At Any Price (Gaming The System) (11 page)

My cheer faded, suddenly. I was only going to be the toast of this room. Of his bed. And for far less than a whole night. I’d stepped into a dream and now, in the middle of it, was all too aware that it would be over before I even realized it.

“We’ll be dining at Ciel Bleu and, if you are so inclined, there will be dancing nearby in the hotel afterward.”

I gaped. “Dancing? What sort of dancing? You mean like waltzing and stuff?”

He shot me a strange look. He looked adorable when he screwed up his face like that. Like a little boy, almost. Almost.

He looked stunning in just about everything he dressed in, whether it was jeans and a casual shirt, a designer business suit or this scrumptious black evening suit and crisp white dress shirt. I couldn’t forget what lay under that polished suit. That perfect body, those hard, defined muscles. That tattoo with a woman’s name just above his heart.

Who was she? And why wasn’t she in his life anymore? I wondered if I’d find the courage to ask before the night was through.

He held a bubbling flute out to me. “Come, have a sip. Then let’s be off.”

I should have told him that I didn’t date. I should have told him that this would be so much easier if we didn’t go out. If we just took our clothes off and did this now. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want the magic to go away so soon and somehow I knew that the moment the act was finished, it would be.

***

“Not even one little hint? Come on…” I whined over my glass of iced mineral water.

His dark eyes flickered with amusement. “The secrets are not mine to reveal.”

Players of Dragon Epoch had been searching for clues to start the secret chain of quests that lay in the Golden Mountains region for months. It was one of the most notorious Easter eggs ever hidden in an online game and here, I had the CEO and chief designer of the game as my captive audience. Hell yeah, I was going to take advantage and try to weasel some clues out of him.

“It’s
your
company. Your game! And players have been working on that quest chain for months. There are entire wikis and databases full of clues.”

He grinned, looking off to the side, as if remembering something funny. “Yeah. Half of that stuff is pure bullshit. Some of it was planted by our own developers.”

I sat back and groaned. “Pretty please?”

“Emilia, you can bat those gorgeous brown eyes at me all night and I won’t tell you. I am sworn to secrecy.”

I sighed, surprised at the heated flush crawling up my cheeks. I’d been told before that I had pretty eyes. They were large, round, dark and my lashes were thick. I suppose people found them attractive and I usually accepted the compliment with a self-deprecating smile. No one ever told me that I had a gorgeous butt or lovely breasts. Thank God for that because it probably would have made me die of embarrassment. But it was something about the
way
Adam complimented my eyes that made me react so strongly. It was so nonchalant. He didn’t throw out the compliment as a way to score points with me or butter me up. He stated that I had gorgeous eyes as if it were a well-known fact—and that no amount of batting them (and for the record, I
never
bat my eyes!) would get me what I wanted.

I wanted his secrets. The game secrets would be great to start with but as I had come to spend more time with this man throughout our day in Amsterdam I found myself wanting to know
all
of his secrets. What drove him to be so successful in his business, to enjoy the trappings of his money without being so ostentatious as to fly in a sandwich for his lunch? What was his family life like? Why hadn’t he slept with anyone in eight months and why wasn’t he with someone now?

And who was Sabrina? Why did he have her name tattooed over his heart—a man who seemed the very antithesis of making such a sentimental gesture? Perhaps he’d had it done when he was very young or drunk. She was the lost childhood love who broke his heart by moving on to someone else once college came along. Or maybe she was a college sweetheart.

I remembered reading that he’d dropped out of college. He’d already made his first couple million by then. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t finished what he’d started—especially when he seemed to be such a driven person.

As I was musing over this, he asked me about my own college plans. “So Heath mentioned that you had finished your BS in biology early and are taking the semester off.”

I took a sip of wine from my other glass. I shot him a look. “Yes. I’m calling it a ‘gap year’ without the Europe experience, but this might well count for that, even if it’s only for two days.” I sipped again. There was no reason to tell him I was an utter failure and waiting to retake the damn test that was the bane of my existence. I affected a nonchalant shrug. “I’m taking next year off and then on to med school.”

