Chapter 18

Holland

When we arrived at Delia’s house, Carl greeted us at the door, Olivia in his arms. Today the tiny girl of my heart wore a lab coat and a pair of plastic horn-rimmed glasses, with a tiara perched in her curly black hair.

“Come in,” Carl boomed, standing back.

“Carl, this is Oliver Cody,” I said, introducing them and watching with something that felt like pride as Carl gave Oliver a once-over and shook his hand.

Oliver presented well. He wore a pair of dark flat-front trousers and a checked button-down shirt with a rich blue tie. I was learning that this was Oliver’s dressed-down office attire. When he had a meeting, he wore a suit, and having toured his closet—which hung in another bedroom at his house in a set of rolling wardrobe racks since he refused to use the master bedroom and its walk-in closets—he had plenty to choose from. His hair was tousled and soft, and his beard had been trimmed neatly, revealing the jaw that sent my knees shaking if I spent too much time admiring it. “This is a beautiful home,” Oliver said, his voice finding a sensitive spot inside me and stroking it.

“Thanks,” Carl said, and then he presented Olivia. “This is our youngest, Olivia,” he added.

Olivia ducked her head and hid her face against Carl’s shoulder as Oliver greeted her. “I see you are a scientist princess,” he said.

A tiny fierce voice came from beneath all the curly hair. “Queen. Not pwincess.”

“Of course. Apologies, your majesty,” Oliver said, laughing.

We went inside, and the scent of something rich and delicious met my senses. My stomach growled, and I realized I was hungry. Delia came in from the back, looking regal and amazing in a flowing maxi dress with a bright floral print that set off her dark skin. Her hair formed a wild mane around her face and something about it was intimidating, as if she’d teased it out bigger than normal to appear more imposing. It was also possible she just hadn’t had it trimmed in a while.

“Hey,” she said, crossing the room to pull me into a crushing hug.

“Hey,” I said, laughing. “You’re smashing me!”

“I’ve been worried about you,” she said, pulling back and giving me a critical once-over. Before she could add anything else on that topic she turned to Oliver with a huge smile. “Hello there,” she said, something in her voice more clinical than friendly.

Oliver took it in stride. “Hi, Delia. Thank you so much for including me in your dinner. I know it’s difficult to share Holland.” He cast a glance my way and a delicious shiver shot through me.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” she said. Her voice hadn’t warmed, and I recognized a bit of the tough girl act she used to pull when we were younger. Protective, fierce, and loyal, Delia was always looking out for me.

Gigi was in the kitchen again, avoiding the hellos until we stepped in to deposit the bottle of wine we’d brought. I had forgotten entirely, but when Oliver met me downstairs at Cody Tech, it had magically been in his hands. He must have a stockpile at the office somewhere.

“Are you Holland’s boyfriend?” Gigi asked him, and I felt my face go red.

Oliver laughed, a low rolling sound that conveyed no embarrassment. “I’d like to be, Gigi.” He turned to me. “Holland, will you be my girlfriend?”

“You’re supposed to get down on one knee for this,” Gigi instructed, stepping nearer and pointing at Oliver with a wooden spoon.

His eyebrows shot up and Oliver took a step forward, getting ready to kneel, when Delia put a stop to it. “There will be no proposals of any kind in my kitchen. Gigi, stop telling everyone what to do!” She took Oliver’s arm and walked him out toward the yard, handing him a drink. “That child, I swear…”

Gigi eyed me as they left the kitchen. “So he’s not your boyfriend.”

I shrugged. “He might be,” I told her.

“He likes you,” she told me, her little head nodding solemnly. “You should just get married.”

“Things are pretty complicated,” I said. “How old are you now, eighteen? Nineteen? You’ll understand soon.”

“Holland, I’m still six.” Gigi rolled her eyes at me and we followed the others outside.

“Wait, you’re Delia Summers?” Oliver was saying, sounding incredulous. “The Olympic runner?” I’d forgotten to mention that to him.

Delia was basking in his admiration, and I watched them talk about the Beijing Olympics in which Delia had competed. Oliver’s admiration and knowledge of her sport went a long way toward breaking down any defenses she’d prepared against him.

The evening went well, and the conversation stayed light and casual until Delia and I went back to read to the girls. When we’d finished, she pulled me into her bedroom and started the inquisition. “So?”

“Gonna need a more specific question, Deel.” I sat on her bed, and she stood in front of me, arms crossed.

