’d asked her what it was that she knew—she didn’t think so. Her instinct was, quite simply, that he was concerned about the company, and needed to get more information, however he could. In a funny way, she might feel like the only person that he could trust.
She did some work on a couple of freelance pieces, silly web content and white papers that she could dash off without too much time or effort, and then took a shower. She reeked of sex and sweat, and while there was a certain appeal to meeting him smelling like what he’d done to her, it wasn’t her first choice. So, a shower. She washed her hair, blow dried it out, and styled it simply, a few small braids done in the front sections of her hair, then pinned back under her crown so that they held the rest of her hair back and out of her face. She kept her makeup light, and dressed in a pair of black pants, a deep blue sweater that set off her eyes, and a necklace that she’d gotten from her grandmother, a single pearl trapped in a gold cage. She normally didn’t wear gold; her skin was too pale, and the tone of the metal made her complexion look sallow, but it was her grandmother’s. Exceptions could be made in special circumstances. A pair of black clogs, and a vintage wool peacoat she’d picked up at a thrift store a few months back to ward off the autumn chill. She hadn’t needed it during the day, but once the sun went down, the city could get brisk quickly.
She made sure her tablet and her laptop were in her big leather bag, and then she set off. She had plenty of time to get across town on the subway, which was a godsend; her budget allowed for either taxis or meals, but usually not both in a week.
Zoey had hoped to beat Alex to the restaurant, but when she walked in the door, he’d already been seated. The hostess gave her a second glance when she said she was meeting a friend; Alex was the only diner currently seated.
He watched her every step as she crossed the floor. She liked to think of herself as a modern woman who did not rely on the male gaze to establish her self esteem, but it would have been a flat out lie to pretend she didn’t put a little extra shimmy in her walk, just to see his eyes focus on her hips, and then force themselves back up to her face.
“Hi there,” she said, shrugging off her peacoat and hanging it on the back of her chair. He’d changed, too. He wore dark blue jeans, and a sweater in a shade of autumnal gold that she never would have pulled off, but that made his eyes look even deeper and more luscious. “Nice to see you again.”
He just watched her for a moment, his chin resting in his hand, one finger tracing his lower lip. It was a mesmerizing motion, and she tried not to be enraptured. This restaurant was priced well out of her means, but they still didn’t look like the sort of place that would tolerate her crawling across the table, climbing into his lap, and begging him to do her right there.
The memory of Alex’s face last night, behind the mask, his eyes locked on hers as he thrust into her almost violently slapped into her head, and she felt the sensation again, every nerve ending firing. And he kept tracing that lip, as if he knew exactly what he was doing to her.
She opened her menu, and used it to hide her mouth. “I thought we were getting together to share information,” she said, and he laughed.
“Not just another excuse for me to make a series of plays to get your pants off?”
Her cheeks were flaring red again. “I mean. Not here? Public sex is not one of my kinks.”
And of course that was when the waiter showed up. Because she wasn’t actually blushing hard enough to light up the city yet.
The waiter at least didn’t say anything. “Good evening,” he said, “My name is James, and I’ll be taking care of you this evening. Can I get you started with something this evening?”
“I’m sorry,” Zoey said, and fumbled for the menu. “I’m not sure—do you have a shandy?”
James nodded. “Orange and lemon,”
“Orange, please,” she said. “That would be great.”
James turned towards Alex. “And for you sir? We have a variety of bottled beers.” He listed off several really cheap national beers, completely unaware—or uncaring—that Alex’s face was growing steadily more set. Zoey watched, a little surprised. She wasn’t completely naive, and she’d grown up in the South, she knew micro aggressions when she saw them, but she was used to them being—well, much more subtle. And not happening in front of her, for Christ’s sake.
“Sorry,” Alex interrupted. “Do you have anything locally brewed?” His intonation made it a question, but his eyes were far less quietly curious.
The waiter bristled. “Obviously,” he said.
“I was just curious,” Alex said, in that same level tone, his smile broad and friendly, “Because I wasn’t sure why you weren’t telling me about the chocolate raspberry stout that the Times reviewer raved about last month.”
“I thought—” The waiter said, and then his mouth snapped shut. His jaw worked for a moment, and then he found his smile again, though the edges had gotten decidedly more tight. “Would you care for a pint, sir?”
