Chapter Two
Alex
Being trapped in an elevator was not the way I’d intended to spend my evening.
Don’t get me wrong—there were definitely worse things than being trapped in a small space with the young man who was currently working as my personal assistant. When Barbara Stone, who’d worked for me for most of a decade, had fallen ill, I’d chosen him as my assistant even though he was brand new to the company—not for his looks, but because his résumé had impressed the hell out of me. He’d graduated from Chiswick University’s well-regarded business program with honors, and had spent every summer working various internships with local companies. He was, as my late father would have said, a real go-getter.
I had to admit, though, that the young man’s looks were definitely a perk. He was handsome and well-built, if not too tall, and his fiery red hair and amber eyes made me think of sunshine.
Sunshine was something I’d been sorely in need of for the past few years.
He didn’t seem especially sunshiny about being stuck here with me, though. He punched the buttons repeatedly, glaring at them as if they’d done him a personal wrong. But the elevator stubbornly refused to move.
“Damn it,” he muttered, and I heard his stomach rumble audibly.
An unexpected touch of sympathy unfurled inside me. I was hungry, too. I wanted to reassure him, to tell him, Don’t worry, help will be here shortly. But I hadn’t become even more successful than my father by coddling my employees, or engaging in small talk with them. Instead I pulled out my cell phone and called building security, telling them in a few curt words that we were trapped.
“Fifteen minutes,” I said when I punched the disconnect button.
“Great,” he answered, and sank to the floor in a disconsolate heap.
I remained standing—because I wasn’t about to sit on the floor in my custom-made Dormeuil suit, and because the CEO of a company must maintain a certain dignity and reserve at all times. At least that was what my father had always told me. He brought me up to be cool, almost cold, and I had learned those lessons well. I’d always maintained a certain distance from everyone in my life, even my wife.
Which was probably why she’d divorced me.
Even so, the sight of this young man on the floor, only a couple of feet away, did strange things to my insides. I couldn’t help but imagine him rising to his knees, unbuckling my belt and unzipping my pants, and then—
No, I told myself firmly. When Lydia left me, I’d promised myself…
The honest truth was that my wife hadn’t dumped me solely because I was reserved—though she did throw the words you ice-cold bastard at me more than once in our last acrimonious conversation. The impetus for our separation was that she’d found some gay porn on my computer, and had reacted with—well, with disgust and revulsion. I’d explained that I was bi, but that it didn’t mean I was having sex with men on the side, or that I’d ever even consider such a thing.
But the damage was done. She was grimly convinced that if I liked men as well as women, then I must be gay and simply hadn’t accepted it fully yet. And sooner or later, she was sure that I would leave her for a man.
Which was not in the least true. I had kept my sexuality a closely guarded secret since adolescence, but the fact was that I’d always liked to look at men and women. Though I had to admit that I’d encountered very few men as attractive as the one who was currently huddled on the floor of the elevator, looking like he might pass out from starvation any moment now.
Even so, when Lydia had divorced me, I’d felt guilty, as if it were entirely my fault, and had promised myself that I wouldn’t ever explore that aspect of my sexuality. At any rate, though the world had come a long way in the past decade, and my father was no longer around to be horrified by my sexual orientation, it was still much easier to be straight—or pass as straight, anyway. So I dated women, and only women, and refrained from even looking at gay porn.
Well, mostly.
But I couldn’t completely control my wayward thoughts, which is why I was still imagining this young man—Lawson—kneeling at my feet, doing wicked things to me with his tongue, and then sucking my hard, throbbing cock into the hot depths of his mouth and—
“Ughhhhhh,” he groaned, clutching his stomach dramatically. “I’m going to die if I don’t get some food soon.”
My fantasy instantly ground to a screeching halt, and I almost cracked a smile at his theatrics. To cover it, I frowned down at him.
“If you’re going to be my personal assistant, Lawson, you’d best accustom yourself to working long hours.”
