Page 28 of Masks and Mishaps

“Did you get here before Cavendish?”

“After.”

On the other side of our open office, Dalton is meeting with his six interns and looking, by definition, glorious. Whoever tailors his suits should get a commemorative statue in the Capitol Rotunda because their ability to conceal his cock within such flawlessly fitted pants is nothing short of a generational talent.

“Your parents picked a bad year to get married,” Weston mentions. He tilts his head in Dalton’s direction. “Interns are always obsessed with Cavendish. My father said they were going to put you under him—”

Funny you should say that.

“—but with you two being brother and sister—”

“Step,” I murmur. “Step.”

“—the risk of nepotism didn’t seem worth it.”

Hearing Weston Hannington talk about nepotism is rich. His father istheWarner Hannington—as in the Managing Director at Hannington-Hale, where I’ve been interning every Monday and Friday since September. Over the last two months, I’ve gleaned one standout takeaway: Banking is the riskiest chaos anyone mistakes for a professional career.

An investment bank is the in-between for nearly all major global financial transactions: underwriting, helping companies go public, mergers and acquisitions, etcetera. Within an investment bank, functions are separated into “trading desks” by the transactions they oversee. Dalton, Weston, and I all work on the forex (or foreign exchange) desk, where our work is in currency exchange. Out of all the desks, forex is by far the most volatile. Time doesn’t sleep, and currencies change twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—which is why Dalton works so much.

Money moves in places like Hannington-Hale; Dalton moves with it.

“Shouldn’t you be over there?” I ask Weston, glancing at Dalton again. Now, he’s shrugging off his navy suit jacket, and I briefly experience a pang of jealousy toward the silk inner lining touching the hard undulations of his deliciously muscled physique. Dalton never misses an arm day. Arm day probably misses Dalton when he’s not around.

“Cavendish asked me to make a call.” He reclines in his chair and looks at me.

Weston is young and strikingly attractive with stark black hair and powder blue eyes. His features are easy—long eyelashes, high cheekbones, and a modelesque, slim physique I know gets him into (and out of) trouble.

He bobs his chin at my monitor. “How’s all that going?”

By “all that,” he’s talking about the algorithmic forex model I’m building.

“I did a test using dollars to euros,” I explain, hovering my cursor over a line on my screen. “When the exchange dips below this threshold, we’d sell automatically. The delay would only be a fraction of a second.”

Weston can’t read or comprehend the lines of code I’ve written but nods anyway. “And it works?”

“The transaction happens within milliseconds instead of seconds like our current trading model.”

“Impressive,” a deep voice says from behind us.

Weston and I both jump. Unsurprisingly, when we turn around, Dalton is there, looking far too attractive for someone who has been in this bank since sunrise.

“Look at that, Romero,” he says, locking his eyes on mine. “You stripped all the emotion out of it. Efficient. Lucrative. Purely transactional. I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“I’m playing to my strengths,” I reply, straightening my spine. I let my eyes drop to his crotch (for mere milliseconds—as efficient as can be) and I smirk. “If someone has a unique,highly lucrativegift, they should use it to its full potential.”

He holds my stare, and the corner of his lips rise, verging on that classic smile he seldom gives me when we’re at work.Promising. That glimmer is a sign my offer isn’t totally off the table.

And yet that flash of a smile fades when a sound breaks through the silence—buzzing.

Still staring, Dalton takes his phone out of his pocket. Whatever he sees makes him frown.

“Is everything okay?” I ask, watching as his eyes flick across his phone’s screen.

He doesn’t speak; he barely moves. In fact, it’s the longest I’ve ever seen him stay quiet until he steps back, steadies himself on a nearby chair, and blurts out, “Ohfuck.”

Thirteen

ESSIE

---