Entry-Level Mistress

chapter 4



On Sunday, I discovered Daniel Hartmann wasn’t much of a muse. In fact, my mind had been so disquieted that I could find no order, no joy, in the sculptural work I’d stopped a week earlier. I cleaned the apartment instead, which had Leanna howling in laughter.

Even worse, Daniel didn’t call. Hadn’t said a word since he’d left me at the door to my building, his gaze a heated promise. If I were really interested in him, if there weren’t any of this other history between us, I wouldn’t put up with his somewhat boorish ways. So what if it was slightly hot that he had assumed I would go out with him? That kind of confidence could also be interpreted as chauvinism.

But there was this history. And maybe even the fact that he was dangerous to me made him the slightest bit more attractive. Not that he needed any help in that department. The guy was blessed with more than his fair share of good looks.

When my mother called, I struggled to keep my lies to those of omission, guiding the conversation to safe topics, like art, her gardening, or gossip about all of her friends and her friends’ children. Even hearing her voice, having to obfuscate the details of my life, brought my actions into high relief. I found ways to justify my choices, to justify the kisses and the desire for more. I played with the idea of pinching myself, waking up and quitting. Walking away before I went deeper down a path that was certain to bring nothing but disaster.

But in the end I went to work on Monday because I didn’t know what else to do. In reality, as much as I found the office position surreal and, perhaps, slightly like selling out, the paycheck I would receive on Friday was very welcome. It was more money than I would have made all summer doing odd jobs. Art was not particularly lucrative unless one was famous. Even the fellowship offered only a meager stipend. However, being a Fellow at the Barrows Farm would provide a stepping-stone to major grants and entrée into the bureaucratic art world. If I wanted to play that game.

As much as I found the vibrancy of street art and the indie art movement invigorating—freeing and enticing in a bohemian sort of way—I wasn’t ready for any doors to be closed. I wanted choices.

The fellowship offered me those choices.

Surprisingly, sitting in my little cubicle at Hartmann Enterprises, erasing green pixels around a woman’s leg, offered me options as well. And not just the option to jump into Hartmann’s bed.

Actually, I wasn’t entirely certain that particular one still existed. As much as I’d managed to entice him into kissing me, he’d seemed … unnerved. I didn’t know what that meant.

Only, he wasn’t the man I’d thought he’d be. The Daniel Hartmann I had expected was ruthless and uncompromising. He would have thrown me out the minute he’d learned of my existence. Or he wouldn’t have shown any hesitation about having an affair. But the real life Hartmann was complicated. Perhaps he was demanding and overconfident, expected to get his own way, but ruthless seemed a poor adjective to describe a man who advised me to think twice about getting involved with him.

Maybe he’d brought my father down all those years ago by mistake.

I nearly snorted out loud. A handwritten note congratulating my dad on his new reputation as a criminal? Mistake?

A few years ago, in a rebellious phase and angry at my father, I’d thrown it all at him, asked him what kind of horrible person was he that someone would want to hurt him.

The fight had changed from being about the second piercing on my right ear to something far more serious.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, Emmy,” my dad had said. “Grief can warp a man, and I think Drew’s son … I want to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

From everything I knew, Daniel had taken his father’s place in the company just to destroy my father. The endeavor had taken him three years of careful planning. What sort of man focused on revenge for three years? And at the end of it, although financially both Daniel and my father had been ruined, it had only been the Anderson name that was dragged through the mud.

Despite his plea of not guilty to fraud, my father had spent five years in jail. I had gone back to Tucson.

I shouldn’t have anything to do with Daniel. I shouldn’t want to have anything to do with him. Overwhelmed by hormones, I might have convinced myself on Saturday night that it was fine to have a fling with him, but now was the cold light of day. Or the cool bluish-white of the fluorescent office light. I should be handing in my resignation.

My purse vibrated against my foot. Once.

I erased another pixel. It wouldn’t be him and if I grabbed my phone to check, I would be guilty of the worst sort of dating crime, looking desperate. Most likely it was Leanna, or even my dad since I’d been avoiding his phone calls.

My purse vibrated again. Once.