Alex nodded, utterly gracious. “That would be fantastic,” he said. “We’ll need another minute to look at the menus, I think.”
Zoey watched the waiter leave, and worked to keep her mouth from hanging open. Alex turned to his menu like nothing had happened. “I’m—” she fought for words for a moment. “I’m really sorry about that.”
He didn’t meet her eyes, didn’t even look up. “You aren’t the one who ought to be apologizing.”
“I’ve never—”
He did look up at her then, and there was a layer of pain in his eyes that she hadn’t been expecting. “I was hoping we’d get through at least a few dates before you’d have to witness something like that. I’d really rather not hash into it tonight, if you don’t mind.”
“Okay,” she said. And then her brain caught up to her ears. “A few dates? Are we on a date?” Was that her, making that high pitched squeaky sound? There was nothing good or graceful about that. At all. The way he was grinning wasn’t a great sign for her continued calm either.
“Food first,” he said. “And then talking. I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked up something of an appetite today.” His knees bumped hers under the table. Even that little bit of contact was electric. She forced her eyes down onto the menu and read the dozens of different kinds of burgers that were offered. She couldn’t make sense of half the words, not because they were fancy, just because she couldn’t stop thinking about his promise to lick her until she screamed.
In the end, she chose a bacon burger with Swiss cheese and sauteed mushrooms; he picked a California burger with guacamole. She tried not to look at the prices; she was fairly sure they were going to give her palpitations if she thought about them too hard. Alex was scrupulously careful placing his order; he essentially made it so that the waiter didn’t have to ask any additional questions. Zoey, to compensate, took her sweet time, making him drag out of her how she wanted the burger cooked, what she wanted for a side, and what kind of fries she would prefer. Alex was grinning by the end; when the waiter left and she winked at him, he rolled his eyes.
“So you’re from the south,” he said.
She nodded. “Outside Covington, Louisiana.”
“How long have you been in the city?”
“Three years. Came to pursue the dream, found out dreams are expensive. What about you? You’ve lived in the city your whole life, haven’t you?”
“More or less,” he said. “My mother has a place upstate, and my father kept apartments in a couple different cities, but I grew up here. School in Connecticut, college in Boston. But New York, born and bred.”
“What do you do, when you’re not carousing, beating up willing women, or running multi-national corporations?”
“Carousing,” he said, laughing. “You are from the south, aren’t you?”
“And proud of it, sha,” she said, before she thought better of it.
“You’ve said that a few times,” he said. “It’s not something I’m familiar with. What does it mean?”
Goddamnit, if she blushed one more time, she was going to start wearing a surgeon’s mask to go out in public. “It’s kind of like dear, or sweetheart, most of the time. It comes from cher.”
He nodded. “That makes sense.” He took a bite of his burger, and she had to love the face he made. Pure, delighted pleasure at well cooked food. It was nice to know that someone could be a billionaire and still love burgers. He wiped some avocado off his lip, then met her eyes while he licked his fingertip clean. She reminded herself again that crawling into his lap would probably get them banned, and giving his reputation, she’d probably end up making an appearance in her own crappy paper. When the first reminder didn’t work, she reminded herself again, must more firmly. “I like to run,” he said. “I don’t get to run in the city as much as I want to, but I try to keep up on a treadmill enough that I don’t humiliate myself when I get the chance to run somewhere else. I have a secret passion for really bad science fiction movies, the kind they used to make the joke movies about, with the robots, and the janitor?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll show you some time.” He said it so casually. “I was a pain in the ass for a lot of years. And now that I’m less of a pain in the ass, the media seems determined to turn me into a pain in the ass, just so that people will keep clicking headlines about me. I haven’t trashed a hotel room or gotten thrown out of a club in five years, I’ll have you know.” He chewed for a moment, and took a long pull off his beer. “And what about you? Journalist, novelist, or poet?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s three types of people who move to New York to make their living writing. My money’s on journalist; if you were a novelist or a poet, you’d be getting coffee for an editor somewhere, hoping he’d take a look at your manuscript sooner or later.”
“Guilty as charged,” she said.
“So what made a young Zoey Gardener look up and say, ‘I know, I want to pursue a career in a profession that’s slowly dying?”
She told herself that he didn’t mean to be rude and dismissive. He was probably trying for flip and goofy. Hitting him would be ridiculously out of line, no matter how tempting it felt in the moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “What made a not so young Alexander Blankenship decide to take over his philandering father’s company and keep selling the kind of weapons that are sooner or later going to kill all of us?”
