“Nope, just being cautious – we had to pull this trip together at the last minute, remember?”
He squinted into a standing mirror that looked like it came from Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, tilted his head one way and the other, and then gave his tie a final tug. “And if you could stay here in the suite until I get back, that would be great – I’m sure you’d be fine, but they’re fussy here about women wandering around by themselves, and it’s hotter than the surface of the sun out there during the day anyway, right?”
I didn’t buy that, but I also didn’t argue.
Instead, I stood on tiptoe, grabbed his lapels, and pulled him down into a kiss – a long, slow, aching kiss that ended with both of us gasping and his tie crooked.
He also had to take a few calming breaths and rearrange his pants, because Kansas girls damn well know how to kiss their men.
I watched him disappear down the hotel corridor a few minutes later, surrounded by silent armed men who glanced in every direction, second by second, scanning for hidden threats and searching for unknown someones.
I wanted to run after Dave. I could protect him from the monsters better than anyone – I knew that, no matter how little sense it made.
But one look at the bodyguards stationed outside the suite’s front door told me I wasn’t going anywhere.
Dave was gone for ten hours.
I tried to call him, even though I knew he’d be in meetings, but it always went straight through to voicemail. I shot him a bunch of texts, but they went unanswered. Nothing to be alarmed about, really, because he’d vanished into hours and hours of meetings before, on other days in other cities, and he didn’t need me holding his hand.
And I should be able to cope all on my own anyway, right? Sometimes he needed me at his side for business and sometimes he didn’t – today was one of the days he didn’t, that’s all. Somebody was getting the law laid down to them, and he didn’t want to bore me to tears with all that angsty drama. That had to be it, and he didn’t take thirty seconds at any point to text me because it slipped his goofy mind. No problem.
That didn’t stop me from wondering what was going on while I flipped through the hundreds of channels available on the largest of the suite’s several HD televisions. It didn’t keep me from worrying while I ordered from room service and received a roast beef sandwich that for some reason needed to be escorted into the room on a silver serving cart by three waiters in evening clothes.
I took a shower, I fussed over my hair, I clipped every nail I had and walked the suite from end to end for over an hour because it was good exercise, and not because I was a nervous worrying idiot. Not at all.
After eight hours of waiting inside my gilded cage, I ducked my head out the front door because I figured the bodyguards on duty outside had to know something.
If they did, they weren’t talking. All I could get out of the most talkative one was the single sentence, “Mr. Dallstrom’s security detail will look after his needs, ma’am.” The others just nodded, while glaring up and down the hall as if they expected terrorists to come boiling out from under the wallpaper at any moment.
Dave came to me on the balcony as evening fell.
I hadn’t been out there earlier because of the heat and the balcony railing was still warm beneath my arms as I leaned on it, but I had to get outside. I watched the sky turn blue and purple in the east, I watched lights flicker on in buildings large and small, I wondered at how a girl with curves and attitude and not much else had somehow gotten from Kansas to Dubai, and I twisted around as the glass door behind me slid open and Dave was there.
“Hey, beautiful.” His crooked grin, his tired voice, his wide-open welcoming arms that pulled me against his body when I rushed to him – Dave was everything. I wrapped my arms around him, I hugged him close, and who cared that he’d been away all those hours? He was here now, and that was all that mattered.
All we have is the present moment, here and now, and in that moment Dave and I had each other.
“You’re late, you big goofy moron.”
“Please punish me, boss, I’m begging you.”
“Pervert.”
“Goddess.”
“Lunatic.”
“The most beautiful and loving woman I’ve ever seen.”
I wasn’t going to argue with that, no sir.
We stood together after that, looking out over the city. I leaned against the railing as Dave held me from behind, his arms around me and keeping me safe. He rested his chin atop my head, I blissed out, and we watched birds dive through the evening air.
I nodded at the traffic pouring through a complicated tangle of roads below us. “Look at those cars, scurrying all over the place like ants on crack.”
