I couldn’t believe he’d done that.

  “I was so sure you would see how good we were together and that we belonged together,” he said plaintively.

  So good that I pretended to be sick rather than sleep with him? I couldn’t say that, of course. Instead, we spent an awkward evening in the hotel room, me listening to him sniveling next to me.

  I couldn’t wait for morning to arrive. I went with him to the airport, and he arranged to take an earlier flight home.

  “If you change your mind…” he said hopefully, and I had to shake my head. I couldn’t be giving him false hope.

  After I’d seen him off, I called my father.

  “Hey, honey, how are you?”

  “Did you know Sven was hoping to bring me back this weekend?”

  He admitted that he did.

  “You’re not behind all that, are you?” I told him that Sven said he seemed to be missing me.

  My father gave a deep sigh. “Oh, Belle. Yes, I’ve been having a hard time with you gone, but that’s not what has been bugging me. You may as well know that I’d been seeing a woman in town. Darcy Callaghan?”

  “The pharmacist?”

  My father chuckled. “We’ve been seeing each other secretly for years but I didn’t want you to find out. Then, when you left, I thought we could start seeing each other openly but I hadn’t realized Darcy thought I’d propose marriage and have her installed in the house. That’s moving a bit fast for me. She says four years of courtin’ on the sly is hardly ‘moving a bit fast’. So, we’ve kind of been arguing and I guess, that’s what’s made me a bit grumpy lately.

  “Darcy Callaghan! With the red hair?” I was still getting used to the idea of my father, the grieving widower recast as a dashing older boyfriend.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m happy for you!” I said, and I really was. “What does Aunt Kate think?”

  “Oh, she’s been saying I should move on for years. But I wasn’t ready to do that, yet. So, you see, it had nothing to do with you being gone an’ all.”

  “Oh, Daddy, I’m so happy to hear that!” I told him that Sven and I had broken up and that I wanted to stay in the city if I could and he said he was happy to hear I was settling in and doing well. “That is the best outcome I could have wished for,” he said. “To see you happy and settled on your own.”

  On my way home, I stopped by the office to pick up a bag I had forgotten there on Friday in my rush to get to the airport.

  It was Sunday afternoon, and the office was deserted.

  I went up to my cubicle and picked up the bag. As I walked across the office, I noticed that Michael Greer was coming up the escalator.

  “What are you doing here? On a Sunday?” he asked me.

  “I could ask the same of you,” I said, perhaps a bit impertinently. It was, after all, his company.

  He cocked his head to one side and regarded me for a minute.

  “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you Belle Scuziak?” he said.

  Maybe I was feeling buoyant and upbeat because I had finally managed to break up with Sven, or maybe it was the conversation I’d had with my father, showing me that all of us were ready to take a few risks and move on with our lives.

  But, I took a step closer to Michael and looked him in the eye.

  “You have no idea,” I said.

  I didn’t move any closer, but I didn’t have to.

  I barely had time to draw breath before he had pulled me against him, kissing me hard and insistently, his hand sliding down my back and pressing me into his body. I could feel the bulge in his pants, and felt instant desire coursing through my body. All this pretending not to care, wanting not to be attracted to him was bullshit. I wanted him and he wanted me. There was no need to make this any more complicated than it had to be.

  He pulled me around the corner, out of the main office, into a corner. We were kissing fiercely, his hands were underneath my top, fumbling for my bra. I couldn’t think straight, all I wanted was to have sex right now, not think about it anymore, not wonder about what it would be like. I undid his belt buckle, slid down his pants and gasped at the size of his erection.

  “That’s all you, baby,” he panted in my ear.

  I quickly stripped off my jeans and he lifted me up, my back against the wall, my legs twisted around his waist as he entered me. I had never been with anyone this big before and I was amazed at the sensation of fullness, spasms of pleasure that rippled through my body. I gasped in pleasure.

  “Oh, my God!” I moaned as I came and felt him shudder against me.

  “Anyone there?”

  We froze when we heard the voice ring out in the empty office.

  “Hallo?”

  Michael quickly pulled on his pants, and I fixed my clothes and my hair. He looked at me and I nodded, he was all good.

  “Just me,” he said, walking out. It was one of the developers, coming in to pick up something from work.

  “I was just looking at the stats…” I heard the developer talking to Michael as I grabbed my stuff and made my way out the door.

  When I reached the front door, I looked over my shoulder and he was standing at the top of the escalator, looking at me even though the developer was talking to him. I held his eye for a moment and with my heart beating wildly in my chest, I walked out the door.

  Chapter 14

  Michael

  When Bernard Sanger invites you over for lunch, you leave everything and get over there. The tech genius was almost impossible to get hold of as his phone was always off and he almost never answered emails. We handled some testing for his social media platform, Glint, however, and so I counted him as a client. Usually, I dealt with his head of operations, a by-the-book executive called Con, who was everything Bern was not.

