by Sienna Swan
“You can drop me here,” she says halfway up Maple Street. She points to the sweet little house that I should remember from years ago but don’t. Maybe the yard is different. I guess they changed the fence or something. “Thanks for the afternoon,” her smile is paper thin. “It was amazing.”
I sigh. “You don’t have to pretend, Cassie. You came because I’m your boss and I asked. I appreciate it, and I appreciate how hard you’ve been working for me, but you don’t need to indulge me. You’re young, I’m sure you have many guys hanging around.”
“But I…” she starts.
“Yesterday was a mistake,” I continue, “and that’s alright. I promise you, that’s alright. You aren’t obliged to indulge me, you aren’t even obliged to carry on working for me. You don’t have to do any of this.”
“You don’t understand…” she says, but I do. I understand everything.
I’ve been a fool.
A fool to indulge this stupid fantasy and a fool to think I could really have something like this.
“I had a great afternoon,” I tell her, and think that’ll be the end of it, but when she unclips her seatbelt she doesn’t open the door. She’s fast and agile, twisting in her seat to slide a leg across my lap. My cock hardens as she lowers herself onto me, straddling me in my seat.
“You don’t understand,” she whispers again, and then she kisses me. Her soft lips take me by surprise, their sweetness everything I’d have hoped for.
I pull away for just a moment. “You don’t have to,” I begin, but her lips silence me all over again.
Her tongue hunts out mine and I groan into her mouth. My hands fist her hair as she squirms on me. The kiss is hot and heavy, and I realize as my heart thumps that it’s actually our first.
I’ve never kissed her before.
And now I can’t stop.
I suck at her bottom lip, nipping at her until she squeaks for me, and she kisses me back with such enthusiasm that I feel her heart drumming against mine.
I’d stay there with her all night long, just kissing, but as the sky darkens she curses under her breath and pulls away. “I’ve gotta go,” she says. “I’ll miss dinner if I’m not careful.”
I feel so guilty as I think of her dad waiting indoors. She slides off me, back over to the passenger side and eases open the handle. “Don’t wait,” she says with a smile, darting her eyes nervously at the house.
It’s when I catch sight of a strange woman in the window that I realize this isn’t her house.
Cassie skips on up a few doors, and there’s the house I remember. The same picket fence lines the yard. The same one they always had.
Crap.
I know in a single heartbeat that Thomas Newark has no idea what’s going on between me and his daughter, probably even no idea she’s working for me. I knew this before, but I guess I’d assumed she’d told him by now. Told him about us.
If I felt like an asshole before, I definitely feel like one now. I feel like a prize asshole. An absolute douche.
Not only did I take the man’s business from him all those years ago, I’ve now got every intention of taking his daughter too.
Chapter Fourteen
Cassie
I’ve always hated hospitals. Looking at my dad, leaning back in the big seat as poison is being pumped into his veins, I know I’m not the only one. The chemo room is uncharacteristically barren today, he told me, the implication being that most people tend to come in later in the day when they can have their loved ones with them.
The morning sessions on Sunday are lacking in people for obvious reasons.
He’s bundled up under the blankets, one of which being my baby blanket, made by mom. I gave it to dad when he came in for his first session and he’s been taking it with him ever since, though I don’t think it has much to do with keeping warm at this point. That flimsy thing couldn’t keep a kitten well covered.
I swing my legs back and forth, sitting on the empty seat next to Dad’s. I don’t always get to come with him but I do when I can. This time, I insisted that he planned it in a way that I could be here with him. He fought me less on it this time – he hates it when I see him in a state of weakness – but I think it’s just because as far as he knows, he doesn’t have a lot of time slots left before his insurance runs out.
In fact, I think it’s supposed to run out tomorrow.
“Can I get you anything?” I ask him for the umpteenth time, getting another weary shake of his head as a response.
“Cassie, bug, you don’t have to be here. I’m a grown man, I can handle it,” he tries to argue after a moment of silence, but I give him a look and he sighs.
He gives in a lot to me, but only when he knows I’m right. I know Mason thinks I’m spoiled, but I think my dad did the best he could, under the circumstances. I went a bit off the rails after mom died – cancer, too, but hers came and went too fast for even chemo to be of any help – and I think dad made some real Herculean efforts to keep me on something sort of resembling the straight and narrow.
I kept my grades up, for one. I didn’t start sleeping around or doing drugs. I slammed some doors, wrote angry poetry and crushed on a man more than twice my age, but other than that, I came out relatively unscathed. It’s because of Dad’s cancer that I didn’t go for any of the colleges that accepted me.
I knew we couldn’t afford it and the cancer treatment at the same time, for one. Secondly, I knew I didn’t want to leave my dad alone. I couldn’t take another repeat of what happened to mom. I think he understood, because after I told him I wasn’t going to UCLA or any of the Ivy League schools that would have me, he nodded, kissed me on the forehead and told me that my time would come.
“So tell me about your job. You’ve been out of the house so much I’ve barely seen you,” dad starts, rousing me out of my muddled train of thought.
“Oh, my job, right!”
