The Billionaire's Heart (The Silver Cross Club Book 4) (5 page)

Shit, maybe I should just try to get a job with Google.

Elliott’s voice interrupted my interior design fantasies. “You can do web design, is that correct?”

I turned my head away from the window and said, “That’s right. If you look—I think it’s number 29, with the—”

“The red background,” he said, clicking. “Yes, I see. And can you code it as well?”

I shrugged. “I did that one from scratch, but it’s just the CSS and HTML to make it look nice. I can’t do any of the back-end stuff.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to have any experience with software engineering,” he said. “That’s fine.” He clicked a few more times, that line between his eyebrows making a reappearance, and then looked up at me and said, “I’d like to offer you some work.”

I sat back in my chair, trying to decide how I felt about that. Excited? Terrified? “What do you have in mind?” I asked.

“It would just be a contract position,” he said. “Frankly, I can’t afford to hire a full-time employee at this point.”

“Benefits and whatnot,” I said. “I understand.”

He nodded. “There’s a major international development conference in four weeks, and I’d like to have a full branding package by then. Business cards, website, informational packets. I’ll pay you $100 an hour.”

That was a good rate: on the high end for freelancing, but not so high that it felt like pity or a personal favor. Elliott was a strange bird, but he fascinated me, and he couldn’t possibly be a worse boss than my last one. And it would get Carter and Regan off my back. I took a deep breath and said, “When do you want me to start?”

He smiled at me, wide and genuine, and it hit me like a punch to the gut. I wanted this man: fast, hard, and as often as he liked.

And now he was my boss, which meant he was totally off limits. I had really put myself in a bad situation. It was going to be a long, frustrating four weeks.

Suck it up, Sadie. Sexual frustration was better than eviction or starvation.

“You can start on Monday,” he said. “If that isn’t too soon.”

“Monday is fine,” I said.

“Good,” he said. He stood up and extended his hand. I scrambled to my feet and shook hands with him, feeling that same staticky charge as our skin met.

Lord help me.

“I’ll see you Monday morning at 9, then,” he said.

“I’m looking forward to it,” I squeaked, and got myself out of there before I did something dumb.

FIVE

Elliott

Every night, I returned to Africa in my dreams.

I dreamed of the town in northern Uganda where I lived for a year, and my house there, and the amarula tree outside where the neighborhood children waited each morning, first for a glimpse of the strange white man, and then, after they grew to know me, to say good morning and show me whatever treasures they had accumulated in the past day: an empty Coke bottle, a new puppy. I dreamed of the dirt road out of town, and the thorny cattle kraals where the herds spent their nights, and the women walking to the market in their brightly-colored skirts.

I dreamed of the mountains, green and silent, clouded in thick fog, where I went to see the gorillas at Bwindi while I still had the chance. They would be gone in another generation, wiped clean off the face of the earth. I dreamed of the small clearing where I crouched among the foliage and watched a female gorilla placidly strip leaves from a branch and eat them one by one, while her infant—only four months old, the guide told me—clung to her furred belly and gazed at me with dark, solemn eyes. Rain dripped from the trees overhead. Somewhere a bird called and then fell silent.

And then I woke to the sound of a taxi honking on the street outside my apartment, and knew I was back in New York.

I sat up and swung my feet onto the floor, and rubbed my hands over my face. I should have stayed in Uganda. I was a stranger there, permanently marked by the color of my skin, but I was a stranger here, too. I hadn’t spent more than six months in New York in almost a decade, and for most of the last five years I was in East Africa, in one country or another. The US was foreign to me now. Everything was too clean and bright. The first time I went into a supermarket after returning from Uganda, twelve hours after landing at JFK, I had to turn around and leave, overwhelmed by the fluorescent lights and the sheer selection of food. I was fluent in four languages and knew enough of a handful of others to hire a taxi or ask for directions. I had lived through the crisis in Kenya after Kibaki was elected. I had fallen in love with a Kenyan woman and lived with her for almost two years. And now here I was, in the shitty apartment I had rented, rootless and adrift in the city of my birth.

I never should have come back.

My phone chirped at me from the nightstand. It was my calendar reminding me that I needed to get to the office earlier than usual so that I could set up Sadie’s workspace.

Seeing her name brought forth a vivid, unexpected memory of the other dream I’d had that night: a woman beneath me, her warm curves pressed against my bare chest, her arms wrapped around my neck…

I pressed my fists against my eye sockets, hard enough to see bright spirals behind my closed lids, and then I stood up and headed for the shower.

The woman I had dreamed about was Sadie, of course. When she walked into my office, slim waist accentuated by the same pants that highlighted the shape of her ass, I knew I was in deep, sexual-harassment-lawsuit trouble. She was my employee, now. My attraction to her was irrelevant. Dreams were the brain’s sad mulling over of the day’s events, like a cow chewing its cud. It meant nothing.

She was a talented designer. That was the extent of my interest in her. We would have a productive working relationship, and once she had completed the branding work I needed, I would send her on her way with a glowing reference.

Heaven help me.

I had never been particularly good at lying to myself.

Fine: she was gorgeous, intelligent, sharply funny—a deadly combination. And I was just fool enough to lose my way and do something regrettable.

Four weeks wasn’t such a long time. I could hold out for that long.

I walked to the office, my hands shoved in my coat pockets, head bent against the January chill. I didn’t remember New York being so
cold
. I thought that my bones might freeze and shatter, too brittle to withstand the icy winds that whipped through the Midtown streets.

Always complaining, Sloane. Uganda was too hot; New York was too cold.
Delicate as a woman
, my father would say, sneering. As if women were somehow fragile and worthy of his contempt. As if he had never noticed the steel rod my mother had in place of a spine.