  Con was practical, direct and to the point where Bern was pure Silicon Valley eccentricity. He meditated, was fully vegan and lived off the grid on a farm in some remote Californian location nobody had the co-ordinates for. At least, this was what the rumor was.

  It was still dark when my phone rang on Monday morning.

  “I wake you?” Bernard asked without so much as a hello. I recognized his voice straight away.

  “Nope,” I said. “Getting ready to go for a quick scramble.”

  “Come over to my place on Lake Tahoe,” he said. “We’ve got some great spots, you can climb here. I’ll take you there.”

  “Today?”

  “Right now. Spend the night. I’ve got some things I want to talk to you about.”

  I couldn’t get away for two days, but I’d known the climbing on Lake Tahoe was spectacular and I’d heard his mountain getaway was incredible. I called Maya and told her about my change of plans. I packed quickly and jumped in the car, eager to get a head start on the trip.

  As I was heading out of the city, my phone rang.

  It was Josie.

  “I heard you’re off to see Bernard Sanger?” she asked.

  “That’s right. Why?”

  “I thought you should know… there has been a query on the last invoice.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I checked now to be sure. Belle called them last week to follow up and she was told there was an ‘issue’ that needed addressing and that Con would be in touch.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” I said with a frown. At the mention of Belle’s name, I almost became distracted for a moment, our little escapade in the office threatening to interrupt my thinking, but I managed to stay on course.

  “What do think is going on?” Josie asked.

  “I’ll call Adam and find out.”

  Adam was our lead developer on the Glint project. He’d been running a range of tests on an ecommerce section of their site and the project was scheduled to run for several months.

  “Adam!” I said as soon as he picked up.

  “Is there anything I should know about on Glint?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Apparently there has been a query lodged? What’s that about?”

  He gave a sigh. “Those guys are real hard arses, you know? They’ve been giving me a hard time about some of the data. Questioning it, saying it isn’t true. But I’ve had Queen take a look at it as well, she says we’re spot on.”

  Queen was our nickname for Barbara Hill, an Oxford graduate from their top mathematics program. She was a data scientist and worked from home, avoiding the office as much as possible. But if she said the numbers were right, then they were.

  “Okay,” I said, ending the call and focusing on the road.

  It was only a few hours’ drive and I started to see the mountains in the distance. Bernard had sent me a pin and I headed into the forest, following his directions until I reached a turn off to his home, an imposing mansion of rock and wood among the trees. I parked outside, got out and stretched my legs, taking a deep breath of mountain air.

  The front door opened, and Bernard came out, dressed in shorts and flip-flops, not looking at all like the hi-tech genius I knew he was.

  “Mike!” he said, holding out his hand and giving mine a firm shake. “Good to see you!” as if we were old friends. “Come inside, let me show you around. You hungry? I thought we’d grab something to eat before I take you out for some climbing?”

  “Sounds great!”

  The house was truly spectacular, with plenty of views of the lake and the mountains. The interior was not ostentatious, but it was clear that money had not been spared when it came to building and decorating the living spaces.

  “This is … awesome,” I said. “I don’t think I’d ever want to leave.”

  “I’ve been staying longer and longer,” admitted Bernard, who was a couple of years older than I was. “Most weeks, Sam and the kids come for the weekend and then they head off of to the city for work while I stay here with the dogs.” Right on cue, two Retrievers came into the room, sniffing my shoes and wagging their tails.

  We had a light lunch of locally caught trout on a rye sandwich, which was delicious.

  “I thought you were vegan?” I said and he gave me an ironic lift of the eyebrow.

  “Must have been the article that said I also take ice water baths twice daily and meditate for hours.”

  “So, you don’t?”

  “Fuck, no, but don’t tell anyone!” He laughed out loud. Then he relented, “I do try to live more sustainably, more authentically. Be more natural, you know, healthy. So, I avoid screens, don’t watch TV and out here, it’s all renewable energy and my own water.”

  “No screens?”

  He grinned “Hard to believe, right?”

  “Considering you’re the founder of Glint, yeah.”

  He took us out to his Jeep, packed the rock-climbing gear in the back and drove us out to a popular climbing spot called Spooner Crag.

  “This isn’t too much of challenge, but it’ll give you a good go. Tomorrow, I’ll take you to Donner Summit, if you’ve got the time.”

  “Hell, yeah!”

  Now that I was here, I wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of me getting up those rock faces. I forgot about work, about Bernard and whatever was going on with Glint, even about Belle. For a few hours, it was just me and the mountain, finding crags to put my hands in and hoist me up the rock face.

  Even though the climb was not particularly hard, sweat was pouring down my face. We took to the boulders as well and I was impressed by Bernard’s climbing ability.

  “I didn’t know you climbed,” I said, when we were taking a break at the top of a boulder.

  “Started a few years back,” Bernard said. “Part of the reason I bought this place.”

  We had a great view of the lake and the forests, the tops of the trees all round. It was incredible being in nature like this, no houses, or highways in sight, only birdsong and the wind in the trees.

  “The lake is so blue,” I said. “It’s incredible.”