For a moment, I consider spilling the beans to him. Just telling him everything, like I’ve wanted to do so many times. At this point, even Stacy thinks I should come clean. But I can’t. I can’t disappoint him like that, especially after the misconceived e-mail I sent from Mason’s laptop.
“It’s… okay. They’re keeping me busy,” I tell him evenly, rummaging around in my brain for what interesting things could possibly happening in the life of a Neiman Marcus junior sales rep.
Not much comes to mind. Definitely no hot sessions with their boss during lunch hour.
“That’s good,” dad nods.
More silence. He reads a couple of pages of his magazine – a monthly edition of some engineering paper about liquids and gases – and I stare into the distance. Mason’s kiss still lingers on my lips, like a shadow. There were many kisses, truthfully, and I wish there had been many more.
I think it was the brutality of it, mixed with the sweetness, that gets my head spinning. I was afraid to kiss him, but I was more afraid that he would think that what we had together, what we shared, even though it was filthy and raw and sudden, didn’t mean anything to me. He means something to me.
He means a lot to me.
My stomach churns, knowing that I’m just waiting to be found out at this point. By my dad, by the HR department of Roarke Incorporated, by Mason… Sooner or later, something’s going to give, and I’m terrified to think that at the end of it, I might not have my dad, or Mason, or the self-confidence I’d mustered to go as far with everything as I had. It looked like all I had to look forward to was losing.
“Dad,” I start, the question that hasn’t given me a moment’s rest swimming up again in my head. “Can I ask you something? And could you be honest with me, please?”
“What about, bug?” he asks me, cocking a brow and setting down his magazine.
He smiles slightly but it dissipates when he sees my expression. He looks so withered now, so exhausted. I’m horrified of the thought of my dad wasting away the same way my mom did.
“Why won’t you ask Mr. Roarke for your
job back? I know the cancer is bad, but you can still work. You’ve been working every day now, at home.”
He has, too. He’s been planning to expand the house to have a work room for himself, and a small library for me. He’s done all the calculations and the architectural drawings, though we both know it’s a pipe dream at this point. We’ll probably have to sell the house if we want to keep him in chemo, and even then it wouldn’t cover enough sessions.
“Cassie, we talked about this.”
“Please, Dad. I need to know.”
It must be the tone of my voice because I see the moment he relents. He sighs, taking his glasses off and rubbing the bridge of his nose. When he looks at me again, I can see a glimpse of the man that I know and love, one that no illness could take down.
“Mason Roarke has done a lot for me, more than he knows. I don’t think I’ve necessarily returned the favor.”
I want to protest. I know the story. Dad was the engineering genius behind the company and Mason had enough technical knowledge and more than the needed business acumen to get things going. It was never just a one-man show, until of course it was.
“I went to Mason when I and your mother had been together for a while. We were married, we’d had you. There was more work every day, more responsibilities, and that meant less of your mother and you. I went to Mason selfishly, asking if he’d buy me out, and he did, eventually.
“I didn’t do it for his good. I did it for my own. It was almost impossible running that place with two men at the helm, I can’t imagine what it had to be as one. Sure, I stayed on, but it wasn’t the same. I was an employee. I didn’t have to stay late, so I didn’t. I didn’t have to go in early, so I slept in with your mother in my arms, and showed up when Mason had already been in the office for hours.”
He pauses for a moment and I’m hanging off the edge of my seat, wanting to hear the whole thing. I never considered that dad could have thought of selling the company, especially since in the years since, it has grown to be thousands of times more valuable than when he sold his shares.
“You see, Mason gave up his youth, his chance at a family, probably his chance at love because I asked him to. He was my best friend. He would have done anything for me and frankly I think what I asked of him took more from him than it gave to me.
“Don’t misunderstand me, I am forever grateful for what he did, but I also know that it must have robbed him of so much that he never had a chance to experience. I have you, and I had your mother. Even if this godforsaken illness takes me, I’ve lived a full life. Mason’s been stuck in his ivory tower and it was me who put him there.”
He shakes his head, obviously finding it hard to talk about it. I scoot off the seat and nuzzle in next to him on his. He’s so cold to the touch. My heart aches, for both of them.
“I won’t ask for anything from him, because once I asked for everything, and he gave it to me.”
Dad falls silent and I hug him. We stay like that for a couple of minutes before a nurse comes to check on him and I’m shooed off of him for fear of messing up the lines. I give them their space and find myself pulling out my phone and typing a message.
I knew the moment I sent off that letter that I’d done something horrible, but now I know even more how wrong of me it was. I might not agree with my dad’s code of honor, but I have to respect it. Along with that, I also can’t keep hiding something like that from Mason.
I know we never had a chance once I lied to him. A man like him wouldn’t accept it. Despite the fact that I love him with all my heart, I can’t keep hanging off of him, dragging him down when he has a business to run, a business I know he has given everything to build and maintain.
With my vision swimming in tears, I thumb in the words quickly, wanting to get them over with. I can tell myself how I never meant for anyone to get hurt, but I know I’ve hurt Mason, myself, and my dad by proxy. Everything I feared would happen, has, and there’s no one else to blame for it than me.
