by Sierra Rose
“Well, at any rate, I agree with Caleb. If we want to recoup the numbers we lost with Billings, it has to be all hands on deck. That means pulling out all stops, leaving no stone unturned. I’m talking Paraguay, Milan...”
The three of us looked up at the same time at the fourth member of our party, a lovely man who had cheerfully tuned out at the mention of work and was now sketching what looked like a perfect re-creation of the Sistine Chapel in his plate of maple syrup.
“James?”
He offered nothing, as completely absorbed in his breakfast as the syrup was in his toast.
A little grin crept up the side of my face, and I leaned forward to try again. “Hey, babe...”
At the sound of a pet name, James’s head snapped up instantaneously. His eyes fixed on mine for a split second before sweeping quickly over the two other people sitting at the table, both of whom were watching him with patient smiles. A flush of color reached his high cheekbones as he pushed back from the table with a gracious smile. “I should let you three get to it. I’ll just go...somewhere else.”
Caleb chuckled quietly as Madison promptly cleared the plates and opened the oven to begin removing her cartons of spare client files.
After watching her for a moment, James turned back to me. “I’m glad you’re all right, and good luck today. If you get need anything, just call. Oh, I forgot to ask. Do you always sleep with knights in bed?” A flash of mischief danced through his eyes as he looked down with a devilish grin. “I would have been in your bed, too, but it seemed the place was already taken.”
“That’s just Madison’s suit of armor. She thought it would be funny to put him in bed with me. His name is Ronald,” I said with a groan. “He’s...a little hard to explain.”
“A little hard, huh? When I gave him a thump, he seemed very hard to me.” James bit his lip to keep from laughing. “If only I knew you have a strange medieval fetish. I would have sought you out much sooner, in an entirely different wardrobe.”
An image of James riding atop a stallion, waving a giant sword, flashed through my head, and it was all I could do to deep from jumping on top of him right then and there. “Well, there’s still time for that,” I teased, stretching up again to breathe my words into his ear. “And if you’re into role-playing...I’m sure I could find a corset, brave knight.”
His eyebrows lifted slightly and a secret smile escaped and was on full display. His hand twitched nervously, yearning to sweep me off the feet and carry me right back up the stairs, but the next second, he was backing swiftly to the door. “Milady, I fear I must now take my leave, before I corrupt the fair maiden incredulously.”
I threw back my head with a laugh and cocked my hips as I stared teasingly after him. “You’re leaving? That isn’t exactly the reaction I was hoping for.”
“Trust me,” he said with a grin. “It’s for the best, unless you wish to remove your garments immediately.”
I was one the verge of taking off my clothes right then and there when a throat cleared sharply in the kitchen. My shoulders wilted, and I lifted my hand to wave him off in regret. “The world of corporate overachievers calls. Sorry.”
James shrugged innocently as he pulled open the door with a little smile. “No worries. I’ll just be out saving babies, strumming my lute, brandishing my sword...”
I snorted with laughter. “Just don’t brandish your sword at any of the ladies, okay?”
He slipped out into the cold with a little wink. “Riding my steed...”
Chapter 18
IN THE HOURS THAT FOLLOWED, I was the one who kept my head down, focusing entirely on my work, and it was James who couldn’t stay away. Blame it on the impromptu family breakfast, our mind-blowing sex the night before, or his fantasies about me in a renaissance-era corset, but by the time lunch rolled around, my new phone was buzzing with a million adorable texts.
Hey.
Hi there. Hi. Thinking about you. Again.
You still working? I bet you are. Good job. Way to focus.
I get bored just thinking about it.
A few seconds later, there were more:
So...what are you working on?
And a few seconds after that, there was:
Want to see a movie?
Shit. Sorry. Forgot you’re working.
I’ll see what’s showing, just in case you want to later.
Nothing. It’s all terrible.
And a few seconds after that, he wrote:
We could make a movie of our own, you know, maybe something...medieval.
Just kidding.
(Half-kidding. I’m totally willing if you are.)
Some of them were unexpectedly sweet and insightful:
There’s a children’s benefit Tuesday. We should go. It’s a cause I strongly believe in.
Others were a bit on the obsessive-compulsive side:
Thirsty. Going to find some water.
I didn’t take the bait, didn’t respond to a single one, because I knew each and every word he wrote was a dangerous sort of gateway. Once I opened those floodgates, my work day would be gone forever. Still, my lack of participation didn’t exactly stop his chronic texting. If anything, ignoring him only seemed to make him text me more, each message more absurd and hilarious than the last.
After a while, I made a strategic fort out of my papers and propped my phone up beneath them, so I could continue to read in secret. It took everything in my power to avoid bursting out in laughter when I read:
Hey, I’m taking an online quiz to find out which mythological creature I am.
While I was supposed to be translating a financial index into German, he informed me:
Dragon. Imagine that.
Huh? No one gets dragon. What did he do? Admit to eating raw meat?
Confession: I cheated. I want to be a dragon.
An involuntary snort of laughter escaped my lips, drawing stares from Madison and Caleb at the same time. True to form, the first seemed intensely frustrated, while the other broke into a smile.
