I set Troy up with a small desk to the side of the room, near his filing cabinets, where he could work without interrupting me. At first, I’d been nervous that he wouldn’t respect my authority in person and dismiss me because of my age, but Troy impressed me with his devotion to submission. Even when he was uncertain about how well I’d manage to run his business, he’d been willing to listen to what I had to say. That was a lot more than I could say about some of the other men I’d encountered during my time touring casino to casino. I liked that about him.

The day was spent partially in discussion about my plans for The Palisade’s future, and partly working quietly on refining those plans on my own. Troy had standard business to attend to, so I let him work while I took care of my work. By the time five o’clock rolled around, I had the headache to end all headaches and an empty stomach that had started to grate on my nerves. Troy and I had been so caught up in my work that I’d forgotten to take lunch. Being hangry was a real thing, and I was total proof of it.

I clicked the top of the pen in my hand to draw back the nib, then closed Troy’s laptop and wheeled back from his desk. If I didn’t get something in me soon, I was going to have to snack on Westward.

“Are you done for the day?” Troy asked. He’d turned around from his desk, one arm looped over the back of his chair. I didn’t like to admit it, but in that spread pose, with his suit on and his hair mussed from worrying, he was handsome.

“Yeah.” I yawned and stood. “I didn’t get very much sleep last night—for whatever reason—” I raised a brow suggestively, “and I came in early this morning to put together a plan, so I’m exhausted. I’m going to head out and report back in tomorrow. I’ve got the revisions to my plan almost sorted, so I figure I’ll wrap it up tomorrow and we can go over them again before starting to roll out early implementation.”

What was I going to eat for dinner tonight? Something greasy was singing my name. Screw Monty and his oats—I was going for a burger. Fries sounded good, too. And a milkshake…

“What are you up to tonight?” Troy asked, pulling me from my food fantasies.

“Oh.” I hesitated. I liked Troy, even if he was a stubborn dunderhead, but I hadn’t come to The Palisade expecting to be overly social with him. Our text-based relationship happened on an irregular basis several times a week, and after last night’s session, I hadn’t thought he’d want to go again. “I’m going to find something to eat, then sleep for the next five years. I’m on East Coast time right now.”

Troy smiled in a sincere, meaningful kind of way that got right under my skin and made me shiver. He looked kind when he did that, not like the unprofessional tyrant who’d personally kicked me out of his casino, and whose life I now controlled. “Let me take you out somewhere.”

“I’m just going to head home.” I shrugged. A little white lie wouldn’t hurt. “I don’t really… you know.”

Do that.

Going out to dinner with Troy felt way too much like a date, and with the way his smile got to me, I didn’t want to risk it. I was Troy’s Dom, not his boyfriend. If he wanted to find someone to invite for dinner, he could go down to the casino and find any young man with stars in his eyes. That definitely wasn’t me.

“Oh.” Troy blinked, then clued in. “Oh.”

He got up from his chair and turned to face me in full, giving me his total attention.

“I didn’t mean as a date,” Troy admitted sheepishly. His tone of voice suggested the opposite. “It’s your first day in the office, and the proposal you’ve pitched is fantastic. It’d be as business associates… that’s all.”

Business associates. That was cute. Despite being hangry, I found it charming that Troy would go to such lengths just to take me out for something to eat. Besides, we could keep talking about business. It was a Mills move to go on vacation and end up living and breathing work, but I was excited by the prospect of proving myself, just like my brother had.

And at the end of the day, whether I ate alone or with company, Troy was footing the bill, anyway.

“If that’s the case, sure.” I pulled at my tie, loosening its knot a little. “But, here are the rules: you will not order for me or speak on my behalf to restaurant staff, I will not pretend to be your boyfriend if an old flame shows up just so you can look macho, and you need to take me someplace I can get a burger.” I paused. “And maybe a shake.”

Troy laughed. “Done.”

I hesitated. “You… don’t want to take me out for fancy steak or escargot or sushi served off some poor, misguided, naked girl?”

“Oh.” Troy’s face fell. “So you probably don’t want to go to the burger place I was thinking of, then. They serve the burgers deconstructed on former underwear models—male or female, your pick—and the fries come on the side, served in the cups of padded bras.”

I stared at him.

Troy’s lips trembled, then he burst out laughing. “I’m kidding. If a place like that does exist, I don’t know where.”

“New rule,” I said. “I choose the restaurant. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Naked underwear models. Padded bras.

It was almost like Troy was a real person behind his bigwig moneybags persona.

The thought of Troy as a person stuck with me as we headed out of the office and said goodbye to Lena, who still had a squirt bottle sitting on the corner of her desk. When Troy wasn’t being an asshole or trying to woo me with his money, what was he like?

And more importantly, why did I care?

We found a mom-and-pop burger joint off the strip with red vinyl booths and records hanging on the wall. By then, I’d taken off my jacket and tie, not wanting to stay in business attire for any longer than I had to. Troy, who looked like he’d been born in his suit, hadn’t so much as undone the top button of his shirt.

The monster.

“You know this place?” Troy asked once we were settled and the waitress had taken our orders.

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“It’s cute.” He pointed across the restaurant. “They have a jukebox. Think it works?”

I looked over my shoulder at where he was pointing. The jukebox was up against the wall near the hostess station, its songs listed through a rounded glass compartment at the top. Tubes lined the corners of the glass compartment, somehow filled with a blue liquid and a yellow lava lamp type substance that rose and fell, growing and splitting apart on a whim. With all of its lights on and the lava lamp part operational, I was pretty sure the mechanics inside had to work, too. “Probably. But I bet all it plays is Elvis.”

