Billionaires, Bad Boys, and Alpha Males (65 page)

He was colder now, more boss than lover,
and he took out his phone and played with it momentarily.
 
When he looked up at her, his expression
was neutral.
 
“Outside, my driver
waits.”

“You’re staying here, sir?”

“Don’t worry about what I do.”

“Of course, sir,” she said, but couldn’t
hide the sarcasm in her voice.
 
Nor
did she want to.

She gathered her purse and took a deep
breath.
 
She was drenched in sweat
and the driver would surely know what had gone on.
 
But then, she suspected he’d seen this
kind of thing before.

The thought of other women undergoing
this exact ritual angered her.
 

Red was on his phone when she left,
standing in the middle of the apartment.
  

“Well, thanks for showing me a good time,
sir,” she said, again with as much sarcasm as she could muster.
 
And then she left.

He didn’t speak a word to her.

***

Nicole didn’t hear from Red or see him
the rest of that day, nor did she see or hear from him for the rest of the
week.

Needless to say, she was depressed and
anxious.
 
She did her work as faithfully
as she could, although she was constantly distracted with thoughts of Red.
 
Looking up from her computer and hoping
to glimpse him coming towards her with that enigmatic smile on his face.

 
Having lunch with Remi and always keeping
an eye out for Red to come strolling past the way he did that first day, while
Remi went on and on about her cowboy ad that was still the biggest pain in her
ass.

Nicole found she was getting into the
swing of things at work, mostly because it was easy.
 
Glen usually had her making copies,
sending faxes or running out to pick up lunch from Café Metro.
 
Edward was rarely around, and when he
was, tended to mostly be in Glen or Remi’s offices—sometimes she’d walk
by and hear them yelling at one another.
 
And then the next minute they’d be laughing.

Remi was the only one that gave Nicole
any real work to do.
 
Mostly
researching images, occasionally she’d ask Nicole to swing by and look at some
of the advertising concepts she was working on.

Work was easy.
 
The hard part was waiting for contact
from Red.

One morning she heard a couple of the
girls in nearby cubicles whispering about him.
 
She couldn’t hear much, because they
were trying to be quiet.
 
Just
snatches of conversation.

“…unbelievably hot in that Armani
suit…the one with the purple tie?”

“Red…told someone that he could buy and
sell them the way he sells his used Bentley.”

“…so funny.
 
When he looks my way I just melt…”

“I would give anything…”

Laughter, hushed whispers.

“How big it is?”

“I’ve heard he’s
huge
.”

More laughter.
 
She hated those girls.
 
Moments later, peering around her
cubicle, she saw them.
 
The type of
girls she absolutely despised with their high-end designer bags and shoes and
clothes, their two hundred dollar salon hair treatments, their manicures and
perfect teeth.
 
What would they do
if they knew she’d been with Red and not them?

Nicole sat back down at her desk and
smiled secretly.
 
But the smile died
when she thought about how long it had been since she’d seen or heard from him.

***

The weekend was interminable.
 
Friday night, she and Danielle went out
to a local dive bar and had margaritas.
 
Danielle was in rare form, flirting with any halfway attractive guy,
mostly trying to get free drinks.
 
She had no shame when it came to grifting her way through a night on the
town.

“The city is so expensive, how can I
afford to go out if I can’t get a guy to subsidize me?” she said, after Nicole
asked her how she could so brazenly coerce men into paying for her drinks.
  

Nicole was a little loose from her one
margarita.
 
Sitting together at a
high top table while the male vultures circled them like prey, Danielle asked
her about Red Jameson.

“So, have you seen
him
around the office at all?”

“Who?” Nicole said, licking the last bits
of salt off the rim of her glass.

“You know who.
 
The famously hot CEO that runs the
company you work at.”

A thrill of excitement followed by a wave
of sadness.
 
“Mr. Jameson?”

“Hell, yeah.
 
Do you ever see him walking through the
halls or anything?”

She smiled.

“You do!
 
He talks to you, doesn’t he?
 
Tell me, Nicole.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”
 
Nicole picked up her glass and sipped
the dregs of her drink—it was strong, most of the alcohol was at the
bottom.

“Bullshit.
 
I know something’s happened, I can see
it on your face.
 
Did he say hi to
you or something?”
 

“Well…”

“Ha!
 
I knew it.
 
Now talk.”

“He did bring me into his office once,”
she said slowly, enjoying the look of absolute shock as Danielle registered the
information.

“Bullshit.”

“Fine, you don’t believe me.
 
Why’d you ask then?”

One of the vultures came in for a
landing.
 
A slick kid who looked
like he’d never even shaved a day in his life.
 
Justin Bieber groupies would probably
love him, but he wasn’t Nicole’s type at all.
 
“Hey, ladies, you look like you could use
a refill,” he said.

“Oh, how nice—they sent over a
waiter,” Danielle replied, batting her eyelashes.
 

“Nah, I’m not a waiter.
 
I just noticed you two looked thirsty is
all.”
 
