by Cynthia Dane
I don’t know why I was so anxious. Was it the opportunity to spend so much time with a woman I was infatuated with? Or was one of my oldest enemies coming to claim me again?
The day before Brooke was off on her short vacation, she stopped by my office to go over my itinerary once more. She also assured me that Natalie was progressing in her training much more efficiently than anyone thought possible. Aside from me, perhaps. Naturally, I believed in Natalie’s abilities. I had a good eye for that sort of thing, didn’t I? I almost told Brooke as much, but my tongue was dry and my heart fluttering at the thought of sharing a row of hotel suites with Natalie, let alone flying in the same private plane or sitting next to her at dinner.
Hearing Brooke genuinely praise the woman I pined after should’ve made me giddier than a kitty with a new toy. But for some reason, it made me pop another pill.
“Everything okay?” Brooke asked before the bottle could hit my desk.
“Butterflies,” I quickly responded. “Stirring up a riot in my stomach. Guess it’s because I don’t go out very much, as you know.”
“You’ll be fine. Sherman will make sure of that.”
“And Ms. Chen?”
Brooke tilted her head. “What about her?”
“Will she look out for me like you would?”
“Is that what this is really about?” Brooke smiled, as if that somehow relieved her. “That girl – excuse me, woman – is so worried about disappointing people that I doubt she’ll be much trouble. Just make her sign some NDAs.”
“Oh, I will.” NDAs were my favorite thing. Sometimes, they were the only weapon I had against people finding out the truth and frothing to go to the press. I’d be the hottest story of the year if it came out that I had a vagina. “You should see my stack of NDAs in my bedroom.”
That wasn’t a sexual come-on, of course, but Brooke still gave me a strange look that insinuated she had thought of it as one before realizing who I was. Not once, since we broke up a few years before, had I begged her to come back to me. Not like that. The only time I begged her to be around me was when I needed a new assistant and couldn’t think of anyone better. My assistant must know what is really going on with me. Brooke was not only perfect for the job, but having her around gave me comfort.
She may no longer be my lover, but she would always be my friend.
“There’s one other thing I want to go over before I leave,” she said, pulling a paper from the bottom of her pile. “It has to do with Sam Garrett.”
I perked up from my bottle of pills to hear that. “Go on.”
“He called me yesterday, asking if he could schedule an appointment to see you.”
I ruminated on that before replying. “He called me a little while ago, asking if I was open to it before he contacted you for an appointment.”
“Yes, he said as much. Didn’t have any reason to disbelieve him, but…”
“But?”
“Well, this is my first time hearing the voice of Garrett.”
I chuckled. “Haven’t heard it much either. There’s a reason he’s a silent partner.”
“I honestly thought he was dead. Or indisposed.”
“He was long retired before I inherited the company.” I opened my schedule and grabbed a pen from the basket on the corner of my desk. “When does he want to meet to discuss… whatever?”
“As soon as you get back from San Francisco.”
“How short notice of him.”
“When you’re retired, you have a lot of time to spare… I suppose.”
“When I’m retired,” I said, copying down the date and time on Brooke’s tablet into my schedule, “I’ll be driving my Lambo around the track until I die.”
She laughed. “You and your Lambo.”
“The only baby I’ve ever needed.” One of my favorite ways to unwind that didn’t include drink or sex. The country club on the outskirts of town had a race track I could rent for hours at a time, and my favorite car – a Lamborghini Veneno Roadster – was made to go in endless loops while I screamed my frustrations. The fact I could do it in a suit or a dress made my life.
Brooke rolled her eyes. “It’s good to see you feeling a little better, Eric.”
“Don’t take this as me feeling better. If you had my Lambo, your face would light up too whenever you talked about it.”
I told myself that I was happy again. That I didn’t need my anxiety pills. That everything would be fine, and that the gala that weekend would tell me everything I needed to know about my confusing feelings toward Natalie Chen, a woman I had been avoiding for my own mental health.
That’s what I told myself. But when I woke up the next day on Thursday morning, I was sick enough in the head that I had no choice but to call out for the next two days. I conducted what business I could at home, but for the most part, I lay in bed and watched TV with Sherman, because my brain was convinced absolutely nothing could go right.
Meanwhile, my body waged war with my heart.
Chapter 11
NATALIE
The flight attendant handed me a glass of sparkling iced water before we reached our cruising altitude. The way she flawlessly walked around the cabin – in those heels, no less – without once stumbling while I struggled to stay upright in my seat was pure inspiration.
So far, the trip to San Francisco was nothing like what I expected. Clyde picked me up in the empty Mercedes and drove me to the private airport an hour before takeoff. Sherman escorted me onto the plane while going over some security parameters for the duration of the weekend trip. It was early on a Saturday morning, but I had slept like a log the night before and absorbed his words as if I were his personal sponge.
I only briefly saw Mr. Mann, and he hadn’t been in work at all Thursday and Friday. I have mentioned that he often called out of the office and preferred to work from home. That wasn’t the unusual thing. No, what concerned me was how he was indifferent even toward me, a woman he had been favoring ever since I stepped into his office.
