper articles as Daniel worked, showered in his shower, and went straight to work from his bed.
My body craved his with a ridiculously increasing intensity, as if sex with him were meth and I’d become an addict. It felt good. It felt dangerous. I knew I had crossed the line ages ago but I didn’t know how to stop or how to go back to a time before.
I did all the work asked of me and if anyone noticed my extended “bathroom breaks,” they didn’t comment. Except for James, who shot me judgmental looks as if he knew exactly what hanky panky was going on. Which, I supposed, he did. Maybe he was my conscience, my Jiminy Cricket, and I should have heeded the warnings in his disapproval. Instead, I went deeper.
On Friday, I started thinking about the weekend. There was a show in Cambridge that Leanna wanted to go to. There was a gallery opening as well on Saturday. But what I really wanted to know was whether this weeklong flirtation would keep going or if Daniel would fall back on whatever pre-scheduled events he had.
Lunch hour passed without any message from him. I’d been answering his texts all week, jumping at his call, and it just felt too quiet. Maybe it was time for the game to change.
Two p.m. He was in a meeting; I knew that. He’d mentioned that one of his business associates from London was in town. But at the same time, I wanted him. I wanted him to do what I wanted him to do.
I flipped open my phone. Started typing.
thirtieth floor. Now.
I had no idea if he’d meet me. I could totally understand if he didn’t. Yet if he did … I couldn’t stop the pleased smile at that idea.
I took my time, strolled to the elevator, stopped to ask Jillian, one of the higher-ups in the department, if she wanted the image I was rendering in any specific format. Maybe I fooled no one, but the meandering made me feel less conspicuous.
The thirtieth floor was its usual dim self, the hallway eerily silent. I stepped into the conference room. Empty. I struggled to ignore the disappointment. The elevator ride from thirty-second floor to thirtieth was much shorter. He’d had plenty of time to get there.
The floor-to-ceiling glass window offered a stunning view of Boston, not so different from the one visible from Daniel’s office. Even when my father had been a rich man himself, he had never worked out of a skyscraper. He’d preferred a SoHo brownstone, visiting the main office only when necessary. I’d never wondered about that before, about his working halfway across town from his business partner. Hartmann had been the one with the midtown offices, the fancy reception area and the views. Maybe there had been some strife there before Hartmann’s death. Maybe it had had to do with Daniel’s mother.
But my father wouldn’t talk about the past and I was strangely reluctant to bring it up with Daniel, even though the past was the very reason I was here.
Now Daniel Hartmann wanted to expand his business globally. What did that even mean? A skyscraper overlooking the world? A view of skylines in Istanbul or Dubai? Or something fantastical and futuristic?
I wasn’t entirely sure if I’d heard him or sensed him first but then I felt him, wrapping himself around me, brushing my hair aside to kiss my neck.
“You,” Daniel said, interspersed between kisses, and between the insistent motions of his hands pulling my skirt up, “knew I had a meeting.”
“Yes,” I admitted, reaching back to caress him, to unfasten his pants.
“Which, technically, I am still in the middle of.” He pulled my hips back slightly, away from the wall. I rested my hands on the glass, gasping both at the thinness of it separating me from a thirty-story drop and at the touch of his fingers. He slipped my thong down my thighs. Thighs I parted more even as I arched my back.
“You left your client upstairs?”
“Yes,” he said, thrusting into me. I bent my head, my forehead resting against the glass. It was exquisite, earthy and breathtaking all at once, with the view before me and the strength of him filling me, pushing me forward.
“Daniel?” I looked back over my shoulder toward him. “Why did you settle in Boston?”
For a moment he was silent, and the movements of his body as he slid forward and back felt full with tension. I regretted asking anything in the middle of sex, of creating any sort of distance. But then his mouth lowered to my ear, his breath teasing my skin.
“So I could do this,” he said softly, “Right here, right now, with that view beneath us.” I pushed back against him, silent but for my moans. He had avoided answering but that was all right, part of the unspoken agreement to keep things light.
But then he slid out, and the scent of me, him, latex, was heavy in the air. I didn’t move, gasping. Feeling the loss and terrified that I’d broken something.
“Turn around,” he commanded softly. He knelt down and I followed.
On the floor, he thrust back into me, his face buried against the curve of my shoulder. I gloried in the fullness, in the feel of his body between my legs and inside of me. He was mine for just a little longer. I lifted a hand and wrapped it around his neck, curving around the base of his head, something like tenderness in that touch.
