Somehow she still manages to look incredibly sexy, sitting there hunched over with an oxygen mask over her face. She looks so innocent, but yet her body screams at me at the same time. Her curves draw my gaze towards her, and I have to pull my head away, quite literally, to keep from staring at her. She’s been looking up at me with those beautiful eyes, her long eyelashes flittering down along them. There’s a look of sleepiness or exhaustion in her gaze, but there’s something else too.

“I’m the owner of the building,” I say to the nearest fireman. “Can you tell me what the damages are?”

“Pretty bad,” says the fireman, wiping some black grime off his face.

He’s one of the ones who’s just come out of the building, and he’s covered in black smoke residue.

In one hand, he’s holding a huge fireman’s ax.

“How bad are we talking about? Do you think we’ll be able to use the building again?”

He shakes his head vigorously at me. “There’s no way,” he says. “The structure is holding up for now, but the inside is completely destroyed, and we don’t yet know what kind of damage has been done to the walls, the foundation, and the roof. Except just by looking at it, I know the roof isn’t going to hold up for more than another day.”

“Isn’t it risky going in there now?”

He shrugs. “That’s what we do, though.”

I nod my head. “So the place is basically fried?”

He nods. “In situations like this, usually the whole building has to be razed.”

I nod my head.

This puts a bit of a damper on my plans, but not much. It’s not like the office building was doing me much good, anyway. I’ll have to find a temporary place for the sales team, in case there are any new clients. But as of right now, the potential new clients are probably just waiting to see what happens with the Simmons algorithm, waiting to see whether they should buy that instead of mine when it comes on the market.

The office workers are standing around looking at the burned out building. They see me approaching and look nervous. That’s understandable, since they don’t really know me at all. Many of them I’ve never seen in my life, and they’ve probably just seen me in the news.

There’s a middle-aged woman who I think is the secretary. She’s biting her lip nervously. Her clothes have a little bit of soot on them.

“Is it Stacey?” I say, approaching her.

“It’s Sheila,” she says, looking up at me. “Are you OK, Mr. Hudson?”

I nod. “I’m fine,” I say. “Is everyone all right?”

She nods. “Everyone got out fine. At first, we didn’t see you or the new employee, Lily, and we thought the worst.”

“We were trapped in there, until Lily pointed out the other exit,” I say. “At first, we didn’t think it was a real fire alarm.”

She nods and continues biting her lip. Her finger nails are painted neon green and if they weren’t, I imagine she’d be biting those too.

“So,” I say. “Do you think you can organize the set up of a new office?”

“Right now?” she says, sounding shocked.

I guess I’m understanding how traumatic an experience like this could be for people. But we’ve got to get back to work. That’s one of the things that helps me make money—staying on track with a laser like focus, no matter what happens.

“Tomorrow,” I say. “It’s going to take me at least a day to lease a new office building.”

She nods at me, but looks worried.

“Why don’t you pick a couple good people in the office that you work well with,” I say. “And you guys can make a little team to organize the distribution and ordering of new office equipment. Here, take this.”

I hand her one of my no-limit credit cards. “I forget how the finances were set up for office materials but you might need a higher limit. Order whatever you had in the old office, or whatever you need. And it goes without saying that it’s not to be used for anything personal.”

“Of course, Mr. Hudson,” she says.

“Great,” I say. “Give me your cell number, and I’ll send you the details. You’ll be responsible for letting the rest of the other employees know the new address. I’m going to get a place with a good conference room so that my small programming team can keep working on our new project.”

“Is everything OK with the… uh… algorithm, Mr. Hudson?” she says.

I nod. “Of course,” I say. “We just might need to make a few updates. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but tell everyone not to worry.”

I walk away and stand looking at the building for a moment. There goes the end of an era that I was barely part of. I can count the number of times on one hand that I actually came into this office building, and I don’t think I’ve ever spent a whole day there until very recently, trying to fix this new problem with the algorithm.

I scroll through the contacts list on my phone, and find a guy named Jeremy Green who helps me get what I need. He works as a sort of intermediary for things like real estate and business equipment, so that I don’t have to deal with realtors.