“So what’s going on? Oliver is great. I can see how much you like him…and of course…”

“What?”

She nodded. “He’s in love with you, you know.”

I felt my eyes widen, but a secret place in my heart warmed at her assessment. “We haven’t known each other long enough for that.”

“Love doesn’t always take time,” she said. “I can see it when he looks at you, Holl. It’s nice. You deserve it.”

Staring at her, I felt a smile take over my face. “I care a lot about him,” I said.

“But…?” she prompted.

“But what?”

“I can hear a but coming. Spit it out, girl.”

I searched my mind. Delia often seemed to know what I was thinking before I did. Under her watchful scrutiny I felt something click in my mind, a glimmer of light that shone on a scrap of something I’d been ignoring. Something I didn’t want to consider. “I care about him,” I repeated. “But I feel like a fraud. What if the only reason I got this promotion was because of Oliver?”

“We talked about this. So what if it was?”

“Then I didn’t do it myself! That’s so fucked up. It invalidates everything I’ve spent my life working for.” I felt my shoulders crumple slightly as I gave voice to the worry I’d been refusing to acknowledge, hiding instead in Oliver’s arms and behind my busy desk.

“You don’t have to achieve something completely alone for it to count.”

“But achieving it and being given something because you’re a delightful fuck are completely different things.” I felt my lip go out slightly in a pout. It was ridiculous, but Delia was the one person in the world I could pout in front of.

“You can let your ‘ethics’ get all up in here and screw everything up.” Delia waved her hands around my head. “Or you can smile, enjoy what you’ve earned, and try to actually be happy for a change.”

I let out a frustrated sigh.

We went back to Oliver’s that night, and the next night, too. For two weeks I practically lived at his house, though my concern over the ethics of my promotion began to haunt me. After sleeping at Oliver’s more often than at home, something comfortable and easy had developed between us. Which was not to say that the sizzling heat we shared had dissipated. At all. If anything, the more I got of him, the more I wanted. But in the moments when we were apart, when I was at my desk, for example, a quiet voice spoke deep inside me. I knew I should be listening to it, that it was the voice of reason. It said things I didn’t really want to hear.

It talked about how hard I’d worked for the things I had, about how I’d done it all on my own. Until now.

I could have stared into space for hours, but I was interrupted by the ringing of my office line.

“Holland O’Dell.”

“Ms. O’Dell, this is Anton Mitchell. From MLB?”

I sat up straighter in my chair. “Yes, of course. How are you?” It had been several weeks since our initial presentation and I’d begun to worry I’d never hear from them at all. Oliver and I had made a point of avoiding the topic.

“I’m doing well,” he said. “Can’t complain. Do you have a few minutes?”

“Of course.” I picked up a pen and clicked it furiously, waiting to find out if this new office I was sitting in was deserved or not.

“I wanted to let you know that we’re very interested in the measurement device you presented to us. Your presentation notes have been shared throughout the organization, and everyone agrees this could be a game changer for baseball.”

My heart jumped. This was what I’d been waiting for, what I’d hoped for and dreamed about. “That’s great news,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

“We have a few more questions,” he went on. “And naturally, we need to talk numbers before anything is certain.”

“Of course.”

“Can we set something up for a few weeks out? We’ll be back out in LA the middle of April.”

“Sure,” I said, and we set up the meeting. I was barely able to keep myself seated, and bounced in my chair as I wrapped up the call. Once I’d hung up, I bolted to the elevator and punched the button for the top floor. When the doors opened, I grinned at the receptionist as I bolted past and practically danced in front of Pamela’s desk. “Is he in? I just got amazing news.” I was gushing, I couldn’t help it.

“He is,” she said, smiling broadly. “Just let me tell him you’re here. And you still owe me lunch.”

“Friday?” I suggested.

She nodded and then buzzed Oliver’s office.

On the other end of the intercom, I heard Oliver’s voice call, “Send her in!”

I didn’t wait for Pamela to get up, letting myself into Oliver’s office with a huge grin on my face. “MLB just called!” I sang. “They’re in! I set up a meeting for mid-April, and they want to talk numbers! I sent you a meeting maker in Outlook.”

A broad smile broke across Oliver’s face, making his dark eyes sparkle. “Fuck yeah!” he shouted, jumping out of his seat and pumping his fist. “We did it!”

I grinned, but his words hit me hard. We did it. Not me. The deal I’d worked and scraped six months to bring in was close to being a reality. And I didn’t know if I had very much to do with it. What if the CEO of Cody Tech hadn’t shown up to impress the MLB people? What if it had been just me?

