Chapter 4
Anthony
Iarrive at Voss no eyes watching my face for the cracks I refuse to show. I want a moment to breathe in the stillness of the empty top floor before she shows her face.
The lights flick on one by one as I walk down the hall toward my office.
The late autumn morning sun only half-lights the unlit zones.
Ironically, the city that never sleeps is waking up and starting to move down below.
For reasons I never quite understood, this is the time of day when being up this high over it all feels the most like power.
I slide my coat off as I step into my office.
I hang it in the closet, shut the hall door behind me, and set my briefcase down on my desk.
I don’t bother turning on a light. It’ll be bright in here soon enough when the sun fully rises and burns off the misty fog.
I don’t love working beneath harsh overhead lighting, anyway.
The idea of leaving the door between my office and April’s closed is preposterous to me, especially when I know that’s exactly what she’d want.
She’ll need every ounce of nerve just to show up, and I’m not letting a closed door fool her into thinking she’s earned a moment’s peace.
She can walk straight into the storm. I won’t sit here listening to her gather her courage.
I open it just wide enough so that I’ll be able to see her the moment she steps in. Part of me wants her to walk in and see there’s nowhere to hide.
Part of me wants to see how she’ll react.
I lean back against my desk, arms crossed, letting the silence stretch.
I tweaked the Paris press release last night once I realized there wasn’t a chance in hell that it would be fixed this morning, so there’s nothing to do but wait.
The email, that email, is still fresh in my mind, sharp as glass.
I’ve read it ten times since yesterday evening, not because I didn’t understand it, but because I did. Too well.
And then came her messages. Sent by accident, or maybe fate, clearly meant for someone named Nicky who is absolutely not me.
When they started trickling in, I thought for a moment that it wasn’t about me.
I didn’t believe it was real, thought that maybe I was thinking too much into it, that she was talking about someone else.
But the moment she mentioned my text asking her to come in early, the moment she wrote my name, the evidence turned damning.
Her words weren’t just crude. They were honest, frustrated, bare—a written-out fantasy she’d clearly indulged one too many times.
They were enough to make my brain short-circuit and my blood rush south.
They were enough to make me question too many HR policies.
They were enough to make me consider things I shouldn’t be considering more seriously.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it all night.
I couldn’t stop imagining her, somewhere, probably getting off on the idea of her splayed out like a feast on my fucking desk.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how she looked beneath me when she picked up that piece of paper.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
And my hand, unfortunately, was not enough to quell the thoughts or turn them into something sane.
I hear her before I see her. The faint scuff of heels on marble, the clumsy jangle of her keycard against that stupid little bee pin she keeps on her lanyard, the beep of that keycard at the glass entryway. She’s early, and I almost admire it. Even in a crisis, she’s punctual.
The moment she steps into her office, she freezes.
I see it. That brief halt, the way her shoulders tense when she notices the door between us is ajar.
Her eyes stared straight ahead at her desk.
She takes a breath as if she’s bracing herself, then sets down her bag.
She disappears behind the door for a moment before it moves with the aching slowness that makes me impatient. And then she walks in.
She’s got a deathly pallor, but her cheeks are flushed more than I’ve ever seen.
Her makeup is almost nonexistent. She either rushed this morning or thought better of wearing it in case she cried.
She’s dressed in stockings and a black, knee-length skirt with a white blouse that hangs loose around everything but her breasts.
Her blonde hair is damp at the ends, hanging over her shoulders and breasts instead of up like it normally is.
Christ, I’ve never wanted a fistful of anything more in my life.
“Close the door,” I say, my voice level, but just a touch softer than the way I’d usually speak to her. She blinks at me once with her big green eyes, searching. She listens and closes it behind her, but her eyes lock on mine like she’s begging for mercy.
I nod toward the chair in front of my desk, not more than a foot in front of where I’m leaning. “Sit.”
She blinks faster, crossing the space slowly, her heels clicking with every step. The subtle scent of her perfume wafts over to me. She moves within inches of me, turning to sit, and I dig my fingers into my biceps just to keep myself from doing something insane. Even though this is already insane.
She lowers herself into the deep brown leather chair like it might explode and crosses her legs.
She pulls her arms in tight to her chest, which only accentuates her breasts more.
Her face is composed in the loosest sense of the word.
She’s not crying or outwardly panicking; she’s simply sitting there with her lips parted. I’ve never seen her so…thrown.
I know she’s waiting for the guillotine. So I take my time.
“I received a very interesting string of messages last night,” I begin, my voice steady as if we’re discussing supply chain logistics or the Paris release, like we were meant to be doing. “They were…vivid. Unfiltered. Surprisingly articulate for something typed, I assume, while drinking.”
She flinches, just slightly, but lifts her chin. Her eyes focus off to my right as she shakes her head just once. No.
“No?” I ask, leaning right to place myself in her view.
“You weren’t drinking?” She meets my gaze, then shakes her head again before her eyes dart away.
Ah. That changes everything. “What were you doing then?” I ask, tilting my head to the side.
She glances at me once before averting her eyes again. Silence. “Oh, you—”
“No,” she chokes, her cheeks flaming. “No, no, I wasn’t—I was making tea. I was just making tea, Anthony. Christ.”
I stare down at her, unmoving. “I didn’t even finish my sentence.”
“You didn’t need to.”