She had probably gone way too far. It was too close to what she’d said this afternoon. To her surprise, though, he went still for a moment, then shrugged. “Touche,” he said continuing on his burger.
“Journalism isn’t dying,” she said. “It’s evolving. And I want to be part of the evolution. I want to help drive it towards its next great thing.”
“And you’re doing that at the Downtown Voice?”
“God, no. But they pay my rent—barely—and I do my time. Sooner or later, I’ll break something big, and I’ll be able to get the kind of attention I need to move up.”
“I don’t know, I thought your work on the guy who was jerking off in the faces of all those little old ladies on the subway was stellar.”
In an odd way, it felt like an apology. She decided to take it as one. For now, at least.
“And so this is where AEGIS comes in.”
She nodded. “I’m seeing some things that don’t add up. Like—”
He wasn’t paying any attention at all. His burger hung in slack fingers, and he was staring up at the TV that graced the bar behind her. She would have been mad if it had been some sort of sporting even on, but he was staring at the nightly news. “What’s the matter?”
He didn’t say anything, just gestured at her to be silent. She couldn’t hear the report. The anchor was talking, the ticker said something about a murder, and there was a picture of a man in his early thirties or so, who had a Latino look about him. While Alex stared at the screen, apparently trying to lip read the news anchor, Zoey pulled out her phone. She tapped search terms in quickly, and ended up finding the breaking news on a local new group’s Twitter feed. She scanned the article until the report ended, and Alex’s attention drifted back down to the table. His hands were clenched in fists, his knuckles pale. She reached out tentatively, lightly brushing her fingertips over the backs of his hands. He glanced up, as if he were surprised to find out that she was there with him. “Did you know him?” she asked.
He shook his head. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. “I’ve never met that man in my life.”
She waited, her journalistic instincts kicking in. He had some sort of story to tell her, and he wasn’t going to blab unless she kept quiet. He wasn’t pushing her hand away, and that was actually a good thing.
“He was at my office this afternoon,” he said, his voice so quiet she had trouble hearing him, and she leaned in closer. “Well, not my office. Olivia’s office.” His eyes caught hers. “My mother.” She nodded for him to go on. “His name—she called him Arturo. I thought he was—you know, someone she was seeing. A friend.” He shifted, clearly uncomfortable. “She never said anything. But she would deserve—anyway. I saw him this afternoon. Why is he dead?”
Zoey glanced down at her phone. “The police haven’t released a ton of details yet, but he was a contractor in the city, ran a fairly well regarded company. They’d gotten some good projects from businesses, kept them pretty busy, and making decent money. He was killed in his office. Looks like foul play.”
Alex rocked back like he’d been hit. She didn’t dare to tell him the other details she’d found, and why she’d recognized Arturo’s name, even before she’d started searching on her phone. Not yet, anyway. Not in public.
Alex stared down at his half eaten burger and pushed it away. “I can’t eat this,” he said. “Let’s go.” He pulled out his wallet and yanked some cash out, tossing it down. Zoey’s eyes widened; it was twice what the meal had cost.
“Should we get change? Box up the left overs?”
He was walking, not talking, and he was halfway to the front door. There was a not small part of her that wanted to just let him go. She owed him nothing, and she didn’t know him from Adam, not really.
But it was against her nature to let a distressed person take off on their own in a city like this. He could walk into traffic and be hit by a car. End up with amnesia, starring in some horrible reality show. If she could save anyone from a fate like that, it was practically her responsibility.
She shrugged into her peacoat, and then wolfed down the last bite of her burger, chewing as she hurried after him. Responsibility was all well and good, but she wasn’t sure when she’d next get to taste a burger that someone dared to charge $40 for.
Alex had stopped just outside the door. He had his cell phone out, but he was staring at it owlishly, as if he was utterly drunk. The looks people were giving him were completely disgusting, way out of line for the looks that a guy blocking up the side walk in New York City would usually get. She glared back at anyone who dared to make eye contact with her, and guided Alex back, out of the immediate flow of foot traffic. She took his phone from his fingers and glanced at it. It was similar to hers, although his was the newest model, and hers was a few years old, but it was close enough to work. “Who are we trying to call, Alex?”
