The top floor was silent. Eerily so. After hearing someone compare my new boss to the Beast of the Apocalypse, I was a bit more cautious about meeting him. I examined the space around me carefully. Unlike the other floors, there weren’t different departments to take up extra space. There was just an empty desk sitting in the middle of the room and behind it were large double doors that were currently closed. The walls looked as if they were made from bamboo, and a stream with no discernible source acted like a moat spanning the perimeter. The noise it made over the rocks that had been carved into the marble floor was soothing, and for a moment I let myself admire the simplicity of the space before venturing any further within it.
“Hello?”
My voice echoed in the sparsely furnished room and I felt exposed somehow. I hurried to the set of double doors behind my new desk. I knocked, lightly at first, and when that got no response I tried the handle.
Beyond the door was an office fit for the most notorious man in the city.
Two sides of the room were made of nothing but glass. They showed a breathtaking view of the city. I imagined that you could watch the sunrise on one side in the morning and watch it set on the other side at night.
The room was twice as large as the one adjacent to it. The floor was made out of black marble, and against the far wall sat an antique writing desk. There were couches set along the eastern wall. They were angled so that whoever sat in them would be able to enjoy the view offered by the floor to ceiling window. In the center of the room, hanging from the ceiling, was a floating electric fireplace. All black chrome and sparkling flame on coals. On the west side, was a great table, empty now, but worn from repeated use. On the back wall near the desk was another door, and instantly sensing a chance to snoop, I hurried towards it. My heels clacked hollowly against the floor despite how softly I tried to step, and feeling more than a little exposed I reached out to open it.
I’d barely even turned the handle before the knob was jerked out of my hands as the door was pulled open from the other side. I took a step back and regarded the man who filled up the doorway.
He was broad shouldered and wide through the chest. Like a small mountain dressed in black, he sort of towered there before me, expression blank and blue eyes cold and hard. I saw that he could possibly be handsome if his mouth weren’t so pinched.
And maybe if he stopped scowling so much.
But it wasn’t my job to critique the man’s temperament. Though as far as first impressions went, I was unimpressed.
“Who the hell are you?”
I opened my mouth to respond, but he dismissed me by the simple expediency of turning his back on me.
“It doesn’t matter.” He spoke with his back to me as he worked to lock the door he’d just come through. “I don’t really need your name. After all, we both know why you’re here.” Finished, he stepped around me and walked deeper into the main part of his office.
I pulled my gaze away from his bare feet slapping against the marble floor and tried to keep from curling my lip at his back.
“And why is that?”
“For now?” He turned and leaned his hips back onto the edge of his writing desk, arms crossing over his chest and a smirk spreading across his face. “It’s to bring me a cup of coffee.”
“Size? Flavor?” My voice was without inflection and I saw his lips twitch in wry amusement. “Surprise me. I don’t care what you get, but I only drink the stuff from the Starbucks across the street. I’ll give you ten minutes. If you’re not back by then I’ll be leaving for the Jensen meeting without you, and you won’t have to worry about coming back in tomorrow morning.”
I opened my mouth to say something rude, but he gave his watch a significant glance, and fuming I marched away. Ten minutes? It would take me almost as long just to get out of the building and across the street. And god forbid there be a line. It’s not like the hundreds of other people who worked in the business district would want a cup of coffee to start off their day or anything. Evans had set me up for failure, and the worst part was that he knew it.
I stood there, silently outraged, and he waved his hand as if shooing off a pet.
“I suggest you hurry. The clock’s already started.”
“Of course.” My voice was stiff, but I really couldn’t drum up much courtesy at the moment. Feeling like an idiot, I hurried as quickly as my pumps would let me out of both rooms and back to the wall of elevators.
I knew, in the back of my mind, that descending into hell would be less torturous than riding the elevator down to the first floor. I knew that. My heart just didn’t believe it.
An elevator that was slower than Clinton’s southern drawl?
Seven minutes.
Racing through the lobby and across a busy intersection?
One minute.
Busting into Starbucks like an avenging angel and being recognized instantly as Fiery Phaedra by twelve patrons and four employees?
Timeless.
“We don’t want any trouble.”
I looked into the pale face of the woman behind the cash register, pondered the status of my moral code for a moment, and then smiled. Leaning both arms on the counter, I got in real close and confided, “Then I think you had best hurry up and get me two espressos before I remember that I have a temper. Sound good?” She nodded, wide-eyed, and my smile grew bigger. “Smart girl.”
