by Amber Bardan
In a way they were. I knew what I wanted and intended to have it. My gaze traveled to the open door.
I’d keep my hands off her. There’d be no touching her tonight. Not tonight, or the next time we met. Nor the next.
No, I’d had my eye on her while I’d been gone. Dug deep into her social media. Discovered the details of her life.
Dishonest, perhaps. But old habits die hard. And I’d never played fair. There wasn’t anyone I associated with whose background didn’t get the Avner treatment. But for the first time since I could remember, the gloom around me had lifted, and this excitement was real.
I’d learned there’d be no seducing this woman—she was the seductress.
My blood rushed, heavy with longing.
An excellent seductress.
There’d been little else I could think about other than finishing what we started in Italy. But the moment she had me, she’d let me go.
Everything I’d learned about her told me she’d exorcise me from her system—just like that. But there’d be no exorcising her from mine.
A slow smile spread across my face. I’d have to woo her slowly. Something I’d never attempted.
I adjusted my jacket.
My intentions with Emma tonight were pure. But my desire for her was far from it.
Emma
I stared at myself in the mirror while washing my hands. I’d been washing my hands for the past five minutes. What the hell had I just overheard?
Because it sounded a crapload like Avner had just tried to buy approval for Guardian’s next energy developments.
Did Haithem know about this?
I dried my hands and wandered back into the foyer. Wound my way between the now empty wingback couches and indoor plants, back to the ballroom, and leaned in the door. Large round tables huddled where the dance floor would’ve been, a platform stage nestled at the front of the ballroom. Hundreds of identical heads bobbed. Black suits, white shirts, black ties. Up-do’s, little black dresses, pearls...
I let out a long, slow breath.
“Can I help you?”
“I...” I turned to the usher, glancing at his clipboard. “I’ve lost my table.”
He smiled, not openly, just that pursed-lips smile that sometimes people do when they talk to me.
I returned his smile, but I made mine full.
“What’s your name?”
“Oh, I’m with Dean Waldolf.” I leaned closer, set my fingertips on the clipboard, and peered down. “I’m his plus one.”
The usher glanced up, and he wasn’t smiling anymore, his eyes widened.
“Then it’s a good thing I found you.”
I spun to the speaker, recognition clicking into place. My skin drew to attention. It wasn’t like with Avner. Wasn’t attraction flooding my marrow. But the body has a way of sensing power. A way of tuning in to it.
He was powerful.
He was good looking.
In a way that had a lot to do with the suit he was wearing. The way his tie clung to his throat, and how his hair was slicked back.
The way his teeth were so very white—were they even real, or were they veneer?
“Hi,” I said, not letting the smile slip.
Dean’s gaze moved over me. Enough to be obvious. Not enough to be rude.
Got it.
Undivided attention, if I chose to take it.
I held out my hand, and slipped closer. “Emma,” I said, and let his palm slip against mine. “I’ve been dying to meet you.”
* * *
“Well, Emma,” Dean said, swaying closer from the chair he’d taken beside me in the foyer. “You make a compelling argument.” He held out a slip of card. “And your passion is persuasive.”
The way he said that made my belly seize, but I ignored the cool clamp of it, and took the card. “Thank you, Mr. Waldolf.”
“Dean,” he said, and smiled again, and yes, those teeth had to be veneers. Too shiny. Too sharp. “And this time, Emma, when you call, I can promise you’ll get a meeting anytime you want.”
My fingers closed around the card and I pulled it to my chest. Against my thunking heart. I’d done it. Dean wanted to know more.
Maybe I’d made a good argument, but I don’t think anyone, except maybe someone who’d been through what I had, could hope to understand what this could mean.
“Thank you.” I grinned. “Thanks so much, Dean.”
“Emma,” a deeper, rougher voice said behind me.
My spinal cord fused tight.
Dean glanced up, blue eyes squinting. “Can I help you?”
Avner’s gravitational presence pressed up next to my chair. “Avner Malfacini.”
His name rang out with an echo. More of a statement than an introduction. Don’t think I’d heard his full name before. His surname so very Italian when his first name wasn’t.
Dean exploded to standing. “Dean Waldolf.”
I glanced beside me.
Avner’s pointed stare sliced at Dean.
What the hell is happening?
“Have you two met?”
“Not until now.” Dean’s voice dropped about a hundred degrees.
Without another movement, the tension ricocheting between them was like watching two dogs pee all over the place trying to saturate the most territory.
Did Avner think he could mark me as his?
I touched his arm. “Well, I’ll see you at the table.”
“It’s okay, I’ll wait,” he said, eyes not so much as twitching in my direction.
“I can make it back myself.”
Avner’s gaze finally reached me, and I made the contact count, setting my own features battle-ax sharp.
“I’ll meet you there in a moment.”
The corners of his jaw jutted out like two apricots jammed inside his cheeks. “I’ll wait for you at the door.”