The cars were like ants, ants with gleaming white headlights and trailing tail lights glowing scarlet in the dusk, coursing here and there in an endless stream. I’d seen the same thing in Chicago, time and again as evening fell west of Lake Michigan, but it still fascinated me, all those lives rushing along, so many little worlds and stories spinning away beneath me. It was like having a god’s-eye-view of creation, and I never got tired of it.
“The future is going to be so different. That was the problem with the people I had to talk to all day – they’re mired in the past, in all the old jealousies and competitive bullshit that have held us back for centuries, and they’re scared of the future. It’s coming closer every minute, they know they can’t stop it, and they’re terrified.”
“So enlighten me about this future, Obi-Wan.”
“I’ve got it right here in my pocket.”
Dave pulled a folded sheet of lined notebook paper from an inner pocket of his suit jacket. Teasing the soft, well-worn folds apart as if he were handling the only copy of the Magna Carta, he added, “This was with me all day, sharing the same pocket as your dad’s watch. That has to be good luck, right?”
“I’d say so, but what is this?”
“This is what those blueprints covering my bedroom walls back home are all about – this is the first sketch I ever made of my dream, and the blueprints are the roadmap for how I’ll get there.”
Reaching around me from behind, he held the opened sheet of notebook paper in front of me, his fingers clamped tight to keep it safe from the tug of the evening breeze.
A ballpoint drawing of a building covered the page from top to bottom. It was a skyscraper of sorts, I could tell that much – a towering colossus with more floors, according to the notes scrawled in the margins, than any building in history, more floors than any architect had ever imagined. It would stretch higher than the clouds and wider than imagination, and was such a thing even possible?
“Dave, you want to build this? How? I’m no engineer, but isn’t this about twice as tall as it should be possible for a skyscraper to be without collapsing?”
“It’s so much more than a skyscraper – it’s an entire city in one structure and it’s the future.”
He pointed at the city spread out below us, glowing in the oncoming darkness. “Imagine all of that under one roof. Imagine each sprawling, ugly tangle of concrete and glass and asphalt around the world as a single organic being, a structure growing up out of its surrounding environment, nurtured by it and giving back, processing its own byproducts and waste into a form that the earth supporting it can use to start the cycle all over again. Instead of sprawling across the world like a polluting cancer, our cities will become single structures like this one, islands as the planet becomes a garden all around us.”
I chewed my lip, trying to puzzle it out. “Does the technology for all this even exist?”
“Some of it does, and I’ll figure out the rest. This whole concept of hyperstructures was first mapped out by a guy named Paolo Soleri, years before I was born, but he never managed to build one. I ‘m going to do that.”
He folded up the sheet of paper that held his dream and returned it to his pocket. “I made that sketch fifteen years ago, and it’
s the master plan – I’m working out the details on those blueprints back home, and I’ll make it all happen in real life. I’ll work out the technical problems, I’ll find the experts and builders I need to help me smooth out the wrinkles and make the concept a reality, and I’ll build a prototype. I’ll build my dream, Cassie, and our children will live in it. I promise.”
I believed him. I wasn’t sure how it would work, but I trusted Dave to make it work because I trusted him. He’d build his dream, somehow. He’d make it real, we really would have kids together, and they’d live in his golden future.
I was so sure.
The next day, Dave took me to see the Burj Khalifa.
If you want to feel like an ant, go stand next to the Burj Khalifa. No, scratch that – if you want to know what it’s like to be a speck of dust at the base of Mount Everest, then stand next to the Burj Khalifa. It’s an insanely huge skyscraper and the tallest manmade structure on the planet, it was only ten miles from our hotel, and Dave was its adoring, starry-eyed fanboy.
“Did you know this was designed by the same company that put together the plans for the Willis Tower back home? And also the One World Trade Center complex in New York City?”
