“Please?” I begged silently, tugging on her arm as she led us confidently to the conference room. “Can’t we just say I got food poisoning or something? Maybe you could tell them I choked on a crunchy noodle or, better yet, that I didn’t even arrive from the States or... Shoot! That won’t work. I signed in downstairs.”
“Delilah Jones.” She whirled around on her heel, stopping us both in our tracks. “Is this a shark, a ski lift, or a person too avidly affectionate for abused alliteration?”
My defenses died on my tongue as I shook my head.
“Then, for goodness sake, let’s just get in there and get this over with.” With that, she tugged me toward the door, glancing down as yet another alarm went off on her phone. “I actually have a massage scheduled for—”
Her voice broke off suddenly as I yanked her to the side. The two of us tumbled against the far wall, pressing flat against it, so no one in the conference room could see us.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded, smoothing her dress. “Don’t you see the height of these heels I’m wearing? I could have died if—”
“Remember the man I told you about?” I asked in a deathly hush, staring at the wall in front of me. “Mr. Rooftop Romp?”
She looked at me in confusion, wrenching her arm free. “Of course I do. What about him?”
A shuddering breath ripped through me, and I leaned my head back against the wall. “Apparently, he’s not such a stranger after all! He’s in that freaking conference room!”
“Oh. In that case, maybe you should have had more vodka then, dear.”
Chapter 8
Robert Alistair Cross III. How is it even possible I didn’t recognize him?
After all the magazine covers he’d graced through, all the hours I’d spent reading up on his father’s company and applying to work at that very company, it made no sense that I had no idea, that I had failed to realize that the man I’d had wild sex with just the night before was the very prince of the kingdom I was now a part of.
Why? Because you’re a freakish anomaly, Della. You buy magazines to actually read the articles, not just gawk at the pictures. Plus, he’s a British celebrity, famous on this side of the pond—not exactly the Hollywood red carpet type. We’re talking Robert Cross here, not Robert Downey Jr...but hell, I’ll take him over Ironman any day.
Having grown up in the States, I was well aware of its thriving culture of reverent celebrity idol worship. It was a custom that had quickly spread to the rest of the world, but aside from a few outliers like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, that angry Scottish chef who made the killer wellington while yelling at people, and the Pope, we yanks tended to favor our own. I might have been less interested in all the fame and glory than most of my fellow generation, not exactly a starry-eyed fangirl of anyone, but that didn’t mean that I was immune to it. Just two years earlier, the entire island of Manhattan had basically shut down when the son of a corporate giant eloped with his pregnant girlfriend. When they had their baby a year or so later, people actually laid heaps of flowers outside their penthouse. So, the States did have our unofficial royalty, but as for Robert Alistair Cross III, the man was a British phenomenon.
Still, there’s no fucking excuse. I should have known.
“Are you absolutely sure?” Madison whispered in astonishment, gripping my arm with the strength of a titan. “You’re absolutely sure he’s the man you, uh...met last night?”
My eyes swept over him through the frosted glass, leaving little room for doubt. A few details seemed different in the bright light of day, but there was no mistaking those eyes of his, his most telling feature. His hair was shorter than I remembered. It was the same shimmering onyx hue, but instead of cascading to his jawline in gentle waves, like some hunk’s on the cover of a raunchy paperback, it was actually cropped just a bit below his ears. His face held more creases than I remembered, aging him a little, as if the man I’d made love to had spent an additional ten years frowning with stress.
But we were drunk last night, I reasoned, and it was dark. Not only that, for a large portion of the evening, we were both covered in dessert crème.
“I’m positive it’s him,” I finally answered, then bit my lip. A wave of embarrassment washed over me, and I slid down the wall, all the way to the floor, taking my new mentor with me. “What am I gonna do?” I murmured, staring up at the ceiling in a drunken daze. “This is my dream job, the one I’ve been chasing for years. I mean, I moved all the way across the Atlantic, to a whole damn new country, and now—”
“And now you’ve gone and fucked the CEO,” Madison muttered, as if she was tuning me out completely and speaking only to herself. Unlike me, she missed the tragedy of it and seemed to find the entire thing highly amusing. “How’d you manage that in just your first night here?”
“My gosh! I’ll have to flee the country,” I continued, gazing unblinkingly ahead. “I’ll have to get a new name, a new identity. Maybe I’ll dye my hair.”
“And you said he was really great, huh?” Madison peeked over the frosted glass with a little grin before returning to me on the floor. “The best you’ve ever had?”
“I wonder if there are any comparable companies in Spain,” I mused, drifting in and out of my own personal hell. “I can learn Spanish...or maybe I’ll go someplace where no one’s ever heard of him. Australia! That’s it! I can become a sheep farmer.”
I had just seized the notion with great fervor, already begun imagining myself with unkempt hair and a long hooked staff and furry boots, stepping in piles of sheep shit when Madison smacked me suddenly in the arm. She did so with superhuman strength, and it was all I could do to keep from shouting.
“What the fuck was that for?!” I hissed, rubbing my new wound tenderly.
“You are not going anywhere,” she said, her eyes glowing with excitement. “You, my friend, are exactly where you’re supposed to be, where you deserve to be. You’re staying right here.”
My eyes narrowed as I tilted my head sarcastically to the side. “Please, Madison. Do you really think it’s a good idea for me to stay at Cross Enterprises after I accidentally had sex with... Gosh, who is he again? Oh, yeah. Robert fucking Cross, that’s who!”
She didn’t even bat an eye. She just beamed back at me, as excited as I’d seen her since we met hours earlier. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”
Before I could stop her or make a wild dash for the elevator to go home and buy my copy of Sheepherding for Dummies on Amazon, she sprang to her feet and grabbed my hand, then pulled me resolutely along with her. I teetered precariously in my shoes as we skidded to a stop and just had time to perform the cursory smoothing down of my hair and dress before she popped a mint in my mouth to hide the booze and pushed open the door with a broad smile on her face.