Twenty-Two
Devlin
I felt like shit.
It was the only reason I was going home, because productive, a word that usually defined me, in no way encompassed the shit show that today had been.
Only one thing had gone right, and even that came with strings attached.
Tired of the bullshit from the board, from Mandelson’s inability to find anything on Rhode, I’d asked a friend from school who worked for MI6 now to get involved, to do a little nosing around her life.
The initial findings more than made it worth my while for bombing that favor owed me, but it wasn’t exactly admissible in court. Knowing what Rhode was capable of, and that she’d filmed several of her attacks and stored them on her home computer, he’d recommended someone in the States who could break into Robert’s laptop.
That was the good news—even if Robert had never kept anything on there, at least we’d be able to find out and could hopefully access his personal email account and messages as no one in his family had managed to get into his iPhone either.
I was praying he might have mentioned something about her in his DMs or text messages that we could use in a court case to trigger reasonable doubt. It was a long shot, but I was getting desperate.
The bad was that nearly half my staff had been decimated by that goddamn stomach bug that Micah and I had been hit with, which meant every single one of my PAs apart from Paul hadn’t been at work. Even Sadie had been a no-show.
With everything taking five times as long, it had been like running a marathon while wading through porridge.
Slaking a hand through my hair, I shook off my fatigue with thoughts of the coming night. No, I wouldn’t be fucking Micah’s brains out, but it’d be such a nicer way to fall asleep when we were together than to be on my own and feeling like crap heated up on a bonfire.
There was something about him that made me act like another person around him. It was like, with him, I let out the real Devlin. Beneath all the Astley bullshit, the Viscount nonsense, he saw me because, for whatever reason, I let him.
That was the most perplexing thing of all.
As was the hard truth that I was probably going to push him away. It was inevitable. These feelings he inspired in me weren’t healthy. I’d learned time and time again that transactions were the way forward, but how did you buy a man who’d once had everything and had been taught that money was a weapon?
It wasn’t like the way to his fucking heart was sandwiches and cronuts. It was a token of my esteem, a small one, but it wasn’t enough for him to put up with me—I knew it. Accepted it.
Something about me was inherently unlovable.
And I was okay with that, but it just made me want to appreciate Micah for the time I had him. He was young, still had all his twenties ahead of him. Why the fuck would he want to get tangled up with a businessman who lived at the office? Who didn’t have much of a life?
Christ, I was a multi-millionaire and where had I taken him on a date?
My apartment.
“Jesus,” I muttered under my breath as the elevator rolled to Micah’s floor.
But where could I take him? It wasn’t like we could be seen together in public. I had an image to maintain—which made me feel like shit. On top of the shit from before, as well. I probably deserved that though.
Grimacing at the thought, I headed out onto Micah’s floor and started strolling down the corridor as I pondered where I could take him that would show him I cared, without making him think I was trying to buy him.
Each floor of Astley Publishing was split into four, with the elevator shooting a person out into the middle. Each quarter housed forty to eighty people, and within those segments, there were corridors that separated upper management from members of staff.
Micah, as the intern to the EA of the Marketing VP, was in the top quadrant, so I headed to the end of the corridor where Rhode’s office was situated.
We’d tried to lessen the corporate vibe, and while the walls were homey, bookshelves lining them that housed every single one of our titles—prioritized with release date in mind because we had a back catalogue of thirteen thousand books—but there was still that weird smell in the air on the lower levels. That strange carpet/vacuum cleaner scent that made me crinkle my nose with distaste.
Making it to the doorway, I peered over the floor. This part was set up so that, if she wanted, Rhode could see over every single desk in her department.
I looked over the sea of computers, spied that it was empty, before I peered at Micah’s cubicle, which he wasn’t seated at. Reckoning that he was in the bathroom, I cast a glance at Rhode’s office.
The light wasn’t on, even if her screen was glaring the bluelight into the empty room, which pissed me off. How much electricity we wasted by idiots not turning off their units every night was something that’d give me a nightmare if I thought about it.
Half-tempted to wait for Micah to finish up in the restroom by sneaking into her office and seeing if she had something in the desk drawers—which would be the height of stupidity, but I hated the bitch, and needed her gone even more now that I knew what she was capable of—a slight groan caught me unawares.
With my briefcase in hand, I twisted to find the noise, and then when I heard it again, definitely coming from the direction of the department and not in the vicinity of the bathrooms, concern hit me that Micah had been struck with the stomach flu again.
Darting over to his cubicle, the second I got a close look at the floor, I nearly had a heart attack.
Frozen for a couple of seconds too long, I could only process what my eyes were telling me, but even that didn’t make sense.
His head was in the entranceway to the cubicle, his body flat out on the gray carpet, with his hands at his sides, the tender palms face up to the ceiling. His eyelids moved slowly, blinking in a way that made me think he was in a trance, but that wasn’t even the half of it.
Rhode was on top of him.
I saw her pussy, saw that he was inside her, and then Micah made that moan again.
It was distressed.
Agonized—
Jesus.
It broke my shameful stasis, and I dropped my briefcase to the floor with a solid thunk, before I ran over to the bitch and dragged her off my man. My hands bit into her arms as I threw her against the desk, uncaring if it brought the fucking cubicle down around us as I snarled, “What the hell did you do to him?”
Not waiting for her to answer as she screamed obscenities at me, I reached for my cellphone and even though it pained me, took a quick photo of her and him. Then, I hit my cell for Rachel on reception.
“Send Security to Marketing, and call the cops as well as the EMTs. Advise Security to detain Rhode until the police arrive, and inform them she is never to be allowed back onto the premises again.”
“You can’t do that!” Rhode snarled, and it came as no surprise that she reached out, hurling a stapler at me as she did so.
My phone fell from my fingers as the stapler collided with my temple, prompting me to stagger backward, and as blood spurted from the wound and my already aching head exploded with pain, I somehow managed to deflect her when she came for me, nails curled into claws as she attacked.
“Yes, sir!” Rachel hollered down the line as I raised my hands to grab Rhode’s arms.
“What did you do to him, you crazy bitch?” I snarled, as I twisted her wrists behind her back to try to contain her aggression by trapping her into staying still. She continued to struggle, and though it fucking pained me to give her any of my attention when Micah so clearly needed me, I dragged her over to the doorway, wanting Security to get her from there, and not see Micah like that.