Now that he was apparently
having success, his wingman sidled up next to Nicole.
 
The wingman’s cologne was pungent and
overwhelming.

“You girls come here a lot?” he shouted
into Nicole’s ear.

“No,” she answered flatly and turned away
from him.

She was hoping they’d take the hint, but
Danielle apparently was a Justin Bieber fan, and the two of them were now
gabbing away.

So for the next forty-five minutes,
Nicole endured the pestering flirtations of Justin Bieber’s cologne drenched
pal, trying her best to stick it out for Danielle’s sake.
 

Eventually Danielle even invited the two
suitors back to her and Nicole’s apartment, to which Nicole shook her
head.
 
“I’m tired, I won’t be
staying up.”

“Oh, come on—don’t be like that,”
Cologne Guy said.

“Yeah, hang with us,” Bieber smiled.
 

Danielle gave her a pleading look, but
she’d already done enough sacrificing.
 
“Sorry, I need to be up early.”

“For what?” Danielle said.

“I have work to do.”

“Staring at pictures of your boss online
is considered work now?”

“Shut up, Danielle, you’re drunk.”

Bickering, the four of them went back to
the apartment together.
 
Danielle
and Bieber were snuggling on the couch and getting romantic while Nicole fended
off Cologne Guy’s ever more insistent advances.

Finally she’d had enough.
 
“I’m exhausted, and I’m going to bed
now.”

Her grabbed for her wrist.
 
“Chill, baby.”

Somehow his snatching at her wrist
reminded her of Red.
 
And it
reminded her just how unlike Red this buffoon was.
 
If Red grabbed her wrist, it wasn’t
impulsive, like a baboon, trying to crudely stop her from acting.
 
He did it out of love.

She pulled her arm out of his grasp.
 
“Don’t touch me.”

“Relax,” he laughed.

“I’m not interested.
 
Got it?”
 
She glared at him and he wilted.

“Yeah.
 
Yeah.
 
Loud and clear.
 
Jesus.”

“Good.”
 
She turned and went into her
bedroom.
 
Danielle would be
angry.
 
She heard their voices, low,
but still clearly bitching about how rude she’d been.

Of course she was rude one in their
eyes—not Cologne Guy—who’d tried to grab her arm and keep her from
going to bed.

She lay down and closed her eyes and
soothed herself with thoughts of Red, thoughts of his hands on her shoulders,
on her breasts, and the way he’d looked into her soul.

***

Danielle wasn’t that angry with her after
all.

By the time Nicole came out of her room
the next morning, Justin Bieber and Cologne Guy were long gone and Danielle was
on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, watching cartoons on TV.

“Hi,” she said, as Nicole made herself
coffee.

“Hi,” Nicole replied.

Danielle glanced over at her.
 
“Sorry about last night.
 
Those guys were idiots.”

“Did you and Justin Bieber make out?”

“Who?”

“That’s what I called the guy you were
with in my head.
 
Justin Bieber.”

Danielle laughed.
 
“That’s funny.
 
He did have a slight resemblance.
 
I sincerely hope Justin Bieber doesn’t
have as small a penis as him.”

“You saw it?”

“I did, indeed.”

“Oh boy.”

Danielle shook her head.
 
“It wasn’t worth it.
 
I’m hung over and disgusted with
myself.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

“No.
 
He was…kind of premature, if you know what I mean.”

Nicole grimaced.
 
She finished brewing her coffee and poured
it into a ceramic mug.
 
“That sounds
horrible.”

“It was.”
 
Danielle sighed.
 
“I need a real man.
 
Like that Red Jameson type,” she
said.
 
“He seems like he would know
his way around the bedroom, doesn’t he?”

Nicole didn’t answer.

“Weren’t you saying something last night
about him calling you into his office?
 
Or did I just dream it?”

“It must’ve been a dream,” Nicole
lied.
 
In the light of day she
didn’t want to tell Danielle anything.
 
It was special.
 
It was
between her and Red only.

“God I need a real man so bad,” Danielle
said, shaking her head.

***

The rest of the weekend crawled by, and
so did the first few days of the following week.
 
Nicole couldn’t believe that Red hadn’t
contacted her at all.
 
Nothing.

She was positively stewing, alternately
furious and then wounded, flattened by the sheer inexplicable way he’d
withdrawn from her.
 
They’d shared
something so intimate, so intense—and the look on his face.
 
She’d seen that passion burning in his
eyes, it wasn’t just imagined.

Everything came to a head when Red did
happen to walk by her cubicle, and completely ignored her.

It was like slow motion.

She had managed to forget about him for a
few brief moments, and was working on cropping an image that Remi had given
her.
 
A dancing cowboy, of course.
 
It made her wonder if she could really
work in this industry for the rest of her adult life.
 
Remi was doing almost nothing but this
cowboy ad, testing out different pictures, using effects to change them and
mold them into something interesting.

Nicole was already sick of it and she
wasn’t doing it all day long the way Remi was.