• • •
Standing in front of the elevator bank, feeling languid and rumpled, I pressed myself to him, arms draped over his shoulders. He’d come when I called. It made me want him even more—something I’d have to analyze later, much later, as if I could ever turn off the ridicul
ous analyzing machine of my brain.
“Now I’m going to have to think up some reason for leaving him for fifteen minutes.”
“And for looking a bit less pressed than you did before,” I teased.
“Yes, exactly.” He laughed, but I thought I heard an edge to that. “I didn’t build my reputation on lies.”
Didn’t you? The response stopped at the barrier of my lips and I let the silence stand. It was so easy for me to forget who he really was.
“So why don’t you tell him then that the marketing department needed you,” I said instead, pressing myself even closer as if the continued embrace could make my thoughts disappear. If I simply closed my eyes and held on, I could ride the dizzying thrill of it all. Just feel.
He took my arms and slid them from his body, stepped back. I opened my eyes.
“You would think these little work breaks would make it easier to concentrate, but I’ll still be thinking about taking you home, having you naked. Taking our time.”
His words were making me want him again, making the blood rush through my body, heat gather between my thighs. After all these years of looking at his face in magazines, of being fascinated by him, it was stunning to know he desired me. Good for my ego, for sure.
“I’m going home after work,” I said abruptly.
“Emily—” I liked his protestation. He’d come at my text and now he still wanted my company.
“I have mail, bills, something.” And since my first paycheck had been deposited directly into my account, I wanted to go shopping, to buy lingerie and shoes. Yes, it was completely indulgent and likely a waste of the excess money but at the same time, I was twenty-one and stepping out with a handsome billionaire. Clearly, to achieve revenge, I needed to be well dressed. “Don’t you have any friends?”
He leaned against the wall, crossing his arms, the epitome of amused, slightly rumpled and devastatingly handsome billionaire. I liked seeing him this way and I liked how easily our interchanges shifted from humor to sexual tension and back again.
“None that I want to sleep with.”
I grinned. “OK. I’ll call you when I get home.”
Chapter 7
It took me longer than usual to get ready and when, hair still wet and only a towel around me, I stepped into the living room to grab my phone and see if he’d called, there was Daniel, sitting and chatting with Leanna.
“Oh.” I took a step back as both pairs of eyes focused on me. “I, um, am running late.”
“Clearly,” he said, but I recognized that look in his eyes. He stood. I glanced at Leanna who was looking back and forth between the two of us.
“Daniel and I were just discussing Manhattan,” Leanna said, as if there wasn’t anything awkward about that moment, although obviously she was aware of the undercurrent of sexual tension and amused by it all. “And NYU. Aaannd I need to go make a phone call.”
I was only dimly aware of Leanna leaving the room because Daniel was coming closer. He put his hand on my back and steered me gently, his voice a whisper.
“Why don’t you show me your room?”
My breath caught in my throat and I turned, nearly stumbling over myself. I felt young and caught, as if everything about me were laid bare.
He walked past me into the bedroom and I closed the door behind him. When he stopped, surveying the space, I realized suddenly how it would look to a stranger. It wasn’t a large room and though clean, it was filled to the brim with neatly stacked piles of books, artwork and cheap furniture. It was only one step up from a dorm room really. I thought of the expensive new stockings I had been about to slip on. Ridiculous. Like a child playing dress-up.
“This is … ”
“Cluttered,” I filled in for him. “Yeah I know.” I was breathless and waiting for him to pull the towel off me, only, he seemed distracted by my stuff. It definitely wasn’t the sexiest room ever, not even a blank slate like his Charles Street bedroom. Or sophisticated like his high-rise condo that I had only ever seen in a magazine spread. “I could get dressed as I was planning to do,” I reminded him.
He walked, or rather wound his way, to the bust of Medusa, ran a finger over one of the twisted snakes. He seemed to take in all of the random collection of artwork I had completed over the years. I wanted to tell him to stop looking, wanted to push him out of there. Then he picked up my newest sketchbook, which he couldn’t possibly know was the newest.
“Daniel—”
He brushed past me with it, sat down on my bed.
“It’s stupid stuff, just student art,” I said with a shrug, trying to hide my anxiety as he flipped through the book, but angry with myself at the same time for putting down my work. I’d had success with sculpture, had two gallery showings in Jamaica Plains; sold some pieces. But I’d never been cocky about my abilities, not in that showy way that some of my peers had been. Sometimes I wondered if that made me less, if that difference would be what made them succeed. Only, I was going to succeed too. I would.