“Well, he’s certainly bored today, isn’t he?” Madison snapped.
“Say hi to James for me,” Caleb said with a grin.
My face lightened with a look of angelic innocence, an expression I had seen many times lately on the face of a certain mischievous billionaire dragon and one I was learning to master myself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just working on the—”
My phone buzzed again, interrupting me, like a giant neon sign above my head, flashing “Guilty.”
They raised their eyebrows with identical sarcasm as I collapsed my pathetic fort and extracted the phone so I could read the latest text, one that stopped me in my tracks:
Knock-knock.
Suddenly, a chorus of rabid, angry dog barks echoed through the house. Madison and I looked up in surprise, while Caleb shook his head with a look of exasperation.
“Madi, you’ve got to get rid of that doorbell.”
I sprang quickly to my feet, doing my best to ignore Madison’s look of fury behind me. “I’ll get it,” I volunteered.
“Yes, I bet you will, Della,” she called back, lobbing a pencil sharpener after me for good measure. “It’s only my fucking job on the line!”
I scampered down the hall and slid to a stop to fix my hair. I suddenly regretted my choice to wear sweatpants, but I didn’t have time to change. I pasted on my best smile and hurried to the door, then yanked it open.
“Did someone order Italian?” James said, giving me a dimpled grin as he held up a pair of bags, the cutest delivery boy in the entire world.
My eyes lit up just looking at him, and when I yanked him inside, my lips were on him in an instant, my arms wrapped tightly around his neck.
He tensed for just a second in surprise before dropping the bags where we stood. He lifted me off my feet and began marching deliberately up the stairs.
When I finally realized what he was doing, I pulled away with a giggling shriek. “
Wait! Stop, James. We can’t just...You brought food, didn’t you?”
His shoulders wilted, and he let out the most adorable little sigh. “And you really want to eat it?”
I laughed again and wriggled out of his arms, then ambled back to the floor. “I’m actually starving. Your timing is perfect.”
He glanced wistfully toward the bedroom before following me back to the kitchen.
All Madison’s rage vanished the instant she recognized the Italian restaurant logo, as well as the cups of coffee from our favorite café. She and Caleb pushed aside our files in delight, and he was welcomed back into the fold with open arms.
“How are things going?” James asked, after we had stuffed ourselves to the brim with at least seven different kinds of pasta. “Making any progress?”
Caleb pushed his plate back, wearing a satisfied grin. “Madison and I have been making some great progress. Della, on the other hand, seems to be too involved in a game of phone tag.” His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Apparently, some pathetically needy bloke keeps texting the poor girl.”
“Does he now?” James shot me an accusatory glare. “That’s cheating, you know. As if me catching you in bed with Ronald this morning wasn’t enough.”
Madison and Caleb burst out laughing before they got up to clear away the empty food containers so we could resume work.
“Cheating?” I murmured under my breath, leaning closer to James. “How could it be cheating if we’re not even dating?”
“Not even dating?” he retorted. “I stole a rose from my neighbor’s flowerbed two floors down for you. Why, I had to create a pulley system just to do it.”
I bit my lip and stifled a grin. “All very romantic gestures, to be sure, but it still begs a question.”
It wasn’t usual for panic to flicker through James’s eyes, but it certainly did as he glanced quickly across the kitchen at Madison and Caleb, who were caught in a heated debate about the price of steel mills in Beijing. When his eyes returned to mine, they were guarded, cautious. “And what question is that?”
I leaned back in my chair, gazing at him curiously. A dozen random moments flashed through my head: dancing in the club, eating finger food at the top of the world, his valiant effort to save me from his brother, waking up in one another’s beds, and making love beneath the stars. Finally, I blurted, “What is this?”
All traces of a smile vanished from his face as the two of us stared deep into each other’s eyes. His face was a whirlwind of so many different feelings that I couldn’t begin to understand them all, but one stood out above the rest, an emotion I had never seen on his handsome face.
Fear?
His breathing quickened, and I could practically hear his heart pounding through his shirt. His lips parted uncertainly to form a response.
“Hey, James, do you know a Walter Cannis?” Caleb called across the kitchen with what had to be the world’s very worst timing.
The moment shattered, we pulled apart.
James’s head turned distractedly in Caleb’s direction, but he kept his eyes on me. He blinked quickly, as if he’d been jolted back from someplace far away. “Uh...what? Who?”
“Walter Cannis,” Caleb said again as he and Madison settled at the table again, utterly oblivious to the moment they had just destroyed. “He’s in biopharmaceuticals, from Jersey.”
James stared at me for another second before pulling his dark eyes away. “Sure, uh...Walt Cannis. What do you want to know?”
As Caleb launched into a long diatribe about the markets on the American East Coast, I lowered my eyes to the table and began scribbling mindless doodles on my files, doing my best to pretend to focus. Every now and then, James glanced over at me before forcing his attention back to Caleb, chiming in with a yes or no or a nod.
Why did I have to say anything? Everything was going so well, minus the epic brother-on-brother bloodbath, of course. Look at him. I totally freaked him out. Gosh, Della, why can’t you ever leave well enough alone?
