I could barely hear the roar of applause or the words spilling from the wiry man’s mouth over the incessant, unending thumping of my heartbeat.
There were eighteen of us left — interns, all of us, straddling our seats as though they would somehow ground us.
One more would be chosen to give their presentation.
And I needed it to be me.
Dear God, I needed it. Needed the attention of the higher-ups, needed the security of a full-time job out the other end of this in three months. And the only way to get that was to be noticed. But the chaos of the room, filled to the brim with clients, employees, management, and board members of Blackwood Energy Solutions, was making my anxiety almost too much to bear.
I swallowed down my fear as the intern at the podium stepped down.
To my right, a girl I’d only seen in passing a handful of times crossed her fingers in her lap beneath her binder. The lanyard around her neck clipped into her dangling ID card. Kelsey Somers. I’d heard about her, heard of her determination and loudness, and for what might have been the first time in my life, I actively wished for someone else’s demise. However badly she needed to be chosen, I needed it more.
My stomach churned. Okay, Liv. Maybe don’t wish for others to fail.
Sound slowly filtered back in, and in the now deafeningly silent room, the heavy steps by the podium boomed and echoed against all four walls. Last chance.
Turning my attention to the sound, though, might have just been the worst thing I could have done.
The large, hulking frame of a man who stepped up to the podium wasn’t the same as the one who had been presenting in between interns — no, this was someone new, but someone I recognized, someone who even from here took up far too much space and demanded attention.
Damien Blackwood.
Oh my God, I’m going to be sick. The CEO of the company, the owner, was up on the stage, staring straight into the group of interns. My pulse hammered again, blocking out the noise.
He was far, far too attractive in person.
His height struck me first. It was something I hadn’t been able to glean from the staged photographs in the lobby, but here, in full fucking color, it was obvious — he must have been somewhere between six foot and six foot four. His hair, meticulously styled with little black and gray strands hanging beside his face, was the only true indicator of his age: forty-five, according to Forbes in their January issue. A playboy by nature, according to the tabloids, and the likelihood of him even giving someone like me the time of day was unheard of.
He was far too sexy to be running a company. His face should have been plastered on billboards, projected in movie theaters, or printed by fashion houses. But even with all of that, it wasn’t the wrinkles beside his eyes, the close-cut facial hair, or the shocking blue of his irises that grabbed my attention.
I was far too focused on his hands.
One large, ring-laden hand wrapped around the microphone and for a fleeting moment, I forgot entirely about my project, about my pitch, about everyone else in the room. The light glinted off the watch on his wrist and my breath caught, but not out of fear, not because my mouth had gone dry and my throat was closing in. Instead, my mind drifted far too close to the sun, imagining the way that same hand would look around my wrist, the way it would curve around the swell of my breast, the way two fingers would disappear inside of my—
The eruption of applause yanked me back down to reality so harshly I almost forgot to breathe.
Kelsey stood up beside me, beaming as if the world was her Goddamn oyster, and clutched her binder to her chest. Did I miss something?
“Excuse me,” she said, her knees practically bumping mine as a request to move past.
The others around me clapped with tight lips as I shifted in my seat to allow her through. I joined them almost robotically, the reality of the situation slowly sinking in, forcing bile up my throat to make room for the rocks that filled my stomach.
I wasn’t picked.
I wasn’t fucking picked.
My breathing picked up as I watched her climb the stairs. Mr. Blackwood reached out a hand for her and she took it gleefully, her fingers so small as they rested gently in his palm for leverage in her heels. Her black hair, curled and tucked behind her ears, bounced as she approached the podium.
But I didn’t hear the echoing sound of her nails tapping against the microphone, didn’t hear the laughter from the crowd when she asked, “Is this thing on?”
Instead, two words pinged around inside of my mind, filling the space, doubling, tripling, quadrupling until the words blurred and became meaningless as they seeped into my bones, becoming me, entangling themselves with me.
I failed.
————
I couldn’t get out of my head.
I made a break for it the moment the meeting ended, choosing to pour myself back into work instead of hanging around, mingling, and chatting idly with everyone else. At least if I could work on my project and perfect it, I could leave Blackwood knowing I’d given it every Goddamn shot I had in me.
