Chapter Five
Jacob
“Insider trading? Jesus Christ, when is this little prick going to stop?”
My chief business partner, Greg Sistero, pounded his fist on my desk as I leaned back in my chair, taking a deep breath. We’d just had a wildly unproductive call with Damon Schwartz, who worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission. He—and the SEC in general—had been breathing down our necks for months now, trying to accuse my company of all sorts of bullshit. Now they were going to start auditing us.
I knew Damon Schwartz, and I also knew he had an agenda other than regular SEC stuff. I actually went to college with him, and he’d always hated me, simply because I achieved so much more than him. Back then it was in terms of grades, and now it was in terms of business. I’d started my company with very little right out of college, and now it was worth millions with over a hundred employees. A position at the SEC wasn’t a bad gig, but I knew it probably wasn’t what Damon wanted. He’d wanted to start a boutique investment firm like I did, but it just wasn’t for him. So now he came after everyone like me instead, trying to make us look bad when we hadn’t done anything wrong.
“We’re fine, right?” Greg said, looking at me with wide eyes. “They won’t find anything wrong when they audit us?”
I shook my head. Great, even my own partners weren’t entirely trusting me now. “Course not. We only do thing above board here. You know that,” I said stiffly.
Greg went to college with me too, and he’d helped me a lot in the beginning. I’d had a lot of people vying for the position of deputy CEO over the years, but Greg would always be my go-to guy for the job as long as he wanted it. He’d always been dedicated, and without his help, I wouldn’t have achieved so much. It simply wouldn’t do to have things start falling apart now.
“Why don’t we go out for a drink?” I said, standing up. “We could go to that bar you like, blow off some steam. Things will feel better in the morning.”
Greg visibly relaxed. “Sure. Good idea, man.”
“Just let me call Va…er, my nanny, and see if she can stay late.”
Greg nodded and left me alone, and I dialed Vanessa’s number, my pulse increasing slightly. Speaking to my little nanny had that effect on me. Every time. I’d been trying to quash the intrusive thoughts, but every time I came home and saw her playing with my nephew and doing her best to take care of him, my cock would twitch and my chest would tighten.
She was so young, so beautiful, and so innocent. The way she looked after Tommy made me want to give her the same thing. From the few short conversations we’d had about her childhood, she hadn’t ever had much, and I wanted to change that. I wanted to spoil her; give her everything she could ever need or want. I wanted to teach her everything, too.
But I couldn’t do that without getting close to her, and getting close to a teenager wasn’t something a man in his mid-thirties should be doing.
I cleared my throat as she answered the phone. “Hello, Vanessa. I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”
“Of course, si…Jacob,” she said, hurriedly correcting herself. After six weeks of working for me, she still wasn’t used to calling me by my first name. I was sorely tempted to just give in and let her call me ‘sir’, but if I did that, it would be a slippery slope, and I’d find myself unable to stop myself from taking her in the way I really wanted to.
“Are you able to stay later today? I have a business drinks thing to attend. I’ll pay you double for overtime, of course.”
“Yes, I can stay,” she said. “I have some college work to do, but I can just do it here.”
“Great. There’s a spare laptop computer in my home office, on the white desk. No password. If you want, you can use that for your assignments.”
“Really? That’d be great. I hate having to hand-write everything.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is that what you usually do, even when you’re at home?”
“Yes. I don’t have a computer. Sometimes I use the ones in the library on campus, though, if they aren’t all booked out. So it’s not too bad.”
Jesus. I’d forgotten how hard it was to afford things at such a young age.
“Let’s go with triple pay for the overtime, seeing as it’s such short notice,” I said, wishing I could just give her a brand new computer without coming across as a total creep. “And you can use that laptop whenever you want. I never use it anyway.”
“Thank you, Jacob, that’s so generous,” she said.
I ended the call, my heart pounding. Christ, I needed to stop thinking of Vanessa in this way. It wasn’t right, and I was setting myself up for disappointment.
I headed out to Bobeche Bar and Bistro with Greg, who let out a low whistle when we stepped inside.
