by Corri Lee
It was a selfish, taciturn city, and it was home now. This was my new stomping ground, and I made no promises to anyone, not even myself.
Emmeline Tudor, whoever she was, was waiting in the wings and it was nobody else’s job to tell me who and where she was. That was my prerogative.
There was a definite sense of smugness when I walked into The Seymour on the first Monday of September looking more human. I’d found myself in Soho the day before and stumbled across the alternative fashion stores that enticed me in with the rock music I’d grown to love through my teenage years. At twenty-two years old, the desire to be confined to suit had never been something that had really taken a place in my ethos, but if I could do it with an edge, I thought that might just be the person the city wanted me to become.
Once I had that initial idea, it grew. When I might have usually found a bar and drank alone until I could identify a heartless lay for the night, I stayed in with a bottle of wine and finally dipped into the sickeningly healthy looking bank account I’d set up separately for the allowance Henry had insisted on giving me when I left the family home in Cardiff to follow my best friend, Daniel and his civil partner into London. I raided online stores and ordered an entirely new wardrobe and footwear collection. I’d still wear the prim and proper suits Ivy had forced on me, but I’d mix them up with my new stash of slogan t-shirts, patched jeans and entirely less debilitating skater shoes and creepers in a whole host of colours.
The contact lenses she’d insisted on me wearing for meetings and dinners were also a no-goer. I loved my geeky thick rimmed glasses and they were a sticking point. They were my eyes, not hers, and in no way could I justify jabbing a finger in them and ending up feeling more tired than I really was for vanity’s sake.
The staff appreciated it. When I strolled in with my hair in scruffy pigtails, acid green Converse and a Spiderman t-shirt underneath my blazer, they instantly warmed to me as I suspected they would. Professional was good, sure, but approachable was better when they’d spent years being ruled over by the Tudor tyrant.
My apparently unorthodox approach won me lunch with the HR department for the ‘troublesome’ sector of The Tudor Initiative: a small but booming business charged with the design, manufacture and distribution of mobile phones. Could I have ended up anywhere better? It also scored me some brutal honesty regarding exactly why they were all feeling so pissed off and demoralised—nobody listened to them. Their sub-office in Flushing held their artistic types, and it was a dive. The building was cramped, poorly ventilated, poorly heated in the winter and lacked natural light. No amount of far too generous monthly bonuses and increased holiday entitlements could ever really serve as a suitable platitude when the environment they were forced to work in made them miserable. If Henry had bothered to listen, he’d know that they just wanted a new office; a far more cost effective way to keep his staff happy and productive.
But I knew for myself only too well how he thought that throwing enough money at a problem would solve it. When I was sectioned after my suicide attempt, his idea of parenting was to pay for all the best doctors and a private room with a view when what I wanted was for him to ask me who’d pushed me to such a reckless place, and go and have cross words with them to defend my honour. In fact, not a single person had asked me ‘why’ or ‘who’ in the right way until Blaze...
I worked solidly through the month, conferring with Henry once a week via Skype. The Flushing Artists, as I called them, were more than happy to surrender their excess incentives once they found out that I’d secured them a new office on Broadway.
I turned heads. People were surprised by how calmly and efficiently I’d handled the situation, and requests flew in from across the States for me to help them in the same way. It was satisfying to say the least—to feel like I was finally doing something productive with my life. Whether Henry was looking better for it or learning anything became the least of my concern when I knew now that, as much as I’d fought it, this empire was going to be mine.
And as much as I hated to admit it, it was thanks to Blaze. He had to drive me across an ocean to make me see where I belonged, and I was grateful for that. I just wished I could stop thinking about him. What he was doing, who he was with, if he’d spoken to my friends... He seemed pretty friendly with Henry, so how had that relationship been affected with the news of his secret marriage? When I thought about it, Henry really hadn’t seemed all too surprised when I’d told him. That was enough to make me stop thinking about it. I knew I’d analyse the hell out of everything until my exodus was pointless because everything I was trying to leave behind me was dragged to the forefront of my mind.
Still, there was no denying the way my mind strayed to full colour flashbacks of our better times—memories so vivid I swore I could feel his hands and lips on me. Any time someone stood too close or crept up behind me, it felt like him. Blaze left a dull hollow ache that caught up with me every spare second I had, so I forced my smiles and drove forward.
Because I had to get past it.
Because he wasn’t mine to remember anymore.
Because even if he was, I wouldn’t be the only woman in his life. I’d have to share him and that wasn’t enough. I deserved all of him.
Towards the end of the month, I found myself studying a subway map spread across a table in a café on Canal Street. Chinatown had quickly become my favourite place to explore when I had free time—so close to Soho and a different kind of hustle and bustle from the rest of Manhattan. People began to recognise me and stopped being surprised by the lack of a language barrier, and became the closest to friends I had in the big city.
“Sight-seeing?” I glanced up from the map at the petite aproned girl who strolled over with a jug of coffee and shrugged. Her name tag said Sophie but I knew she’d picked a Western name for work.
