by Zante, Lily
That day had been especially bleak for him and he’d given in. Whatever he did, however much he drank, however much he used Naomi’s body for his own satisfaction, or no matter how hard he drove his business negotiations, he always felt the void—the one she had left behind.
He missed her. He missed her with all his heart and soul, but as time went on the memories and feelings he’d treasured had slowly started to slip away. It wasn’t that he was beginning to forget her, but more that the vividness of his memories had started to fade. Her essence still lingered around him, but not as strongly as before. He could still see her smile, hear her voice, feel her skin, but only for a few seconds before the imprint of her image slipped through his fingers like water. People told him it was high time he moved on but the stain of his misery wrapped itself around his soul and refused to leave him completely. It lingered around him, dragging him to the cellars of darkness whenever he tried to come up for air.
But something strange had happened this morning. He’d woken up feeling better than he had these past few days. Consecutive nights of not sleeping much, coupled with heavy drinking and spending Christmas alone had left him in a sour mood for the most part. Yet he’d woken up alert, and refreshed, and ready to take on the world. Maybe he had needed time away, by himself. No board members to bother him, no business meetings to attend, no Candace, no Naomi. Not even his parents or Xavier.
This morning he decided that it was time to return the gift. Buying a gift for Ivy was as sick as it got. Coming to the office today had been a way of getting back into the world. Of leaving his place that reeked of alcohol and dirt. He hadn’t washed during those days, and had loped around in his PJs, looking like a sixty year old has-been. At least he’d successfully managed to dodge his parent’s pleas to join them for Christmas in Aspen. He’d even ignored Xavier’s calls.
Another assistant, one who carried an inflated air of self-importance, appeared before him. “I’m sorry to have caused you some distress, Mr. Stone. The transaction has been reversed and your account will be credited shortly. However, due to the holidays—”
Tobias waved his hand at the man and turned to leave. “It’s not a problem.”
“Have a good day, Sir. We will be updating our designs in time for Valentine’s Day, should you be interes—”
His body tensed as his heart rate skyrocketed. “My wife is dead. She won’t need a fucking Valentines gift any more than she needed the—”. The words stuck in his throat like thorns on a rose bush.
Any more than she would have worn the necklace and earrings he’d bought for her.
Imbeciles.
He raged silently as he walked out, wishing he had never set foot in this damned place.
Chapter 6
“Another present for Jacob?” Arnold’s gappy smile greeted her as she walked through the door which he held open.
“Oh yes,” she replied, “one more gift for Jacob.” Relief swept over her as soon as she entered the lobby. The bags had weighed her down, becoming heavier towards the end of her almost hour long commute and she was anxious to be relieved of them.
“Jacob will be very happy.”
“I expect he will be.”
Rosalee gave her a perplexed look the moment she walked into the apartment. “Didn’t you take that to work with you a few days ago?”
“It was a present for Jacob.”
“What happened?” Her sitter asked. Savannah set the box down and busied herself by taking her coat off; she was reluctant to explain.
“Well?” persisted Rosalee, folding her arms.
“It was from someone at work and it didn’t seem right to accept it.”
“Someone at work showed a kindness to your son at Christmas, and still you say no?”
Savannah shrugged. “I brought it back. He can have it now.”
“The gift basket?” Rosalee placed her hands on her thick, wide hips. “Was that from work too?”
Savannah nodded.
“Your work people seem to appreciate you. That’s a good thing.”
“Hmmm,” she replied casually, not wanting to encourage too many questions from her highly observant sitter.
“You make sure you stay there for life,” advised Rosalee, taking off her apron. “I made dinner and now I must leave you.”
Savannah sniffed the air. “Thanks Rosalee. It smells delicious but you didn’t have to go to the trouble of cooking.”
“I have to eat,” the older woman replied. “And your gift basket is still full of good things.”
“Thank you, and take whatever you want,” Savannah encouraged.
“I already did.” Rosalee smiled, her face worn out like old material.
“Has Jacob been good?”
“Your boy?” The elderly woman gave her a surprised look as she put on her coat. “He is an angel. Bye, Jacob,” she shouted over her shoulder. “We will meet again tomorrow.”
Savannah knew he was an angel. Somewhere from the depths of his room she heard Jacob shout out to Rosalee.
“Thanks, Rosalee,” said Savannah, opening the door. “See you tomorrow.” She walked towards Jacob’s room carrying the toy in her hands and he shuffled back a step and then yelped with delight when he saw the toy in her hands. “But I thought you said…?”
She walked over and sat by his bed narrowly missing two of his Marvel figurines which lay facing one another. “Mr. Stone insisted you keep it.”
“You mean it, Mommy? I can keep it and play with it?” He asked again, as if she might change her mind at any moment. She nodded and two seconds later the box was opened and empty and a second Iron Man was flying around on something that looked like a spaceship.
“Will you tell Mr. Stone I said ‘thank you’?”
“I already did.”
“Yeah, but will you say it again?” Jacob’s eyes twinkled as he asked her.
“Okay,” she replied, feeling apprehensive at the thought of meeting the man again.