  “That’s because the water is so pure, so clear. There are very little algae, which is why it has that turquoise color.”

  “Magnificent.”

  We sat in silence for a while, I looked over at Bernard and noticed he was sitting very quietly, with his eyes closed. His face was lined and wrinkled, tanned deeply by the sun. He wore a bandanna to keep his hair out of his eyes. He didn’t seem to notice that I was looking at him and I turned my gaze back to the lake and the view.

  “I like to come here and sit,” Bernard said suddenly. “Some might call it mediation or prayer. I call it sitting,” he grinned at me. It struck me that he might be mad as a hatter.

  In the afternoon, we did some bouldering and made it back to the house in time for dinner.

  We ate outside on the stoop, which consisted of delicious sushi prepared by a private chef. I kept waiting for him to bring up work. He was the one who’d invited me after all, and I had a sense that he might not take it well if I brought it up too soon. Bern seemed to want to talk only about climbing and different routes, nature and all kinds of mountain man stuff. It was definitely weird and some kind of test. But I had no problem with that. The climbing was fantastic, and I loved being out in the wild like that. The next morning, we were out early again and despite some soreness in my knee, we did a few more hours of climbing before we called it a day.

  It was only once I headed out to my car that Bern called out to me, almost as an afterthought, “Oh, about our agreement with you…”

  I turned to face him, waiting to hear what he was going to come up with. This was why I’d come after all, to talk about work.

  He walked slowly towards me, a sly grin on his face. “We want to double it.”

  “Double it?”

  “Can you handle it? Your results from the last round of testing were very interesting, indeed. I had your guy double-check it, but seems you were right. It’s not what I was expecting.”

  “We can handle it,” I said, thinking that I might have to pull in some freelancers if that contract was expanded.

  “I’ll get Con to send over the paperwork today,” he said. “Don’t worry about the query. It’s nothing. Over.” He winked at me, the bastard, obviously he knew that this was weighing on my mind.

  That was that. I had driven down to Lake Tahoe, spent two days in the wilderness talking climbing routes and grades and picking fish bones from my teeth for two sentences that he could have texted me from his phone.

  But as I drove back, I knew that the whole time I was out there, he had been evaluating me, testing me, watching my behavior. Bernard Sanger was savvier than I had realized. I wondered when he had made the decision to double the contract. Had it been when we sat on the boulder or when I pushed through my knee injury to summit on the second climb? You never really knew with a guy like that.

  My phone started ringing, I recognized the office number.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Belle. I thought you might like to know that Glint have dropped the query. They have in fact increased the number of sites and pages they want testing. It’s significantly more.”

  “Oh? That’s good to hear. When did you get the mail?”

  “About an hour ago. I’m thinking this morning. Whatever you did, it worked.”

  “I had to climb a mountain. Or two,” I said, enjoying the conversation with her. Even over the phone, the chemistry between us was evident.

  “But you like that kind of thing, don’t you?” she said, teasingly.

  “What sort of thing?” I asked.

  “A challenge.”

  “I don’t mind getting dirty,” I said.

  “So do I.”

  We had stopped talking about climbing or exercising a long time ago and both of us knew it.

  The line was quiet, and I wasn’t sure if she was still there.

  “I’ll be back in the city by afternoon.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

  “Come by to my place this evening,” I said.

  “Text me the address.”

  The line went dead.

  Chapter 15

  Belle

  I didn’t tell anyone, not even Ty.

  After I left the office that Sunday, I ended up just walking the streets, thinking about what I’d done. Having sex in the office? Right there, behind a plant, anyone could have walked past and seen us!

  Okay, maybe not anyone, and the office was empty, except for that developer.

  But still!

  I was not the kind of girl who did things like this! Had sex in the office! With my boss! Even just walking in the streets, alone, I could feel my face burning with embarrassment. I had been attracted to him from the beginning, even though I had been trying to deny it. All my outrage about the photograph and his flirting in the office had been my rather immature way of dealing with it. I had always preferred to be in control when it came to relationships. Maybe that was one reason why I kept making up with Sven, that way, I was always the one in control of the relationship.

  I hadn’t liked it when Michael made jokes about the naked scene. It made me feel vulnerable. I wanted to pretend that nothing was going on. When there was clearly something going on. Something big and throbbing and oh, well, no need to get into all of that!! But I was surprised by myself. I’d never thought of myself as being a very sexual person. Sex had not been that big a deal to me. It was nice, sure, I liked doing it, but it had never been a burning desire, something I absolutely wanted.

  When I thought back to how I’d felt in the office when Michael had come up the escalator and we had started talking to each other, I mean that was something I had never felt before. That level of chemistry, the air almost zinging with it! If we had been in a cartoon movie, little thunderbolts of lightning would have been flying all around. And then when he’d been inside of me, oh my goodness, that had felt so good.

  Sex with Sven had always been a bit boring, I guess. We had become too familiar with one another, too used to each other. I knew what he liked, he thought he knew what I liked.

 

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