I glanced at the time. Only ten-fifteen. If it was Daniel and he wanted to talk to me, he could very well call the office phone. Although, as I didn’t have a direct line, anyone could pick up. Of course he wouldn’t do that. Right, he was texting so that he wouldn’t interrupt my work either.

If it was him.

Rolling my eyes at my mental gymnastics, I leaned down and reached into the bottomless pit of artfully cracked pink leather—it was one thing to wear sweater sets but I liked my purses—and searched for the phone, which buzzed again in my hand as I held it. Once.

I flipped it open.



Emily.



My office at noon.



We need to talk.



How did that take three text messages?

I fidgeted in my seat, thinking about being alone with him again. Or just near him. We didn’t need to talk. We needed to continue where we’d left off on Saturday. Although if it was talking he wanted … I started to type a reply when the phone buzzed in my hand. I pressed next.



I’ll order in Greek.



I narrowed my eyes. Next.



Bring a file or something.



I barely stopped myself from slamming the phone down on the table. The cliché of my life was getting worse and worse. I was actually supposed to bring work to pretend that this “meeting” was strictly business? As if that would fool anyone. As if it weren’t already strange that the boss took the new hire out for lunch.

Back to pixels. Delete, delete, delete.

Until 11:59 a.m., when, just as I stood up, stretching and breathing deeply to calm the nervous flutters of anticipation, James swung by the cubicle asking if I wanted to grab sandwiches with him.

I stared at him. What the hell was I supposed to say to that? No, sorry. I have a date with Mr. Hartmann. Again.

“I, um, I have some files to drop off,” I said, struggling not to look away.

He got a strange look on his face and stared at the floor. As if he heard the subtext beneath my words, knew exactly where I had to drop those files off.

“It’s a sexist world,” he muttered before he looked at me. “Listen. It’s not my place to tell you how to lead your life, Emily, but getting involved with the boss?”

I didn’t bother to pretend.

“Like you said, James, not your place.” I cut him off, all too aware that other people were listening. I grabbed my bag and the fake “file” and swung away. He was right though; if I were invested in this corporate life thing, if it weren’t just a game, then what I was doing was totally wrong.

Of course, it was a game. Even if the rules were still being defined.


• • •



I stepped out of the elevator and into the spacious hallway of the thirty-second floor, which was decorated with artwork that could easily have hung in the Museum of Fine Arts just a mile away. Large frosted glass double doors stood open before me, and beyond I could see the empty outer office. Until I stepped in, and found a thin woman in her fifties with pale, grayish blonde hair standing by the left wall, sliding sunglasses onto her head.

I stepped in a bit further.

“I’m here to see Mr. Hartmann.”

The woman glanced at me impassively.

“I’m Emily Anderson,” I added.

Without the slightest change of expression, she strode over and opened the second set of glass doors, which were tinted just slightly darker than the last.

“Mr. Hartmann asked for you to wait in his office until he returns.”

Warily, I stood on the threshold of the empty office. I looked back at the woman, who seemed about to leave me there—to leave the entire floor completely—to go to lunch.

“Thank you,” I said, but she was already walking into an elevator. I stood there and stared. Blinked at the emptiness. The phone on her desk rang before stopping abruptly. A red light flashed on the phone bank. Turning around again, I let the glass door close behind me and stepped fully into Hartmann’s private office.

It was strange being in the man’s space without him around. Almost invasive. But clearly he had known I would be in here alone while he was off somewhere else. Making me wait.

The office was large and modern, yet with the slightly retro color scheme of taupe, brown and orange. The far wall was completely glass. The last time I’d had this expansive a view of Boston had been from a plane, or maybe from the top of the Prudential building.

Just as in the lobby, artwork punctuated the walls. A large ovoid sculpture stood in the corner, and I recognized the work of one of my mentors. One of his works was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and yet this piece had become a temporary bookshelf, with two hard covers and a yellow legal pad lying flat on the peak. I fought the urge to go to it, to pick up that pad. Instead I turned to the clean lines of the large, light wooden desk that was intended to be the focus of the room. I walked toward it hesitantly, and then ran my fingers along the edge. This was where Hartmann did his work, made his millions. Billions.

