Page 59 of Due Diligence

“Because it’s salacious,” she insisted, intrigue detectible in her tone. “And nothing about you is salacious.”

“Nothing?” I took another drink of my coffee. “Didn’t I make you come in a nightclub bathroom five days ago?”

Immediately, Cassie looked to her right where a few developers were working. She inhaled sharply as she scanned the room for any indication someone heard me.

“They can’t hear,” I informed her. “The room is sound managed. All they hear is muffled sounds.”

“So they won’t hear me when I tell you that if your definition of salacious is hooking up in a nightclub, you’re just a sweet summer child.”

Those words didsomethingto me. I breathed in deeply, practically drinking in the way she observed me with interest. “Now,thisis intriguing,” I commented. “I’ve been wondering about this for days, actually.”

“What?”

“You said I can go from sweet to cocky at the flip of a switch, but you have a similar Jekyll and Hyde vibe, if you ask me. Chiffon by day and nipple piercings by night.”

“Don’t be silly,” she responded airily, but her eyes slowly hooded with desire. “I wear the nipple piercings during the day, too.”

I held back a smile. Cassie preferred that. She liked it when I was stormy and serious, not when I was grinning at her like a lovesick puppy—even though that was how she made me feel. Unsteady. Confused. Smiling so much that my face hurt.

I kept my tone even. “What kind of salacious things are you getting into then?”

Playfully, she scoffed—but her body betrayed her. Her generous chest heaved with lustful inhales. “As if I would just tell you that.”

“Show me then,” I ordered, not missing a beat. That sent her lip right back between her teeth, which immediately made me harden under the table.

“Tell me what kind of PR you have to do,” she countered.

Our gazes lingered on each other, equal parts defiant and desirous. After a beat, she raised the top of her laptop. “I believe this is called an impasse.”

“Clearly.”

***

It wasn’t until the PDF reader on my laptop crashed that I realized it was after six and most of the office had gone home. The only people that remained were a couple of developers sitting at the flex desks a few feet away and Cassie.

Cassie was typing rapidly, her eyes drifting between her screen and a massive binder next to her. While I was on the verge of keeling over from exhaustion, she was as bright as she was when I walked in this morning. It was fucking incredible, frankly, but not surprising. I mean, she was apparently the valedictorian of the top ranked university in the country.

After leaving Princeton and running my own business, I had learned something important about the upper echelon. These people—the wealthy and powerful who went to these fancy schools—weren’t much different from anyone else. Going to an Ivy League school didn’t immediately make someone formidable or brilliant. Half of the people I met there were distressingly incompetent. Now, that wasn’t to say that everyone there was entitled and vapid. There were plenty of people there who were the first in their family to go to college, or who had studied diligently their entire life to earn a spot. But the bottom line was this: I wasn’t always impressed with the privileged and the wealthy. They had to earn my respect before I gave it to them.

Cassie had more than earned my respect though. Her capacity for work trounced mine—and I was a bona fide workaholic. I had been that way since I was eighteen. Yet day after day, she worked me under the table—and she made it look easy. Natural, if anything.

That capacity, coupled with the fact that she had captured every iota of desire in me, meant I was gone for her. She was all-consuming. There was a part of me that needed her to feel at ease. I longed for the sweetness of her body and the feeling of her touch. She was the genesis of my every fantasy. She was the still point of the turning world.

“Come get a drink with me,” I said, after staring at her for a full sixty seconds without her noticing.

“Like a date?” she responded, doing that thing where she didn’t remove her gaze from her laptop—like she couldn’t even be bothered to look at me. I loved it when she did that. It was so damn flippant.

Emphatically, I shook my head. “No, not like a date. I have zero interest in dating you.”

“Well, that makes two of us.”

“I’d rather double the length of this due diligence period than date you.”

“And I would rather sit through corporate finance class a second time than date you.” She was quick to respond, like she’d had that one ready for a while.

“I would rather have my bag searched and get wanded down by the TSA during Thanksgiving weekend at JFK than date you.”

“And I would rather work for TSA than date you. So, five minutes and then we’ll go?”

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