“I have a pretty good idea that you can pull this off if you stop whining and put your mind to it. David Dallstrom is about to step out on the world stage where he belongs, and you’re the only one I can trust to have the scene of his big debut ready in time. Deal with it.”
Dave crumpled forward, hiding his face in his hands.
His dad looked at him next. “And you need to pull yourself together and be a man about all this – it sure doesn’t set the right tone if you look like a giant sniveling baby on the six o’clock news.”
And then the tyrant glared in my direction. He looked me up and down, my skin crawled, and he raised one eyebrow. “The only question left is what do I do with you?”
Fuck you, the horse you rode in on, and anybody who even sort of looks like you, Einar Asshole Dallstrom.
I crossed my arms and stared right back at him. “Unless you magically get a lot younger and a whole lot cuter, you’re not doing jackshit with me, pink boy.”
Kristen choked back a giggle and Dave managed a weak laugh.
The man at the center of this shitstorm was not impressed, though.
“Nice try, little girl, but face it – there is no place for you in this scenario. My boy will be way too busy for a girlfriend or a fuck toy or whatever you are –”
Dave’s head snapped up. “Another choice you don’t have is talking to Cassie like that. She’s sweet and fierce and beautiful and willful, and between your mouth and the fact that you blew up her business and destroyed her life, you’re lucky she hasn’t punched your lights out yet. If she’s crazy enough to want to stay with me, then she is part of this scenario, and there’s just exactly squat you can do about it.”
My former cook from my blown-up bar turned to me. “Cassie, are you interested in sticking around? Oh, and also in going back to school? Have I mentioned the fantasy where I’m tied up by a sexy veterinarian?”
No woman with working hormones could resist that mile-wide smile or those devil-green eyes. And having my dream handed to me on a silver platter? By a man I ached to be alone with, a man who was too gorgeous and sweet and funny to be real?
What was the catch?
Meanwhile, Dave’s dad refused to give up the fight. “Son, you won’t have the time and you don’t need the distraction of dealing with a … well, with a relationship, if that’s what this is. You don’t need the distraction, you don’t need the headache –”
“He will need a personal assistant, though.”
We turned to look at sweet, smiling, sly Kristen.
“Think about it, Dad. While you have Dave trotting here and there around the globe in the coming weeks and months, who’s going to keep him on point and on schedule? Or do you seriously expect your angry and defiant son to stay sparkling clean, neatly groomed, and well-dressed on his own, just because you want him to? Do you see him being organized enough to get everywhere on time and remember what he’s supposed to say when he gets there, all by himself? Or since he’d deeply resent being forced away from the life he wants and the woman he cares about, don’t you think it’s a lot more likely he’d show up for a meeting with the Prime Minister of Wherever three hours late and wearing a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt, torn jeans, and flip-flops? After not having showered for three days?”
Dave smiled like a fiend. “Why would I bother with wearing pants at all? A man needs to swing free and easy, I always say.”
Their dad groaned. “You two shits never miss a chance to team up against me, do you? And does this woman even know what a personal assistant does? Does she care? Or does she think it would just be an excuse to fuck my boy blind in every world capital a plane can fly to?”
I yawned. I examined my nails as if their chipped pink polish was the most fascinating thing in the world. “Please, Mr. Dallstrom – I’ll be way too busy fucking your boy blind and sideways and upside down on the plane to have the energy to do it once we get to our destination.”
I turned to Dave. “Your dad is so adorable when he fusses and fumes and acts like he has a choice, huh?”
Dave snorted laughter, his father looked like he wanted to tear my throat out, and Kristen turned a tad more serious – but yep, I still saw her smile lurking.
“Dad, Cassie has already been Dave’s boss, and she’s been his boss in a situation where she’s been organized and knowledgeable enough to also juggle other employees, customers, bills, food prep, breaking up fights, beverage suppliers, alcohol regulations, and a host of other things. As in she ran her own business by herself, all day, six days a week, for the past few years – once I get her set up with the basics, keeping Dave in line will be like a vacation.”