“But I didn’t even have lunch today,” he whined in a pitiful voice. “Just a candy bar.”
With a touch of shame, I recalled myself tossing a giant stack of folders on his desk at 11:45 and barking out my customary threat to fire him. Of course the poor kid had worked through lunch. He’d probably figured he had to. In point of fact he was doing a very good job as my personal assistant. He wasn’t quite as fast and efficient as Barbara had been, but then she had a decade’s worth of experience on him. He was doing fine work, and I should probably quit trying to cow him.
But that was the way my father had always motivated his employees.
Maybe Father was wrong, I reflected, not for the first time.
As always, I instantly quashed that unwelcome thought. My father had been a great man. He’d built this business from the ground up, turning it from a mere production facility into a multinational company with vast, far-flung holdings. The world had respected him, and so did I. And when he’d died seven years ago, he’d left a vacuum at this company, a vacuum I’d striven to fill every day since.
And more importantly, the methods I’d learned at my father’s knee were working. The company was making money hand over fist, after all. The fact that we had a bit of a turnover problem, and that many of my employees didn’t seem altogether happy in their jobs, was a minor issue, in the grand scheme of things.
Even so, I couldn’t help feeling sympathy for Lawson as I looked down at his messy red hair. He really did look like he was melting into the carpet. Words I had no intention of saying leapt from my mouth.
“When we get out of here,” I said, “I’ll take you by Le Château. It’s only a block away, and we can get some food. All right?”
He looked up at me, and for the first time I noticed he had pale ginger freckles, scattered across his nose and cheekbones. They were cute.
He was cute.
And something must be terribly wrong with me, for me to be using words like cute (even inside the privacy of my own head). Obviously I was hungrier than I’d thought. I must be becoming light-headed.
“I… I really can’t afford…”
“I’ll pay for it,” I said, as curtly as I could manage with those huge amber eyes gazing up at me. “It’s the least I can do, considering you worked through lunch to get that paperwork done for me.”
He hesitated a moment longer, then offered me his warmest, brightest smile. It hit me in the gut with the force of a fist, and I almost staggered from the impact.
“Okay,” he agreed.
✽✽✽
For a small guy, Lawson packed away food like a linebacker.
He’d allowed me to order for him (“I don’t speak French,” he’d muttered with a self-conscious blush), and he seemed to approve of the salad, the French onion soup, and the boeuf bourguignon I’d selected. I’d suspected he didn’t eat French cuisine often, if ever, so I’d picked out the most basic items on the menu, and he seemed to like them, judging from the way he’d gobbled down his food. In fact he went at his food with such enthusiasm that I was a little relieved that he hadn’t accidentally devoured the china and silverware while he was at it.
Le Château was the hot restaurant in Chiswick at the moment, and in the crowded room filled with perfectly dressed executives, Lawson and his cheap polyester-blend clothing stuck out like a sore thumb. But even in his awful suit and tie, he drew admiring glances. His hair was spiky and disheveled, in what I assumed was a deliberate coiffure, though it looked like he didn’t know how to use a comb. And it was extremely (one could say glaringly) red. Combined with his delicate features, which made it perhaps more accurate to call him beautiful rather than handsome, and the warm sweetness that shone from his golden-brown eyes, it was actually surprisingly difficult to look away from him.
Not that I was staring. Because I most certainly was not.
“Thank God we didn’t wind up stuck in that elevator all night,” he mumbled through his last mouthful of stew. “I don’t think I could’ve survived another hour without food.”
“There was never any danger of that,” I informed him. “The building is staffed with security and maintenance personnel at all hours.”
“Still, it was scary. What if the elevator cable had, like, snapped or something, like they do in the movies? Imagine that. Like…” He raised his arms over his head, made a whistling sound, and lowered his hands abruptly. “Boom!”
I assumed this was meant to suggest an elevator falling thirty stories and smashing to smithereens at the bottom of its shaft. Dramatic, but highly unlikely.
“For a young man who majored in business,” I said, “you seem to have a penchant for drama.”