Staring at my feet to keep myself from making eye contact with anyone who might want to talk to me, I slipped inside the elevator, my shoes crossing over the metal threshold just as the doors slid shut behind me.
Across from me, a larger pair of shoes lingered, polished to a shine, fine leather and tapered slacks—
Oh, fuck.
I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye as I checked which floor we were on, jamming my finger into the button of the next closest one up, but the light flickered, flashed, and I pressed it again. It didn’t even light up at all.
“You’re one of the interns, right?”
The elevator came to a screeching halt and so did I.
Frozen, unmoving, with my finger jammed into the button for floor eight, all I could do was try to breathe. Why aren’t we moving? Why aren’t the doors opening?
“What the…?”
Turning my head to glance over my shoulder, I stared directly at the center of Damien Blackwood’s chest.
I wasn’t brave enough to look any further north—or south, really—but even that was a mistake.
The way his suit clung to him… tailored perfectly to fit the obvious muscles in his arms, his shirt puckering just slightly over what I could only assume were the ripples of abdominal strength in his core.
And his cologne.
It permeated the space the longer we lingered, with hints of rum, almonds, and vanilla invading my nostrils and making my head spin.
Fuck, it smelled heavenly.
The lights flickered above my head, and I made another mistake and looked up at them, my gaze dragging right across his chiseled, hair-speckled jaw and the high ridges of his cheekbones.
Every beat of my heart seemed to amplify behind my eardrums as the lights went out.
“Power must be out,” Damien mumbled, and a second later, two white emergency lights lit the small metal cube.
“Ironic,” I gulped. His piercing blue stare burned into me as I finally dropped my gaze to his, every part of myself heating. “Cause of the… y’know, the solar panels.”
Ignoring me completely, his hand slid down his jacket, tendons flexing and two platinum rings catching the light just as his fingers dipped into the pocket. One singular brow rose when I caught his gaze again, and just as quickly as it had appeared, it slipped from his features as he typed furiously at his phone.
The walls were too Goddamn close.
Every surface reflected the two of us standing as far apart as we possibly could in the cramped space. Endless realities, endless mirrors, and no matter what, in every single one, he hadn’t picked me today.
My throat went dry.
“They’re getting the power back on,” Damien said, his voice filling and replacing every cubic inch of air. It was rougher than before, a little hoarse, a little angry. “It’ll be a few minutes.”
I nodded and leaned back against the cool glass of the mirrored wall, letting my head fall against it. “Okay.”
The quiet descended, nothing but our heavy breathing and the occasional clunk from outside of the elevator.
I tried not to look at him, but the only direction that didn’t reflect him a million times was down, and even then I could still see his pristinely polished shoes. I was almost positive his reflection beamed from those, too.
But the silence, the stress, the anger — it was bearing down like gravity, pushing into my shoulders, my head, my bones. I hadn’t been picked. Someone, likely him, had read through my proposal and didn’t think it was worthy of being spoken aloud or presented to the board. I clutched the binder closer to my chest, trying to take a deep breath in, but all I got was that damn cologne and the faint scent of what I could only imagine was shoe polish—
“Why wasn’t I picked?”
My stomach sank the moment I realized I’d said the words out loud.
Somehow, the silence became thicker, heavier, and I winced as another clang came from somewhere above the elevator box. His jaw tightened, the muscles below his ear sticking out just a hair further.
“I’m sorry—” I said.
“Which one was your proposal?”
The softness of the words caught me off guard.
I clutched my binder tighter, my heart pounding behind my ribs, and tried to focus. Why the fuck did I even bring it up? “Uh, mine’s the…” My words trailed off as one hand, rings glinting, reached for my binder.
“Let me see it,” he said, his voice like gravel.
His brows knitted as his fingers slipped over the top of the binder, the tips of them ghosting against the top buttons of my blouse and making both my breath and the black fabric catch.
I relinquished my binder before he could demand it and loosened my grip on the one thing I’d worked the hardest on since university, watching mindlessly as he pulled it from my chest and flipped it open.