He gave me a curt good morning and retreated into the master bedroom on board. The flight attendant was the one left to give me a tour before we took off. I opted to stay in the main cabin to do my weekend work at a large table surrounded by leather swivel chairs. My seat also had a grand view of the TV on the wall. It was set to C-SPAN, and while that is also one of my favorite channels, I opted to change it to Lifetime for their lineup of fall romances. I daresay Sherman, who sat in the chair nearest the master bedroom, wanted to kill me.
“Is Mr. Mann all right?” I asked halfway through the flight. “If he’s sick, I could take up more…”
“He’s not sick.” Sherman didn’t often speak, but when he did, his gravelly voice was like a baseball hitting me in the side of the head. “Don’t assume that because he’s scarce he’s also sick. That’s how rumors get started.”
Right. The rumors that Mr. Mann wasn’t only gay while paying escorts to beard as his girlfriends, but that he was a sickly man doomed for an early death. While it was no secret that he had been sick for a lot of his childhood – mono, was it? – he had worked hard to dispel the myth that he remained sickly in adulthood. He never addressed the rumors about his sex life.
“Of course. Forget I asked.” I knew he wouldn’t forget. Like Eric said, Sherman was in charge of protecting his client’s body.
“He wants to be alone.” That was all Sherman said for the rest of the flight.
We landed fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. A car awaited us right on the tarmac, and both the driver and the flight attendant helped load our luggage into the trunk. Sherman got in the front. I rode in the back with Eric, who ignored me and stared out the window the whole way to the hotel.
A decoy car followed us.
I knew this was security, and Sherman was in charge of security. Still, I wasn’t used to this kind of treatment. Why did Eric Mann need a decoy car? Was he expecting someone to attack him? Was there a threat I should know about? No. If there wa
s a viable threat, the trip would have been canceled. The gala wasn’t that important.
All of this made me wonder what the situation at the hotel would be like.
The team had informally informed me that we would be staying in the same suite. Of course, my puny middle-class brain assumed a close-quarters suite where it was only a few steps between bedrooms with communal eating and relaxing areas. My room would have its own bathroom, of course, but if I screamed loudly enough someone would come running.
Yeah, right.
The “suite” was practically four penthouse apartments crammed together. Each living and eating area had its own entrance, and I shared mine with no one but my own shadow. I had a kitchen, living room, and study to myself. It was my own one-bedroom apartment. I quickly deduced that the only one staying with Eric in his two-bedroom down the hall was Sherman. I don’t know who was staying in the other two penthouses. The rest of the security squad, I suppose.
A woman named Kristine was assigned to me. I never exchanged words with her, but every time I entered the main hallway from my apartment she was there, standing silent guard. She also later shadowed me at the function and rode in the decoy car.
Why did I need my own bodyguard? Eric I could understand, but… did Brooke get her own bodyguard when she went places? Or was this less about my personal safety and more about making sure I minded myself? Would Kristine report my actions to Sherman or directly to Mr. Mann? Either way, she was as ex-FBI as she looked, and I knew not to tangle with her cool looks or those muscles outlined in her blazer.
After a late light lunch and a shower, I spent the hour before we had to leave gussying up in one of my favorite outfits – the same black dress and tights I had worn on the first day of my internship. Brooke had approved it for the function, saying she knew I had good taste from that day. She gave me some makeup tips, and I admit they made my face pop without commanding too much attention to myself.
Even if Brooke were jealous of me, at least she wasn’t out to sabotage me. These people were too professional for that.
Sherman knocked on my door moments after I stepped out of the bathroom. It was time to leave so we could be fashionably late to the charity dinner.
I had done my due diligence in the research department, both before we came here and on the plane. Ray Holmes, one of the biggest kings of Silicon Valley that managed to stay under the radar, was throwing his annual charity dinner and auction. Every year the cause changed. This year’s was for the National Center of Human Rights with a focus on impoverished pockets of the country. Last year’s was for MS research, and the year before that was Water For Africa. No matter what the cause, Ray Holmes summoned some of the biggest, richest people from all corners of the USA. Some of the faces changed from year to year depending on schedules and whether someone was all for one cause but not the other. Eric had skipped out on last year’s but took Brooke to Water For Africa.
This year was bound to be a huge bash of unprecedented proportions. The timing for NCHR in the current political climate was ripe for rich people finally getting a semblance of a clue or working overtime to fix their public images.
The only reason we were able to get into the venue in record time was because Eric Mann insisted on skipping the red carpet and taking the back entrance. Security met us on a back street, where the few paps who ran forward to make lives hell were quickly chased away or instructed to take their passes to the front street.
“Go!” That was one of the only words Kristine said to me that night. As soon as it was our turn to get through the back entrance, she pulled me out of the backseat of the car and gave me a hearty push toward the awaiting security personnel inside. With any luck, the only pictures someone would get of me would be too dark and blurry to use.
Eric was surrounded by Sherman and two more bodyguards, one of whom threw a coat over my boss’s head until we were inside.
