“Rose, how about you record this test run? Not for Instagram,” he hollered once three other staffers whipped out their smartphones, “just for data.”
“On it.”
Knox flipped the switch. Crouched to hold the sleek metal frame just above the ground. Let go…and watched it stay aloft. Applause broke out. “Wait for the main event,” he said. Then he stepped on.
It tipped a little, like getting into a canoe. Steadied once Knox added another foot up front. Felt like it was still in the air. But it wasn’t moving. So he tightened his abs to keep his balance and put his right foot back on the ground to push off.
The thing shot forward like it had the Batmobile’s thrusters underneath. Holy shit, it could move. Knox crouched for better stability, like he did when surfing. Except that he’d never managed to stay on a surfboard for more than ten seconds. The air in his office had less wave action than the water off Hawaii, though, so maybe it’d work.
Staffers squealed, laughed, made a path as he managed to throw his weight around enough to aim down the long hallway to reception. Huh. He should’ve figured out how to stop before firing it up. Falling over worked on a snowboard. Should work on this, too. Knox glanced up to see how soon he needed to bail off…and saw Madison in the reception area, clipboard in hand.
Either the surprise of seeing her or the way she filled out the white blouse and tan skirt like the epitome of a sexy librarian was enough to kill his concentration. The hoverboard tipped enough to spill him to the side. Knox’s ass landed on the receptionist’s desk. Luckily, Amit lunged from behind and managed to grab the tip of the thing before it chunked the ceiling in accordance with Clark’s dire prediction.
Hell, it wasn’t like anyone here had ever seen a hoverboard dismount before. The fact that he’d landed on the desk ought to earn him style points. Knox’s hand automatically went to straighten his missing tie. He settled for popping open the button on his collar like it was what he’d intended all along. And yeah, he needed the extra breathing room. His heart was pounding. Not because the ride had been scary. It was just the excitement of actually doing something everyone else only watched on a theater screen. It’d been a techno-orgasm.
Still, being a fan of actual orgasms, he gave Madison his best appreciative leer. “Madison, the way you look in that outfit took my legs right out from under me.”
“Smooth move,” Amit whispered beside him.
Like he needed the help.
“That was quite an entrance.” Madison dropped the clipboard to sidle up and plant a kiss on his cheek. “It would’ve knocked my socks off—if I were wearing any.”
God, was that a hint? What wasn’t she wearing under that tight skirt? Knox snaked an arm around her waist to keep her locked to his side while he gave her a real kiss. A kiss to remind her just how great he was at kissing, in case he’d lost any manliness in her eyes by falling off the glorified skateboard. A kiss with tongue. Because it was his damn office, and because he could. When her leg cocked at the knee like a fifties film star, he figured he’d made his point.
“Wow,” whispered Amit.
For God’s sake. “How about you take the top-secret prototype away from the glass walls of reception and back into testing, Amit?”
“Can I ride it back there?”
“No.” Then, because he wasn’t heartless, he amended it to, “Not without wearing Clark’s helmet.”
Everybody else got the hint and cleared back into the bowels of the office. Except for the receptionist, who tapped the clipboard with her pen. “Your visitor hasn’t finished signing in, Mr. Davies.”
“You just watched me give her mouth-to-mouth clearance, Lydia. Skip the forms.”
“But the Department of Defense rules we implemented last week state—”
Knox was sick to death of the DoD forms and rules and red tape. Still in the negotiation phase, but eight hundred things suddenly had to pass clearance. Big Brother might pay well, but did he pay well enough to counteract all the hassle? And paper forms on a clipboard? Those annoyed him right off the bat. A clipboard? Like it was 1996? Unbelievable they wouldn’t let him collect the data on an iPad. If word got out there were clipboards at Davies Enterprises, he’d be the laughingstock of the tech world.
“Don’t worry, Lydia. I know a guy at the Pentagon.” Okay, Griffin didn’t technically work at the Pentagon. But he rubbed elbows with people who did.