He tugged the edges of his jacket together, and gave Dean a jerk of his chin that could have been a nod before striding back to where the usher flanked the door to the ballroom.
I stared after him. What...
“I don’t know what your game is—”
I turned back to Dean. His mouth curled toward his nose. If I thought there was an edge to his features before, now that sharpness was piercing.
“—but I don’t care to find out.” He reached out and took the edge of the card still caught in my fist, and plucked it out of my hand.
“I’m not playing at anything.” A sound like the ocean rushed in my ears.
“Your date tonight is Avner Malfacini of Guardian Technologies, and you want to talk to me about your research?” Dean stuffed the card into his pocket. “We are done here.”
No. No. No.
He stood. I leaped up and grabbed the sleeve of his jacket, right at his elbow.
Dean froze, only his eyes slitting back toward me.
“Please,” I said, and god how that word ground at my throat. “He’s only an acquaintance. One I don’t even like.”
“Yet here you are as his date?” Dean smiled, and I got caught on his sharp white teeth again.
“It was the only way I could get here and have a chance to talk to you.” I shoved down the shaky, queasy feeling. I couldn’t lose this opportunity. “I don’t want to work for Guardian Technologies, I want to work with Waldolf Enterprises. You’re the best at this.”
Dean turned to me. The bite of his smile relaxed with a shimmer of ego.
“We all know when it comes to this type of microtech, there’s no one quite like Waldolf.” I kept my grip at his elbow. “That’s why I want to work with you. Just give me a chance.”
His eyes stayed still, too still.
I held a balloon of air
under my ribs until it burned.
“Sorry, Emma,” he said, and brushed my hand from his elbow. “I don’t like conflicts of interest.”
He walked away, gliding past Avner, back into the ballroom.
All the blood in my body rushed downward. I held on to the back of a chair. So close. I’d been so close. Pressure burned up from the base of my nose all the way into the back of my head.
Avner started toward me.
I shut my eyes, and dragged air into the hollowed-out cave of my chest.
“What did he do to you?”
My eyelids snapped open. “What did he do?”
His mouth turned down and his fingers brushed the top of my arm. “What did he do to upset you?”
“Are you really so ignorant, you can’t see you just ruined everything?” Oh god, my voice broke. I snapped my palm over my throat. “I need to go.”
“Emma,” he said.
I glanced around the foyer, then started toward the exit. His thumping steps shadowed mine. I pushed through the doors and broke into a wave of night air that prickled my arms. Emilio waited, leaning against the car parked behind two taxis.
“I’m taking a cab,” I said, and sped up toward the street.
Avner caught me by the elbow. “Emma, wait.”
I froze. All my limbs went heavy.
“What’s ruined?”
My eyes burned. My throat burned. My chest burned.
I chewed my cheek. “Everything.”
He drew me closer, and his arm went around me. Without thinking, my body curled into his. My forehead sank into his shoulder. He was so big, his shoulders so broad, his scent so rich, as though he were made for this. I let my cheek rest on his chest. Listened to the thump under my ear. Exhaustion weighed down my bones. A kind of exhaustion that leaked out of my mind sometimes. Like a fog, creeping from my head, saturating my body, blotting everything out.
Sometimes, when the fog was this thick, it seemed like I’d never crawl out of it.
“Come on,” he whispered, and guided me to the door Emilio opened for us.
I slid across the seats to the opposite side, and buckled myself in the corner. Avner came in after me. The door clunked shut.
“Now explain what’s ruined?”
A sigh filled my lungs. Who had the energy for explanations? But the stubborn grind of Avner’s words left no doubt that there was only one way to get him to leave me be. I took my phone from my clutch and navigated to a saved article, then handed it to him.
“What’s this?”
I looked out the window. “Just read.”
Chapter Six
Emma
He read the article. My article in the small but well-regarded medical journal, published a week ago. I couldn’t watch. But every now and then he’d make a sound. A kind of hum, maybe of agreement, then every so often another sound, a puff, that I imagined could’ve been objection.
“This article is published online?”
My gaze snapped to him. He still watched the phone. That’s all? The concept that started in high school, that I’d spent every free hour since then, during university and through every job I’d had, developing on my own—a concept that could save hundreds of thousands of lives, and I didn’t even get an “interesting”?
“Yes.” The sound at the end of the word slipped, hissing.
He watched the screen, scrolling with his thumb. “Hmm.”
My jaw throbbed. “What?”
He glanced up.
“What is it that you don’t agree with?” I leaned up off the seat. “Or is it that you think it couldn’t work?”
“I think it could work.” He clicked the button on top of the phone, locking the screen. “I just don’t think it should be attempted.”
A cleansing wave of fury washed through me “Why is that?”
Do you not like saving people?
“Tissue repair and regrowth isn’t a new concept, but the way you’re proposing to develop it—” he bent closer “—brings about serious ethical dilemmas.”
Ethical dilemmas? From a man who resorts to bribery.
I took the phone from his hand. “They aren’t dilemmas, they’re challenges. Ethical challenges.”
