Page 110 of Fierce

Her next words confirmed it. “I know it’s so tempting,” she told me, “to think it will last. It’s a beautiful dream, isn’t it? But you know,” she sighed, running two fingers lightly over the diamond pendant at her throat, the gesture so habitual, “that’s all it is. A dream. One brief shining moment. And the thing about dreams? You wake up.”

I swallowed, but didn’t trust myself to speak. It’s not a dream, I wanted to say. It’s real. Because Hemi was real. He might be handsome, he might be rich, he might be powerful, and heaven knew he was the most desirable man I’d ever met. But he was so much more than that. He was a living, breathing, caring man whose emotions were as deep and strong as they were hidden.

It wasn’t the myth I loved. It was the man, in all his shining, glorious light and all his dark, disturbing shadows. The man who thought he had to hide both of those sides from everybody, but who couldn’t hide them from me, because I saw him, and I knew him, and I loved him.

“And then you wake up,” Martine repeated, and I forced myself to focus. “And you get such a lovely present. The most beautiful farewell gift, carefully hand-selected. By Josh. The kind of present you’d have given anything to receive, if it had been what you wished for. If it had been the real thing. And the better your time with him has been?” She smiled sadly. “The better the gift, because he’s always fair. But that’s when you know it’s over, when you get that token that you can keep to remember him by. Or that you can sell, of course, if you need the money more. If you’ve been picked up from the gutter, and you can’t stand to go back there again.”

I barely heard her, because her fingers were still at her throat, stroking the huge diamond solitaire on its heavy golden chain, the one she wore every day.

No. Surely not. It couldn’t be true.

“Well,” she said, gathering her things, “you’ll want to get to that work. You don’t want to go back to the gutter, I know you don’t, and for that? Work is the only solution. That’s what’s left after men leave. Because the thing about men?” She put a hand over mine for just a moment, the lightest of caresses. “They always leave.”

I didn’t open my laptop. I didn’t pick up the stack of papers, and I didn’t look at my notes. I stood up without knowing what I was doing, walked to the window, and stared out at bare brown branches. At the frozen expanse of Central Park in winter.

The sky was gray today, the clouds low and menacing. Just like that day in San Francisco. The weather turning cold, the storm threatening to break.

No.Martine was jealous of me, of my position. Of course she was. I’d seen it from the beginning. She’d been forced to hire me, forced to keep me on. If she resented me for that, wouldn’t anyone? But Hemi wouldn’t have set me up with a job working for his former mistress.

Really?My inner voice mocked. Not even at first? When all he’d wanted had been to add me to his list? Who knew what he’d said to Martine to get her to agree to my going to Paris? Who knew what he’d actually said to her about my being “needed by Marketing,” the day I’d gone to San Francisco?

No.Hadn’t I just been thinking that I saw him, and I knew him? When had he ever been less than honest with me, even when a lie would have served him better? These past weeks—when had he been less than kind, and thoughtful, and...honorable?

Never.

So I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to go there. I was going to wait for him to come home—or, better yet, for him to call me tonight—and ask. Like a reasonable adult woman who loved and trusted a man.

I turned from the window, went back to the table, and began to move everything to the desk. I wanted Hemi to take me seriously? Then it was time to get to work. I might be about ten giant steps below the CEO, but what I’d told him was true. I could do a job if I were given a chance, and I’d been given one. Maybe it wouldn’t be this job, in the end, because the signs weren’t looking good. But I could do something, and it was time to start proving it.

Which was when there was another knock on the door. Housekeeping, probably.

I went to the door and opened it for the second time in an hour. But it wasn’t housekeeping.

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