“I told you he was nice.”
Tobias Stone’s sainthood had been sealed in Jacob’s eyes. Savannah tucked her hair behind her ears and said nothing.
Chapter 7
She was hoping for an easy and non-confrontational day at work today, and had high hopes of having the 21st floor to herself.
She prayed for a Tobias Stone free day and hoped it was highly unlikely that he would be in again since she got the impression that his visit to the office yesterday had been a flying one.
Keeping her word to Jacob, she emailed Tobias as soon as she got in, thanking him for the present on her son’s behalf. Email seemed the safer option, whether he was in or not.
Then she got to work driven by the need to finish the task she had been given by tomorrow, New Year’s Eve. Since it was so deathly quiet she put on a Taylor Swift playlist on YouTube to break the silence. It wasn’t too loud but loud enough for her to get caught up in the songs which she and Jacob often danced to and she soon forgot where she was.
Therefore it wasn’t all that surprising that she was blissfully unaware of Tobias standing at the door watching her get her groove on. It was only when she turned all the way around, with a file in her hand, jigging her hips suggestively from side to side that she caught him looking at her. She almost tripped forward in shock.
What the hell was he doing here?
And was that amusement that flickered across his eyes and the hint of a smile that kissed his lips—or was he trying hard not to laugh at her?
Her body turned rigid except for the furious movement of her chest as it rose and fell sharply. For a few long, distressing seconds, time seemed to have stopped and she was lost for words. A silent prayer for the earth to shift and swallow her up went unanswered as she stood frozen, trying not to analyze how ridiculous she must have looked.
“Do you know how to modify a Word template?” he asked, coolly.
A Word template? His words made logical sense but she was still drenched from head to toe in embarrassment and it
took her a few seconds to answer. She nodded her head first, then managed a “Yes.”
“I need you to fix something for me right away. I have a document which I need to send out in half an hour.”
“Yes,” she said, in a robotic tone. “I mean, okay.” Relieved that he’d chosen to completely ignore her dancing, she followed him like a lamb to the slaughter, back to his office. She walked slowly, dropping back slightly so that she walked more behind him than alongside him.
He strode into his office and walked over to his computer. “I need it to look like this one.” He showed her a document on the screen. “I don’t understand why this one looks such a goddamn mess.” He opened up a second document. Standing beside him, her chest pounding, she stared at the screen and forced herself to concentrate. “I can fix that,” she said easily and with relief because she knew she could.
“Sit,” he told her, and then stayed where he was, standing and watching over her shoulder. He stood so close that she recognized the heady wood and spice mix of his aftershave and was immediately transported back to that day in the elevator when she’d gone to the 30th floor by mistake.
Fix his problem, she told herself, and kept her eyes glued to the screen. Why was her heart banging against her ribcage so loudly?
Could he hear it?
She didn’t like that he watched her like a hawk or that he stood so close behind her that she could feel the heat of his stare on her back. Something about him set her on edge and made her feel self-conscious and her reaction to him both puzzled and disturbed her. She couldn’t work like this.
“Do you mind?” She asked, turning her head to the side and staring up at him.
“Do I mind what?”
“Do you mind moving away?”
He lifted his shoulder in a half-shrug and walked away.
“Just this one?” she asked, tidying up his template and fixing the document he had given her.
“Yes.”
After a few minutes her task was done. “Here you go.”
“Already?”
“It doesn’t take long,” she said, getting up from the chair. He was by her side quickly and she stepped away.
“Wait,” he said, ordering her to stay as he looked over the document carefully. She caught the fading scent of his aftershave, but there was something else, something less sensory, something imperceptible, almost like an invisible web in which she felt herself entangled.
Did he feel it too?
Or had it been so long since she had been around someone who wasn’t Jacob, or a woman friend, that her body no longer knew how to react?
Tobias Stone made her nervous, not like Colt, but another type of nervous. A type she hadn’t encountered before. She wasn’t even sure if what she felt was a sign of nervousness or something else.
“It looks fine,” he said.
No ‘Thank you’?
And instantly she dismissed her naiveté in expecting one.
“I have some more.” He fixed his gaze on her and sent her insides into free-fall. “Could you fix them?”
“Now?”
“It doesn’t take long,” he said, echoing her words. “I’ll keep myself busy seeing that you feel so uncomfortable with me hovering around.”
“You don’t make me uncomfortable,” she lied, narrowing her eyes at him, even though her heart rate had gone up in the last few minutes. She had yet to work out whether she hated him because he was such a cold and arrogant bastard, or because his very aloofness was something she had come to see as a challenge.
“No?” he asked, his mouth twisting.
“No.” She looked away and pretended to look carefully at the documents he’d opened up for her.
Get through these as fast as you can and get the hell out.
He walked over to the leather sofa and started to go through some paperwork while she worked quickly, going through the documents one by one and fixing them all. A couple of times when she glanced at him, she’d catch him staring, and he would look away sharply, and then she would return her gaze, and her attention, back to the computer screen.