He, of all people, would understand that.
“Either way, the potential for exploitation is—”
“Is irrelevant because we’re exploring specific medical applications.” I pushed the phone into my bag, and snapped the clasp.
“You have to see, Emma, that once you armor the heart, you’d essentially be creating an indestructible vital organ.”
My cardiac system strained so hard, a little biotechnological armoring would’ve been helpful right then. “Some illnesses require just that.”
Like the illness that killed my mother.
“Emma—”
“No, you listen, Avner, just because you’re smart and rich and own a technologies company doesn’t mean you know everything.” I shifted toward him. “There’s some things you can’t hope to understand.”
“Such as?” He gave me a look so arrogant, so opposed to the idea I might know things he didn’t, there was nothing on earth or in heaven that could give me greater delight than knocking it off his face.
“Such as, the face of a parent of a heart patient.” I said those words, but the moment my voice rung out, amplified in the back of the car—I was the one knocked sideways.
Or the child of one...
I breathed deeply. “There’s no way you can understand the kind of pain that comes from being helpless, being prepared to do anything to save the person you love, but being completely useless.” My throat closed, because for an instant I was that kid at my mother’s bedside, watching her lips grow bluer. For an instant I was locked again in that undying hurt. Was standing right there at the point in my life where everything fell to shit. “I’ve found a way to stop more people dying.” I swiped the hair from my forehead, limbs weak again. “I’d do anything to make it happen.”
His lips softened but his gaze brightened on me. An intimate, penetrating brightening revealing just how much he saw.
The air turned heavy in my chest.
Horror pounded at the base of my ribs—a kind of startled horror like jerking awake at night to discover the front door wide open.
I was wide open.
His features moved, rippling and reacting to what he’d pulled from mine. “Emma,” he said with a twang of pleading. Like when he asked if we’d be friends. Raw and real. Something I only recognized because I knew it well—aching loss and loneliness.
Never ending and never easing.
Yet on Avner for a split second, it seemed more complete, more encompassing, and I couldn’t imagine how terrible that must be.
Or how dreadful a thing must have put that look on him.
“Then why not come to us?” He reached for me, and put his big engulfing hand on mine. “If you’d do anything, why not come to me and Haithem?”
“For starters, you’re into apps, gadgets and energy. This is biochemistry and nanotech. Plus, I wouldn’t take advantage like that.” I extracted myself from his touch. “The closest thing I have to family is Angelina.” Something unspeakable happened—the top of my nose tingled, and my eyes blurred. “I thought I’d lost her once. I won’t ever let that happen again.”
I drew back and swiped at my face, then stared at my damp fingertips. How’d that happen? I wasn’t a crier. No one would believe the things I hadn’t cried at. Not me. Yet, the urge to give in to the feeling, to let go and succumb, pushed so hard on me my head went light with it.
“You think asking for help would cause you to lose her?” There he went again with that stare of his. Looking at me like he knew me. Like he understood me.
>
“It would, because that’s not friendship. Friendship goes two ways. Give and take.” I tugged at the seatbelt vise over my middle. “Not take, take, take, with one person always being the taker.”
“Friendship is having your friend’s back.”
I shook my head. Boys. Having backs—this wasn’t an episode of a cop show. “No, it’s bad enough I let them take me to Europe—and I only did that because I knew how much Angelina wanted it—but how can I let that be the rule? How long would it take before they started to wonder what our friendship was based on?” I tugged the belt wide, freeing my neck, and shifted again. “I won’t do it. I won’t let things go there. There’s exactly one certain thing in my life, and I won’t fuck it up.”
He watched me for a long moment, wrinkles running his brow.
I rubbed the top of my arms, trying to suck back in emotions cracking my surface. I shouldn’t have had that gulp of wine—obviously this was the wine acting.
He bent forward and pulled off his suit jacket, then lay it over my lap. “You won’t fuck up anything with Angelina, because you are going to work with me.”
“What?” I stared at him. Heat soaked into my thighs, not only from the heavy fabric where his warmth still lingered in the fibers. “No, that’s the same thing, I won’t.”
“You will.”
My jaw unhitched a little, then snapped back up. “I won’t.”
“You will, Emma.” His frown vanished, and a ghost of a smile—the same mischievous smile that stole my breath that first day and quite frankly still stole it now—brushed across his lips. “Because you said we are friends.”
“Right.” I twitched back into the corner, my gaze narrowing at him. What was he trying to do? “Exactly, we said friends. So I won’t take anything from you either.”
“But you said give and take, and I want something from you in return.”
That smile stretched wider. My skin prickled. My nipples strained inside my bra.
“Wouldn’t that then be give and take?” His voice dropped lower, husky but firm, putting me in mind of other things he’d said before.
“Do you want me to fuck you like you are a naughty, dirty girl?”
My system burst with heat. My heart beat harder. I couldn’t catch a breath. Is that what this was? I could fuck him for funding?