He put the sketchbook down, shifted to sit with one knee bent and the other leg still rooted on the ground.
“I don’t know you all that well, Emily,” he said, his tone utterly serious, and I had the sense that this would be what it felt like to be on the other side of a business meeting with him. “And while I might have had suspicions, I still don’t really know why you came to work for me. But we all make choices in our lives. At twenty-one I wasted away a fortune in the name of revenge.”
I went cold. He spoke so matter-of-factly about the revenge he had taken on my father. Revenge for some unknown hurt my father had caused. I wanted to stop his lecture and force the long-awaited discussion. Except he continued, sweeping all thoughts of any bold confrontation about the past from my mind.
“But I came back,” he said. “And I succeeded. That kind of comeback doesn’t happen for everyone. If you want to pursue this,” he gestured around the room, “this is the time to do it. Not the time for working in corporate America.”
I felt small all of a sudden. He was right and I knew it.
“I was nominated for a fellowship,” I said, hating the defensive tone in my voice. “It starts in mid-August. The Barrows Farm Art Colony.” He seemed to recognize the name and despite all my other conflicting emotions, I appreciated that.
“And you naturally didn’t inform Lance of this when he hired you.”
I sighed, and then rolled my eyes at the amusing stupidity of the whole situation. Here I was with the head of the company, admitting that I had taken the job under false pretenses, that I had never intended to work there more than the summer. I was also sitting there in a towel with drops of water from my damp hair dripping on the sheets.
Unreal.
I had a billionaire sitting on my bed.
And not just any billionaire.
Which reminded me of why we were sitting there, and the fact that I didn’t have to feel this way, like the one who needed to make excuses. I tilted my head, studied him, let the desire I always felt for him well up and show in my eyes. His own narrowed, as if he understood that my mood had shifted.
I leaned closer to him, reached out and slid the leather tongue of his belt out from under the metal. He didn’t stop me so I pushed him backward until he was flat on the bed.
“If you don’t want me to get dressed,” I whispered, unzipping his pants, “then you’re just going to have to get naked instead.”
• • •
By Sunday, I was exhausted, sore and happy. We sat in his living room like a couple that’d known each other for longer than two weeks. He was reading some sort of a report and I, in one of his shirts, had plucked a collection of Hemingway’s journalism off of a pile.
It was all so domestic, so peaceful. As if there were nothing between us that might cause strife. And maybe there wasn’t. Maybe it was all some huge misunderstanding. Half-truths and distorted perspectives. Fallible narrators simply trying to do what was best.
Daniel and I had
some sort of unspoken agreement to not talk about the past, but if we didn’t, how would I ever reconcile the two versions of him I knew?
“Why did you hate my father?” I asked before I could stop myself and then waited breathlessly for his answer.
He glanced over at me, at my naked legs. I smiled at that despite the seriousness of the conversation.
“Are we going to fight about this?” He placed the stack of papers on the coffee table. Moved over to the side of the sectional on which I was lounging. I stretched out, lifting my legs and he took them into his lap, stroking them.
“I just want to know.” I wanted to figure out how the Daniel I was getting to know could be the same as the mythic one I had resented my whole life. “Is it because your mother turned to him … after … ?”
“My father killed himself.”
I stilled in shock, yet Daniel’s hands still stroked my legs, rhythmically, but almost by rote, as if all of his emotion, personality, had fled his body.
“Kidney failure,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s what the paper said. That’s what my father thinks.”
Daniel’s hands tightened briefly on me before they relaxed and I realized then how tense he was beneath the casual exterior. “Everybody lied because it was an insurance issue and so many people depended on him for their livelihood. I learned by accident much later.”
A ripple of unease ran through me but I forced it away.
“I know,” he said, his voice low, answering my unspoken doubt, my discomfort with the deception.
“So what does that have to do with my father? It was suicide, not murder.” I felt completely insensitive saying that but I needed to understand.
He looked away. “He found out about the affair. “
“I don’t understand,” I pressed. I only knew pieces of the story, and it wasn’t fitting with what he’d said. Daniel’s father had died, and in his wake his mother had turned to my father.
Daniel faced me again, raised an eyebrow silently. I didn’t like what he was suggesting. It made my father seem rather immoral. But then again, there was my mother to testify to Mark Anderson’s womanizing ways.
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