Now I did. I also knew Dave looked ridiculous and adorable walking around with his head craned skyward, his Cubs cap on backwards – again – and his blond mane spilling down the back of his billowing Doctor Who shirt. The geeky shirt was set off by his baggy knee-length cargo shorts, and with each lanky step his Firefly flip-flops slapped against the pavement. He did not look where he was going.
“One hundred sixty-three floors, forty-six maintenance levels in the spire, and –”
“Dave, tree at two o’clock!”
Yes, he did walk right into a palm tree.
He shook himself off, picked his hat up off the ground, and went right back to gawking. “And 2,909 stairs from ground level up to the 160th floor, along with fifty-eight elevators –”
“I remember them all, trust me.” Dave and his kazillions of dollars had talked a member of the Burj Khalifa’s senior management team into giving us an extended personal tour of the interior of the building, and I remembered every last stair I set foot on in there. Thank God we took the elevators most of the time, or I don’t think my chafing thighs would have survived.
“– and a bundled tube design that’s unique, along with a buttressed core support structure! That’s so innovative, basically it’s a hexagonal core surrounded by three buttresses forming a ‘Y’ shape, providing lateral support that keeps the structure from twisting, plus –”
Waving his hands this way and that to sketch out the wonders of a buttressed core support thingie, Dave spouted chapter and verse about his bestest architectural friend in the whole world while I walked on ahead, keeping an eye out for obstacles.
Well, I tried to scan for potential trouble – it was hard to look anywhere but up, though, because this monstrous thing vaulting skyward out of the desert was overwhelming for everybody, not just architecture fans. It pulled at your eye and your body and all of your attention like God’s magnet – I stopped more than once to just stand and stare straight up, watching all that concrete and steel and the thousands of shimmering glass windows disappearing into the clouds.
Yes, there was literally and with zero exaggeration a drifting bank of clouds directly overhead, impossibly high and concealing the upper floors in a cloak of vapor and mystery. Maybe Sauron was up there, plotting the overthrow of Middle Earth …
Down below among us mortals, though, I spotted the Burj Khalifa’s complex network of pools and fountains up ahead, extending from the tower’s base in a display that shoved the conspicuous consumption of water right in the desert’s face – choreographed jets of spray shooting hundreds of feet into the air while music played, glistening pools, and all of it just the sort of thing Dave was likely to walk right into with a spectacular and puzzled splash.
I got between him and the pools, tugged at my loose cotton sundress to get it straight and situated – too much marching hither and yon had sent it riding in all the wrong directions – and then looked up to see Dave maybe a hundred feet away. He was reaching into one of the roomy pockets of his shorts and pulling out, yes, a handful of his beloved Star Wars figures.
About ten members of the rebel alliance had made the trip with us in their usual traveling case, and now he was lining them up in a crisp military row at the base of the artificial mountain of concrete and steel looming over us.
“Cassie, come take my picture with the guys!”
He stood back, hands on hips and beaming with pride at the sight of his troops standing in formation before his favorite piece of neofuturist architecture.
I retrieved my iPhone from my shoulder bag, checked the camera settings, and wondered for the thousandth time how I’d blundered into a guy who was goofy and brilliant and sweet, a total nutjob, and a wildly enthusiastic kid living in a Viking warrior’s body.
Cassie, how did you get so lucky?
“My daughter was right, he is both an idiot and a child.”
I started out of my skin, jumped around, and looked into the cool grey eyes of Gregor Szörnyeteg. Where had he come from?
The father of Dave’s fiancée-for-five-seconds stood with the pools and fountains of the Burj Khalifa at his back, looking as calm and calculating and dispassionate as ever. His grey wool suit must have been roasting him alive in the desert heat, but he gave no sign. Short and pale and dripping with well-bred disdain, he stared at me as I stood there gaping back at him, and he raised a single eyebrow.
“As an intelligent and attractive young woman, you could certainly do so much better for yourself.”