She folded her own arms. “Dad, face it – you need her.”
The lord and master of Dallstrom Defense Systems knew he was beaten. He played it out a bit longer, glaring down at the gleaming steel beneath his balled-up fists as if this was all the desk’s fault somehow. The desk refused to cop to the charges. Then he looked up, running his gaze all around the room as if he expected to find the answer printed on the bare white walls. No such luck, Einar.
Then he looked at me.
“Two questions – can you get him to wear a suit every day, and can you get him to cut his hair?”
I glanced at Dave. He tipped me a wink, and then threw his head back and made a big show of running his hands through his tumbled mane of shoulder-length blond hair.
I looked back at his glowering and bald dad. “Yes to the suit –”
Dave squealed in his best Gollum voice, “No, not the suits, my preciousss! The suits steal our soul, they are evil, we mustn’t!”
“Hush up, Dave, or you’ll be in white tie and tails each and every day, and I’ll make you wear a top hat with it – besides, with your body and face, you’ll look amazing in a high-end tailored suit. I promise to keep you naked in private, don’t worry.”
His smile lit up the room. “Promise to keep me naked and chained at your feet in private?”
“If you’re a good boy. As to your other question, Mr. Dallstrom, it’s a firm no on the haircut.”
“He’ll look goddamn ridiculous if he keeps all that girly hair while he’s wearing a suit –”
“Here’s a bulletin from the twenty-first century, Mr. D – women love the combination of lots of wild hair and a fancy suit, because they like to imagine ripping away all that silk to find a barely tamed barbarian beneath. We could go with pulling it back into a ponytail for super-formal occasions, but that’s as far as I’ll budge on this issue – or do you want me to describe in detail why I need your son’s hair at grabbing length for when we’re alone? You know, while I’m manhandling him during an all-night session of ‘dominatrix veterinarian disciplines the naughty rich boy’?”
“Christ on a goddamn crutch …”
Forty billion dollars groaned in disgust and defeat, and I felt great.
For about sixty seconds.
Einar Dallstrom turned to his daughter. “Kristen, see to it she gets security clearances, cards, cars, outfits, the whole package. And put her on duty as soon as possible – if she’s incompetent, I need to know that now and not next week.”
Dave chimed in, “Sis, make sure Cassie gets a fabulously huge salary for babysitting me. Plus college tuition including vet school, and maybe some kind of arrangement where she can study independently for the undergrad courses?”
Kristen nodded, already at work on her iPad and her phone. “Done and done.”
Dave stood up. “Swell, we’re through here. Cassie, let’s go enjoy my last few hours of sweet freedom.”
Kristen administered a final tap to her iPad before hiding it away in her briefcase and rising to her feet, while she issued orders to an unseen someone on the phone jammed between her ear and her shoulder. Man, that woman was organized.
I followed them to the door.
We almost got away clean.
“You think this is a happily-ever-after story, don’t you?”
All three of us tu
rned to look at him, but Dave’s father stared right at me and me alone.
“If you’re as smart as I think you are, you know life doesn’t work that way – life is a bitch with icy tits, and she’ll fuck you over every time. How long do you think you’ll last in this cushy new job of yours, anyway?”
“For as long as Dave needs me – why?” And why did I feel like an invisible bear trap was waiting to spring shut on me?
That painful smile, so unlike his son’s, crept across Einar Dallstrom’s face.
“Because on Friday night, you’ll find out just how much that dream of yours will cost you.”
11
“Dave, even money says your car will be up on blocks and stripped for parts in twenty minutes – seriously, some two-year-old has probably already keyed it, and could you please hurry up in there?”
I dropped the corner of the filmy sort-of-tan-and-sort-of-just-dirty window curtain and turned to holler these words of wisdom at the bathroom door in Dave’s ‘freedom’ apartment. That was how I thought of the tiny place he’d rented with the money from his now-dead construction job, although he’d proudly called it ‘the Free Republic of Dave’ when he’d ushered me through the front door – right before he’d disappeared into the bathroom for a shower, instead of helping me pack up his stuff.