He stood, with Madison still plastered to his side. “I’m a big fan of a beautiful woman dropping by to break up the workday. But I know you’ve got a less fluid schedule than me. What gives?”
“I brought you something.”
“Kisses and presents? You can drop by any day. No, make that every day.” He waited while she picked up a giant picnic basket. “Come on back.”
“I haven’t done a visual search of the basket, Mr. Davies,” Lydia protested.
“Then you can truthfully state that you didn’t see Miss Abbott here smuggle in anything illegal.” Knox pushed through the glass door and held it for Madison. “Sorry about that. Lydia’s been on a power trip ever since we upgraded our security clearance. She acts like she’s guarding Area 51.”
“Is she? Is that hoverboard actually alien technology that you’re just taking credit for?”
Knox loved that she’d jumped right on board with his reference. “Not ours at all. Just a side project for an old college friend. She’s having trouble working out the kinks and thought I could help.” Help fix the basic problems…and maybe juice the application beyond fun to functional. It could be an easier way to move loads for the military, for disaster relief. The possibilities were just waiting to be monetized.
“You sure know how to work out my kinks,” Madison said with a throaty purr. “Bet you’ll do the same for her.”
“Not exactly the same,” he choked out on a laugh. And loved that the presence of his employees didn’t dial back her flirtation one damn bit. Maybe he’d finally found someone who could play at his level. “Her problem’s more cerebral than physical. And Dr. Stacia Lazaroff doesn’t have nearly the kinks that you do.”
The eyes of everyone in the office followed them as they strode down the hallway to the very back. The least noise, the least distractions equaled the best workspace for Knox. So the vertical blinds were closed, shutting out the view of the Old Executive Office Building. The walls were soundproofed. Very well soundproofed, as he’d discovered during a building-wide fire drill that had security bursting through his door when he’d been oblivious to the alarm.
“Welcome to brainiac central, as Josh calls it.” Knox shut the door behind them. He’d never brought a woman in here. Probably because the eighteen days he’d spent with Madison were about three times as long as he’d ever spent with one woman.
Interestingly enough, Knox discovered that he liked seeing her in front of the massive whiteboard that filled one entire wall. Madison sexed up the place. Hell, she brightened the place even in those neutral colors, just with her sunlight hair and sun-bright smile. The lascivious smile aimed directly at him.
She ran her index finger over his crown, down to his nape, and along the length of his arm. “Have I ever told you that your big brain’s almost as sexy as your big biceps?”
“No. But keep talking.” Talking. Petting. Looking at him with those half-closed bedroom eyes that promised things he’d only dreamed about happening in his office as a high school nerd. Yeah, the future was even better than advertised. Hoverboards. Busty blondes. The only thing to make this day better would be a perfectly made Manhattan teleporting directly into his hand.
“I’m serious.” She thwacked his temple. “Your above-average intelligence is a turn-on for me.”
“Great. If I start reciting the periodic table, will your bra just unclasp itself?”
“Pretty much.”
“Guess I’d better be careful about our conversation when I take you to dinner at that tapas place in Georgetown tonight. I can’t have you spontaneous
ly stripping before I get my fill of albondigas.”
“Maybe you should preempt that by starting now. List the elements. By weight.”
Oh, he sure as shit would. In U.S. customary units and metric. Knox looked around the room, gauging the best surface area. The desk could hold them easily. The treadmill was a nonstarter. Up against the whiteboard might be a great fantasy-come-true, though.
“So this is really why you’re here?” he asked. “Drop-by sex? Because if so, I just need to know what’s in the picnic basket. Lube? Sex toys? If it’s porn, we can’t use my computer. The DoD apparently frowns on that sort of thing even from their contractors.” It was a joke, of course. Knox had so many firewalls and layers of protection on his machines that he could film and edit a porno from his desk and the government would never be the wiser.