“Depends. Is there anything good in Astoria?”
“There are some museums, Hell Gate Bridge, some decent places to eat... But I’ll be offended if you trade us in for somewhere trendy.”
“Of course not!” We grinned at each other and she set the jug down to help me make sense of all the different lines. I thanked my lucky stars that I had someone to explain it for me because I’d already gotten lost and boarded the wrong trains enough times to be thinking of doing something unspeakable; buying a car and driving in the bumper to bumper traffic.
The question was in Sophie’s eyes but she didn’t ask it: what business did I have in Astoria if not sight-seeing? Well, that was Blaze’s fault, too. Our third what I suppose you’d call a ‘date’ started out with me throwing myself down Oxford Street, trying to run away. From what? I’m still not sure. It might have been the hallucination of my overweight teenage self, it might have been the crowd that made me so anxious. It probably should have been Blaze—yes, I should have run the hell away when I had the chance and not gotten attached to the man who had been honest about his inability to forge a romance from the start.
Either way, I’d ended up flat on my back on the concrete in front of my reason to be in Astoria.
Calloway Ryan’s face left me speechless. His ice blue eyes and the way he wore a suit was still permanently engrained on my mind. I’d somehow charmed him into surrendering to me an engraved money clip crammed with pound notes wrapped in a business card and I had to return that clip. It had been one of the few things I’d packed to come with me when I left, and his card had been the inspiration I’d needed to get on a plane. He’d told me he’d come and collect it himself but it seemed like too good an excuse to escape.
I’d been bolstering myself for weeks to go to his office and now, I was going to damn well do it. It was too long a flight to not go there and return his possession.
But I hadn’t gone there for him. I chanted that over and over to myself as I rode the N line, eyes looking between my new smartphone and the windows to make sure I didn’t miss my stop on Broadway. Occasionally, I pulled out the business card to check the address, feeling li
ke I’d seen it somewhere before.
Oh, hell. Two streets away from the subway station, I found my destination and immediately released why I knew the address. It was the same building the Flushing Artists had moved into three days earlier.
The building stood out of the ground like a giant obelisk—a huge steel structure with the street facing wall made entirely of reflective one-way glass tinted gold. The building had no visible name like Henry’s, just the number emblazoned above the automatic doors leading inside.
Okay, so it was an office block. A really freaking tall office block, but no more or less impressive than the ones I’d already been inside. It did look a little odd stuck in the middle of a neat row of red brick buildings, but what the hell did I know? I was no architect. And Calloway Ryan worked inside it, I just had no idea where.
I must have stood there staring for ten minutes before I finally took a breath and plastered on my business face. Nothing about this scenario was new—I’d been known as a prolific man eater before I met Blaze and I’d seen enough looming great buildings in New York to no longer find them intimidating. But somehow, I felt awkward this time, like the class out-cast making eyes at the prom king. That was a mindset that should have died off when I left school, where it was absolutely my reality.
Trying not to be dazzled by the huge glass chandelier that hung from the foyer ceiling and the glaringly golden turnstiles that beeped intermittently as they allowed employees through with their barcoded ID cards, I paced over to the black slab of a reception desk and waited patiently in the line of several other business types queuing for guest passes. I was thankful that I’d abandoned my rogue sense of fashion for a day and gone all out in a form fitting suit and shoes that pinched my toes—looking anything other than official in that crowded room would have made me an eyesore.
When I was waved forward to approach the row of unpleasantly hostile looking security staff, I squared my shoulders and took a proud step up to them. Don’t lose your cool.
“Good afternoon, Miss Tudor.” I faltered. How the hell did they know my name? “Here to see if your staff are settling in?” Oh. I guess anyone with two braincells to rub together would research someone using the name Tudor when they tried to rent out property. It was too easy to produce counterfeit ID and the ‘right’ paperwork, asking that the rent was charged to The Tudor Initiative. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
“Not exactly. I was hoping to speak to a Calloway Ryan.” Pulling his card from my purse, I returned their raised eyebrows with one of my own. “I have something that belongs to him. I just need five minutes.”
“Mr. Ryan doesn’t see anyone without an appointment. Do you have an appointment?” My eyes tracked down to the card in my hand. An appointment, you idiot. I should have called ahead. But seeing as I was there and known...
“I don’t know,” I squared myself even more and crossed my arms. “Do I have an appointment? Or do I have to backtrack and pretend that I’m here to see my staff after all, find out from someone useful where Mr. Ryan is and sneak there without your knowledge?” My lips curled up into the sweetest of smiles. “You don’t look like you want to be chasing me so soon after lunch.”
They stared at me in stunned silence for a moment, turned to confer, then the female among them slapped a guest pass down on the desk and slid it across to me. Too easy. “You want the top floor. Fifty bucks says you can’t get past his assistant.”
“Fifty?” I did a mental head count of the security staff. Five at the desk—a ten dollar win for all of them. “One hundred.” What can I say? I liked my chances that day—I had a good feeling about it.