“I’ve done something horrible. I want you to know that I’m sorry for it. I should have never done it and I knew it was wrong then, and I still do. I sent HR a letter from your laptop that night after you left, telling them to reinstate my dad’s contract. Please don’t be angry with him, he had nothing to do with it. As for HR, they could have never known the command didn’t come from you.
I’ve breached your trust and that’s unforgiveable. I want you to know that what we shared meant everything to me. I regret a lot of things about the last two weeks, but I don’t regret kissing you, or having you be my first. I hope you won’t either.
You’ve been far more patient with me than I’ve had any right to hope for. I’m sorry for the trouble I’ve caused. You won’t have to deal with me anymore, I won’t come in tomorrow. I hope that won’t leave you in the lurch.
- Cassie”
I don’t read the words over, just send it to his corporate account. Wiping the tears away, I shoot a message to the headhunter for Neiman, asking if they have any openings – I’ll take anything. Before I get back into the room with my dad, I have an invitation to come in for an interview and trial day starting tomorrow.
There’s not much I can do to set things right again, but I’m going to do everything I can. I sit back down next to my dad, feeling hollow inside. It’s like someone’s taken my heart, sucked it out of me, and chucked it somewhere I can’t even see it anymore. All I know is that it’s shattered in pieces and it’s my fault.
I deserve it.
Chapter Fifteen
Mason
I stared in horror at Cassie’s text message for a good ten minutes before I regained my senses, and then I headed straight down to HR to confirm her admission with my own eyes. The email was there plain as day for me to see. Of course it would be. It makes sense. It all makes sense.
I feel a sense of sadness at being betrayed this way, although if I were in her position I doubt I’d have made any other call. In her mind she’d given her virginity to a cold, hard man who’d walked straight out on her. Saving her dad’s job, even for a short while, would have seemed to make that all worthwhile.
Although the betrayal hurts, I mainly feel the weight of crushing loss at something that was beginning to mean so much to me. What Cassie and I had was real. Fragile and turbulent, but real.
After all these years of denying myself the pleasure of human connection, I don’t believe I can let it go. Not without a fight.
But I have questions to answer, and confessions to make. If I’m going to make this right, it needs to be on the right footing. Honest footing.
I owe that to Cassie and I owe it to her father too. I also owe it to myself, this one tiny shot at happiness, and I’m going to grab hold of it with both hands.
It’s strange driving away from the office in the middle of a work day. The drive goes so quickly, and this time there’s no confusion in my mind which is the right house in which to find Thomas Newark. The little gate creaks as I make my way to his front door, and my firm knock booms loud in the hallway beyond.
It takes a while for him to answer, and when he does I take a sharp intake of breath. This isn’t the man who left my office just a few weeks ago. He’s aged twenty years, his once solid frame weak and fragile looking.
Is this what losing a job does to a man? The thought gives me shivers.
His blue eyes stare at me in shock, his eyebrows questioning as he finds me on his doorstep.
“Mason?” he asks. “What brings you to this part of town?”
He steps aside to let me in, and I tower over him as I step inside. “We need to talk,” I tell him.
He gestures me to the living room and I take a seat, and I don’t feel nearly so big and brave sitting here, my stomach in knots with the weight of my confession.
“What is it?” he asks, and I take a breath.
“It’s about your daughter,” I admit, and Tom’s eyes flash with concern.
“Cassie? Is she alright?” he pauses. �
�She’s at work right now, she won’t be back until lunch.”
The thought of her working at some other business is like a knife in my heart. “She’s been working for me,” I tell him. “For a few weeks now.”
“Working for you?” I watch Tom’s expression with intent as his mind whirrs. It doesn’t take him long to begin assembling the puzzle pieces together, but it wouldn’t. He’s a sharp man, and I love how his daughter takes after him. “I see,” he says. “Yes, that makes sense.” He sighs. “Cassie is headstrong. I imagine she thought she may be able to persuade you to change your mind about my position.”
I nod. “Yes, she did.”
“I’m sorry about that,” he says. “It won’t happen again. Cassie didn’t understand our history, but she does now. I filled her in on all of it last night.”
The puzzle pieces click together for me too.
“That isn’t all,” I admit. “We’ve grown close, Cassie and me. She’s a credit to you, Thomas. She’s vivacious and spirited and sharp. I don’t know why she isn’t going to college, but she should be. She’s a hard worker, dedicated and reliable and she doesn’t mind pitching in to get the job done.”
Thomas smiles. “I’m so proud of her,” he says. “I’m glad you’re impressed with her, Mason. You’ve always been a hard taskmaster, I’m glad she’s lived up to your standards.”
“She’s more than lived up to them, Tom,” I sigh. “She’s turned my world upside down.”
He doesn’t say anything, and I suspect his mind is one step ahead of me. His smile is guarded and his eyes dig into mine. It’s hard to find the words, so I opt to just come right out with them.
“I’m in love with her,” I say. “I think she’s in love with me, too. And I should have come to you, before any of this, because I respect our friendship, and I respect all the things we’ve been through together, but I guess I’m a weaker man than I thought. She knocked me sideways, and I haven’t known myself. She was like a wrecking ball, the most beautiful kind.”
