The Darkest of Shadows

by Lisse Smith

And with those final words, I stormed out of the office and out of the building and, finally, out of both their notice.

  Six

  “In the office, Sloane.” Lawrence voice interrupted the stunned silence.

  With an encouraging prod from Lawrence’s guards, Patrick walked back into his office and slumped down on one of the lounges.

  “Shit.” Patrick’s words echoed quietly around the room.

  “That could have gone better,” Lawrence admitted, as he took a seat across from Patrick. Lilly’s reaction wasn’t quite what he’d been expecting. He was a little pissed with himself, actually, because he should have known better; he should have anticipated something unusual.

  “Are you kidding me?” Patrick’s head shot up in annoyance. “She’s never going to trust me again. I can’t believe that I just did that. What the hell was I thinking?”

  “You were thinking about your own future,” Lawrence declared.

  “What future?” Patrick slumped down in the chair, he looked defeated. “You know she was never mine to bargain with in the first place,” he added, after a long minute of silence.

  “Yes.” Lawrence admitted truthfully.

  “Then why all this?” Patrick waved around the room.

  “You had to acknowledge that. You had to let her go in your own way.”

  “What for?” Patrick asked. “So she would walk straight into your arms?”

  Lawrence snorted in amusement. “I doubt very much that she would do that.”

  “You don’t know her at all,” Patrick countered. “She’s not what you think. She is damaged in a way that I don’t understand.” He didn’t say it in an attacking way, simply stating a fact.

  “I know everything about her,” Lawrence announced. “I know all her secrets.”

  Patrick looked stunned. “You had her investigated?” His voice edged up in volume, but then just as suddenly his face was overcome with a horrified expression. “Oh, my God!” he stammered. Then he leaped up from where he was sitting and started pacing the room, his fingers running haphazardly through his hair. “You are crazy. Fucking crazy,” he announced.

  Lawrence couldn’t hide his amusement; he almost looked embarrassed to have been caught out.

  “You did it, didn’t you?” Patrick exclaimed, turning back to stare at Lawrence. “You paid one hundred million pounds to get Lilly in your bed!”

  Lawrence shrugged, but offered no explanation, because he couldn’t deny it.

  “She won’t do it, you know.” Patrick’s words stumbled over themselves. “She just isn’t like a normal woman, and she isn’t impressed by who you are. You don’t understand her. Hell,” he huffed in exasperation, “I don’t understand her, and I’m sleeping with her.”

  “Not anymore, you aren’t.” Lawrence didn’t try to hide the edge to his voice or the fierce surge of jealousy that rolled through his body at Patrick’s words.

  Patrick shot him an equally fierce scowl. “No,” he agreed. “You made pretty sure of that didn’t you?”

  “She will come to me of her own free will. I have a great deal of patience.”

  “You’ll break her if you try and force her to do your will,” Patrick warned.

  “I’ll never hurt her.”

  “What do you want with her? If you know her as well as you think you do, then you should also know that she isn’t the happily-ever-after type.”

  “It’s no longer any of your concern. You have a choice to make, one that I’m fairly confident you have already decided on. Here’s my number.” Lawrence handed over a small card. “Ring me when you’re ready to talk about the job.” Lawrence had nearly made it out of the room before he turned back with a warning. “Stay away from her.” He didn’t need to expand on that; Patrick understood exactly what he meant.

  Kensington Gardens wasn’t big enough, so I added in some of Hyde Park and wished for a moment that I was somewhere else. I ran until the ache in my chest burned, and then I ran some more, but when I started to see lights flashing in my vision and there was a real possibility that I might be sick, I stopped.

  I collapsed in a quiet corner of the Gardens, far enough from anyone else that I could pretend to be alone. With my iPod shuffling its way through all of my songs, I lay on my back under the arms of a gracefully bowed tree and tried to forget my life. I could almost believe I was the only person alive.

  Right up until the point where I opened my eyes to find Lawrence sitting peacefully beside me on the grass. Strangely, my first thought was how horrified his tailor would be to find him sitting on the ground in his five-thousand-pound suit.

  “You are the devil sent to torment me,” I told him, closing my eyes against the sight of him and trying to get back to that place where I was all alone.

  “You’re not the first person to tell me that,” he replied. I turned my music up louder, hoping to drown out his words. Like a child, I wished to believe that if I couldn’t see him, then he couldn’t see me.

  He flicked an earplug out of my ear and asked. “Are we going to sit here long?”

  I gave a sigh. “I’m unemployed.” I reminded him. “I can sit here all day.” Let’s hope he had more important things to do with his time.

  “One hundred thousand pounds!”

  “That’s not a question,” I commented. I tried to ignore his presence, but I was smart enough to realize that he wouldn’t go away until he had what he wanted, so it would probably be easier if we just got it over with.

  I was a lot calmer now. It hadn’t taken me long to realize that it only mattered if I let it, and considering I was leaving, there was no need to stress about it. However, it did reinforce my original mindset about men. I was much better off when they weren’t in my life.

  “It’s an offer,” he clarified.

  I sat up so suddenly that my head spun. “You had better not be offering that to get me in your bed!” I hissed.

