I bit my tongue and tried to maintain a dignified scowl. “The service at this place is awfully mouthy,” I muttered.
When he set the food in front of me with a flourish, I remembered how hungry I was. Instead of shoveling the food in without taking a breath, I sat back and looked up at him.
“Feed it to me.”
Ellison’s eyes widened. We stared at each other for a beat before his father’s angry voice broke the silence. “What did you just say?” he growled
“I told your precious boy to hand-feed me my dinner. My hands are stiff from signing all of those legal documents with your brother Mark’s attorneys. I would like my assistant to… assist.”
As I spoke, I kept my eyes on Ellison to see how he would react. I kept waiting for him to balk, to storm out in an angry tirade.
But he didn’t.
His father did. He pushed his chair back so hard it smacked the wall and left the conference room while threatening all manner of retaliation.
I didn’t watch him leave. I only had eyes for his son.
I raised a finger to halt Ellison, then made a very brief phone call, holding his gaze all the while. “Marcel? Yes, I know you’re at home. Yes, tell Luca I’m extremely sorry. Please have security remove Warren York from the premises immediately and permanently. His time here is done.”
I threw my phone on the table with a clatter and quirked a brow at Ellison. “Proceed.”
Ellison leaned over me, much closer than necessary, and cut a small bite of lasagne before squatting next to me and bringing the fork to my mouth. “Open up, sir.” His voice held the barest hint of breathiness, and it made my mouth dry up completely.
My dick roared to life against my leg. Every other muscle in my body stiffened. He was so close, I felt the warmth of his body, saw the individual curls against his collar, noticed two eyelashes crossed in a tangle over one eye.
Fucking Christ.
I opened my mouth for him. The warm, savory pasta slid onto my tongue as the fork pulled out. My stomach flipped wildly, torn between hunger and excitement. I forced the excitement down and focused on the hunger. The food hunger.
What the fuck was I thinking? What was I doing? This was a waste of my time. It was beneath me.
“That will be all,” I said after swallowing. “You may eat. Hopefully you picked up your own food as well.”
Ellison’s gaze was all too knowing. I hated him even more than before, if such a thing were possible. So I did my best to ignore him.
I hadn’t eaten much in several days. Convincing Mark York to sell me his shares hadn’t been easy, but it had been worth it.
As I ate, I watched Ellison out of the corner of my eye as he unpacked his food. The rounded fall of his trousers over his ass, the narrow waist accentuated by a close-fit button-down shirt tucked into his pants and nipped with a belt. His shirt was rolled up at the arms, and the veins leading down to the back of his hands caught my eye. He had slender wrists and long fingers, even though his arms had muscle definition.
Hands that had been born holding a silver spoon.
His fingertips ended in neatly trimmed nails. I wondered if he’d ever done even an hour’s worth of physical labor with those hands, changed the oil on a car or tried to fix a busted garbage disposal. Of course, I already knew the answer to this. He had the soft, perfect hands of a businessman who didn’t even need to change the toner on his own printer or write his own checks.
“Are you still hungry? Do you want some of mine?” Ellison’s question had a note of false innocence.
I glanced up to see him smirking at me. He’d caught me staring at his dinner. Hopefully he didn’t realize it hadn’t been his food I’d been salivating over.
“No, I’m fine. Uh… thank you.” I took a moment to calm myself. “Now, let’s talk about the deal.”
Ellison paused with his fork halfway to his lips. “Alright.”
“As I mentioned, your father has assured me that you will act as my personal assistant for the next two weeks during the transition.”
Ellison blinked at me. “You were serious about that.”
I smiled evilly. “Dead serious. For a man as self-important as your father, he owns surprisingly little in his own right. All of his real estate, for example, is now owned by York Capital, and since I am now in charge of York Capital, I am now the owner of the property in Greenwich and the apartment on Fifth Avenue. The Greenwich house is quite a valuable asset. I can’t imagine it would be fair to take it out of the company without proper remuneration.”
The shock on Ellison’s face made me downright giddy inside. He knew his father banked on his reputation as one of the wealthiest investors in the city, and his luxury home in the burbs was part of that reputation.
“As I told your father, I will be happy to give him lifetime rights to reside in the home if you’ll simply assist me during the final two weeks of your employment contract.”
“Rights to reside?” Ellison repeated. “He agreed to that?”
I hesitated. Technically, negotiations hadn’t gotten that far. “He will. I hold all the cards.”
Ellison’s eyes never left mine. He seemed to see right through me.
“You’ll sign it over to him in full,” Ellison said calmly. “And in exchange, I’ll give you what you want.”
A bead of sweat made itself known between my shoulder blades and slid lazily down my spine. Images of Ellison York on his knees for me, bent over the conference room table for me, and tied up and begging me for mercy flashed erratically through my mind’s eye.
How could he possibly know what I wanted? Because despite my baser tendencies to want Ellison naked and writhing beneath me, I wanted something greater than that, bigger than this one acquisition.
I wanted for once in my life to no longer be the poor kid from White Plains begging for a seat at the table and pretending to know which fork to use when I finally got that seat.
I wanted acceptance.
I wanted to belong.
But I would never let on to this entitled prick that I gave a shit about any of it.
4
Ellison
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
~ Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Grey was colder than I remembered, and why wouldn’t he be? He’d been through hell and had to fight ten times harder to get where he was today.
The man was an angry shell, full of bitterness and resentment. He’d always had some of it. I’d seen the looks he’d flashed the rich country club members behind their backs when he was caddying, the judgment and impatience, but this was different. I hated seeing the jaded adult where the idealistic and eager kid had been before.
Despite the hard edge to him—or maybe because of it—he was sexier than ever before. Grey Blackwood was blistering hot, the kind of person I both couldn’t look at directly and couldn’t look away from. My heart skittered around wildly in my chest as if begging to bust out and fling itself pell-mell at the corporate raider in front of me.
But my heart didn’t know jack shit. The man at the head of the table was clearly here on a mission of hateful revenge. He’d be happiest when my father and I had been thoroughly ruined, dragged through any available mud, and buried beneath whatever rubble might remain. His eyes were glinty with steel, and his lips were tight with thinly veiled annoyance.