Chapter 15 #2
Work kept me busy for the next several hours.
A video conference with investors in Dubai.
Email responses to the head of R&D, an official signature on a letter to the trade secretary of Portugal, and a call with the finance team to discuss expansion funding.
Through it all, I was vaguely aware of gardeners working outside.
The open doors to my balcony framed a view of the pool terrace and the sea beyond it, but to the left were also views of and a short staircase down to my grandmother’s favorite garden.
It wasn’t until everyone on the finance call except my sister hung up that I realized one of the men working outside my room was Jett.
He’d changed out of the linen pants and into a pair of running shorts and shoes. A dark tank exposed his shoulders to the sun, and his skin carried the sheen of sweat. The gardener he was chatting with seemed oblivious to the sheer temptation Jett Davis presented.
“Sure you can’t come with me? Jasmine keeps asking me about you.”
I tried to focus on what my sister was saying. “Come with you to the Caymans? No. I’m in Italy. I thought I told you that.”
“You probably did. I’ve been buried in work.”
I forced myself to look away from the scene in the garden in which Jett had been gathering clippings between making the gardener laugh.
“You’re always buried in work,” I told Celeste.
“Yes, well. There are worse things.”
I hummed in agreement, thinking about the unspoken alternative. Our father hadn’t worked enough. Had played too much. Our mother had never worked at all.
“Anyway, I really wish you’d come with me. You need a vacation even more than I do.”
“I’m on vacation,” I said. “The Paxis players don’t show up until Friday.”
Her laugh was clear over the line, familiar and comforting for all that she was making fun of me.
“A couple of days in the villa to prep for your silly gaming week is hardly a vacation. Besides, I might believe you if you tell me you haven’t checked in with the office today for more than a few minutes. ”
I ignored her implication, my eyes sliding to the balcony doors and back away from them. The old gilt mirror on the wall by the suite door caught my attention. My grandmother had checked her lipstick in that mirror every time she’d left the suite.
“It’s weird being here,” I admitted.
“But you were already there in January, right?”
“It’s not the same. With everyone coming, I’m the host. They moved me into the primary suite.”
“Is Willow there, too?” I could hear the hesitation in Celeste’s voice.
“No, why?”
“I don’t know. So you won’t be alone? She’s not my favorite person, but then again, I haven’t spent much time with her.”
“Which is fine because we’re not dating,” I said peevishly, my eyes moving back out through the balcony doors like little torpedoes whose navigation was completely fucked-up.
Jett was leaning over, gathering a rogue branch from under a bush.
Shorts pulled tight across his ass, and his hamstrings curved along the back of his thighs.
“Well, maybe if you were dating someone, they would be a comfort to you right now,” she snapped back. “And maybe you wouldn’t be such a fucking asshole to someone who loves you.”
I blew out a breath and closed my eyes. “I’m sorry. I just…” I opened my eyes and let them find Jett again. “I haven’t found anyone who’ll let me be who I am.”
“I’m not sure you’ve actually been looking,” she pointed out.
That was probably fair. I didn’t have the bandwidth for it.
“Who are you, Johnny?” she asked gently, using the nickname she’d used since she’d heard my fourth-grade teacher mistakenly call me by my first name. Jett had been righter than he knew when he’d teasingly called me John. “Tell me.”
My sister and I had always been close. Maybe with the exception of the years when I’d been in college and she’d still been in high school, held in my mother’s socialite thrall.
But when I’d gone to London for graduate school and she’d done a semester at Oxford, we’d become close again, bonding over the impossibility of feeling sorry for ourselves while also having everything we’d ever asked for.
“’Cept decent parents,” I remembered her muttering while sitting on the floor next to a half-eaten pizza in a takeout box.
“Except that,” I’d agreed.
“Thank god for Grandpa,” she’d added.
“Yep.”
I dragged in a breath and thought about confiding in her. Telling her I was having a midlife crisis a decade too soon. Telling her I’d gone full Richard Gere and hired myself a Julia Roberts… er, a Julian Roberts.
But it was a bell that couldn’t be unrung. If I told her I’d found one man temporarily attractive and intriguing, she’d try to set me up with every gay man she’d ever met.
And that wasn’t what this was.
“I’m a happy workaholic,” I said, stretching my legs out in front of me and reminding myself I needed to do some kind of exercise if I wanted any chance of sleeping tonight. “My first priority is Maris. And not many women are happy to take second place to the job. Or men. You know that.”
She laughed again. “For a minute there, I thought you meant men as in you being with a man.”
I squeezed my back teeth together. “Ha.”
My eyes flicked back outside. To the man who was now carrying a patio umbrella out to a table, his biceps popping and shoulders catching the sun.
“You’re not wrong,” she continued wryly. “My new idea is to date someone at the office. We can be workaholics and still see each other.”
Considering she worked for Maris, I was not impressed with her idea. “Absolutely not.”
Her laughter rang out enough that I could picture her assistant smiling to herself through the door to her own office.
“Locke, I’m hardly going to harass an employee. It was a—”
“Everyone at Maris is my employee,” I reminded her. “My responsibility. And we have rules for a reason. Promise me, Cellie.”
She was suddenly quiet on the other end of the line. Enough that I pictured her silently fuming and began to feel like an ass.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Wow. An apology from a Maris. I should buy a lottery ticket.”
The old joke made me smile, but I was glad she couldn’t see me. “I just—”
“I’m going to pretend you don’t actually think I would date an employee,” she interrupted. “It was a joke. You, of all people, should know that. This call is over. Feel free to try me again when you remember who I am, Locke.”
The call ended.
I was crushed. She was right. I’d overreacted. I’d been so distracted by the goddamned go-go boy in my garden, I hadn’t had my head on straight.
I shot her a text apologizing, but I knew she wouldn’t accept it for at least a couple of days.
Accusing her of doing something our father had been notorious for was unforgivable.
And she wasn’t even the Maris currently sleeping with an employee.