As for the neighborhood, I could understand that part-time, seasonal construction work wouldn’t pay for much of a place – but even so, this was carrying economy way too far.
The street was lined with once-grand Victorian houses that had each been subdivided into half-a-dozen tiny apartments like Dave’s. Trash filled the gutters, potential muggers lounged in front of the liquor store on the next block, and if you didn’t like the look of the abandoned warehouses looming nearby, you could scope out the dingy pawnshops and the storefronts where checks were cashed with no questions asked. Between the frequent police sirens, the wandering drunks, and the obvious-to-a-blind-man drug deals going down on the nearest corner, I figured the lifespan of the Cadillac Escalade we’d left parked at the curb had to be pretty short.
I could barely hear Dave yelling over the pulsing thunder of the shower. “You worry too much, but my even money says you’d feel a whole lot better if you came in here and scrubbed my back!”
“Somebody needs to pack up your stuff, shower boy –”
“And I’d feel even better if you also scrubbed my front, long and slow and luxuriously, with lots of soap and enthusiasm!”
“Dream on!”
“It’s your duty as my personal assistant!”
I hollered over the racket from the shower and wondered how many other tenants could hear us through the paper-thin walls. “Did your last personal assistant help you get all sudsy?”
“Seeing as how my only other babysitter ever was a guy, no – and besides, he quit three years ago and I haven’t had any personal or impersonal assistants since. So I’m in serious need of very personal assistance in here, and you can’t refuse me because you’re sweet and sexy and kind and helpful, and you’re also my employee!”
“Sorry, but if we’re going to get out of here and back to your high-rise lair before your car is stolen –”
“Dallstrom Defense Systems owns several dozen fleet vehicles just like it in this town alone, so relax – and besides, the people here are cool, they won’t bother it. I know the neighborhood looks dodgy, but –”
“It looks like Detroit after the apocalypse, and why did your assistant quit?”
The shower shut off, and Dave’s voice was loud in the sudden silence. “Well, he said something about how I was a ten-year-old in a twenty-something’s body and that no amount of career advancement was worth putting up with my juvenile bullshit – personally, I think the poor guy was just born without a sense of humor.”
I heard cabinet doors thumping open and shut as he added, “And I guess it didn’t help that I wouldn’t share those two Victoria’s Secret models with him that one time –”
I hated those skanks immediately, and resolved to burn the next Victoria’s Secret catalog that came in the mail. “Dave, that is not a mental picture that I need right now –”
The bathroom door swung open behind me. “ – but the last straw was one day when he was being particularly pissy and humorless, I told him he had to dust every one of my 1,219 Star Wars action figures. That finally did it and thank God, because I was getting pretty tired of him reporting back to Dad about every last move I made, night and day.”
I abandoned my lookout post at the window, turned around, and have you ever seen a modern-day Viking beast of a man dressed in a towel and nothing but?
Sure, I’d seen Dave intensely naked in the back of my truck, and maybe stolen a few glimpses while he was hosing himself off out back of the bar … but those were circumstances where nothing was going to happen, where nothing could happen, not really – but now? Now he stood only a few feet away, alone with me in a small apartment where anything could happen.
He was dripping and magnificent. His blond mane was plastered flat against his head and across his broad shoulders, and a few strands strayed onto his chest. I wanted to put my hands there. I wanted to feel those sculpted muscles beneath my fingers, wanted to feel the pounding of his heart, and was his chest rising and falling faster with the speeding rhythm of his breathing?
Beads of water hung in the fine golden hair coating his chest, rivulets of water ran down his flanks and over the warm skin of his hips, and trickles of water slid over the tight muscling of his abs before soaking into the towel tied around his waist.
That towel. That waist. What was under that towel, and below that waist …
Yes, I stared. It had been over a year since I’d been with anybody at all, and with a gorgeous muscled god of a guy like this? Since never.