“Really?” Troy raised an eyebrow. “We’re not on the Strip anymore, you know.”

“Why don’t you go see?”

I didn’t expect him to bother with it, but to my surprise, he climbed out of the booth we were seated at and made his way to the jukebox. He looked so out of place there, with his expensive shirt creasing as he leaned down to peruse the song list, that I couldn’t help but smile. Was he here just because I’d wanted to eat burgers?

Troy squinted at the machine and spent a short while inspecting it, then moved out of sight in the direction of the cash register. Half a minute later, he returned and pushed two quarters into the slot, then hit two of the jukebox’s square buttons. By the time he made it back to the table, my head was in my hands.

“What?” Troy asked as he sat.

“Beat It?” I asked, looking up at him. He grinned at me. “Really?”

“You wanted me to prove it wasn’t all Elvis. MJ isn’t Elvis.”

I narrowed my eyes. “And you expect me to believe that the only Michael Jackson song on the jukebox was the one with the most suggestive title?”

“It was either this or Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough, and I was pretty sure I’d be in trouble either way.”

“Oh my god.”

Troy laughed. His eyes filled with emotion, and as much as I didn’t want to, I kept finding excuses to look into them again and again. When he wasn’t crippling himself on the business front, he was funny.

He opened his mouth to reply, but before he could, our waitress arrived. She slid a strawberry milkshake topped with a generous portion of whipped cream across the table to me, and set Troy’s lemon water in front of him.

“I’ll be right back with your meals, gentlemen,” she told us, then was gone.

“So…” Troy craned his neck to look at the jukebox. “Now that the Elvis jukebox question has been answered, how was your first day in the office?”

I contemplated his question while I sipped at my milkshake. “Good, all things considered. I’m tired as all hell from jet lag and from how late I stayed up yesterday, but it’s been good to see that you’re so receptive to the plans I’ve put forward. I honestly didn’t think it was going to turn out this way.”

“Neither did I,” Troy admitted. “I had no idea what to expect after you sent me that text, and I certainly didn’t think you had the business know-how to pick apart our practices and build them back up from scratch. I know you said that you’ve helped your brother with his business in the past, but… how did you get started? That’s not typically something most people just walk into.”

“Are you interviewing me?” I raised an eyebrow.

Troy shook his head. “No. I’m curious.”

I crossed my arms on the table and turned my head to look at the wall. The salt and pepper shakers were shaped like tiny microphones. I slid the pepper next to my milkshake and turned it in circles, observing it from all sides so I didn’t have to look at Troy.

We were supposed to have gone out to eat as work friends, not as a date… but the questions Troy was asking straddled the line between business and pleasure. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me, since as his Dom, my connection to him straddled business and pleasure as well.

“Our dad owned a business,” I said simply. “When we were young, my brother and I used to hound him with questions about it. You know how it is when you’re small, right? Your dad is the coolest person in the world, and you want to grow up to be just like him.”

Troy made no comment.

“So I learned from him. Just little things, you know? The kind of stuff you usually wouldn’t know as a kid. Nudge theory, adverse selection, and the curse of first—” I looked up at him and pointed a finger in a joking way in his direction, “—which is handy right now, actually, because that’s exactly what you’re suffering from at the moment, aren’t you? You’ve developed a lead, and now you’re letting your hubris destroy you. Bit by bit, of course, instead of all at once, but it’s still the same thing. The principle still applies.”

My lips twitched to the side, and I looked at the pepper shaker again. Beat It ended, and a second song came on. I didn’t know the title, but I knew from the crooning voice that it was Elvis.

I shot Troy a look. He snickered.

“I figured you’d like to know that there were a few Elvis songs available,” Troy said, grinning. “I couldn’t help myself.”

“You’re a monster.”

“Only if monsters have good taste in music.” Troy paused for a moment, and his expression turned from playful to serious. “What happened to him? Your father, I mean. Why aren’t you running the company with him right now?”

“He died when I was a teenager.” I closed my mouth and ran my tongue over my top teeth, trying to hold back the bad memories talking about that time brought up. “It was sudden. One morning, he was at the kitchen table and told Mom he wasn’t feeling well. He finished his coffee, took out the garbage, and came to sit back down, but he was fidgety and pale. Mom asked him if he’d call out for the day and go back to bed—sleep off whatever it was—but by then, he was out of it, and he folded his arms on the table and put his head down. He, uh, he never sat back up again.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. Even all these years later, it was hard to think about. “He had a heart attack, and they couldn’t bring him back.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You weren’t the plaque clogging his arteries.” I laughed in an attempt to dispel the sorrow. “It’s okay. Death happens, you know? You never want it to happen so young, but sometimes that’s just the way it goes. He had a will, of course, but both my brother and I were too young at the time to inherit the company, so it was sold. After paying off all the tax burdens, and the house we were living in, and a university education for me and my brother, we used what was left to start our own business. Even after Dad died, we’d done our best to learn everything we could, from joining the high school entrepreneurs’ club to researching on our own after school. As Mills kids, we have a competitive streak, and it gave us an edge.”

“But then you left to count cards and work for Rent-a-Dom,” Troy said. “Why?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know…”

The waitress returned with our food, so I set the pepper shaker back in place near the wall and prepared to chow down. I’d opened up to Troy more than I’d thought I would, and I knew it was dangerous to go any further into detail. I was here as his Dom, and I was here to get revenge on someone who’d wronged me long ago. I wasn’t here to make friends, or for him to take pity on me.

“So,” I said as the waitress placed my plate in front of me. “About your current staffing situation—here’s what I was thinking…”