He grinned at me. “At least I have you talking now,” he answered.
I recalled (again with a touch of shame) the way I’d refused to respond to his conversational overtures when I’d encountered him at the elevator. Despite my awareness that I’d behaved poorly, I felt compelled to defend myself.
“I have never been one for small talk.”
“No kidding. Geez, for a while I thought maybe you were just an android who was programmed to threaten to fire me every hour.” He laughed, a warm, silvery sound. “But you eat, so I guess you’re not an android.”
I looked down at my own plate. I’d had blanquette de veau, which I had polished off efficiently, if not with as much carnivorous enthusiasm as he’d displayed. “I’m not an android, no. But I do pride myself on a certain reserve.”
“Reserve is one thing. But you—” He pointed his fork at me. “You’re terrifying. You have all your employees so afraid to put a foot out of line that they don’t even dare go to the bathroom to take a piss.”
I lifted an eyebrow, as superciliously as I was able. “Are you criticizing my managerial style?”
He looked briefly alarmed, but then he must have sensed that I wasn’t seriously annoyed, because he flashed an unrepentant grin. “I guess I am, yeah. But honestly, I’m just saying you should try warming up a bit. I mean, I admit I don’t know anything about running a company the size of Snow and Associates, but there’s got to be a better way to do it than terrorizing the people who work for you.”
“I do not—”
“Reorganize the entire file room in the next ten seconds, Lawson, or I’ll fire you!” he sang out, his eyes dancing, and I growled softly.
“Perhaps I do terrorize them,” I admitted. “Occasionally.”
“Also.” He pointed the fork at me again. “You could call people by their first name every now and again. Wouldn’t hurt. It would make you seem more, you know, human.”
I wondered why I was sitting here, taking advice from a man who was so young and inexperienced that the milk in my refrigerator had been around longer than his bachelor’s degree. My father would have frowned upon this sort of insolence in one of his employees, and I should do likewise. But for some reason, I didn’t feel inclined to chastise him.
I realized that I liked him. He was a very likeable young man.
“Very well,” I said. “What is your first name, Lawson?”
“Uh…” His cheeks flushed red, drowning his freckles in a sea of crimson. “Well, most people just call me Nash.”
I had a vague memory of his first name from glancing at his employment application, and that didn’t match up with my memory. “But that’s not your full name, is it?”
He looked hunted. “Nash is fine.”
I glared at him with all the sternness I had cultivated over the past seven years. “Your real name, Lawson. What is it?”
His face absolutely flooded with color. “Nashville,” he muttered, looking like he wanted to crawl under the table and disappear.
“Nashville,” I echoed, unable to stop the corners of my mouth from twitching upward. He must have seen the faint smile, because he immediately bristled, and a flood of defensive words poured from him.
“Look, my parents fell in love in Nashville, all right? They went back there for their honeymoon, and I guess they—well, Mom always told me I was made in Nashville, so that’s what they called me. It’s a stupid name, okay? I mean, I don’t even like country music! Just call me Nash. Please.”
“Nash it is, then.”
His face was still bright red, but he smiled a little, too. “See? That makes you seem more human already.”
“Thanks so much,” I said, trying for sarcasm and failing utterly. “And you may call me Alex.”
His eyes went wide, like I’d surprised him. “You go by Alex? Not Alexander?”
“Alexander was my father. My friends call me Alex.”
The truth of the matter was that I didn’t have any friends, just business acquaintances and social contacts. But he didn’t have to know that.
“Alex,” he breathed, as if trying out the syllables on his tongue, and all at once I was hard again. Just from the sound of him whispering my name.
Which was of course ridiculous.
I needed a diversion, right now. Something to take my mind off my too-attractive assistant, his bright smile, and the sound of his voice murmuring my name in an intimate tone.
“Care for dessert?” I suggested.
His eyes lit up, as if he hadn’t already eaten enough to feed a small country.
“Is there any cake?”