part0054

T he elevator dinged softly to grab her attention and that of the other five women in the conference room with her. A man stepped out as the doors parted and looked around. He appeared decidedly uncomfortable in the building, stiff and hard to define. Rather than a suit, he wore a leather jacket over a gray bowling shirt, a pair of worn jeans, and boots. His brown hair was cut short and a hint of scruff traced along on his jawline. Greenish-brown eyes seemed to change color with the light.

The receptionist jumped out from behind her desk and circled it to talk to him. He looked a little surprised and took a step back when she smiled and talked over him before she handed him a folder. He smiled that thin-lipped smile of his as she directed him to the other conference room on the floor. Anderson was waiting for him there.

As the man entered the room, the receptionist broke away and headed into the secretaries-office-slash-conference-room. Marie was a younger girl, barely over twenty, but her likable nature and quick mind for the gossip around the building had made her something of a hit among the newcomers in the room.

“Oh, my God,” she said with a grin as she prowled the table and kept her gaze discreetly on the two men in the opposite conference room. “How hot is he?”

Alexandra glanced at the receptionist, then tilted her head to examine the two men.

Apparently, it was a popular move.

“Don’t all look at once,” Marie shrieked and looked utterly abashed. “Are you girls completely unable to control yourselves? Jesus.”

Alexandra waited a moment before she looked once again. She could see it, although it wasn’t the obvious kind of hotness. She’d seen him around before, of course, but she’d never caught a name. He had the look of the quintessential tough guy, and there was some attraction to that, but there was something else there too. She couldn’t really place it—perhaps the mysterious look of a man with secrets?

Marie pushed her shoulder with a finger. “Come on, Alex, could you be more obvious?”

She looked away quickly. “What do you know about him?”

The girl grinned. “Anderson introduced him as Savage. Does that sound like a fake name to you or what?”

“Why would he have a fake name?” one of the other secretaries asked and leaned in closer, the better to hear the gossip that was sure to come.

“Here’s my theory, okay?” Marie dropped on one of the seats and waited until she was sure she had the attention of all the women present before she continued. “Well, he doesn’t look like he belongs in a place like this, right? Where even the interns need to wear suits and ties? He looks tough, right, like those fake tough guys? But then I saw a scar on his arm when he took his jacket off, and my dad was in the Marines and he has a scar like that. Bullet scars. So he’s not simply some tough guy, he’s ex-military.”

“Anderson is ex-military too,” Alexandra mentioned and still tried to catch the odd glimpse of the men out of the corner of her eye.

“Right?” Marie agreed, “So ‘Savage,’” she said with air quotes, “is here doing business for people who just got into a position for a company with government contracts. So I’ve heard, anyway. I’m not actually supposed to know that, but I get memos and stuff. And again, it’s in the family, so I can put two and two together and get four, you know what I’m saying?”

“Stay on topic,” Alexandra said.

“Oh, right. Anyway. What I was thinking was that…well, he’s probably tied up in Delta force or something like that. He’s retired but he’s brought in by his friend, Anderson, and they’ll work together on this and be all covert with their operations around here. For the good of the company.”

“I would let him run his covert operations all over me if you know what I’m saying,” Miranda, another secretary said with a soft giggle.

One of the other secretaries, Gina, raised an eyebrow. “You know, I’ve been writing a kind of…novel of my own that he would work perfectly for. Nothing professional, of course. But I’ve struggled to come up with the male character for the book, and damned if he doesn’t fit that bill to a T. Or a B, in this case.”

“Do tell?” Alexandra asked and moved closer without even thinking about it. Gina always said her writing wasn’t professional or anything like that, but from what she’d managed to share over their time together, Alexandra had realized that she was actually pretty damn good. She mostly wrote short stories and romantic stuff that Alexandra usually avoided, but it was still interesting enough to grab her attention. Most of the other secretaries poised themselves to hear more.

“Well, the story was about a guy—the hard ex-military type with a dark past—being brought in out of the cold,” Gina said, knowing she had a captive audience. “He’s kind of gruff but with a heart of gold. You know the type. Anyway, he’s sent in to retrieve vital information from a company. Enter our female protagonist, Valerie, who has a dark secret in her past as well. She’s a secretary at this company, working to pay her way through med school, and she ends up with her hands on the drive that has the data our military man needs.”

Alexandra let her mind churn over the idea, replacing Valerie with herself. She was the one who had the information without even knowing she had it, and Savage came to retrieve it.

“Anyway, our guy finds out that she has it, but he also discovers that the people involved in the company she works for know she has it too, and are coming to kill her,” Gina continued. “He pauses. He knows that bringing her along for the ride would complicate his mission, but he can’t simply leave her behind. Not if her life is at risk. So he drags her along to enter into a world of spies, and backstabbing, and death, and she’s right there beside him.”

Yes, she was. Alexandra didn’t have any translatable skills into that sort of situation, but she was a quick study. She could learn how to do it on the go, letting him protect her while protecting him right back. He would come to see her as less of a damsel in need of help and more like a partner, a friend, and maybe even…

“I can totally see it,” the other woman continued. “He needs to protect her. At first, he thinks it’s only about the data, but he starts getting feelings. He’s not a fan of them, but he can’t help them. They have to go on the run. They end up alone in a hotel room, giving them a quiet moment together after they risked their lives and she struggles to cope. He sees it and relies on instinct. He’s not the kind of guy who usually comforts people, but he does. He strokes her cheek. She smiles, and there’s a connection. She leans in and they kiss…”

Gina’s voice trailed off, but the silence she left behind was enough evidence to tell that she had incited the imagination of all the women present.

Marie was the first to react. She shoved up from her seat and looked a little flushed as she straightened her dress. “Well… I think I need to get back to the front desk. Some—ahem—filing needs to get done over there.”

“Right,” Gina said with a nod as the other secretaries pretended to get back to work.

Their minds were all on something else entirely. Alexandra could only speak for herself, of course, but she felt like it was time to take that lunch break she’d put off today.

“Hey, Gina?” she said as she stood and headed over to the door. “If you ever get around to writing something like that, I wouldn’t mind…you know, proof-reading it.”