“The basket contains bread. Sourdough, to be precise. An Alaskan specialty. I baked it last night.” Madison hefted the basket onto his desk and flipped open the top. “Four loaves, plus butter and honey and jam.”
“I have no idea how you’re going to make bread sexy. But I’m totally on board with watching you try.”
“No, silly.” She snapped the lid shut, almost on his fingers. “The bread is an afternoon snack for your colleagues.”
“Huh?” Sharing bread with his employees made even less sense than trying to sexify it.
Madison planted her hands on her very shapely hips. Hips that provided an anchor when he was deep inside her. Yeah, whatever she wanted to do with the bread, he was on board if it meant more sex. “When was the last time you sat down with your colleagues, Knox? Aside from a normal staff meeting. Have you shared a meal with them?”
“Sure. Of course. When we’re under deadline or really juiced about a new idea, takeout flows through here like beer through a frat house. Research and development wouldn’t exist without pizza and moo shu pork.”
“You’re not listening. That is all work-related.”
“Because we’re at work.” He wasn’t sure what she was driving at, but Knox was sure he was getting a little annoyed. Nobody challenged him at work.
“Do you have birthday parties every month? Wedding showers? Do you ever take the whole office out to celebrate when somebody gets an article published in a scientific journal?”
Right. And he brought in masseurs to rub their feet every other hour. What did she think this was—the Google campus? Knox wasn’t one of those people who believed in ball pits and games to de-stress in the middle of a workday. Doctors didn’t do it. Lawyers didn’t do it. So his coding wizards damn sure weren’t going to. Because the programs they were working on to redo the software for drones could easily mean life or death. That wasn’t something to be squeezed in between rounds of hacky-sack.
He almost sneered at the picnic basket. But who knew—maybe offices were more touchy-feely in Alaska. Striving for a patient tone, Knox explained, “This isn’t a club, Madison. It’s a place of business. A serious one. People can goof off on their own time.”
“It’s not goofing off. It’s strengthening bonds. If you understand one another better, you can work together better. Personalization optimizes efficiency.”
For fuck’s sake. Madison didn’t understand coders at all. But she had his best interest at heart, so Knox bit back the urge to snap at her. “Really? You think sitting around over dry grocery store cake every month will improve our ability to refine our software?”
A flush reddened her cheeks. He didn’t know if it meant Madison was just being passionate about her belief, or if she was as annoyed as he was. She pointed at the Mercedes logo on his keychain, sitting on the desk. “I think that someone with your bankroll could spring for something a little nicer than grocery store cake. And yes, it will have a long-term effect on every aspect of your business if your employees know that they can trust one another.”
That zinger hit home. It reminded him of Rose and Clark’s unspoken competition. Maybe if they did trust one another, they’d stop poking and start brainstorming more. Or it could simply be an hour lost every month that added up to more than a full workday lost over the course of a year.
Knox crowded in close to Madison. He wouldn’t raise his voice to her. But he did want her to be aware that she’d crossed a line. To see the seriousness in his eyes. To take it to heart enough to not poke at him again. “Look, you can’t come in here and start spouting off about how to improve things. You don’t know anything about my business.”
To her credit, Madison didn’t back up. Instead, she jutted her chin forward and leaned in even closer. “I know that you want to sell it. And I feel deep in my bones that’s not the right way to go.”
Great. Somebody who wasn’t a multimillionaire entrepreneur like himself was daring to give him business advice. A freaking librarian, of all things. “Your bones have something against making millions of dollars?”
She threw out an arm to point at the door leading to the rest of the office. “Aren’t you making millions of dollars now?”
In interest alone, thanks to some sound financial planning. “Maybe.”
“Do you really need more?”
“Always,” he bit out without a single qualm or hesitation. “We covered this already, Madison. When you start out with no money, there’s never enough. You don’t stop banking against the day that might come when something goes wrong. I have to support my mother. I have to support myself, and my friends.”
Madison pounced. Literally hopped forward a little, with a stabby index finger to his sternum. “Your friends the ACSs? The ones I met the other day who all have stable jobs?”
