Chapter 8 #2
We pulled into the parking structure at Meridian Studios. He cut the engine and reached into the door compartment for a fresh pair of gloves. They were different from the ones he’d been driving in, thinner.
He peeled the old pair off, and for a second his hands were bare and I saw them properly for the first time. Long fingers. Clean nails. The kind of hands that looked like they’d be good at things.
Okay… Uh! I definitely shouldn’t be thinking about this.
He started pulling the new pair on, one finger at a time, and my brain, my silly useless brain, flashed back to the farmers market. Those hands. On my chest.
Get it together. He’s your boss. He sanitizes his own gloves. This is not a man you should be having these thoughts about.
"Are you ready?" he asked, turning to me.
"Yes." Too fast. "Yep. Ready. Let’s go."
He looked at me for a second longer than necessary. "Your face is red. Are you alright?"
"Fine. Great. Totally fine. It’s the heat."
"The air conditioning has been on for twenty minutes."
"I run warm."
He didn’t push it. Thank God.
The meeting was where Jace transformed. If I thought the man in the office was intense, the man in the boardroom was a different species entirely.
He sat at the head of the table across from three Meridian Studios executives who were pitching the movie adaptation of ‘Ethereal Vanguard’, Hunter Interactive’s biggest franchise.
The game had sold forty million copies worldwide.
The expanded edition was breaking pre-order records, and now Meridian wanted to turn it into a blockbuster.
Jace listened to their pitch with his hands folded on the table, gloved fingers interlaced, his face giving away absolutely nothing.
He asked questions that made the executives hesitate.
He challenged their budget projections. He dismantled a timeline they’d clearly rehearsed and rebuilt it in real time, pulling numbers from memory that made their CFO blink.
He was brilliant. Watching him work, I forgot he was difficult. Forgot the gloves, the sanitizer, the rigid control. All I could see was why he ran a company that made games millions of people couldn't put down.
I took notes, tried to keep up, and tried not to look at him too much, which was harder than it should have been because the man commanding that room bore almost no resemblance to the one I’d held on an elevator floor.
My eyes kept drifting to his gloved hands. His fingers were distracting. The leather. The way he tapped the table when making a point. I looked at those hands and my brain went somewhere wildly unprofessional. I dragged it back. Then it wandered there again anyway.
Our eyes met once across the table. Brief. Maybe half a second. He was mid-sentence about international distribution rights and his gaze caught mine and I forgot what I was writing. My pen just stopped moving. He looked away first and kept talking and I stared at my notebook.
Get it together, Anna. He's your boss.
I underlined something in my notes that didn't need underlining.
He sanitizes his gloves. He fired you in a nightclub. This is not a man you're supposed to have wild thoughts about.
I wrote the date in the margin. I'd already written it at the top of the page.
These are not hands you should be thinking about.
I pressed my pen harder into the paper.
Stop it. Stop thinking about the hands.
The meeting ended. Handshakes all around, which Jace didn’t participate in.
I excused myself to use the bathroom.
On my way back, voices drifted from around the corner. Two men. Meridian employees, based on the lanyards. They didn’t see me.
"Did you see the gloves?" One of them laughed. "Avoided my hand like he was handling biohazardous material."
"The guy’s a freak," the other one said. "Brilliant, sure, but a certified freak. How anyone works for him is beyond me."
"I heard his last four assistants quit. All of them."
"No surprise there. Who wants to work for someone that insane?"
I stopped walking.
The anger hit instant and sharp, already in my spine, already moving my feet before my brain caught up. And it caught me off guard, because it wasn't for me.
I came around the corner. They saw me and the conversation died. Two guys in suits, mid-thirties, lanyards swinging, coffee cups in hand, both wearing the expressions of men who’d just been caught.
"Hi." I smiled tightly. "I’m Mr. Hunter’s assistant. Anna Wilson."
They looked at each other.
"If you have opinions about Mr. Hunter, you’re welcome to share them with him directly. He’s just down the hall. I can arrange the meeting right now. Walk you there myself."
Neither of them moved.
"No?" I tilted my head. "Then maybe keep it to yourselves. Because the man you just called a freak just spent the last hour out-thinking every person in that room, including your boss. And the gloves?" I held their gaze. "They’re none of your business."
I turned and walked around the corner. My eyes widened a fraction—there he was.
My heart was pounding. My hands were shaking. From his expression, I couldn’t gauge if he’d heard or not. I hoped not.