Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
“YOU MUST GIVE hundreds of speeches,” Harper said into the phone the next Friday afternoon. “You’re not really nervous about speaking at your parents’ anniversary.”
“No,” Bastian admitted with humor. “Sharing my anxiety is just an excuse to talk to you.”
Sitting in her office, she sank back in her seat, admiring the covered window.
“You’ve called at least twice a day all week. You should know by now, you don’t need an excuse to speak to me.”
“I like having your phone number,” Bastian said. “I prove that by using it.”
Talking to him was the highlight of her day, every day. “You’ve had my phone number for a while.”
“Yeah, but I came too close to losing you.”
An experience she didn’t want to repeat any time soon. Just thinking about it returned the weight of sickness to her gut.
“So now you have to phone me twice a day from work to prove I’m still here?”
“I didn’t call twice from work yesterday,” he said. “I phoned once from work and once from home.”
Playing with him brought more than satisfaction.
She couldn’t explain why the delighted ease relaxed and comforted her in equal measure.
Maybe it was almost losing each other or having their relationship scrutinized on the internet that brought them closer.
Thankfully, the press were far more interested in why Roxie and Zairn had gone to such a low-level event.
Ah, how nice, her insignificance turned out to be a bonus. She didn’t know how her friend coped with such attention.
Though she had dealt with some of it herself.
Calls about new business had skyrocketed.
Wasn’t a bad thing, but she didn’t have an assistant, she’d never needed one.
Since the picture, she spent vast portions of her day making appointments and discussing packages.
More than she spent actually planning anything.
In some ways, that part of her job was becoming easier.
One new client asked about having an event at a Grand Hotel.
The chain was notoriously difficult to reserve for functions, especially at short notice.
To satisfy an adamant customer, she called the hotel to request they send her an email confirming they were unable to accommodate the event.
To her surprise, the staff wouldn’t do that and in fact did the opposite.
She got that date and offered several others. Life was getting expensive.
Bastian swore he hadn’t sent out any memos on her behalf.
Grand staff were choosing to elevate her company all on their own.
The picture of them kissing was out there for all to see.
Everyone and their dog had seen it. Pandering, Bastian explained to her, was an unfortunate side effect of notoriety.
As great as it was to be in professional demand, it didn’t compare to the excitement brought on by Bastian’s number flashing on her phone screen.
“There’s something kinky about you phoning me when I’m in bed,” she said, sitting up to doodle circles on her headed notepad.
“We should have phone sex tonight,” he said. “You never know what element of our relationship will be tested.”
“Phone sex!” She laughed. “It’s okay for you, you live in an empty house. I don’t.”
“I’d tell you to come over to mine, but then I wouldn’t be in an empty house.” The grin in his voice transferred to her lips. She closed her eyes, imagining his dimple. “And the phone part would become redundant.”
He loved to tease, and she could give it right back.
“You know for a big important businessman, you don’t seem to do a lot of work.”
His smile was still in his voice, though he seemed to be playing dumb. “I don’t?”
“I’ve had to return four of your calls this week. Every time I phone, Tina puts me straight through,” Harper said. “Do you just sit around all day waiting for women to call you?”
“Believe it or not, I’m not an easy guy to get on the phone.”
She laughed. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“You get special privileges,” he said. “You’re a rung above my mother on the calls ladder.”
“Wow,” Harper said, connecting her doodle circles. “That throws the phone sex thing into a completely different light.”
His single burst of laughter fired through her heart, awakening her hormones.
“Not the phone sex,” he asserted. “You’re the only one Tina will pull me from a meeting for.”
Whether they were dancing together or just talking on the phone, he flattered her. With words, with the look in his eye, with the way he admired her. His tone. His depth. His… everything.
“Is that why sometimes it takes you a minute to speak?”
“Don’t knock it, it’s more than my previous girlfriends got, believe me.”
“Which maybe explains the ‘previous’ in that sentence.” Pressing the point of her pen into her notebook, she winced when confessing, “My father wants you to come to dinner with us next week.”
“For your birthday?”
“No,” she said, returning to her doodling. “He’s desperate to meet you and wants to take you to a restaurant. If we eat at home, you won’t be suitably impressed.”
“Why not?”