Of course, I wasn’t sure that was entirely true. He was certainly surprised and thrown off balance, taken aback, but I wasn’t sure it was in a bad way. I knew it couldn’t be some huge revelation for him. He was infamous for being a globe-trotting playboy, but he’d also had a long string of relationships along the way. The concept of a girlfriend couldn’t be new to him, but I wasn’t sure if I fell into that category in his mind.
The problem was that he certainly fell into the boyfriend category for me, and that was putting it lightly. In fact, never in my life had I been so enraptured with a man, so completely absorbed. I warmed at the mere thought of him, smiled stupidly at every mention of his name. I knew I was falling hard, but as charming as the man was, he was also impossible to read, so I had no idea whether or not he was falling along with me.
“Why don’t you get Stamper and Shief to help you?” James asked as I tuned back in to the conversation. “The eastern seaboard is their wheelhouse. They’ll know who to call.”
Madison and Caleb shared a quick glance.
“Can’t. Those two were sacked a fortnight ago.”
“Two weeks ago actually,” Caleb corrected.
“Whatever,” Madison said with a roll of her eyes. “My point is that they’ll do us no good now.”
James leaned forward in surprise, his brow furrowing with concern. “Why the hell were they fired? They were the best negotiators we had.”
Silence ensued from the other end of the table, as Madison and Caleb were incredibly reluctant to speak, to accuse his idiot sibling. I, on the other hand, was not so reluctant.
“Robert,” I said quietly, putting our awkward moment to the side so we could focus on the problems at hand. “He said they lacked initiative.”
“Lacked initiative?” James repeated with a note of frustration. “That’s just...” He stopped himself quickly, thinking better of what he was about to say. In the end, he leaned back in his chair and took on a look of forced nonchalance. “Well, it was Rob’s call.”
An awkward silence fell over the table as we all stared at him.
James pushed up to his feet, flashing a smile that didn’t fool anyone. “I should let you three get back to work.”
After some murmured thanks for the lunch and goodbyes, the last of the dishes were cleared, and the piles of paper were stacked once again upon the table.
James helped us organize I work before he left, running his eyes over each document he retrieved from the counter, unable to hide his interest. Then, although his body angled toward the door, he glanced back at the table as he slipped on his jacket, like a kid who was being forced to walk away from a puzzle he was dying to solve. “You really should put Capps on that account with Milton and Hearst,” he blurted.
Caleb and I looked up at him in surprise, but Madison threw her gaze down at the file. “Capps?” she asked. “Are you sure?”
James nodded and stuck his hands casually in his pockets as his eyes swept the papers again. “They were all friends at Cambridge back in the seventies, still play golf together every other weekend at a club in Westlake. If you want to sway the vote toward central pricing, Capps is the only guy at the table who can get those other two votes.”
Madison and I shared a look of astonishment. After all our hours of research and the thousands she’d invested in a private investigator, we had no idea there was any connection between the men, certainly not one that might work to our benefit. That far up the corporate ladder, when we were playing with stakes so high, a little tidbit of information like that could literally make all the difference.
“Incredible,” Caleb said, glancing helplessly at the pile of folders in front of him, “but how can we get to Capps? I mean, the man is notorious for ghosting, hasn’t been seen in public for the last ten years. I heard that even his own mother can’t get a hold of...” He trailed off as James pulled out his phone with a coaxing smile.
“Let me give him a ring,” James said with a smile.
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Chapter 19
THAT PHONE CALL TURNED out to be the first of about 425 of them, spread out over the next three weeks. Whatever questions James and I had about our romantic involvement were put on hold, as the problems with his father’s company had to be addressed first.
Never before had I seen such a work ethic, and I wouldn’t have expected it from a man known worldwide for living in a perpetual state of vacation. Never before had I seen such brilliance, certainly not from any purported mindless playboy who spent his time base-jumping and bedding beautiful women. James Cross was truly his father’s son, and as someone who revered Benjamin Cross as a visionary god, I could give James no higher compliment than that.
No problem was too immense for him to find some way around it, no task so insurmountable that he couldn’t somehow spin it to our advantage. After Capps came Comero. After Comero came Ryiesguard. Then there was Athache, followed by Mills, all lead players in their fields. After James had them onboard, the entire Italian delegation was soon to follow.
I was watching a master at work, a playful, effervescent genius who strung together international mergers on his cell while tossing Cheerios into his mouth with his other hand. It reached the point where he and Caleb unofficially moved into Madison’s house, so the four of us could live and work together to stop the bleeding, to repair the damage Robert had incurred on the company. We worked so diligently, turning deals so quickly that business school students would be studying the James Cross methods of mergers and acquisitions for years to come.
We became a well-oiled team, every one of us falling effortlessly into our roles as we moved the pieces slowly around the board. Each play started with Madison; she was the bait, the hook, the line, and the sinker. She reeled in new clients with that Montgomery charm that made grown men melt or cry with just a flutter of her lashes. Caleb and I handled everything else, hammering out the actual language for each and every deal. We created massive international mergers between bites of Chinese takeout, our fingers flying so fast over the keys of our computers that Caleb swore he was getting cramps.
