Dirty Secrets (6 page)

CHAPTER

On his way back to his desk, he stopped off at Bridget’s. “The reporter who was in earlier, from the
Downtown Voice.
” Alex gestured, like he was having trouble pulling the woman’s name from his memory.

Bridget wasn’t fooled for a second. She’d been his assistant  for two years now, and had seen the parade of women that had wandered through his bed. Well, usually not the bed, usually walls. Couches. Play rooms. Pretty little reporters spreading their thighs on his desk.
Focus, Blank
. “Zoey Gardener?”

He wasn’t giving in. He snapped his fingers like Bridget had just tripped his memory into the right gear. “Yes. Can you get her number for me? I’d like to discuss a question she had in a little more detail.”

Bridget gave him a long look, just long enough to convey her extreme amusement with the entire situation, and then picked up her phone.

“Thank you,” he said, and was grateful, not for the first time today, that the darkness of his complexion helped keep his embarrassment under wraps. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to track a woman’s phone number down. It had been ages ago, if it had ever even happened.

There were a lot of reasons he’d always erred towards casual relationships over the years. A lot of them had to do with being raised with a lot of money, and seeing the number of people who became interested in his wallet more than they were with him. A lot of them had to do with a lingering sense that the faces in the parade were all somehow similar, no matter how many colors and shapes they might take. There was always the same light of avarice in the eyes, the calculated question of how far this alliance would take them. He’d filtered a lot of hassle out of his life just by telling people that he wasn’t interested in more than a casual relationship. When they opted out after that declaration—well, at least he hadn’t wasted his time.

Zoey was different. Some part of it was almost certainly that he didn’t get turned down often, and it was an intriguing sensation, but there was more to it than that. She didn’t seem swayed by him. Or if she was, it was by the heat of his mouth and the strength in his fingers, not by the Amex Black he kept in his wallet.

He sat down at his desk and pulled the old man’s planner out again.

Philip Blankenship had been a business genius, a wild play boy, a skilled politician too smart to bother trying to make a career for himself in Washington or Albany, and every so often, a self aware and deliberate Luddite. He’d refused to write with anything other than fountain pens, and his collection was hugely varied, from
maki-e
pens that cost tens of thousands of dollars to cheap plastic mass manufactured pens that could be had for $15. He’d also insisted on blue ink, but he’d had every shade of blue from every major manufacturer. He’d had planners custom made for him on paper that was high enough quality that his pens wouldn’t bleed through, even when he brought out the ones with the broad or italic nibs.

The daily events parts of the planner were fairly obvious. Meetings, dinners, scheduled conference calls, all the usual things that one saw in the daily schedule of a business executive. But the task list, and the space for a weekly gratitude journaling—that was where Alex was positive that something was going on.

First, the task list was always written in varied shades of blue, with clearly different pens. The handwriting stayed the same from line to line, but the structure of the writing varied greatly from one nib to the next. That in and of itself wasn’t necessarily strange—one would just assume that he added tasks as he thought of them, instead of sitting down and writing out one day at a time. But each task was crossed out in the same color of ink that had been used to write it in the first place. That didn’t make sense.

And then, some of the actual tasks were bizarre.
Laundry
, for example. Philip Blankenship hadn’t done a load of laundry in his life. Alex was fairly sure he wouldn’t have known how to operate a washing machine if someone put a gun to his head. He’d always had people to do those sorts of things. He hadn’t even bothered to pick up his own underwear from the floor. Or
Meet bodega
and
Dancing lessons.
It was clearly some kind of code.

He sighed and rubbed his fingertips into his forehead. Or, a man who’d never had a good relationship with his father was finding meaning in the man’s life after his death, trying to believe that there had been something more to the man than the abusive, womanizing piece of shit he’d grown up knowing. That was probably what a psychologist would tell him. Getting one of those should probably be the next step in his ‘act like a damn adult’ project.

He closed Philip’s planner and dropped it in the bottom drawer of his desk. Maybe Olivia was right. Maybe he should just focus on learning the ropes at AEGIS. He had ideas, plans for how he could make things run more smoothly, but to make anything happen, he’d need to get the board on his side, and to do that, he had to have Olivia on his side. She didn’t want him mucking around in Philip’s old affairs, well, maybe that was a good plan. All he’d wanted in his life was to distance himself from his father, to have the chance to make himself his own man. He wouldn’t do that by just staring at the relics the old bastard had left behind after an incredibly convenient heart attack. At least he hadn’t had it in the bed of one of his many mistresses.

Olivia’s non answer to his question about whether or not Philip had any other questions was concerning. Olivia had always maintained that her fertility was the reason there were ten years of age difference between Alex and Claire, but anyone who could do even the slightest bit of math, or wasn’t totally blind, would realize that Philip hadn’t been home frequently enough to get his wife pregnant in those years. He’d kept his affairs relatively subtle, but for one of the cornerstones of the Manhattan social stratosphere, there was only so subtle he could manage. Olivia had weathered it well, but seeing her husband stepping out with woman after woman, each one paler than her—it had to hurt. It had to poison you.