He’s not there, but I leave a simple message. “It’s Ryan Hudson,” I say. “I need a new office building, quickly. I’ll text you the capacity details right now. Tomorrow would be best. Money isn’t a problem, as always. But keep it reasonable. These employees don’t need anything too fancy. Professional, but not luxurious.”

I hang up the phone and my gaze finds its way back to Lily, who’s still breathing through the oxygen mask.

“You can probably take that off now,” I say, approaching her.

She removes it.

She looks shaken, the way she’s huddled there. Her clothes are tinged with soot, and her hair is a mess, but she still looks fabulous.

“You’ve got some soot on your cheek,” I say, using my hand to wipe some of it off.

As I do so, she gazes into my eyes, and my hand lingers on her cheek for a moment.

“Let me take you somewhere and buy you a drink,” I say. “You need to put that spark back in you.”

“I can’t go anywhere looking like this,” she says.

“Then come back to my place,” I say. “I’ve got a full bar. You need to relax a little.”

“It’s OK,” says Lily. “I’ll just go home.”

“Really,” I say. “It’s the least I can do, after my office almost killed you.”

“But you also rescued me,” she says.

“Then I guess you owe me,” I say, trying not to wink at her.

I can see her interpret the meaning a variety of ways. I can see it in her eyes as the thought passes through her.

“Not like that,” I say. “I just mean that you’d be doing me a favor if you let me give you a drink and feed you, after all that you’ve been through. That is, if you can stand hanging out with the douchebag billionaire for an hour or so.”

She shrugs, looking somewhat noncommittal in her body posture. But I see something there in her eyes, a desire for me that she might not even be admitting to herself yet.

“OK,” she says, after a long pause.

“My car’s this way.”

She walks with me, and as we walk, she leans her head towards my torso. She’s more than a full head shorter than me, and her head doesn’t fall right on my shoulder. That’s pretty normal for me, since I’m just over six foot.

I let my left arm drape around her shoulder and pull her closer into me, and she doesn’t fight back.

We walk in silence, and when we get to my car, I open the passenger side door for her. I can’t remember the last time I’ve done that—maybe just when I was first starting to date.

“Wow,” she says. “Fancy car.” But she doesn’t sound impressed. I’m getting the sense that these kinds of displays of wealth don’t do much for her… she’s so much different than the other women I’ve known.

I start the car and pull out of the parking lot, leaving the burned office building behind us.

“Did you happen to see Johnny?” I say.

“I didn’t.”

“He must have run off,” I say. “That’s just like Johnny. He always runs at the first sign of any trouble now. But I can hardly blame him, since he basically lives his life in constant fear that some authority figures are going to come knocking on his door. That’s what it’s like to be in the black hat world, I guess.”

“At least he gave us the article,” she says, perking up a little at the mention of programming.

“Yeah,” I say. “We don’t really need him.”

“Oh!” she says suddenly, excited. “I completely forgot! But just before the alarm went off, I found something…”

“You figured out what Simmons is doing?” I say.

“Yeah” she says, her voice barely containing her excitement.

I’m driving slowly, and I look over at her. For a moment, I forget all about the algorithm, because all I see is how her face is lit up with excitement, shining with beauty.

My cock starts to swell in my pants.

I want her, and I need her.

I need to sink my cock into her tight virgin body. That’s all I need.

This has never happened to me before—mentally putting a woman above my business needs in a time of business crisis, not even for a moment.

I force my mind back onto what she’s talking about.

“Yeah,” she’s saying. “So I don’t have the terminology to describe it. But basically I think I found what to look for in Simmons’s algorithm. He isn’t doing exactly what he’s doing in the paper, which I don’t think would have worked. But it was a jumping off point for him, where he was able to find something else… something that worked… worked really, really well…”

I have to force myself to keep my eyes off her, with her breasts heaving in and out in excitement as she talks, and keep myself focused on the road.

In another couple minutes we’ll be at my house.

“That’s incredible,” I say. “You’ll have to show me. It’s a good thing you still have your laptop.” I gesture to the back seat where her laptop sits. I stuffed it into my belt when I was carrying her, and it should be fine. My own laptops I left in the building, and I’m sure they’re destroyed at this point, just bits of melted plastic with ruined hard drives inside.