  He lifted one brow. “I hadn’t considered it. But if there’s a chance of you accepting, please feel free to take the offer any way you prefer.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I grumbled in confusion.

  “My PA.” He pulled a pair of dark tinted sunglasses from his eyes and let his gaze meet mine. “I’m offering you one hundred thousand pounds to be my personal assistant.”

  “That’s a ludicrous amount of money for that role.” Seriously, if word got out that he was paying that much, everyone would automatically assume that there were more services being rendered than administration.

  “It’s a serious and legitimate proposition and in no way contains any implied sexual requirements. To be honest, I’ve had a string of PAs in the past and I’ve worn them all out.”

  “Could it be your stellar personality?” Ouch…

  “I believe it has more to do with the fact that I don’t have a home, or an office.” He ignored my jab. “I pretty much live out of hotels and my private jet. I find it extremely difficult to find a competent assistant who has no problems with the travel. I find that people are too attached to a single location or to their own families, which prohibits them from constant movement. It’s extremely frustrating.”

  “And you’re assuming that I would be willing to drop everything I have and go off traveling with you?”

  “I understand that you have no family in this country and that travel is something you have previously expressed an interest in.”

  “And that’s worth all that money?”

  “There is significantly more to the job than travel,” he answered calmly. “I find myself invited to quite a substantial number of social events. Both corporate and charity functions are among our biggest sources of networking and give us a huge advantage in relation to sourcing projects and joint-venture opportunities. Taking a partner to these events is encouraged, and I’m sick of trying to track down someone to go with me. Especially when I could be at a dinner in Moscow one night, and then a charity function in Boston two days later, it’s often difficult at t
he last minute to find someone. I don’t have a permanent partner; you can imagine the difficulties.” He said that so matter-of-factly that I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Oh, you poor baby;” I snickered. “How difficult it must be for you to keep a different woman in each city of the world.”

  “Hardly,” he responded sharply. “It would solve a great deal of my trouble and save a significant amount of time, if my assistant was also of the standard to attend these events with me.”

  “Standard?” That was insulting. “So no unattractive women allowed?”

  “It’s not real.” He didn’t apologize. “It’s all part of the image that people expect. It affects my business when I start confusing them about who I am.”

  “So you need a passably attractive person who likes to travel?” I asked curiously.

  “No,” he corrected. “I need an accomplished assistant who works unsupervised and at a high level, with exceptional communication skills. Someone who understands the industry that I work in and who will be able to stand up with me at these functions, and who, instead of being a hood ornament, actually adds value to the conversation and understands when to speak and when to shut the hell up. Being beautiful is just a bonus. Passably attractive would have sufficed.”

  “Did you just compliment me?” I asked in surprise. “It was a bit hard to tell in among all that opinionated crap.”

  “That, too, is a bonus,” he said.

  “I think I’m lost.” I shook my head to try and clear it of this mumbled conversation.

  “The fact that you aren’t scared of me at all.” He grinned almost in spite of himself. “I’ve never met anyone—well, other than my mother—who had a total disregard for my impressive place in the world.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “You need to come down a peg or two,” I told him. “You seriously can’t believe you’re that important?”

  “Absolutely,” he countered. “I could destroy whole countries if I felt like it. Power like that gives you a certain amount of confidence in your own abilities and makes others wary to be around you. Well, everyone except you. You don’t seem to care at all who I am.”

  “You’re an annoyingly overbearing and arrogant man who manipulated me into a situation that I didn’t want to be in.”

  “You won’t regret taking the job.”

  “I don’t do regret,” I said quietly, but his words struck a chord within me, and for the first time I actually considered what he was offering. It was beyond any of my expectations, most especially in relation to the monetary gain. Not that I was really that interested in money, but there were a lot of shoes out there that I could buy with one hundred thousand pounds.

  “One-month contract.” I couldn’t believe I just suggested it.

  “Done.” Shit. He didn’t even hesitate.

  “If I can’t like you in a month, then I walk away.” I looked at him skeptically.

  “I’ll grow on you,” he assured me.

  “Like a fungus,” I shot back, and wondered why I wasn’t more scared. I’d just jumped right in the deep end, up shit creek without a paddle and all that.

  “We have corporate offices here in London,” he told me, and I could see he was trying not to gloat. Seriously, I caved. How humiliating. “Here’s my card; my private numbers are on the back. Charlie will pick you up tomorrow morning, and we’ll meet at my offices.”

  “Charlie?”

  Lawrence flicked his head over my shoulder and I turned to see surfer boy waving happily at me. “Charlie.” It was nice to have a name for him, and I shouldn’t have been surprised that he and his dark friend were close. “Do you ever go anywhere without them?” I asked.

  “Not on purpose.”

  “What’s the other one’s name?”

  “Frost.” I doubted that was his first name, but it would do, especially when it appeared we would be spending a fair amount of time together over the next month.

  “See you in the morning, Lillianna,” he told me, then rose gracefully to his feet before turning and walking away.

  “Whatever.” I plugged my earphones back in and lay back down on the grass. Tomorrow would come soon enough to deal with him; for now, I wanted to go back to that place where no one else existed.