Bridget’s chat window blinked again, and he forced himself back into the hear and now.
I have her number. Want me to get her on the line for you?

That’s fine, I’ll call her myself.

He pulled out his phone—there was no way in hell he was making this call on the company line—and dialed the number Bridget had given him. It was not a New York area code. That made him smile. He heard some of that syrup in her voice, and he figured she’d come to the city not all that long ago, but it was nice to see she hadn’t entirely shed her roots.

She picked up almost as soon as the call rang. “This is Zoey,” she said, her voice distracted. He wondered if she’d even glanced at the caller ID before she picked up. He found himself smiling, more than a little.

“Hi, Zoey,” he said. “This is Alex. I owe you an apology.”

The silence stretched out, and he was almost positive that, any moment, he would hear the dull click of the line disconnecting, followed by the silence of his phone shutting down. That would be her right, and he’d force himself to behave, and not try again, if it came to it. He just hoped that it wouldn’t. He wanted to cross his fingers like a child. He wanted to stroke his dick and remember the way she’d looked up at him through her eyelashes while she’d sucked on him so fiercely.

“Hi, Alex,” she said. Her tone was cautious, but not cold. “I’ll tell you the truth, I didn’t think I would be hearing from you again.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d want to. I was pretty out of line earlier. You asked some sensitive questions, and I just wasn’t expecting to need to handle them.” He winced. The statement was a quiet insinuation that the rag she worked at was exactly that, a trashy rag, and even if she knew it, the odds were against her wanting it pointed out.

“I have more sensitive questions for you, if you’d be willing to answer them,” she said. Interesting. He didn’t hear anything in her tone that was abrupt or upset. Good.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Over dinner?”

She was quiet again, and he was sure he had overstepped. Just before he decided he was going to need to apologize again, she let out a soft sigh. “You’re confusing me,” she said, quietly.

“Does it help at all if I say that I’m confused, myself?” He was still smiling, and he tried to let the feeling of the smile bleed into his voice a little bit. “I’m not entirely accustomed to this.”

She chuckled, and he had just a little more hope. “I imagine you have a very finely tuned sense of exactly what it is that you want.”

“You would not be wrong.”

“So what is it that you want?”

That was the $64 million question, wasn’t it? “Right now, I want to have dinner with you. It seems to me that I made you a promise this afternoon, and if you want, I’m still more than game to fulfill it.” There was a small sound on the other end of the line. Unless he was utterly mistaken, she’d just swallowed a whimper. His cock sprang to attention, and he closed his eyes for a moment, visualizing the Wall Street Journal’s bland black and white pages, and the endless streams of pluses and minuses in the financial section.

“I want to write an article about AEGIS,” she blurted out. “I can’t do that if we’re in a relationship.” 

The fog of lust faded, and a cold stone of fear settled in his stomach. “Well, how about this, then. I’ll take you out to dinner, and you explain to me what it is that you think is going on at my company.” He expended more effort than he’d expected keeping his tone from sounding threatening. Sweat had broken out under his arms. There was always some scandal in the wings, something about to go wrong, but there were too many possibilities right now, too many things that people weren’t telling him. And if it took a gossip reporter to clue him in, then fine. He’d take that. He’d save his pride for the places where it mattered.

“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine?” This time, it was her voice that was flirty and interested, and somewhere back behind the cold fear of what legacy his father had really left for him, he felt the desire for her flaring again. There were so many things a relationship could mean. After all, everyone in the world was in relationship with everyone else. Not that she meant that.

“Whatever you’re comfortable with,” he said. “How about you meet me at—” he ran through some very quick calculations in his head, between what he wanted to eat, and what would probably make her flinch. “Tap and Grill at about seven. We’ll talk.”

Another long pause. Apparently, he was good at making those happen. “I’m not familiar with the place. Dress code?”

“Casual is fine.” He waited, and she was quiet. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“This afternoon.” He hadn’t quite expected to say this, but curiosity was whirling through him. “It has been a very long time since someone paid attention to what I was actually asking for, instead of assuming that they knew better than me.”

She cleared her throat, which brought his smile back. “You’re welcome.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, why did you stop me from returning the favor?” A little whisper of sound came from her, and he pressed forward before he gathered enough sense to stop himself. “I know I only got my mouth on you for a minute last night, but I hope I didn’t do something that put you off.”

“No,” she answered quickly, her voice thready. “That’s not—I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need you to apologize,” he said. “You have every right to tell me no at any point, and you don’t ever have to apologize for that. I just want to make sure I didn’t hurt or upset you in some way.”

“Just confused me,” she said again. There was a little hitch to her breath that interested him.

“Because I keep saying that I don’t do serious, but here I am, calling you again.”

“Yes.”

“And there you are—where are you, at work? At home?”

“Home,” she said. There was that light sound again, that light breathiness. His cock was a rod of hot iron in his pants.

“At home. You probably changed into something more comfortable once you got there. Jeans? Comfy T-shirt?”

“Yes.”