Chapter 16
Lucy
Just like with Nico, Cole Davenport is completely different in person than he appears to be in the media.
He smells fresh, like laundry detergent, and his chocolate brown curls are long to the point of almost being shaggy. His appearance and the way he moves give the impression that his mind is on something else.
Cole is quiet and direct, focused. When he first found me in the office, I thought he was going to fight me. Then, he just turned and walked back into his office, like my heart wasn’t absolutely thundering in my chest at that point.
Like I wasn’t gob-smacked by the fact that Cole, too, is gorgeous.
A little leaner than Nico and Dane, but just as tall.
Dane is always dressed in a suit, and Nico always looks ready to purchase a beach property, but Cole is…
different. My internet stalking has told me that he’s roughly the same age as Nico and Dane, but he looks younger.
Maybe it’s the fact that he doesn’t have the same imposing figure as Dane, or the same effortless charm as Nico.
Cole is the least intimidating of the three, even as I instantly realized just how smart he is. He’s more relaxed and somehow more effortless at the same time. Right now, he’s wearing a deep green crewneck sweater over a white T-shirt, jeans, and white sneakers.
When we get back to the executive floor, he immediately goes into his office, and I go back to my work. But talking to him, being around him—it causes the same problem I experience around Dane, and even Nico when he’s here.
I just can’t focus.
After another hour of trying—and failing—to get all my tasks taken care of, I decide to call it a night.
Besides, if I’m not home soon, Aunt Ruby is going to figure out I’ve been gone, and she's going to flip if she finds out that I’ve been at the office.
She thinks working on the weekend is a sin, and I’m not in the mood to sit through one of her impassioned lectures about living life to the fullest.
But when I hold my access card to the scanner outside of the elevator to go downstairs, nothing happens. No beep, no little flashing green light. I wait for a moment, frown, and try it again.
Once more… nothing.
I stand in front of the elevator for a long moment, thinking of the intense focus on Cole’s face, when I finally suck in a breath and force myself to walk back through the lobby, past my desk, and to the door leading into Cole’s office.
He’s at his desk, scratching something out on paper, and it takes a moment for his gaze to flit to mine after I knock on the door frame.
“Hey.” Why am I so nervous to talk to him? It feels like sacrilege to interrupt his work. “Sorry—I think—my key card isn’t working.”
His brow wrinkles, then relaxes, and he’s rising from his seat, reaching into his pocket for his own key card. Mine is white, but Dane, Nico, and Cole all have sleeker, black cards.
But when Cole holds his black card to the sensor, nothing happens.
“Try the stairs,” he says. It’s different from when Dane tells me to do something—less commanding. Cole says try the stairs like it’s something obvious, like we’re thinking the same thing. Like another person might say have a nice day.
I turn, walking down the short hallway and to the stairs. I’m as much a fan of getting a little extra exercise as the next person, but I’ve never even thought of taking these stairs—we’re nearly forty floors up.
When I press my card to the scanner, it once again does nothing.
“Oh,” I whisper, and when I turn around, Cole is watching from the end of the hallway. “That’s not good—is it?”
“Don’t start any fires,” he says, and I’m not quite sure if it’s meant to be a joke or not.
“We’re trapped?” I ask, and when he nods, I let out a breathy, exasperated, “Not again.”
Cole tilts his head toward the elevator. “This has happened before?”
“No…” I close my eyes, trying not to think about climbing into Dane’s lap on the plane at this particular moment. “Never mind.”
I trot back down the hallway as Cole crouches down, reaching into his pocket to pull out a multi-tool of some sort.
In awe, I watch as he jimmies a flat head into the scanner and pops it right off the wall, staring scrutinizingly at the workings inside. It’s all wires and chips—about as familiar to me as all the veins and chambers of the human heart.
“You might want to sit down,” he says, simply, after a second of staring at it. “This is going to take a minute.”
“…and he’s always been like that?”
Cole nods, popping his tool into his mouth before switching to his laptop, which is balanced on a trash can and plugged into the little pad beside the elevator by several wires.
At first, we’d sat quietly, but I was fidgeting, finding the silence hard to handle. The lights had long gone out, and through the door to the stairs, I could see a red bulb flashing.
Dread and exhaustion were slowly creeping up on me, leaving me with a low-grade sense of fear in my stomach. So, instead of staying quiet like Cole probably would prefer, I started chattering to him like a circus monkey.
And, to my surprise, he’s been answering.
“Yes,” he says, around the tool, glancing at me briefly before typing several lines of code into his computer, hitting enter, and setting it down again as more lines appear on the screen. “Dane was like that, even back in college.”
“It’s wild to me that you’ve been friends for that long.” Cole’s brow twitches at the word friends, and I think about what Dane said. Not friends—platonic soul mates. “How did you meet in college?”