He nodded. He already knew that, obviously. “What kind of doctor do you want to be?”

I hesitated, as I often had since I’d done so horribly on the MCAT the previous year. Since that afternoon when I’d stared at those results, slowly watching my dream twist down the drain in a whirlpool of suck. I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders. “An oncologist.”

He tilted his head towards me, focusing his attention. “Really. Hard stuff. That would take a special kind of strength to deal with cancer patients all day.”

“Cancer is a bitch that needs to get the crap smacked out of it. I intend to stand on the front lines with a big-ass bat.”

He watched my fist clench on the tabletop. “Sounds like it’s very personal to you.”

I took another sip of wine, studied his strong hand resting on the table next to his dinner plate. “It is. My mom had it.”

“She’s okay now?”

I nodded. For the moment. But as close as I came to losing her, there was always the specter of recurrence hovering near. Were it not for her regular inoculation therapy, that specter would be more than just a wispy ghost. But she’d been telling me for months that she didn’t have the money to keep going in and getting treatments. The possibility that she might consider forgoing them entirely almost paralyzed me with fear.

I lifted my eyes to his. They penetrated like arrows.

“That must have been rough on all of you.”

“It’s just us. Me and her. I’m an only child and I have no idea who my father is, nor do I care.”

His expression didn’t change. He didn’t even move. “So Strong is your mother’s name?”

Another sip. “Yep. She’s both my mom and my dad. And she’s done a pretty good job of it, I’d say.”

“I agree.”

“You don’t even know anything about me.”

“I’ve read your blog.” He looked away with a shrug.

I gazed at him with suspicion. “So just how regular of a reader are you?”

An enigmatic smile hovered on his mouth.

“C’mon. Spill it, Drake. How long have you been reading?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, a year or so.”

“A
year?
”

He nodded while gazing at the ceiling. “Yeah. Something like that.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“Because you were already freaked out enough when you found out who I was. I wasn’t going to add fuel to that fire.”

“Shit. Then you know a whole lot more about me than I know about you. You asked me questions like you didn’t.”

“How else was I going to get you to open up?”

“And here I thought you were just interested in opening me up in
another
way.”

At that precise moment, the sommelier appeared to pour us more wine. I blushed crimson, horrified, knowing he’d heard what I said. Adam laced his hands together in front of his face, suppressing his laughter behind them. I shot him a dirty look, which only served to increase his amusement. My eyes narrowed.

“Very funny.” I said, once he left.

He pulled his hands away from his mouth. “Yes, it was, actually. I couldn’t care less about his reaction, but the mortification on your face was hilarious.”

“It’s your turn now. Cough it all up.”

His brows knit. “Cough what up?”

“The goods. Come on. I signed the NDA. It’s not going on the front page.”

He took a deep draught of his wine—the same glass he’d been nursing all night. “What do you want to know?”

I asked him what I’d been wondering earlier. “Why’d you quit college?”

He seemed surprised that I knew that. It was on his Wikipedia page, after all. He’d dropped out after his first year at Caltech. “I wasn’t learning anything new.”

Well, well. He was a boy genius after all. Had I expected any other kind of answer? He cleared his throat and continued. “Sony offered me a lot of money to work for them.”

“They couldn’t wait a few years?”

“Apparently not. I didn’t work for them long, anyway. I quickly learned that the only boss I cared to answer to was me.”

I studied him. So he had issues with authority—professors, bosses. But he’d been a model citizen, no records of arrests or juvenile delinquency. He’d likely had a strong family to guide him.

“Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Did you have a big family?”

He grinned. “That’s a lot of questions.”

I shot him a sweet smile. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

“True enough. I was born in Pasadena. I lived in Washington State until my early teens, then came back to California to live with my uncle in OC.”