After some intense negotiations, they whittled me down to eighty-five dollars and looked pretty sure of themselves when I scanned through the turnstiles and hit the call button for one of the four golden doored lifts. I had a right mind to go back over and take bets on which car would come first, but didn’t have time. The doors directly in front of me slid open and revealed a completely vacant car. I was winning all over the place, or at least I was until I looked at the buttons.
Holy shit. Thirty-five floors. It didn’t look that big from outside—twenty floors at most. What the hell did you have to do to get the office on the thirty-fifth floor?
My data connection on my smartphone wasn’t great on the ride up, which was prolonged by what seemed to be a stop on every floor. As we ascended, I noticed that the calibre of people coming and going changed; starting off smart casual but gradually getting more and more formal. The suits got neater. The men got older. The women looked less friendly. I was glad to have something to centre my attention on, even if my fascinating search engine exploration of Calloway Ryan was persistently interrupted by my signal dropping out.
The private reception to his office had very little more than a waxed mahogany floor, bare eggshell walls and a monolithic desk that stood out from the back wall. A small cluster of backless leather seats were arranged underneath the only embellishment in the room; a canvas painted with slashes of bold colour and a quote written in fine calligraphy.
Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be—Jack Welch
I knew the quote well, though wasn’t sure of what business it had being hung up in somewhere like this.
Blaze had once told me of his theory that the most beautiful people in the world were the ones with the most problems and ‘issues’. If I were to believe him, I was already prepared to accept that Calloway Ryan was going to be severely fucked in the head. If I didn’t, I could still use his words to pardon my own weirdness. But the part of me that liked the sentiment had me mulling over that quote and wondering what relevance it held to the man I was there to see.
The assistant I’d been warned about looked equally as hostile as the women I’d seen in the lift car. Her chestnut hair was groomed to perfection into a bun that looked like it was fastened so tightly it was pulling back the skin around her eyes and forehead. Her grey eyes seemed to focus on her work with laser sharp precision while her fingers moved in a blur across her keyboard, creating a clattering that filled the room.
And next to her desk, a door. The one I had an eighty-five dollar bet on getting through.
“Can I help you?” My eyes snapped around from the canvas that still had my full focus when she barked at me without looking away from her computer. “Do you have an appointment?”
“Ah, no. I—”
“Then I suggest you leave. Mr. Ryan doesn’t take visitors without an appointment.”
This, I already knew, and her obvious superiority complex was grating on me. “So I heard, but I just need five minutes. I have something of his.”
Her fingers stilled over the keyboard. “You think I’m paid to grant five minute wishes to everyone who asks like a fairy godmother?” Her eyes lifted and her head cocked with irritating arrogance. Jesus, she was annoying.
“No, I think you get paid to identify exactly who you’re supposed to allow five minutes to. And considering your boss has been waiting on my call for roughly three months and I flew across an ocean to be here, I think I make a rather good case for myself.”
“I’m listening.” Good, I had her attention.
“I met Mr. Ryan when he was in London in June. He helped me out of a situation when I was mugged—” allegedly mugged, “—and told me to call him to arrange the return of his money clip. Seeing as I’m here, it made more sense to bring it to him.”
“So why don’t you have an appointment?” Because I’m an idiot, and my intermittent dispassion for life has eaten away at my common sense. That’s why.
“Why would I make a five minute appointment when it’s far easier for you to do your fucking job and call through to see if he’s free? I can come back—would you like me to come back?” I’d come back every damn day if it took the smirk off her face. Really, it wasn’t that big a deal to me if I delivered the clip in person. Seeing the man in the flesh again would have been nice, but not essential. This had become a
battle of wills and nothing else. I just fucking hated her. She reminded me of my sister.
The assistant gracefully rose to her feet and arched a brow at me. “What do you know about Mr. Ryan?” I scoffed to mask my ignorance. Honestly, I knew very little from the limited research I’d done on the way up in the lift. He was pure blood American, born in upstate New York—that explained the accent—but his parents ailed from Boston. Gorgeous. Almost too gorgeous. Rich, but not as rich as I suppose I was now so nobody could accuse me of being a gold digger. A young businessman at twenty-seven but headed one of the biggest telecommunication companies in North America, which seemed ironic considering my recent dealings with mobile phones. That was as far as my knowledge spread.
“Enough.”
She looked at me sourly, lip curling into a sneer. “So enough to know that he wouldn’t bat an eyelid at buying a new money clip.”
“Maybe it has sentimental value.” I smiled sweetly and pulled the clip from my pocket. “Let me give it to him in person or give it to him yourself. I don’t care. I have better things to be doing with my time than trying to force feed desk monkeys bananas to get to their organ grinder.”
Blinking in shock at my concession for her to give it to him herself, she looked at the clip in my hand and pursed her lips. “He gave you that?”
“Yes.”
“Your name?” Shit. There had been no formal introduction after our collision on Oxford Street. I only knew his name thanks to his business card.