I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what such wealth meant. Sure, my father had been wealthy before the “retrenching” but this billionaire thing was new to me. As a child, wealth simply meant a private school, and a nanny who took me shopping at Barney’s and Bergdorf’s. It meant friends’ birthday parties that were fantastical and ridiculous. Tea parties served on priceless, antique tea sets and gift bags full of iPods and Marc Jacobs headbands.

A silver pen, a closed laptop, and thick leather portfolio with the edges of papers peeking out, were all that rested on the surface. He was neat, but not too neat, not too careful or precious about his possessions.

Who was Hartmann, and what was I doing here, touching his desk, waiting for him? An image of his lips filled my mind, a memory of their taste, the sharpness of the sensations of touching him, of breathing in his scent … I was making myself dizzy.

My purse vibrated against my side as my phone rang. At least not another text. I fumbled for the phone, saw my father’s number and pressed the button on the side to send the call to voice mail. Of course, he would call right at this moment. The room was too hot, too constrictive.

The phone call was a good reminder. When would I ever again have a chance to be alone in Hartmann’s office? To look through his notes and his files. Would he really be that careless to leave important documents around in an untended office?

Tension made my stomach cramp. What did I expect to find if I did look? Falsified tax documents? Proof that he’d set my father up a lifetime and a different company ago? This wasn’t some primetime television show with convenient eavesdropping and surely no one would be so stupid as to leave that sort of evidence around, not even on a password-protected computer that could one day be confiscated by the feds or the police.

My father hadn’t been quite that cagey. The day they arrested him, they took everything in our apartment, including my computer. When I’d left for Arizona, everything of financial value from my old life had been confiscated, pored over in some distant room by nameless suits with grim expressions.

Hartmann didn’t know what that was like. Hadn’t had to deal with the fear of one’s home being raided. And he was the reason I had.

He could be back at any moment.

I reached out, touched the curved side of the leather portfolio, played with the hard corner. One flick and it could be open before me. Wasn’t this exactly why I was here?

I looked to my right, where a brown sofa sat parallel to the paneled wall. With sudden purpose I crossed the room, dropped my purse on the floor and sat down on the couch. It was completely possible that this whole situation was a test to see what I’d do. Perhaps he had cameras in here and could see every move I made. Perhaps he was even now in a room next door, watching me. If I were a billionaire about to have a date with the daughter of my enemy, that would seem like a smart move.

But if it was a test, then it wasn’t very subtle.

Why did he invite me here for a takeout lunch? To ask me the same question I’d been wondering all day, why was I still working here? Or to talk about this weekend, about what made him change his mind? What did run through Daniel Hartmann’s head?

And what did I want to talk about? Sitting there, I grew increasingly self-conscious and nervous, aware that on Saturday, I’d been bouyeed by a false confidence inspired by physical attraction, by knowing I had the power to tease him, to make him kiss me.

The way I wanted him to kiss me again.

After another silent moment in the huge, empty room, I kicked off my shoes and lay down, arm stretched upward to pillow my head. With that slight tilt, I could see out to the opaque June sky. I looked up. The ceiling was a mixture of white and wood paneling that concealed a well-designed lighting system.

When he walked in, he’d see my legs first, and maybe the fall of my hair off the side of the sofa. I liked that image, imagined it as a photograph in a fashion magazine—as if anything I was wearing was remotely a designer brand.

But I was being ridiculous. Really, I should sit up, stop playing at seduction. If he wanted to talk—about the past—then that would be for the best. And yet the thought terrified me, as if that dark, shared history might hold monsters better left locked away.

I heard the faint but distinct sound of the glass door opening. Then footsteps and a ridiculously loud rustling of plastic. I struggled up to a sitting position.

“Don’t move. Stay right there.”

I looked over my shoulder, found Daniel striding into the office carrying a bag of what smelled like takeout, which he placed on the coffee table as he slid onto the couch next to me.

I didn’t move, desire flooding through me at that expression on his face.

“I wasn’t going to do this,” he said softly, his heat wrapping around me, his mouth finding my ear at the same moment that he touched my stocking-clad thigh just below the line of my skirt. “But then I saw you there, waiting for me.” I melted back against him, into the feel of his mouth on my skin and his hands caressing me. He made it sound as if I had been lying on his bed waiting for sex. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said quickly, turning, nearly crawling into his lap, all thoughts of talking far, far away. He smelled like the hazy June day, aftershave and shampoo. Maybe it was simply our intertwined past, but it felt as if I’d known him forever. “I entertained myself reading all your papers and computer files.”