I wanted him, I was scared and tired and flustered, I needed to discover what he had under that towel, and the room was so small and warm, and then he was closer, and then I jumped like a startled mouse when he spoke.
“Wow, from the way you’re sitting on the bed, I’m thinking you’re not so interested in packing up my stuff anymore.”
I remembered where his face was, my eyes shot upward, and there was that crooked grin. My mouth dropped open, I must have looked like a needy moron, and his smile widened, and –
The bed?
I looked around and holy shit, I was sitting on the bed. When did that happen?
I shot to my feet and started babbling.
“You took forever in there and I got tired of waiting, and I’m not sure we have enough boxes here anyway, and you need to help me with all this crap because I am not your slave, I don’t care what –”
Dave slid up close and wrapped his arms around me from behind.
“Cassie, it’s okay. I care, and I know you’re not my slave.”
He nuzzled my hair and brushed a kiss against my cheek.
“You’re my beautiful, tough-as-nails girlfriend, and I’m lucky to have you.”
His arms tightened, pulling me close, holding me against the hard planes and angles of his body. I felt his warmth against my back, his muscles against my curves, and it came to me that my arms were pinned to my sides, trapped beneath his. I was helpless to stop him from touching me, and I didn’t want to stop him.
I felt his erection surging against me, and I knew Dave didn’t want to stop either.
But he did.
His arms loosened as he kissed my shoulder. “And I swear, I didn’t mean to set you up for this – I was too lazy and disorganized to shower this morning and then we had to rush over to the meeting with Lord Dallstrom the Evil One, so I wanted to finally clean up a bit before we got started on The Great Packing Saga.”
I twisted around to look up at him. “So you’re saying you didn’t mean to get three-quarters naked, dripping wet, and incredibly sexy in front of your parched and needy girlfriend, with a bed right there and waiting?”
His arms tightened around me again, just for a se
cond, and my ear got a playful nip.
“This bed?”
He nodded at the narrow bed beside us, half-covered with a rumpled plaid blanket. “Nope, not this bed – when the time comes, I’ll need a lot more room for all the things I’m going to do to you.”
His broad right hand slid down over my hip, warm fingers spread wide. He stroked the curve of my ass, giving it a gentle squeeze as I shifted within his arms. A shiver of nerves and need ran through me, and when had this room turned into a sauna?
Then he eased away from me after pressing a final breath of a kiss to my neck. I took a big sideways step away from him and started running my mouth again, because babbling under pressure is my special gift.
“Um, yeah, besides, I don’t know if I could do it with the entire rebel alliance watching and all – do you really have 1,219 of these guys? And why aren’t they in their original packaging? I thought collectors always kept these things in the original box because otherwise they lose a lot of their value, right?”
I looked at Dave and then back to the rows and rows of shelving that ran around the walls of his apartment – and hundreds and hundreds of plastic figures stared back at me, action figures of pretty much every Star Wars character in the known universe. Wookies, fighter pilots, Ewoks, more robots than you could shake a light saber at, Jedi knights by the dozen, more versions of Han Solo than needed to exist in any decent galaxy, ten Princess Leias complete with donut hairdos and laser pistols, and a few characters so obscure that only an obsessed lunatic or George Lucas would recognize them – they lined the shelves like Dave’s own private army, devoted to protecting his apartment, aka ‘the Free Republic of Dave,’ down to their last tiny plastic breaths.
“Well, I bought out a couple of estate sales and picked up a bunch more at a charity auction last year, so right now the total is 1,487. And they do lose value without the original packaging in place – but I figure even a Jedi knight can’t fight very well from inside a box.” He patrolled down the length of the shelves, picking up a Queen Amidala to flick a tiny particle of dust off her shoulder, adjusting the position of two Lando Calrissians who guarded a stack of textbooks, and then taking a long step back to take them all in with one sweeping glance.
No Dreams Allowed: A Billionaire Romance Page 12