Moral code? Hah.
And to think that I’d been afraid that my status as a domestic terrorist would never benefit me. Never say never, am I right?
Feeling evil villain powerful, I hefted my two free cups of coffee and hightailed it back to work. The good news was that it had only taken me ten minutes to get the coffee. The bad news was that it was taking me nearly twenty just to bring it back.
For some reason though, after ruining that barista’s day, I was practically glowing with good humor. My situation still sucked but it was all in how you looked at things. I’m sure I could finagle my way into keeping my job somehow. After all, they knew I was a rebel when they hired me. Plus, Janice was probably in the nursing phase, so talk about temporary job security.
So when I waltzed back through the front doors of the Lumière Corporation, I was humming. Granted, that was before I saw the man collapsed in the center of the room. I stopped in my tracks and my heart did this funny little thing in my chest that told me I was terrified, but too nosey to get out of harm’s way just yet. I was just too engrossed in the sight before me.
The man was surrounded by a number of guards and from what I could see of his clothing, he must have been a businessman. There were three or four other men trying to push past the barricade the guards had created with their biceps, but they weren’t having any luck. Understandable since the businessmen lacked the sheer size of this company’s on-hand security.
To be honest, the stand-off in the lobby wasn’t really the strangest thing. The fact that their man down was covered in blood and not moving? Yeah. That was cause for alarm. My eyes darted around the first floor and to my shock, I realized that I was the only person who had stopped to see what was going on. Everyone else was going on about their business as if nothing untoward had happened. That reaction, more than anything else, let me know that the group of men arguing with the guards were as new to this place as I was. Visitors, then, from another company. They probably had something to do with the “Jensen” that Evans mentioned meeting at the end of my time limit.
I heard a strange sound. A bass rumbling that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Instinct had my eyes tracking the noise, and when my gaze met the culprit, the muscles in my legs twitched with the automatic urge to run. Like the other man, this man was also covered in blood. The main difference was that the blood on this man obviously wasn’t his own. It practically covered the front of his gray Armani suit. The suit was perfectly pressed, and the way the material fit his form, it was obvious that it was a custom job. His shoes were gleaming beneath the lights, pristine despite the blood
splatter.
Slowly, my eyes rose to study his face and something about the fear I felt shifted. It didn’t disappear, but there was another, softer element added to it that kept me from screaming. The bottom half of his face was smeared red, but it was his eyes that demanded my full attention. They were amber. A dark, rich amber like a warm drink on a cold night. Wide eyes framed by dark blond lashes and a strong patrician nose.
Despite evidence to the contrary, there was no malice in his gaze or demeanor. He looked at me, head cocked slightly to one side and brows drawn in honest confusion and just absorbed. That’s really the only way to describe it. He absorbed me. And as I examined him in turn, I saw a lock of unruly blond hair fall into his face and had to fight the insane desire to reach out and brush it back.
It was that urge to touch him, the urge to draw closer, that finally snapped me back. This man, despite his good looks and apparent good breeding, had attacked someone to the point where they were nothing more than a still body in the middle of the room. The way the blood coated his mouth made me think he’d bitten the man, but that couldn’t have possibly been the case.
What sort of person goes around biting people unless they’re high off of bath salts…?
Hmm.
I gave the stranger another quick glance out of the corner of my eye, noted with alarm that he had begun to move closer, and promptly turned on my heel to hurry away. With visions of cannibalism and mayhem dancing in my head, I high-tailed it to the elevator and punched the button for the top floor with enough force to hurt. For good measure, I punched it a couple hundred more times, just to make sure it got the message, since there was obviously a short circuit somewhere considering the fact that the doors. Wouldn’t. Close.
Ah.
That’s better.
As soon as those metallic walls began to slide together, I breathed a shaky sigh and collapsed back against the wall. I looked out into the lobby and noted with a curious case of trepidation that the guards who had been encircling the now weakly groaning man, had all turned as one to look in my direction. Under their regard, I straightened to my full height and stared silently back. As the doors slid shut, I saw one of the security guards lift a small black device to his mouth and speak into it.
Then they were blocked from my sight and I bit my lip, my mind working furiously. Some part of me realized that the coffee was sloshing past the lid and scalding my hands. Some part of me realized that I was trembling, but I was thinking too hard to take note of it.