Upon learning she and Bastian were back together, her father almost whooped. Davis didn’t bother to ask what happened, that was irrelevant to the picture he painted his clients. She’d never been his favorite anything and wasn’t sure she liked the new status.
Still, he was her father, she couldn’t refute that fact.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s something my father’s constructed in his mind, who knows where it came from.”
“Are your family cat people? That could be a reason.”
“No,” she said, wishing for a view of his dimple. “Would that be a deal breaker?”
“Definitely,” he said. “I could never have a cat loving girlfriend. No one would believe that.”
Sometimes he could be such a goof. CEOs the world over might quake in their boots when he strode into their boardrooms, they weren’t on the receiving end of his sense of humor. So much of him the world didn’t see.
“Much better we should be in a serious, long-term relationship after having met for just a few seconds in a hotel corridor. People would totally buy that.”
“Obviously,” he said on a comic scoff. “Isn’t that how most people get together?”
Pushing back in her chair, she could stay right there on the phone all day. Yes, she had piles of work to do, but she wasn’t ready to give up his voice yet. She may never be, though she should be wary of his responsibilities.
“Do you have work to do?”
“That’s the good thing about getting to the top,” he said. “Everyone underneath takes care of business. I delegate and prioritize what’s important.”
Her?
The Grand empire was a massive operation with hundreds, possibly thousands, of employees spread across the world. The hotels and airline were just the tip of the iceberg, Bastian had interests in industries beyond her understanding.
“Honestly…” she said, “I struggle to imagine it.”
“Imagine what?”
She could tell him anything, he’d told her that numerous times, that didn’t mean she wanted another fight.
“You’ll be offended.”
“I won’t. Trust me,” he said. “You struggle to imagine what?”
She took a deep breath. “I struggle to imagine you in your big fancy office with your minions scurrying around trying foolishly to please you.”
“I don’t own a Dickensian company. I made the conscious decision when I started out that I wouldn’t stand over them with a whip while the foreman stoked the fire.”
She laughed again. “You know what I mean. All that stuff on the internet…”
“I apologized for that, and I’ll keep apologizing, for as long as you need me to.”
Bloggers and the business media loved to comment on his life.
The kiss picture fueled another wave of commentary.
For the most part, people were complimentary.
From what she’d read, Bastian had a good reputation.
He was generous with his people, which wasn’t exactly a surprise, though he didn’t always extend that kindness to competitors.
To succeed, sometimes he had to be ruthless.
In truth, the sheer volume of what was written about him took her breath away.
“I don’t want you to apologize.” She wasn’t ashamed to be seen with him, even as a hussy enraptured by his mouth. “We have nothing to be ashamed of, I just… I wonder why people should care, you’re just a person.”
“You say that now,” he said. “But when you found out—”
“I was surprised. I felt foolish for not noticing the obvious when it was right in front of me. And you were right, I did construct a new image wholly unrelated to our time together. But… I knew almost straight away that I’d been an idiot.”
“You did?”
Breathing in, she prepared herself. “At your mom’s…
after dinner when… when we argued upstairs…
I didn’t want to leave,” she admitted. “I wanted to sink into one of those couches with you… that big TV, the fire… Maybe for a minute we might’ve forgotten everything else, our lives, our business, our families…
” Silence. No response. Had they been cut off? “Bastian, are you still there?”
“I have to tell you something,” he said after a longer pause. “I want to tell you, but I don’t want you to get upset. We’ve never argued over the phone before so if you hang up on me…”
Her heart raced, what had she missed this time? “I won’t.”
“I’m saying if you do, I’ll come over there right now. No respectable distance. I’ll be in the car in a minute.”
“You won’t have to come here.”
“If we’re not communicating, I will be at your door,” he said. “Whatever happens with us, with this, whatever we are, we stay in touch, okay, Sweet?”
Maybe sometimes that ruthless edge trickled into his personal life too.
“Okay,” she said, but wasn’t going to let him forget that he’d piqued her curiosity. “What did you want to tell me?”
“The house, my house where you spent the night.”
She stopped doodling as dread crept in. “What about it?”
“That isn’t my bedroom.” It sounded like he braced for… something. “You didn’t sleep in a guest room.”
“I don’t understand what—”