“It’s the water purification one,” I breathed.
He glanced at me briefly with a smirk and then skimmed the first page. Why was he smirking?
“You say that as if I should already know,” he said, tucking one finger beneath the paper and using it to flip it over the rings of the binder effortlessly.
What the fuck does that mean? “Were you not in charge of choosing who got to present?”
The question hung in the air as he read over my proposal. I watched him like a hawk, taking stock of every shift of his features, every time his brows rose or his nostrils flared. He flipped the page and flipped again, shifting on his feet, studying the words I’d worked so fucking hard on.
I didn’t know what to say to him, didn’t know if I was allowed to say anything at all. But when I’d finally worked up the courage to ask for my binder back after the fourth and fifth clang of the elevator from above us, he spoke before my words could breach my teeth.
“Is this true?”
I blinked. “Is what—”
He flipped the binder in his hands and held it out toward me, one platinum ring glinting as he pointed his forefinger at a single sentence I’d written. The research team at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) and Myongji University have created a membranous fabric capable of filtering water while simultaneously using the current to produce electricity.
I followed the length of his finger up, my eyes raking over the tanned skin of the back of his hand and the antique-looking wristwatch, up his suit jacket sleeve, and oh God, he was closer now, towering over me—
“Is that true?” he asked again.
I nodded, but fuck, my head was spinning. “Yeah. The filter is dense enough to filter out everything from microplastics to heavy metal particles,” I explained, swallowing whatever saliva I could accumulate in my mouth to soothe my raw throat. “Purchasing that technology could be business-changing.”
“Yeah. It absolutely could,” he mumbled, pulling the binder back toward him. “Do you know if they’re offering up their rights to it?”
Blue eyes met mine again, softer almost, and from this close, I could see his age clearer.
The crows’ feet on either side of his eyes, the faint crease between his brows, the lines of his forehead. What I’d thought was completely black stubble showed hints of gray just like his hair, and the longer I looked, the more it seemed almost taboo to have thought the things that had gone through my head back in the presentation room.
He was almost twice my age.
Forty-five to my twenty-four.
But that didn’t stop those images from flashing through my mind again.
“Olivia.”
One word, one singular word, my name. The way he said it sounded as sweet as honey and just as viscous and thick. I imagined it slipping from his lips over and over as they trailed my bare skin, over my collarbones and further across the swell of my breast, another mumble seeping out as they latched on to my nipple—
“You know my name?” I breathed, reality crashing back in like a screeching banshee.
He blinked at me once before tapping the front of the binder. Olivia Martin, it said in big, bold letters. “You’re also wearing your name tag.”
I gulped. “Right. Yes, they’re considering selling the tech.”
The elevator shifted as the lights flickered back to life, replacing the bright white emergency ones. For a fleeting, ill-timed second, I almost resented them, resented what it meant.
“I’d like to take a closer look at this, if you don’t mind,” he said, shutting the binder with one hand and tucking it under his arm. The box we stood in moved again, shifting, until it slowly resumed its rise one inch at a time.
“Uh, yeah, sure,” I mumbled.
Two seconds later a ding rang out through the small space, announcing our arrival at the closest floor. So it had registered my button pressing. The doors opened and he took a single step, his cologne swarming me from the proximity, but quicker than I could register, his eyes met mine in a flash of blue as he paused.
God, he was too damn tall.
“I didn’t choose who got picked,” he said.
I was right.
“I would have chosen you.”
Words failed me as he stepped across the threshold of the elevator and exited on floor fourteen — Human Resources and Bookkeeping. The doors shut behind him, leaving me alone in the small reflective box with my racing, debaucherous mind and pounding pulse.
But faced with my reflection in the doors and no binder to cover myself, I couldn’t keep my eyes from wandering to my chest where more buttons than I’d intended had been left open.
Three, to be exact.
Enough to see the entirety of my cleavage and the edges of my bra.
Holy fuck!
My cheeks heated as I realized it must have popped open when his fingers had caught on it.
Oh my fucking God.
He saw everything.