Until that moment, I hadn’t quite understood the extremes Eric took to curtail the narrative of his life to the media. There would be no pap pics. The only photographs released to the public were taken by professional photographers on the Mann-Garrett payroll. Since seeing Eric so often in real life, I could now see how heavily photoshopped his official photos were. They added hints of facial hair and sharpened his jawline. They narrowed his eyes and used lighting tricks to make him look taller. I would’ve been impressed if it wasn’t such a stark contrast to the Eric Mann I now saw every day.
At the last moment, right when Eric crossed the threshold into the safe zone and the coat was ripped off his head, I remembered a piece of advice Brooke gave me the day before. “Do not leave his side. Even if you have to take his hand and be his pretty arm candy, do it. Sherman will never be far behind, but you’re the first line of defense when it comes to distracting nuisances. Better to make people think you’re his girlfriend than to have to deal with other issues.”
I rushed forward, inserting myself between two nameless bodyguards, and took Eric by the arm. He stopped. A small crowd built up behind us as we held up the back entrance traffic.
He said nothing. We moved forward, security clearing the path.
As soon as we were in the main room, things calmed down. Considerably.
There were faces I had never seen before and faces I had only seen in magazines. It wasn’t west coast elite making appearances tonight. Many from New England, quite a few from the Midwest, and a handful of big names from the Southern business world shook Eric’s hand on our way to the table. He kept his eyes focused on our assigned seats while I fielded the strange looks and askance gazes sizing up my boss.
“I don’t believe it. He actually came.”
“He looks so different from his photos. But some people are like that, I guess.”
“Who’s that woman with him? What happened to the blond lady?”
We sat down in the far corner of the room, Eric positioned strategically against the wall where Sherman could stand right behind him like a shadow. I only glanced at the names on the other four placards. Nobody else had arrived yet.
“Is there anything I can get you, sir?” I had downloaded my trip files to my phone. I could look up someone’s name or make a special order to the kitchen at a moment’s notice. For anyone else, I would’ve been put out playing the personal assistant like this. But not only was Eric Eric, but this was a one-time affair at an important function. I’d do about anything necessary to make sure it went smoothly. Just as much as it was a chance to do something different, it was also a chance for me to demonstrate my accountability and talents.
Eric glanced at me before focusing back on the elaborate Easter lily centerpiece overtaking half of the circular table. I popped an allergy pill from my purse when nobody else was looking. Antihistamines go great with sparkling water.
A woman in a black uniform hurried by and silently swept two of the placards off the table. So happened that they were the seats blocking our view of the podium a few yards away. A tech crew put the finishing touches on the AV equipment for the keynote speakers imploring everyone to open their pocketbooks for the greater good.
“Sir,” Sherman stepped forward, finger pressed against his earpiece, “the photographer is here. Should I let him over for the photo-op?”
Another glance came in my direction. “How do you feel about being in the society pages tomorrow?”
I turned whiter than the tips of my nails. “I thought we were bypassing photographers tonight?”
“I have to throw a bone to someone. Better to have a photographer I trust taking my photo on my terms than to deal with the rabble outside. The photographers making the rounds in here know better than to take my picture. They didn’t make it into the actual event by chance. They’re highly vetted in the industry. If I say no pictures, they know not to take my damned picture.”
“But this one would be okay?”
“We have to have some proof in the society pages that I was here. That’s part of the point of me making this appearance.
People like to know that I’m still alive. And hale and healthy, I suppose.”
“Sure, then.”
Eric nodded to Sherman. “You’ve got five minutes to gussy up.”
I pulled out my pocket mirror and made sure my lipstick wasn’t smudged. Eric carefully watched me from the corner of his eye, but didn’t offer his input.
“How’s my hair?” I asked.
“Perfect.”
I pretended to not be surprised by that glowing commendation. I didn’t have time, anyway. The photographer was by our side, camera at the ready.
“Look natural,” he told us. “You’ve settled in for a fun night at the charity auction.” His droll voice didn’t make it sound like we were about to have a fun night.
“Should I smile?” I asked.
“Please.”
I pulled some of my hair in front of my face and showed the top row of my teeth in the most natural smile I could muster. For the love of God, I hope I turned my face enough! That thought broadcasted toward the photographer as he took a few shots. It wasn’t until he put his camera down and pulled out a pad and pen that I realized Eric had snaked his arm across the back of my cushioned chair.
“Can I please get your name and your relation to Mr. Mann?”
“Natalie Chen.” My voice cracked. The arm was still behind me, and there I was, nestled in an embrace I didn’t know existed until a second ago. “I’m Mr. Mann’s assistant for this trip.”
“Oh, what happened to…”
“Ms. Pentecost had an important family engagement to attend.” Eric sat up in his seat. “Ms. Chen is filling in.”
I went from white to blushing in fewer than five seconds.
The photographer finished taking his notes and thanked us for our time. I was still pink by the time we were left alone again.
The color in my cheeks did not let up anytime soon, for the two other people sharing our table soon showed up, one commanding so much attention that she had her own trail of “certified, vetted photographers.”