The words slip out before my brain has the chance to vet them. “Because you were already thinking about what I was going to say?”
Her cheeks are flaming red, and in the split second I get to see it before she buries her head in her hands, I realize just how much I want to keep seeing her this flushed, this flustered.
April Swan is never flustered. “Why does it matter?” She mumbles into her hands.
“Are you just looking for better material for my termination letter?”
I grin, just a small one that she can’t even see. “You think I’d fire you for telling me I have a voice that ‘sounds like a sin some god invented just for him to tempt me with’?”
The noise she makes sounds somewhere between an exhale and a squeak. I’m enjoying this far more than I should, especially when her head lifts, her gaze unfocused, her mouth opening in a little O like she’s going to say something, but thinks better of it.
“I’m not going to fire you,” I say carefully.
That, of all things, startles her. She blinks once, then again rapidly, confusion replacing the panic for a split second. “You’re not?”
“No.”
She pauses, her breathing audible. I swear I can see her pulse hammering in the vein on her neck. “Why?”
I push off my desk and move around it, pushing my chair out of the way to reach for the drawer on the bottom right.
The handful of papers I’d printed yesterday before I left are right where I left them.
I pull them out, feeling her gaze on the side of my face like tiny daggers.
Our eyes meet as I set them on the desk.
“Because, April,” I say, drawing out her name just to watch her fingers tighten around her arms. The way he says my name. God, am I really that tempting for her? “I have a problem, and I think you may be the solution.”
Her brow furrows beneath her glasses.
“You’re aware of my position here at Voss & Bartley, obviously. What you likely do not know is that my continued control of this company, the company I built with my father, is tied to a trust established by him,” I explain, pushing the papers toward her.
She just stares.
My jaw clenches as irritation about that entire situation creeps in, but I force it down.
“That trust requires a blood heir to remain in the event of my death, and it requires one before I turn fifty. If I do not meet that deadline, the board will have the right to dissolve my portion of the company. And they absolutely will because they are vultures, April. I do not deal well with unleashed vultures. Do you understand?”
She looks at the papers, then up at me as I lean forward over my desk. Not a single sound comes from her mouth.
“Answer me.”
Her body flinches. “No,” she says, but there’s a little bite in her tone. “I don’t understand. Why would they—”
“Dissolve my shares? Take me off the board? Remove my claim on Voss & Bartley? Because it’s more profitable for them.
They would have control and divvy up the profits every quarter without having to beg for scraps.
Because they want it. This is business, and business at the top is never pretty. It’s competitive.”
Her mouth snaps shut, forming a hard line.
“I am forty-eight,” I continue, lowering myself to my elbows as I stare her down. “My wife is dead. I don’t want to remarry. I don’t want a random woman who can’t keep her mouth shut to have my kid. I don’t want a scandal.”
Her exhale is shaky, her fingers twisting together in her lap.
“I need an heir. Not a wife, not a family. Just a child. A child with my name, my blood.”
The silence between us blooms thick, too heavy in the large room.
Her eyes widen as I imagine the pieces starting to click for her, her shoulder tensing and her fingers stilling.
Her back presses against the chair like I might devour her whole.
Then she looks at me, really looks, doing that goddamn searching thing again where it feels like she’s trying to flay back each layer of skin until she gets to the meat.
“You’re healthy,” I continue. My voice drops as I let my gaze scan down her body before bringing it back to her face.
“You’re discreet. Loyal.” Her cheeks turn beet red, followed by the tips of her ears poking out through wavy blonde strands.
“You understand discretion better than most people in this building.” Her throat works, swallowing heavily, and I can’t stop myself from picturing how that would feel beneath my palm.
“And now… I know you’ve at least thought about it. Fantasized about it.”
Her fingers wrap around her triceps like she’s folding in on herself. Even through the mortification I can see spreading across her face, she looks so goddamn cute.
I push up from my elbows, staring down at her from the other side of my desk. “You can keep your job, April. If you help me with this.”
She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t move.
For once, the sharpest tongue on this floor, maybe in this building, is speechless.
Her face shifts through a dozen emotions: shock, anger, betrayal, and humiliation all warring with each other. But I see the flicker of heat, too. How did I miss that before? Was that always there?
“You…” she starts, her mouth staying open for a second longer as she tries to find the words, but then closes it again.
“I want you to have my kid,” I deadpan. “If that wasn’t clear.”
“It was… c-clear.”
I round my desk again, stopping in front of her, watching as she continues to go through emotion after emotion, her gaze lingering just a little too long on the buckle of my belt before her neck slowly cranes back.
God, she looks good beneath me.
“There would be benefits,” I add, jutting my chin at her to bring her eyes fully to mine. “Payment. Security.”
“You’re—you’re insane,” she breathes. “You’re fucking insane.”
I shrug and rest my ass against the desk again. “If I’m insane for wanting to keep my company, then sure, yes, you’re correct,” I say, resting my palms behind me on the wood. “But if we’re throwing the word around so loosely, then I’d wager you’re insane for considering it right now.”
She pushes up out of the chair abruptly, half-swaying on her heels, the chair scraping back half an inch. “I can’t—I can’t deal with this,” she mutters, stepping around the leather wingback and bee-lining for her office.
I don’t stop her. I don’t follow her. I don’t need to.
Instead, I watch her as she practically stumbles into her office, grabs her bag from the desk, and flees out the door.