She noticed that he didn’t look so harsh today. He was still all hard angles but there was something softer about him, compared to yesterday when he’d looked more wound up. She knew all about that tortured look in a man. She had suffered for it by being with Colt. Towards the end he’d started to take his anger out on her more often but the slapping and punching stopped hurting as Jacob got older. She had developed the ability to mask her pain so that her son didn’t have to hear her cries.
Yes, she knew about tortured souls and today Tobias Stone looked less like one of them.
“All done,” she said, getting up quickly, and hoping that he wouldn’t come over to check every document.
“Briony said you were quick.” He remained where he was.
“Don’t you want to check?”
“Do I need to?” He smiled at her. It was a rare event and it completely surprised her.
“A control freak like you?” Her tongue had loosened and with only one more day left, she didn’t need to watch what she said to him. He walked towards her with his hands in his pockets. “A control freak?” His face was neither hard, nor soft. “Nobody has ever had the balls to say that to me before.”
“I can see why.”
“But you,” he said, standing by her side, “you have no filter.”
She felt braver today; maybe it was because he’d needed something from her and the act of him asking had given her strength. In any case, she felt less indebted. “Maybe the people around you are too scared to tell you the truth.”
“Is that what you think?”
“That you frighten people? Perhaps.”
“You don’t frighten easily.”
Not anymore. “No,” she replied, stepping away from the desk as he glanced at the screen. “I trust that these will be fine,” he said, “but if not, I know where to find you.”
She edged towards the door.
“I received your email this morning,” he said, just as she reached the door. She turned around. “I emailed you because I didn’t think you would be in today. Jacob loved your present and he wanted me to say ‘Thank you’ to you.”
“He liked it?” Tobias asked.
She nodded.
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“He played with it for hours last night, if you really want to know,” she said. “Your gift has even superseded mine and Santa’s.” He gave her an appreciative nod. “It wasn’t my intention to do that.”
“It’s not a problem,” she said, breezily, leaning into the conversation, which for once bordered on being almost polite. “You know what children are like. In a few days’ time he’ll find another favorite toy and your gift will be cast aside.” But even as she said this she knew it wasn’t completely true. Jacob had been faithfully loyal to his tattered and battered Spiderman for years but he was now obsessed by Iron Man and she knew that even with the other figurines she’d bought him, that Iron Man and Wolverine would be his new accomplices for the next few years. Until the next superhero emerged.
“Children…” he said, uttering the word so low, that she wasn’t sure she’d heard right.
“Christmas is for them,” she said, and wanted to ask him if he had any children but his face hardened in that instant and the softness was gone. She decided not to risk it. “I’ll be in 218 if you need anything else,” she said, making a getaway before he said something hurtful and ruined the moment.
Chapter 8
He lay in bed thinking about Savannah Page and their conversation, until another text from Naomi interrupted his thoughts. She wanted to know how he was—with the veiled underlying question being why he hadn’t called.
It was enough to get him to go into the office again in order to keep his mind busy. And really, he had no pressing urge to fuck her right now.
He’d managed to get a lot done yesterday with it being so quiet and with nobody around. Nobody,
that is, apart from Savannah Page.
He showered and dressed and was at his office by 7am and within an hour he had managed to power through the itty-bitty tasks he’d been putting off all year; things he didn’t want Candace to deal with. Thank you and follow up emails to clients and business friends and acquaintances.
With the documents that Savannah had fixed, he was able to send out proposals for new business and introduce himself to new clients. He worked on his strategy for the coming year, refining the finer details of the plan which he had been putting together for a few months. These he would share with the board members in the first meeting of the year once everyone returned to work.
While he valued the opinion of the board members, and they were important to him and to the company, it was Matthias he relied on the most. Matthias was his right hand man and had been instrumental in the success of his company. Of course, he was highly rewarded too. The man was as astute and as shrewd as Tobias and understood him and his vision for where he wanted to take Stone Enterprises in the future.
It was a shame, or perhaps it was really a blessing that Xavier had shown no interest in joining the company. Having his brother on board would have been interesting, mused Tobias. But they were polar opposites.
In his office, with no Candace to bother him and no meetings to attend, Tobias was able to get through a lot of things that had been on his ‘to-do’ list. He’d been surprised at how quickly the time had flown as he’d diligently worked away uninterrupted and when his cell phone rang he answered it without looking.
“I’m here. Upstairs, waiting for you.” Naomi’s seductive voice had the opposite effect from what she’d probably intended. He bared his teeth, enraged by her cunning, and slammed down his cell phone.
What did she hope to achieve?
She’d breached his most fundamental of rules: To be available when he needed her.
Bolting out of his chair, he raced out of his office, his anger inflamed at the woman’s imposition. He stabbed the elevator button repeatedly driven by his haste to reach the penthouse and put her straight.
“That was fast.” The look of surprised satisfaction quickly vanished from Naomi’s face as Tobias glared at her. The sheer white shirt she had on didn’t hide the lacy bra she wore and her pencil skirt had a slit all the way up her right thigh. He’d never thought of her in terms of a high-class hooker before, but her dress code today screamed ‘fuck-me’ and he looked away in disgust.