The article on him in Wikipedia had provided scant information about his childhood. He’d already divulged way more than I’d learned by scouring Google. And it was not lost on me that he hadn’t answered the question about his family. Fair enough, I really didn’t want to talk about mine, either. All two of us.

I tried another tack. “What does your dad do?”

“He died when I was four. He was a professor at Caltech.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember him at all.”

Another thing we had in common, then. We never knew our fathers. But at least his father had wanted him. Hadn’t handed a wad of cash to his mother with the curt order to “get rid of the problem.”

I cleared my throat and coughed. “Okay, so more speed-dating questions…What’s your favorite color? What is your astrological sign? Where does the Golden Mountain quest chain start? What’s your favorite book?”

His eyes narrowed with suspicion but he could not mask the smile curving at the corner of his mouth. “Blue. Aries. Not gonna tell you in a million years.
The Art of War.
”

“Crap,” I grumped and then we both burst into laughter.

Dinner continued like that. I learned that he loved Mexican and Chinese. Didn’t care much for Thai. I told him about my absolute obsession with the perfect pizza—New York-style Zito’s in Old Towne Orange. He told me he’d had the authentic stuff and refused to eat New York-style anywhere outside of New York.

He was astonished to discover that I actually preferred the Special Edition version of the original
Star Wars
trilogy.

He shook his head, eyes widened in mock horror. “I can’t even—”

“Oh c’mon. Three words: better special effects.”

His expression grew dead serious. “Three words: Greedo shoots first.”

I grimaced. “Okay, you have a point there, but I’m not going to change my mind just because of that one little thing—”

“One
little
thing?!” His mouth dropped. “That one moment changed the entire characterization of Han Solo.”

I tilted my head to the side. “You know, I think I’ve only seen the original version once before?”

He blinked. “Your education is seriously lacking.”

“Hey, last time I checked I was the one with a soon-to-be conferred degree and you weren’t.”

His eyes glowed over his deepening smile. “Touché.” He jerked his chin toward me. “Now it’s your turn. Where’d you grow up? OC?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t move there until college. Heath and I come from the tiniest backwater community in the high desert hills in California called Anza. Our only claim to fame is that the Pacific Crest Trail goes practically through the center of town. Only freaks and geeks come from Anza.”

We talked for a long time, until after dessert. We’d shared a cherries jubilee flambé that had threatened to set the room on fire. At one point, we ended up using our spoons to fence for the last bite. He won, scooping up the last morsel in his spoon and then gallantly holding it out for me to eat.

And just next door, for I had been listening to the strains of the orchestra for most of the night, was the dancing. He offered me an arm, like a gentleman out of a nineteenth-century period miniseries. Awkwardly, I took his arm and let him lead me toward the dance floor.

“I don’t dance like this at all. Just sayin’ that I hope your shoes have metal tips for toe protection.”

“Just follow my lead. It’s the foxtrot. The steps are easy. Slow. Slow. Quick, quick. I’ll lead you.”

I frowned. “And how do
you
know how to dance like this? Did you time warp out of
Downton Abbey?
”

He smiled. “My cousin danced ballroom dance for competition. She forced me to be her practice partner.”

“Ah.” Though I had a very tough time picturing him being forced into anything by anyone.

“Come,” he said. “Just follow my cues. I’ll guide you with the hand on your back.”

And after a few minutes of fumbling, I eventually got the hang of it, though I was quite sure no one would ever mistake us for Johnny and Baby from
Dirty Dancing.

In this dress, with these glittery heels, in the arms of this man, the sensation of being outside of myself—of living in a waking dream—continued.

After we’d danced a few dances in silence, he spoke softly. “You cold?”

“Nah.”

“You’re shaking.”

Well, yes. Yes, I was. His smell was fantastic and doing indescribable things to me. And he was so close. One large hand clasped mine, the other rested just below my shoulder blade. On my bare back. The heat of him threatened to burn a hole right through me.

I was having trouble remembering to breathe and he wanted to know why I was shaking.