  Patrick called me several times that night, but I ignored each of his calls and deleted the voicemail messages as soon as they beeped up. He and I had nothing to say to each other anymore.

  TEXT: Think I might have made a mistake.

  REPLY: do tell.

  TEXT: long story.

  REPLY: well im awake now

  TEXT: LM bought C&N and then traded PS a job in Aus for me!

  REPLY: What the hell???

  TEXT: exactly. Its been a strange day.

  REPLY: pls explain what traded means?

  TEXT: exactly what you think, but I told them both to F themselves instead

  REPLY: good girl. Seriously???

  TEXT: I know. What a strange world we live in.

  REPLY: not we, just you. You do seem to attract strangeness.

  TEXT: Theres more.

  REPLY: im scared to ask

  TEXT: i might have quit and then got rehired. But now i work for LM.

  REPLY: pls tell me thats a legitimate job.

  TEXT: u have a disgraceful mind! Of course it is legit.

  REPLY: well explain better than that next time

  TEXT: hired me as his PA. Lots of travel, paying me 100K

  REPLY: can i come carry ur bags?

  TEXT: nope.

  REPLY: r u happy?

  TEXT: i have no idea

  REPLY: well while ur working it out send some of that excitement my way

  TEXT: bored my love

  REPLY: miss u and ur craziness

  TEXT: its been hard lately to stay on the right side of that line

  REPLY: do u need to talk

  TEXT: im working through it ok, some days better than others

  REPLY: each day better than the last

  TEXT: tomorrow better than the past

  REPLY: luv u

  TEXT: same

  I had no idea what to expect the next day, and it felt better if I let go of all expectations and just allowed myself to be carried away by the whirlwind of Monterey Enterprises. Charlie, ever the dutiful servant, knocked on my door at precisely eight-thirty the next morning, and by nine o’clock he was escorting me through the front doors of a new modern complex overlooking the Thames, just outside the city center.

  “Mr. Monterey has asked that you meet him in his offices.” That was the first and only thing that Charlie said to me the entire trip.

  “Lead on,” I encouraged him, with a wave and an amused smirk.

  We attracted a certain amount of attention as we walked quietly through the building. Lawrence’s office was on the top floor, but the elevator we took stopped several times as we ascended, and a staggering number of people hopped on and off it as we traveled.

  I began to realize that it was Charlie who was drawing the attention, and I quickly determined that it must have been rare to see him moving through the building without Lawrence. When the elevator doors opened, and the people getting on saw him leaning against the rear wall with his arms crossed against his chest, every one of them sent a startled glance around the space. They almost seemed confused when they realized he was alone.

  I stepped a pace away from him to distance myself from the attention, but just as casually he moved with me, keeping what he obviously accepted as an appropriate distance to his target. I shot him a rueful glance and continued to watch in amused silence the scenes that unfolded in the elevator. It was becoming highly amusing.

  One poor woman took a look at Charlie, all six foot four of him—he was very easy to spot in the elevator—and turned tail and ran. I guess she was going to get the next one. Another more interesting observation was that with Charlie, you got space. It wasn’t a huge elevator, probably held about twenty people comfortably, but the people who
got on crowded near the front doors, creating a clearly defined space around us both. They were lucky, when the elevator opened, that they didn’t all go spilling out onto the carpet. They seemed genuinely wary of him.

  “Do you scare everyone you meet?” I asked, as the elevator opened after the twelfth floor. No one seemed willing to venture any higher.

  He gave a slow, easy grin and then ushered me out of the doors when they opened at our floor.

  It wasn’t hard to tell which of the offices belonged to Lawrence. There was only one, and its double doors where, not surprisingly, guarded by Frost—and moments later on the other side by Charlie. He gave me an amused wink and opened one of the doors for me to enter.

  The antechamber of Lawrence’s office, where Tweedledee and Tweedledum were stationed, was almost as large as Patrick’s office had been. The architects had really focused on open, light-filled spaces when they decided to build this place. The only entrance to the room was via the elevator, which opened into a room about fifteen meters square. On the left as one exited the elevator was a functional-looking desk, presumably mine, while the whole right side of the room was floor-to-ceiling glass. A few strategically placed lounges completed the room, leaving a large, minimalistic space that was actually appealing.

  Lawrence’s rooms were even larger, and he got two whole walls of glass. His desk occupied the left of the room when one walked in, a similar position to where mine was situated, and a massive row of bookcases lined the space on either side of that. There was a large conference table, easily able to seat twenty people, in one corner, while the rest of the room was taken up with more relaxed seating, a full lounge suite, TV, and a bar. Overall the atmosphere was formal, but comfortable.

  “Lilly.” Lawrence had been sitting at his desk, but when he saw me enter, he rose and crossed the room in large strides. “Excellent. Here, have a seat.” He ushered me over to one of the lounges, and we sat opposite each other. “I assume you had no troubles getting here?”

  I shook my head. “You have beautiful offices.” I took my time looking around, familiarizing myself with the room—anything, really, to keep from paying much attention to him.