He stared off at the cars flowing by for a moment, then blinked, and seemed to come back to her just a little bit. “David,” he said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat, and it came out a little stronger. “My driver.” He pointed at the favorites icon, and she tapped it for him, then tapped the icon to make a call. She held the phone out to him, but he was staring again. She sighed, and hoped for the best.
Someone picked up after the second ring. “Hello, Mr. Blankenship?” The voice had that pseudo-British accent that she’d loved until she’d become friends with Helen, and now grated horribly on her nerves.
“Nope, actually, this is Zoey Gardener. I, um, was having dinner with Mr. Blankenship, and he’s ready to be—picked up now?”
David, thankfully, seemed utterly nonplussed by this conversation. Hell, it might not have been the weirdest call he’d ever received about the illustrious Mr. Blankenship. He got the address from her, and assured her that a car would arrive shortly.
Alex had sagged against the side of the building. She reached out, running her hand along his arm. “The car’s on the way,” she said. “And then we can talk, and you can tell me what’s going on.”
He nodded, his face wooden. She reached up and touched his cheek, feeling the heat that burned through his skin. His eyes focused then, and he reached out, wrapping his arms around her waist and tugging her tight against him. He turned them, pressing her back into the rough brick. Someone whistled as he ran his hand over her hair. His eyes were gleaming with an entirely different type of need as he lowered his mouth to hers.
In a way, it felt like a first kiss. The way her body leapt in response, the way he made a soft sound into her mouth as her hands wrapped around his neck, the way she leaned into him, letting him take her weight. His hands stayed perfectly chaste, wrapped around her waist, but his hips weren’t even polite. She could feel him, impossibly hard, feather light presses against the small of her back making her brush over him, reminding her of what he had, who he was, what she wanted.
It had been a very long time since she’d had a first kiss. Because it wasn’t just about the first time you kissed someone, it was about that feeling that you weren’t just kissing them right now, you were kissing them in such a way that the moment was going to stretch out into the future. It was going to pick you up and carry you along. It was a kiss that said there would be more kisses after this one, and not just kisses. There would be intimacies, there would be give and take. There would be shared secrets and quiet conversations.
She didn’t think it was the same for him. No, she had a sense that he was using her right now, using her to center himself and push away whatever horrible thing was happening in his mind, and she didn’t care. The kiss was what it was to her, and it was absolutely fine for it to be something else to him. She dragged her nails down the nape of his neck as she opened her mouth to him and kissed him back, teasing his tongue with hers, nipping at his lips with her teeth, urging him on until he broke away from her, shaking just a little in her hands.
“Thank you,” he said, quietly, stroking his hand over her hair again. “I’m sorry. That man—”
“We’ll talk about it later,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“No. No, it’s really not.”
“No, it’s not. But it’s okay that we wait to talk about it.”
He accepted that, and his hands tightened around her, pulling her in for another kiss. This one was quieter, softer, his lips just teasing over hers, light kisses one after another. They lit her on fire, and she had to work hard to remember that they were in public. It had been a long time since she’d wanted anyone this very much.
A crowd had assembled, she realized, as he pulled away again. He threaded his fingers through hers, keeping her close against his side, and she let her head rest on his shoulder. Some asshole whistled through his teeth, calling out that they should do it again, and Alex flipped the guy off with a casual sort of irritation that had frightened her when she first moved to the city. It was utterly unlike her home, where people either smiled in public and then ranted in private, or full on tried to kill each other on the street. There was none of this quiet contempt. It just was not done.
When it became clear that they weren’t going to continue making out on the sidewalk, and that Alex wasn’t going to punch the whistler, the crowd shuffled on. Zoey shivered, just a little, and Alex wrapped his arm around her.
“This isn’t going to be a casual thing, is it?” he asked her.
“I really suck at casual,” she said.
“I’m pretty horrible at serious.”
It stung to hear, but it didn’t make her want him any less. She tried to think of her heart as walled off, quietly blockaded from his delicious hands and tongue and teeth. If she closed her eyes and squinted really hard, maybe it would at least seem like it made a difference. Right up until he broke her heart and left her in pieces.
At least I’ll have a better idea of what I want when he’s done, she told herself. That’s nothing to sneeze at, really. She’d just have to be very careful not to spend too much time thinking of him as anything other than fucking material.