Pamela stuck her head in. “What’s all the commotion?” she asked. “We feel left out over here.”

“Oh, nothing really,” Oliver said, pretending to wipe lint from his shirtfront in a casual way. “Holland here just made the biggest deal this company has seen in the last five years. You know, standard stuff.”

Pamela grinned and looked back and forth between Oliver and me. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Amazing. I’ll go get—”

She said these last words at the exact moment Oliver looked at her and said, “Please go get—”

They both finished together, “Rob.”

A few minutes later, I stood with the CEO and CFO of my company, toasting the future of Cody Tech with a bottle of champagne that had appeared out of nowhere. It felt like my world was spinning in the right direction.

We stood in the center of Oliver’s office, West LA spread out before us through the windows, and touched our glasses together, grinning at each other. I caught Oliver’s eye, and a wave of unease went through me. The celebration made sense—but that niggling voice in my head was telling me I didn’t deserve it, that I hadn’t done much except ride Oliver’s coattails to success.

I sipped my champagne, hearing Delia’s advice and wishing I could take it and just enjoy the moment. But nothing felt the way I’d expected it to.

We spent the afternoon with people from many different departments at Cody Tech, trying to refine initial designs and get some idea of production costs in order to have a working prototype and a cost model ready to go when we met with MLB again. There was a lot to be done, and I was glad to be in the middle of it. The rushing around and constant churn almost distracted me from the hard knot in my stomach telling me I hadn’t done it myself. I tried not to think about it, tried to focus on the results instead of the methods used, but one fact kept rising to the surface of my mind, and the more I thought about it, the uglier it seemed: I’d gotten here by sleeping with the CEO.

I explained to myself many times why it didn’t matter, how it was just a coincidence of events, how I would certainly have gotten here another way if Oliver had never wandered into the coffeehouse that night. But it didn’t change the way things had happened. I’d gotten a hand up by putting myself in the CEO’s bed. And that had never been the plan.

Oliver, Rob, and I had just left a meeting in the developers’ tower, and the guys were joking together as we walked.

“If I’d known you were going to come back on fire, I would have told you to take eight months off years ago,” Rob said to Oliver.

Oliver shot him a look, but his expression was light and open. “When are you taking yours?”

“Not anytime soon. I would have,” Rob said. “But then you and Holland here decided to give everyone a shitload of work to do.”

We entered the executive tower and I glanced at the security desk as we walked straight through. The security guys didn’t badge me when I walked in with the executives, and it made it feel like they knew exactly how I’d gotten to where I was now. Suddenly important because of my relationship with Oliver. I shot them a weak smile as I read the time on the clock over their heads. It was already late, and on the news of the impending deal with MLB, we worked even later—Oliver in his office and me in mine. I didn’t get nearly as much done as I should have—I was having trouble keeping my mind on the work. Instead, I kept thinking about how everyone at Cody probably knew exactly how I’d secured my promotion. I tried to shake the idea away, but shame was growing into a hard lump I couldn’t swallow around. At nine, Oliver appeared in my office to drag me away from my desk, and I let him, though part of me just wanted to go home and stew in my growing shame.

That night we didn’t have sex. Instead, I slept in the warm circle of Oliver’s arms, his body wrapped around me. At some point in the night, my mind released me from its constant churn and I slipped into a warm slumber. And even though I’d spent most of the day in a combination of worry and shame, being in Oliver’s arms that night as the city quieted beyond the walls of his house felt right. My mind calmed, my body relaxed, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, maybe for the first time ever, I felt like I’d come home.

I wanted to preserve the feeling of peaceful happiness I’d found in Oliver’s arms, but it slipped away as soon as the sun rose Tuesday morning, and I couldn’t help the distance I put between us as we headed for work.

“Is everything all right, duchess?” Oliver’s dark eyes flitted to me as he drove, worry written around his mouth and in the furrow between his eyebrows. “You’ve been quiet all morning.”

I nodded, a dark pain inside me where my own disappointment with myself had grown. “No,” I admitted. “Not really.”

Oliver gave me a dark look and then maneuvered off the freeway and down a busy street without speaking, pulling into a parking lot a few minutes later. He turned in his seat, concern in his eyes. “What’s going on?”

I dropped his gaze, my mind spinning. What was I going to say? I shook my head, searching for words to capture my own disappointment in myself. “I’m not upset with you,” I tried. “I’m angry at myself.”