“Check out the talent tonight,” he said, nodding toward a group of women. They were all dressed to the nines in tight dresses with Chanel purses and Louboutin shoes, and while I had to admit they looked enticing, I longed to see Vanessa instead, with her faded old pink or purple t-shirts, jeans and white sneakers. She was supposed to dress casually for her job—running around after kids wasn’t exactly conducive to five inch Louboutins—but I had a feeling she was just as sweet and casual in her usual life, too. She didn’t strike me as the kind of girl who cared for designer threads and two thousand dollar shoes, although I would’ve loved to spoil her with some, just to give her a taste of the life she could have with a man who wanted nothing more than to take care of her.
Fuck. Why couldn’t I stop?
Greg and I whiled the night away over martinis with conversation about old times, and before I knew it, it was ten o’clock. Not that late, but late enough that Vanessa was probably starting to wonder if I’d ever come home.
I said goodnight to Greg and headed home, and when I arrived, I padded softly upstairs to give Tommy a goodnight kiss and check up on him. He was snoring peacefully in his bed, and my throat tightened as I saw Vanessa in the big armchair next to the bed. She had a storybook open on her lap, so she must’ve fallen asleep reading to him a couple of hours ago.
She was dressed in a floral sundress with a simple white cardigan over the top, and my cock stiffened as my eyes roamed over her lithe body. The dress was nipped in at her tiny waist, giving her body a lovely hourglass shape. So fucking beautiful.
I managed to hold back my urges to reach out and stroke her soft skin, and I gently shook her awake instead.
“Vanessa,” I whispered. “It’s time to go.”
She moaned, but aside from that she didn’t stir, so I sighed and picked her up in my arms. She was so light; hardly weighed more than a feather, although I suppose that made sense considering she was barely above five foot two and probably only weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet.
I carried her down the hall, trying to decide which one of my many spare rooms to put her in for the night. I settled on one I’d had decorated for a young girl a few years ago when my brother was still alive. He and his wife had been trying for another baby when Tommy was about four, and they were hoping it would be a girl.
The room had never been used, for obvious reasons.
Even though it had been designed for a much younger girl, I thought Vanessa would appreciate the soft white faux-mink throw rug that lay over the sheets and the muted pastel pinks that covered the walls. I knew she loved the color pink, judging by some of the things she wore to work, and she deserved to have pretty things surrounding her.
So she wouldn’t be confused when she woke up, I wrote her a little note explaining how she’d fallen asleep, and then I went and hunted down her purse so she could have it next to her along with her phone. I located her things in the home office, where she’d obviously been doing some college assignments earlier while keeping an eye on Tommy, judging by the stray toy dinosaur on the floor. I smiled and picked up her purse and phone.
As I made my way back up the stairs, the phone began to vibrate in my hand. I looked at the screen out of sheer instinct, and I saw that it was a private number. In fact, now that the screen was lit up, I could see a notification in the top left hand corner of the screen, alerting Vanessa to six missed calls.
I wondered who would be calling her this late at night, and from a blocked number, too. Had she given out her number to some musclebound college meat-head? She didn’t strike me as the type of girl who would be easy to pursue, judging by how pretty she was, but that didn’t mean guys weren’t after her. Of course they were. She probably made every guy on her campus drool as she walked around.
The phone stopped ringing, but then it immediately started up again ten seconds later. I decided to answer. Either it was some sort of emergency, or it really was some uncouth prick trying to get a late night booty call. Vanessa wasn’t that sort of girl; I’d already figured that out from our interactions in the past, and I’d be damned if I let some guy try to treat her like a piece of fresh meat.
“Hello?” I said stiffly.
There was no answer, just heavy breathing.
“Hello?” I repeated.
More heavy breathing, and still no words.
“Look, you little bastard,” I said. “I don’t know who raised you and led you to believe you can just disrespect girls like this, but she’s not going to answer her phone at this time of night and cater to your whims. Lose Vanessa’s number.”
“So this is Vanessa’s number?” a male voice on the other end of the line finally said.
My heart sank. I’d fucked up. Obviously Vanessa hadn’t intended for this little prick to have her number, whoever he was, but he’d gone ahead and found it somehow anyway.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“An interested party.”
“Like I said, lose her number, frat boy,” I said. “She can do better.”
Then I hung up. Fucking college kids. Vanessa really could do better.
Like me, a small voice in the back of my head told me.