God's Eye (4 page)

From the space above his bed, he fell naked onto the comforter, his skin still too raw to relish the textures and temperatures of the fabric and soot he had tumbled into. Muscles stretched and skin rippled as he flexed and curled the new body. But he couldn’t stay and coddle it, no matter how badly he wanted to.

Trailing ash and leaving faint footprints as he went, Allistair dashed for the bathroom. He had to see if he’d done it. If he’d accomplished “same.” If not, he’d have to go back and incorporate again, which would drain his energy further and interfere with his plans for this day.

As his feet carried him, his ears searched the sounds around him, grateful that he couldn’t distinguish the overloud beeping that had occurred when he’d come into his new home for the first time yesterday. His passing had set off smoke detectors in three rooms, as surely burnt flesh should. He’d been grateful they weren’t attached to an alarm system and that he wasn’t in an apartment building. He’d disabled them all, first thing.

The mirror spoke to him even as he approached.

He’d done it. Allistair today would pass through the human world identifiable as the man he’d been yesterday.

The mirror also told him that his brand-new body needed a shower.

He turned back and gathered up the four corners of the comforter so as not to spill any more of the soot. With the blanket wadded up in his arms, he stepped into the shower and turned on the spray. Water hit him, cold as ocean depths, almost painful to his skin. But pleasurable all the same.

The temperature changed as he held the comforter up, letting as much soot as possible run down the drain bit by tiny bit. He didn’t want to explain massive quantities of ash to a repairman. Wringing as much water as he could from the bulky blanket, Allistair then turned to the task of scrubbing himself.

•  •  •

The drive into the office was uneventful. A good thing, since Katharine’s brain was off track.

Or maybe it wasn’t. She had a duty to fulfill. Certainly one required by her mother and father. She wondered if therefore maybe she owed Light & Geryon as well. As the only remaining Geryon heir, it was her job to marry and produce another heir, preferably a spare as well–although that had been an oversight on her parents’ part. At thirty-two, she wasn’t getting any younger in the baby department, and the knowledge that her family was waiting was a force breathing down her neck. Never mind that her mother hadn’t lived to see her first grandchild. The idea had been planted long ago, and she was required to see it through.

The problem was, most daughters were married off in their twenties to wealthy men from the right families. But Katharine wasn’t just a daughter–she was filling in as son, too, entrenched in the family business. Her mother had once huffed at her marital lack, arguing that Katharine’s father had surely accomplished what he had needed to: he had run the Geryon side of the investment firm and found a wife and fathered a child. Katharine had held her tongue, not pointing out that they’d fallen a little short on number of children. It wasn’t just her fault they were short of options.

There were a lot of inherent problems with that comparison. No matter what her place in the company was, Katharine was stuck as a female. Short of a sex-change operation, there wasn’t much she could do about that. And it completely changed the playing field. The men in high positions at the company had women draping themselves across the shoulders of their Armani suits and wrapping their silk ties in manicured fists. There was never a shortage of willing females–and therefore opportunities. Katharine had no such options.

Apparently, she intimidated the hell out of most of the men she met. She outearned them, and often outranked them. And the practically guaranteed co-CEO position rankled. There seemed to be only two categories of men who were interested in her. The first were gold diggers: male counterparts of the uber-blondes at high-end bars. Only these men worked. Hard. Their work was to woo her, and their goal was to build a future, a future resting on Katharine’s place at Light & Geryon. Endless money, nonexistent responsibilities. The second type wanted her spot. Each figured if he married her, he would get the position at the firm–Katharine could stay home and make babies and run charity events. While she might have no ambition to actually run the family company, the thought of being a Main Line housewife like her mother was enough to make her dig some up.

Zachary Andras had come to her door a second time and asked her out. Perhaps at dinner tonight she would be able to figure out whether he belonged to either of those two categories. She harbored a faint hope that he didn’t.

Her car dinged at her, telling her she was trying to get out with the keys still in the ignition. It was also telling her it was time to get her head screwed on straight. Yanking at the keychain, Katharine gathered her thoughts and her things and headed inside.

In her own hallway on Light & Geryon’s twentieth floor, she made out Allistair hovering over Lisa’s desk, a wide, telling smile on his face. With a sigh, she reprimanded them both. “Mr. West. Do not spend your time flirting with Miss Breu.” She directed her gaze to Lisa next. “Even if she states that it is a job requirement. There should be no fraternization among employees.”

Katharine stepped through her door with Mr. West hot on her sharp heels. “Is that a company policy?”

In her own office, feet planted on the carpet, she turned to face him squarely. “Not in print, but at any level of common sense, yes.”

Ignoring him now, or trying to, she settled her things on her desk. It was hard to ignore the presence of another person in her space. There was plenty of physical room, but she’d been taking up all the atmosphere here for a while now, and Mr. West was an affront to that. Or maybe it was him; maybe
he
took up too much atmosphere.

He worked quietly over his desk, a smaller version of hers, in the corner he’d been relegated to. His dark hair was combed out of his face, letting her see all the planes and angles while he worked. His fingers marched across the keys in short bursts, alternating the staccato typing with scratching notes on a legal pad he had carefully set at his side. He used the computer programs she had first showed him the day before with almost the same ease that he used the fountain pen.

Her eyes seemed pulled to him, unable to look away or to concentrate on her own work. Finally she forced herself to open her programs and do something. She checked her emails first, returning those she could and finding out what was needed for others. That alone generated work for the first half of the day. But that was standard in her world. Researchers found what was needed for the other employees, and when that was done they dug up other investment opportunities.

Katharine was likely the most overpaid researcher the firm had ever seen. But she was a Geryon. So she didn’t think about it much. It was, quite simply, what was.