He moved away from me infinitesimally.

“I don’t think you did.”

Despite the undercurrent of uncertainty, the note of seriousness in his statement, I refused to laugh and give up the bluff too soon. Instead I ducked my head, pressed my lips to his neck. He groaned and moved against me. Apparently thirty-something-year-old men responded not dissimilarly to college boys.

“Isn’t it what you wanted me to do?” I prodded lightly, realizing, even as I did, that we said so much in the subtext, in the spaces between words. I needed to know how devious he was in our most basic interactions. I needed to know—

“No,” he said, punctuating his words with the breathtaking movement of his tongue down my neck. “Because I wouldn’t want to have to send you away. You’re coming home with me tonight.” A shiver cut through me as I imagined myself in his loft, in his bed. He rolled away, shrugged out of his suit jacket and straightened his tie. Gave me just enough space to gather my thoughts. To realize that he had not provided a conclusive answer to my previous question … and that, for the pleasure of his touch, I was far too eager to do exactly as he wanted and go with him tonight.

“You assume so much.”

He gestured to the food. “Pita, hummus, falafels, salad.” He paused a moment, then looked back at me. “Am I wrong?”

“Yes, you are,” I said evenly, proud of myself for my composure. For not outwardly jumping at the chance to see him undressed as soon as possible. Whenever I was next to him rational thought disappeared but, in rare moments of cold clarity, my actions shocked me.

Yet, it was all play, none of this real.

Which meant there was nothing wrong with doing exactly as I wanted, as long as it was on my terms.

“But,” I added, “if you ask me out, I might consider Friday.”

He reached for a slice of pita bread and then said, in the most aggravatingly mild tone, “I’ll check my schedule.”

Some part of me that was still the feminist, independent Emily, even when within a dangerous proximity of him, bristled. I reached for him, resting a hand on his thigh as I leaned forward and plucked my own piece of pita. After I relaxed back, I didn’t move that hand. I waited until I felt him shift, his breath just inches from my neck. Then I lifted my hand and leaned back.

I couldn’t let him be the only one with power here. I needed to even the playing field, and if physical touch was my only weapon …

I turned all my attention to my food. Until I very casually said, “Friday’s no longer available anyway.”

“That’s rather childish, don’t you think?”

“Is it?” I put down my fork and shifted so that I was facing him again. “More childish than you checking your schedule when we both know that if you want to see me you can cancel any plans you have?”

My quickened breath punctuated the silence between us. The phone in the outer office rang muted and distant. I tried to understand the play of emotions on his face, the seeming desire that warred with restraint, with that part of him that had tried to warn me away two nights before. Maybe I was making things too difficult for him, giving him space to be rational. Was that so bad since at least one of us should be rational?

“What I want, Emily, is something I shouldn’t even be thinking right now, with that door unlocked and Janine about to come back from lunch any minute.”

My eyes widened. My lips parted a bit more. I wanted the exact same thing and yet hearing him voice that desire startled me.

He laid his hand onto one of my knees, slid beneath the hem of my skirt, skimmed the edge of my stocking. He caressed my skin with his thumb.

“Hartmann?” I managed quietly, struggling not to tremble under his touch. “I’d better go.”

He slid his hand up an inch more, stroking, kneading the softness of my thigh. I liked his hand there and yet I was terrified of it at the same time. As if it suggested something irreversible, some line I was about to cross. What was I doing?

“I have a late meeting. I’ll send my driver to pick you up at eight. Tonight.”

“Right,” I said, shaking my head even as I agreed, knowing that I was saying yes to the wrong plan. I quickly stood, forcing him to remove his hand. “I’d better to get back to work.”

I couldn’t help but look back over my shoulder as I pushed open the glass door. He was still watching me with that inscrutably dark expression on his face. A flutter went through my abdomen as I realized again how little I knew this man.

I stumbled forward, letting the door fall shut behind me.

Despite everything, I had no doubt, that tonight … tonight I would sleep with him.