It was his turn to shake his head in confusion. “About what?”

I let out a breath, wishing for clarity. “I feel like a fraud, Oliver.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The promotion. The new office. The deal. I feel like I got everything I wanted and deserved none of it.”

“You deserved every bit of it. You’re the one who revised the technology. It was your idea. You got the meeting.” He shrugged and shook his head. “I really don’t get it.”

“Even if I did deserve every bit of it, it doesn’t matter,” I said, staring at my hands. “Because no one would believe it.”

Oliver said nothing, waiting for me to continue.

“Everyone will think I got where I am by sleeping with you.” My voice was a harsh whisper.

“What?” Oliver barked. “Bullshit!”

I pressed my lips together, determined not to cry.

“Who even knows? And whose fucking business is it, anyway?” Anger fueled his words, but his rational mind was taking over. I glanced at his face, saw the dawning understanding there.

“It doesn’t look right,” I told him. “It makes it hard for me to be at work, to feel like I can hold my head up in meetings. I feel like a fake, Oliver. I can’t stand having people talking about me.”

“Tell me who’s talking, and I’ll take care of it.”

“I don’t think this works that way. You can’t fire or demote everyone your girlfriend doesn’t like.” I let myself stare at his chiseled face for a long moment more as we both remembered the analyst he’d demoted after I told him how he’d taken a position over me. My brain had kept spinning around the only clear answer, and my stomach turned as I gave the thought a voice. “I think we need to stop seeing so much of each other. Maybe work harder to keep it away from the office.”

Oliver’s mouth pressed into a tight line. “I won’t let the opinions of other people determine what I do or don’t do.” The words were like steel.

I sighed. How could I make him understand that our situations were completely different? “That’s easy for you,” I said. “Don’t you see that? You’re the CEO. And you’re a man. Things just roll off your shiny reputation, but it doesn’t work that way for women. Especially at a company like this one.”

“Like this one…” Oliver repeated. “What does that mean?”

“Where you don’t get the job unless you have a dick. Where men do the deals, where men make the decisions.”

He shook his head once. “I hate that you think Cody works that way.”

“It does. I found that out early, and I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I could still make a name for myself—and maybe even change things a little bit. Maybe if I’m successful it will be that much easier for the next woman who comes out of her grad program on top and wants to work for you. But I can’t do any of that if people think the only reason I’ve got the job is because of you.” I watched his face, saw his eyes clear with understanding. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t think of any other solution. I think it’d be best if we didn’t see each other.”

“At work.”

I chanced a quick look into the dark eyes, and the confusion and pain I found there ripped my heart to pieces. But I knew I couldn’t see Oliver and work at his company. And I couldn’t leave my job. “I don’t know. Maybe at all,” I said, hating the words and feeling my heart tear apart. “For now. People would know, even if we tried to hide it. Maybe if we just take a little time…” It wasn’t what I wanted, but I didn’t know how else to make the ache of shame vanish from my gut where it had begun to burn constantly.

“You really think you got where you are because of me?” he asked.

I didn’t meet his eye, keeping my gaze on the supple leather of his dash where my fingers were tracing a line. “That’s the problem. I don’t know anymore. It doesn’t feel the way I thought it would.” I thought about the plans I’d made, the way I’d imagined I’d feel when I’d checked the first big item off my plan.

“I understand,” he said, and I felt the warmth that usually emanated from him click off like a space heater, and it was suddenly cold.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t want…”

“I’ll drop you off a block from the building,” he said, his voice icy and stiff. “I wouldn’t want anyone to see you getting out of the CEO’s car.”

“Oliver, I—”

His eyes had hardened to coal and he drove us to the Cody Tech campus with aggressive speed that frightened me. When he pulled over at the corner of the block that held the four Cody towers, he stared straight ahead, waiting for me to get out.

I stared at his profile, a muscle clenching in his jaw as his hands stayed on the wheel.

“This isn’t how I—I mean, I don’t want…” I didn’t know what to say. I felt the way I had as a kid when I’d been dared to drop my favorite Polly Pocket doll into the roiling water beneath the ferry’s railing when the orphanage had taken us on an outing to Catalina Island. The second the doll’s tiny head disappeared beneath the foamy dark waves I’d regretted it with everything inside me. And as I stood on the curb, watching Oliver’s car glide away as soon as I’d shut the door, my heart squeezed with a similar regret. What had I done?