She pulled files, sent Mr. West out on errands under the guise of his “getting to know the layout of the office,” and showed him another path through the computer system. He hadn’t seemed to have forgotten anything from yesterday, so Katharine amused herself by giving him a pop quiz.

He aced it. Much to her surprise.

After he left for a short lunch break, she pondered the possibility that West was her replacement. That would mean she was headed to a new department. Katharine pondered her options for the rest of the day. Her hands kept up with her responsibilities, but her brain was elsewhere. Even as she drove home, she wondered what her next department would be. She had held every position in the tax department. That had been kind of fun, trying to outthink the laws and find a legal place to store money for Light & Geryon’s wealthiest clients. But aside from running that department, there wasn’t much she could learn there. And Dean Geckhoff wasn’t likely to kick the bucket anytime soon, which was the only way he was going to let go of the death grip he had on his job.

Client Relations was an option. She’d started there but hadn’t learned the whole arena before her father had deemed her fit to move to another position.

Her key was in the lock of her condo door before she was able to jump from the runaway train her brain had become and bring her focus back to the present. She had a date with Zachary Andras tonight, and this morning she’d have willingly taken a bet that nothing would have budged her mind from that. But her brain had been absolutely hijacked by curiosity about her assistant.

Now she boldly walked into her own apartment, determined to be unafraid of what she might find. Her nose sniffed at the air, checking for a singed smell, but detected nothing out of the ordinary. The last thing she needed was for Zachary to show up at her door and see a wide streak of soot in the middle of her carpet. Worse, she wouldn’t have a clue how to explain it. But she didn’t find anything. Hopefully that was a good sign.

She changed clothes, noting that all her hangers were in the appropriate places. Her shoes stood in a sharp line across the floor of her closet. She rehung her jacket, slipped her pumps back into the space they had vacated that morning, and chose something suitable for a date with a man who could afford the corner unit in her building. A man who wore a suit to work but went out to delis in jeans and a sweater. Unconsciously, she emulated Zachary’s look, pulling a “date” outfit from behind the other clothes. Throwing on a pair of “fun” shoes, she figured she could go anywhere, except maybe on a hike.

Katharine picked pins from her hair and brushed it loose while she waited. Unusually nervous about the date, she fidgeted around the apartment, checking her email and nibbling just a little. She couldn’t recall feeling this hyped up about something as stupid as a date before. Then again, she couldn’t recall a date where she hadn’t already been close to certain which kind of predator the man was prior to the first course.

At seven sharp, her bell rang for the second time in three years. Katharine sprang up, again checking for soot around the room, or black animals, or to see if her sanity had wandered away while she wasn’t looking. The one thing she didn’t look at was the peephole. It had to be Zachary on the other side, right?

Throwing the door wide open, she startled him from a motion that looked like maybe he was settling into his skin for the evening. Blue eyes looked deeper than the surface of her, creating a buzz that she hadn’t felt in … well, maybe ever. “You look ready.”

It wasn’t a question, and she didn’t know how to respond. So she slung her purse over her shoulder and said, “Yes.”

His smile made her want to follow him down the hall or into hell. And she wondered why she hadn’t questioned the wisdom of dating the man next door and why, even after thinking that, she still didn’t question it. Zachary didn’t speak until the doorman had handed her into the passenger side of his car. There was a tiny thrill in his assumption of superiority. He
was
more than the other men in the room. There was something there; it radiated through his bearing and around him as well. It was also evident in the low-slung car they were cruising in–a wealthy man’s toy. Turning to face him, Katharine asked him about his new condo, but not about where they were going. She’d been taught to hold her tongue on that one, and so she did.

Zachary answered with details about the move, and his story about something the movers had broken was enough to make her laugh. The way he told it radiated alpha male, but there was no mention of where he’d moved from, why he’d moved, or any of the other standard bits of information. Katharine tucked that observation away, knowing that she could deal with those issues later. Men loved to talk about themselves.

LeDieu was crowded when Zachary slid the car up to the entrance. Without a word he handed over the keys and pocketed the valet ticket so deftly it was as though it had simply disappeared. People standing outside the restaurant stepped back as they approached–as though Zachary were a war hero, or Moses. The hostess smiled at him, a soft, welcoming bend of mouth that told everyone in eyesight that she could take care of more than just getting him a table.

Had he not responded so coolly, Katharine would have taken more offense at the hostess, but Zachary brushed it off. Maybe he was used to such offers. He was, after all, beautiful. Katharine wanted to wonder what it was that interested him in her. But once they were seated, his attention turned full-watt onto her and she ceased to care. In the end, it didn’t matter what interested him; it was enough that he was interested.

She spent the evening telling him everything about herself. Trained socialite though she was, she still wasn’t able to get more than a passing comment or two out of him about his life and what he liked and wanted. By the end of dinner she knew only a small handful of facts: he was an only child, a lawyer, and new to L.A. by way of New York. In exchange, he knew all her deepest secrets.

Normally she would never have told such things, but there was something about him that made the words come tumbling out. About her parents, about their expectations, about her work at Light & Geryon, about the employees who weren’t her employees but still treated her like the fire-breathing boss.

There must have been something in the wine–she bordered on feeling drunk. Although she couldn’t be. She was too well schooled to let herself do something like that. Then again, maybe she’d been hit by the proverbial lightning that comes with falling in love. Or maybe it was just the kind of chemistry that leads to it. Never having experienced it before, she didn’t know how to deal with it.

At least that’s what she told herself later as she stood in her living room, Zachary’s hands peeling her clothing and his mouth sending hot streaks of need through her. Before she could think any further, they were tangled on her bed, cool sheets twisting around limbs that reached for each other. She opened for him and his name fell from her mouth in a cross between a sigh and a moan as he drove into her. Countless minutes later an intense orgasm slammed into her, tearing the world apart before her eyes.