I would never know why she had agreed to marry him. It was too late to ask.

The building was quiet still, this early. The lobby was empty aside from the security guard, who nodded at me in a weary, companionable sort of way. This was hardly the first morning he’d seen me in before 8. I knew I should stop and chat with him, ask him about his family—surely he had a family—but I had never developed a knack for initiating a conversation with a stranger. Three months in, and I still didn’t even know his name.

A shameful trait in a businessman, of course. I should be greasing palms and charming women out of their panties. But my allegedly inborn charm had failed to develop. I was tongue-tied, awkward. A disgrace.

I stepped out of the elevator on the sixteenth floor and hit the switch on the wall. The light above the receptionist’s desk flickered on. Belatedly, I realized that I should have turned the rest of the lights on yesterday before Sadie arrived, to lessen the office’s undeniable air of “serial killer horror house,” but I was so accustomed to working beside the windows that it hadn’t occurred to me at the time. Keeping the lights off saved energy. I was conserving the environment, and my bank account.

The office building was aging, well past its prime, but it was half-empty and rent was cheap. I liked the deserted air: no one to bother me, and free rein to spend as many nights as I pleased sleeping on the floor beneath my desk. And, as an added bonus, I could poach furniture from the empty offices above and below me.

That was what I did now. I had a desk for Sadie, but I needed a decent chair—ergonomic, lumbar support—and a lamp. Maybe two lamps. Maybe a poster of a tropical island, to remind her that there was more to life than bleak midwinter New York. “YOU COULD BE HERE.”

Maybe that would be cruel.

One floor down, I found a chair that looked suitable. It was leather, in relatively good condition, and—when I sat in it to test it out—comfortable enough to pass muster. I took it upstairs in the elevator, and wheeled it to the desk I’d chosen for Sadie, close enough to mine for easy communication, but not so close that she’d feel I was constantly looking over her shoulder. I plugged in the table lamp I’d found and turned it on, pleased when the bulb lit up.

I wanted her to—well. Not
be happy
. Office work had never made anyone happy. But I wanted her to at least be content, to enjoy her workspace and not dread coming to work each morning. I wanted us to get along well, and for her to do good work for me, and for everything to go smoothly.

We were both professionals. I was a professional. I could control myself.

Everything would be fine.

She arrived promptly at 9:00, blowing into the office in a whirlwind of coat and scarf and enormous totebag and boots that clicked across the floor as if to say: I’m Sadie, here I am, look at how lovely I am and how unexpected.

You are, I told her silently. You’re both of those things.

“Hi, Mr. Sloane,” she said. “I guess you don’t have a coffee maker, huh? I should have stopped somewhere on my way in, but I didn’t think of it until just now.”

I drew in a steadying breath. “There’s a place just around the corner where I usually get coffee,” I said. “You’re welcome to step out whenever you’d like.”

“Yeah, I probably will,” she said. She unwound her scarf and shoved it in her totebag. She scanned the office, head swiveling, and I saw her gaze light on the new desk. “That’s for me, I guess.”

“That’s right,” I said. “If the chair isn’t suitable—”

“It’ll be fine, I’m not picky,” she said. “Although I’ve noticed lately that my back hurts if I sit at the computer too long. Getting old, I guess.”

“You aren’t old,” I said automatically, well-trained by my mother and sisters.

She grinned. “Turning thirty this year. That’s a big birthday, you know. Over the hill.”

“You aren’t over the hill until you’re forty,” I said.

She waved one hand, dismissive. “Whatever. Is there any paperwork I need to sign?”

The sudden change of subject made my head spin. “Uh, yes. I drew up a contract that outlines the terms of employment—”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” she said. “I’ll sign it. I won’t understand it anyway, and Carter wouldn’t let you screw me over.”

She had an optimistic view of Carter’s influence over my actions, but I handed over the paperwork without comment.

She scribbled her signature, head bent over the papers, and then she glanced up and said, “Look, I’m going to go get both of us some coffee, because you sure look like you could use it, and then let’s sit down and you can explain what I should be working on. I still don’t even really know what the company
does.
Carter told me you’re doing stuff with clean water, but that could cover a lot of ground. Okay?”

“Sure,” I said, amused by how neatly she had taken charge.

“How do you take your coffee?” she asked. “Let me guess: black.”

“Cream and two sugars,” I said. “I’m not nearly man enough to drink my coffee black.”

She laughed. “If you’re lying to me, you’re going to be sorry,” she said, “because I’ll make it plenty light and sweet. Okay, I’ll be back in like five minutes, and then we’ll get started.”

She left again, shoes clicking back toward the elevator, and I watched her go with the distinct sensation of having been hit over the back of the head with a blunt object.

It was going to be an interesting four weeks.

SIX

Sadie

I gave myself a stern mental dressing-down as I waited in line at the coffee shop. Elliott wasn’t my
buddy
. We weren’t
pals
. He was my boss, and I needed to remember that and not fall into bantering with him like he was a co-worker. It didn’t matter how ridiculously drop-dead sexy he was. I worked for him now, and I wasn’t going to cross that line. At least not for the next four weeks.

When I wasn’t working for him anymore, well—all bets were off.

Not that I would date him or anything. But maybe I could screw him just once, to get it out of my system.

“Hello? Do you want coffee?” the girl at the counter asked, squinting at me, and I realized that I’d been standing there thinking about Elliott’s broad shoulders like some sort of fool.

“Yeah, sorry, uh, coffee,” I said, fumbling with my wallet, and the girl rolled her eyes.