“Maybe I’ll get better,” he said, and her heart did a little skip inside her ribcage.
“Don’t tease,” she said, before she thought better of it.
His arm tightened around her shoulders. She fit well against him. He was taller than her by several inches, enough that she could lean just slightly and slip under his shoulder, but not so tall that she felt overwhelmed by him. Which would work well if she could ever get him to put her up against a wall… She shook her head gently. That was a perfect example of the kind of thought that was dangerous to think. “You’ll find,” he said, his voice a low rumble that was only for her ears, “that I only tease in bed, and only if you’ve been very, very bad.”
“Do you like it when I’m a naughty girl?” She couldn’t stop herself, just like she imagined he couldn’t stop the little rush of air from his throat.
“Oh princess,” he said. And then a long black car pulled up to the curb, and something changed in Alex’s bearing. He walked briskly to the car; Zoey had to move quickly to keep from being towed along like a little kid. He opened the back seat door for her, and she slid in. He followed her, pulling the door shut behind her.
The quiet once the car door shut was nearly absolute. All the noise of the city was shut out, and replaced with quiet music. Classical. Mozart, she was fairly sure. “Thank you, David,” Alex said. “I’m sorry for the short notice. I hope you didn’t have to cut your evening short.”
“I live to serve,” the driver said in a dry tone that made Alex laugh.
“Sorry to do this to you,” Alex said, before flipping a switch that raised a partition between the back seat and the front. Zoey heard a quiet chuckle before the front of the car sealed off, but instead of reaching for her again, instead of winding his fingers into her hair and leaving bruises on her ribs with tight and hard fingers, he opened a cooler and passed her a bottle of well chilled water.
It was such an abrupt transition that she almost retreated. One moment, he was the man who spanked her ass until it stung and kissed her in streets until crowds gathered; the next he was the CEO of a multi-national company that had its fingers in every pie that had been baked in the United States for fifty years. She didn’t quite know what to say, so she went for something totally obvious.
“You have your own driver?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Yes. And a private jet, and a housekeeper. The house in Connecticut has horses. Olivia has a sailboat the size of the Hamptons, but I hate it. I get seasick.” His expression dared her to comment on any of it, and she zipped her lips. She kept herself from making the gesture that went along with the emotion. Barely.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be,” he said, but he didn’t relax. His gaze shifted out the window. The glass was tinted; they could see out, but anyone looking in would only see their own reflection. “My father was a stingy bastard,” he said. “Olivia donates to a few charities, but none of them—well, they’re all run by her friends, and her donations always seem to come back to her in the form of invitations and jewelry and whatever else. That’s not who I’m going to be.”
“I live in a studio apartment in the Bronx. I don’t have room in my apartment for a desk and a sofa, so I do that thing where I pretend that it’s comfortable to sit on the floor and work on my coffee table.”
His eyes were cold as they turned back to her. “And that’s my fault, because I was lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family?”
She shook her head. “Nope. But you were sharing some uncomfortable things about you, so I thought I should do the same.”
Alex watched her for a long moment, his eyes studying her. She had the sense he was looking for any hint of mockery, any sign at all that she was teasing him. He didn’t find it. She made sure he didn’t find it. “You mean that,” he said. His voice was quietly wondrous.
“I do,” she said.
He took her hand again and tugged her towards him. She slid across the seat and kept her eyes on his as one of his hands came to her chin, the other to the small of her back. He softly tilted her face up as he kissed her, and this time, there wasn’t a crowd to encourage them to keep the kiss chaste. She made a whimpering sound in her throat and he groaned against her, pulling her sideways into his lap as he bit at her lower lip. She could feel his erection against the backs of her thighs, and she shifted a little. He slapped at her butt; she barely felt the contact, but she gave him the little yip she knew he wanted from her.
“I am going to keep my promise to you,” he said, his voice closer to a growl than anything else. “But first, we need to talk business. I need to know everything you know about Arturo. Everything you even suspect about my father, about AEGIS, about the will. I need to know what’s going on, Zoey, and I’m starting to think that there’s no one else I can trust. Not even my mother.”
“Not your mother? What do you think she has to do with it? Just because he was in her office—”
He was shaking his head. “No, that’s not it,” he said. “I think—God, this is hard to say. I think Arturo might have been—well, a half sibling of mine. And I think my mother just might have had him killed to protect my inheritance.”