And various-sized trust funds. But he sure as hell wasn’t spilling that info onto her side of the argument. “So they wouldn’t be collecting food stamps without me. But I like to give them a nice place to live, fun vacations. It’s the least I can do to pay them back.”
“For what? For saving your life in Italy? Because you all argued pretty vociferously that you saved yourselves.”
“For being my friends,” he burst out. God, Knox hated it when he dropped the persona of the über-successful, Casanova businessman. Hated it when his inner twelve-year-old pushed forward and grabbed the reins of his emotions. It didn’t happen often. But he couldn’t stop it once it did. “For taking pity on the nerdy charity-case kid that everyone else mocked and looked down on. For seeing that I was worthwhile. For sticking with me.”
A white-noise machine hummed in the corner. Music distracted him. Knox needed to hear the equations making their own music in his head when he worked. But right now the humming just made for a flat background of nothing while Madison looked at him with eyes suddenly wide and damp and so damn sorrowful.
“Oh, Knox,” Madison said softly.
“So yeah, I’ll be grateful to them for the rest of my life. A few fucking radiant heating coils to warm up their bathroom floors and a butler don’t begin to pay them back. But at least it’s something. A token.”
Unable to bear the pity in her eyes another moment, he strode to the windows and yanked open the blinds. The view—one that so many couldn’t begin to afford—soothed him. Reminded him of how far he’d come.
Madison sidled up next to him. Even though she was the one who’d caused his outburst, her nearness soothed him. Weird. “I’m guessing Griffin and Riley and Josh would hate it if they heard you talk about paying them back.”
Letting his forehead drop to the glass, he said, “They’d eviscerate me. Hell, Logan would probably fly back from Wherever-the-fuck-istan he is, just to help them. But it doesn’t change the way I feel. It doesn’t mitigate the debt I can’t ever repay.”
She slid her hand around his. “They’re your family.”
“Yes.” With her fingers touching the almost invisible scar on his palm, Knox had to add, “Actual blood brothers, even.”
“Your family means everything to you.”
“Yeah.”
Now she leaned against his side. “Don’t you see that you’ve cr
eated an offshoot family here, with your company? All of you working together for a common goal? Depending on each other? Supporting each other?”
“That’s hitting below the belt.” It was impossible not to at least acknowledge her point. As much as the media touted him as a business success? Madison was making him feel like a little bit of a failure right now. In a not-loving-what-he-saw-in-the-mirror way. And when something didn’t work, Knox was always the first one in line to come up with a way to fix it. He started by squeezing her hand back.
“I’m sorry if I’m pushing. I just want you to put faces to those numbers you’re crunching. Maybe you’ll never have enough money. But I’ll bet a lot of them feel security right now, working for you. Feel like they have enough. And maybe that’ll be yanked out from under them with the sale of the company. Get to know your people. Spend half an hour eating some truly remarkable bread and swapping stories. See them as people, not just as computers with faces. Know that I’ve spent my whole life yearning for a family, a place to belong, people who depend on me every day…and you’ve got all of that right here. So you’re even richer than you think.”
It was a simple enough request, on the face of it. But Knox knew damn well it might lead to something the opposite of simple. He turned to look into those golden brown eyes. “You’re complicating everything.”
Madison ran her fingertips down his cheek, as soft as a shadow. “Don’t blame me. Life is complicated. Messy.”
Messy didn’t work for him. Knox preferred order. Craved it, with scientific precision. “You’re pissing me off, you know. Poking your nose into my business.”
“I’m not telling you how to design a computer program.” She threw back her head and let out a throaty laugh. “God, I couldn’t if I wanted to. But business has to be about more than numbers and product. You’re so generous, so giving. But you’ve kept that part of yourself separate from your work. Just try opening it up.”
“As much as you piss me off, I’ve got to hand it to you—your tenacity is a turn-on.”
Wanting It All: A Naked Men Novel Page 15