The frosty bastard openly looked me up and down, evaluating my curves right out there in public, as if I was a piece of meat dangling in a butcher’s shop. His eyes crawled over my skin and sickness filled the pit of my stomach.
“Or does he pay you to warm his bed?”
My brain didn’t think, my body just acted. I unslung my shoulder bag, wrapped the strap around my hand, and swung the full weight of the bag at the miserable little prick’s head.
“What the hell is wrong with you, you sick FUCK!”
The blow rocked him to one side and maybe he ducked enough to save himself from the worst of it, but I didn’t waste time wondering – I threw down the bag and lunged at him, right fist drawn back to break his nose, and Dave grabbed me from behind.
Arms wrapped around me, he lifted me off my feet. His voice shouted past me, ringing in my ear.
“Tell your men to back off NOW!”
I squirmed and kicked in Dave’s arms, nailing him in the shin with one heel without meaning to, and looked up to see five pissed off bodyguards closing in on either side of my bagging victim, shielding him from me, hands already on their guns.
I had a second or two to wonder at how quickly this day had taken a turn for the crappy, and then three of our own guards were pushing past us.
“Let us handle this, Mr. Dallstrom –”
Szörnyeteg’s faint Hungarian accent cut through the confusion. “It is no matter, gentlemen. A misunderstanding, nothing more.”
He dismissed his men with a wave of the hand. They stepped back a few reluctant feet, looking less than happy about missing a chance to shoot somebody. Dave’s guys didn’t go anywhere.
Gregor Szörnyeteg ran one hand over his mussed grey hair, sighing with an ever-so-mild air of disappointment. “A pity, truly – the father was a force to be reckoned with, a man of power because he crossed lines no one else dared go near. But the son? It seems the son is no more than a yapping puppy who lets his woman fight for him. So sad.”
Peaceful guy or not, I knew that had to push all kind of testosterone buttons for Dave, so I beat him to the first word. “Look, asshole, I saw your statement to the press about your daughter and her busted hand, and you said you didn’t bear any ill will towards Dave –”
“You think that is what thi
s is all about? Your ignorance is charming.”
He turned to Dave and added, “You’ve told her nothing at all, it seems. An interesting choice.”
Dave set me back on my feet and pushed me behind him with limited success. “Why are you even still here? Why didn’t you fly out last night with the rest of them? I spent all day yesterday telling you people –”
I heard the warning in his voice, but Szörnyeteg cut him off without blinking. “Yes, yes, my associates and I spent many tiresome hours listening to your foolish prattling about ideals and honor and the future, but you cannot expect us to take you seriously. I for one have channeled a great deal of your company’s money through my bank, and no man with sense can think that I would endanger the future position of my business and my family for the sake of a silly boy and his childish notions of right and wrong.”
He glanced at our security guys. “A boy careless enough to send away most of his guards, assuming that the danger was over. That was ill-advised.”
It had to be at least a hundred degrees of dry heat in the shade, but the day suddenly felt much colder.
“As to why I am still here, we discussed a great many options after you left us yesterday. You should know that our friends from Pyongyang favored immediate action – I understand their Revered Leader even tried to hire Sergei Karvainyi, but was refused out of hand. Karvainyi actually hung up on him, or so I was told.”
“I could have told The Revered Madman he was wasting his time, Sergei wouldn’t –”
“Yes, it seems you have somehow pulled the old wolf’s fangs or perhaps he has simply grown sentimental with the years, but no matter – I persuaded my colleagues to take a longer view and wait. I said that while Einar Dallstrom’s idealistic son was willing to throw away a profitable relationship, we should not be so quick to do so. I offered to stay behind, to make it clear to you exactly what is at stake here for all of us, and the others agreed. After all, surely even a sheltered boy who has lived always in his father’s shadow can be made to understand that once certain lines have been crossed, there is no going back.”
No Dreams Allowed: A Billionaire Romance Page 25