I don’t know how long I stood there before I noticed him. Honestly, I don’t even know what it was that finally drew my attention. There was no sound, no sense of another person inside of the small space along with me. He didn’t touch me or move. He shouldn’t have been there, but he was, and one second I was staring down at my hands and the next I was looking up, turning my head enough to glance at the space behind me.
He just stood there, watching, amber eyes alert with curiosity, while the blood cooled and dried on his face. His hands were loose and easy at his sides, but there was an air of expectancy around him. A promise of perfectly controlled, carefully aimed violence. Of destruction hidden behind charm.
I felt hunted.
There’s a moment in everyone’s life when something so…unexpected happens that all you can do is close your eyes and wish it away. As if, by making it disappear from sight and denying the reality of it, you can convince yourself it wasn’t happening. Only, when I opened my eyes and looked again, not only was the monster still there, but he had come closer.
I whipped back around and tried the out of sight out of mind thing again. I stared at the seam between the elevator doors until my eyes ached, and hoped desperately that the doors would open. Then his nose brushed against the back of my neck, and screeching like a rejected warrior woman, I swung around and slapped him in the side of the head with my tall espresso. The extra foam went everywhere, and I hissed as the hot liquid scorched my hand. Even so, I was readying the second cup for an up close and personal meeting with Mr. Bath Salt’s nuts when I realized that he had yet to react to the first assault. I may as well have splashed him with an icy cool beverage for all the notice he took of it.
Weird. I could have sworn that drink was scalding.
But he stared down at me, a 6’2 wall of confusion and hurt. Not a “I have first degree burns on my face” kind of hurt either. But a “why did you hit me, I thought we were friends” kind of hurt.
“The hell?” The expletive was more breathless shock than full bodied outrage, but at the sound of my voice Bath Salts Cannibal Man grinned at me.
That grin?
It was devastating to both my heart and my biological clock.
Just for the record.
“You see me.”
I snorted, rubbing my still stinging hand on the side of my pants and trying not to laugh at how absurd this all was.
“Sorry to break it to you darling, but you’re kind of hard to miss.”
God. I had just called bath salt boy “darling.” Damn him and his dimples.
He must have taken my grimace at my own weakness for something else, because he sort of slumped, instantly contrite. “Apologies, little fox.”
I blinked at him. “For?”
Uncertainly, he said, “Being hard to miss? Scaring you? Making you spill your coffee?” He shrugged, and suddenly, there was a spark of amusement in his eyes. “My mam taught me that a smart man apologizes first and asks questions later.” He ducked his head so he could look at me eye to eye. “I have been hailed for a number of things, little fox. My intelligence just happens to be one of them.” The way the corner of his mouth twitched, the way his dimples deepened as his smirk grew, was a threat. I could see the danger I was in, and I looked down before he could smile at me again. We were too close now for such an act to be anything but an automatic K.O.
I would not be charmed by a man who literally had blood on his hands. I opened my mouth to speak, but even if I’d known how to respond to him, the doors sliding open again would have wiped every other thought from my head.
Here was freedom, here was help, here was—
“Gabriel? What are you doing out of your room? I thought we talked about this.”
The man I’d met earlier was staring at the two of us in growing annoyance. He was wearing shoes now and a suit jacket, presumably in preparation for the Jensen meeting.
“I took it upon myself to meet the newest member of our team.” Gabriel licked the back of his hand, and, with a laugh, held it out as if for inspection. “Look, Marcus. She brought me coffee.” He tapped his chin with his index finger and winked at me. “I find myself quite charmed.”
I watched as annoyance morphed into rage, Marcus’s pinched face growing even more foreboding as he noted the spattered coffee, foam, and blood stains on the man he’d referred to as “Gabriel.”
Gabriel.
As in my new boss.
As in plot twist.
Slowly, I turned to Gabriel Evans, CEO extraordinaire and man-eater and offered up a shaky smile. “Phaedra Conners, Mr. Evans. It’s so nice to finally meet you.”
“Believe me, Miss Conners—” He stepped up beside me and spoke against the shell of my ear and there was a growl in his voice, “—the pleasure was all mine.”
Amused, he took the remaining coffee cup out of my hand as he slipped past me off the elevator. Numb, I side-stepped a fuming Marcus and followed quickly behind.
“If you live among wolves you can’t just act like a wolf. You must be one.”
—Richard Peirce
Chapter Four