“Nico and Dane already knew one another. I didn’t really have any friends, preferred to stick to myself. My sister, Claire, was a fanatic about me finding my tribe, or whatever, but I preferred to be alone. I was always like that.”
He pauses, types something into his computer, goes back to the panel and snips a wire, re-checking the laptop screen once more. For a second, I think he’s completely forgotten the conversation, but he goes on abruptly when the program starts running again.
“Dane’s father made him join the yachting club.
Dane hated being on the boat, but he hated being bad at something more.
” Cole speaks at a fast clip, but I’m enthralled, so I catch every word.
“When he realized Nico was the best, he formed a team with him. Their team began winning competitions thanks to Nico’s natural talent and Dane’s leadership.
Nico saw business potential in the partnership, but they needed one more.
A tech guy. He and I had a computer class together.
Guess he thought I was pretty smart.” Cole flashes me a smile that makes my heart stutter to a stop in my chest.
God—if the man is handsome frowning, he’s unreal when he smiles.
“Nico’s good at reading people,” I murmur, and Cole nods. In fact, both Dane and Nico are, but Dane’s is more calculating, creating distance. When Nico reads you, it makes you feel like you’re already best friends.
“He is,” Cole states. “I ignored him, at first. But he was the only guy in that class who didn’t constantly annoy me.
And I needed the money—” Cole pauses, his throat catching, and I wait, watching something like grief flash over his features.
As much as I want to push, I don’t let myself—forcing my lips shut, waiting for him to go on.
After a beat, he does. “So, when he asked me to join in with them on a business opportunity, I did.”
“What was the opportunity?” It’s not what I really want to ask, but I’ve just met him. It’s not like I have the right to ask about the sadness I just caught in his expression. Cole switches between the wires and his computer again, then glances at me, a rogue curl falling over his forehead.
“It was the nineties. There was too much going on with tech, specifically the internet. We started one of the very first SaaS companies. Dane predicted the advantageous margins, Nico built the team, and I wrote the code.”
I bite my lip, “…SaaS?”
“Software as a service,” Cole says, “I programmed the whole thing in two afternoons. It was stupidly simple, but we got a ton of customers from Nico’s marketing ideas, and then Microsoft bought us.
Big payday. Could have gone our separate ways then, but Nico already had another idea, and I thought I could do it, and Dane was hungry for more, so—”
Cole cuts himself off when there’s a beep, and I hear, down the hallway, the click of the door to the stairwell opening.
“Oh!” I surprise myself by jumping up, relief coursing through me so fast I feel like a shaken bottle of champagne. “We’re free!”
But my leg knocks against my chair, and I stumble.
“Well—” Cole starts, but his words end with an oomph when I collide with him, knocking him to the ground and landing on top of him.
We slot together instantly, Cole falling back, one of my legs sliding between his, my chest pressing against him. For a dizzying, suspended moment, we just stare at each other, breathing hard.
Maybe it’s how good it felt to be with Dane. Maybe it’s how much I like Cole’s curls, or his quiet nature, or how smart he is. Maybe it’s even the exhaustion—the fact that it’s well past two in the morning, and my body was stressed from being trapped once more.
I don’t know why I do it, but I stare into his eyes for a beat—mapping the greens, golds, and faint, faint blue in his hazel irises—before leaning down and pressing my mouth to his.
His mouth is hot, and opens for me instantly, his hands coming to my back, firm but gentle. Present but not insisting on anything.
With Dane, the moment I initiated the touch, it was out of my hands. And I liked it—I liked that I didn’t have to think with him, only had to follow his instructions. Do what he wanted and receive pleasure as a reward. There’s a certain thrill in handing over the reins.
But this—this is a different kind of thrill. Cole lets me kiss him, over and over, and this time, I’m the one leading the dance. I push my tongue into his mouth, and the noise he lets out from the back of his throat is enough to shatter any self-control I might have had.
I sink down into him, sighing and plunging my fingers into his hair. He slides the tips of his fingers up under my shirt—my Lancaster softball shirt from high school—and skims along the waistband of my sweats, his hands cool against my hot skin.
He kisses me back like he’s solving a problem, like making two sides of an equation balance. Still, there’s a certain hesitancy in him, like he’s not sure he should be doing this.
Maybe because he shouldn’t.
And I shouldn’t, either.
There’s a loud beep, and I jump as the light above us floods on, all that red, low light, gentle and practically romantic. I stare at Cole through it, breathing hard, watching as he pulls himself up to sitting.
“That,” he says, eyes a little unfocused, crewneck twisted from where I tugged on it, “would be the cameras coming back on.”
“I—” I try, but there’s nothing I can say. I can’t make sense of what I’ve just done.
First Dane, now Cole? I just met him, and I’m already throwing myself at him.
So, instead of saying anything at all, I bolt to my feet, grab my things, and run all the way down the stairwell I thought I would never grace with my presence.