Chapter Two
Boston was really fuckingbleak at the end ofDecember.
Usually the view from his top-floor office made Drew McMann smile, regardless of the season. He was high enough above the city that he didn’t see the slush and grime in the winter or smell the baked-in oily fumes that clung to the pavement all summer. From up here, he could pretend the whole city was the glittering harbor, stretching out in endless blue all the way past thehorizon.
But nottoday.
Today, it was all endlessly grey and depressing as hell, but it suited his mood. There was something about the period between Christmas and New Year that always made him feel this way - a kind of lame-duck suspended animation. It was too late to change the mistakes of the past year, and too soon to make the changes he knew he needed to make for the coming year, so for this one week, he wouldwallow.
“Boss?”
Drew turned in his chair to find his assistant, Peter, looking down at him, one immaculate eyebrow raised and his tablet propped against his arm. “Hmm?”
“I asked if you were fine with pushing back the Tekko meeting until next week, for Paula’ssake.”
“Paula?” Drew repeated, his mind as heavy and blank as the cloudsoutside.
“Paula Drake?” Peter gave a perfectly-calibrated sigh, just forceful enough to rebuke Drew without being overtly disrespectful. Peter was a master at sighing. “Have you even heard a word I’vesaid?”
Drew ran a hand down his tie and grimaced. He hadn’t. Not a single word. Zoning out at the office was one of his pet-peeves, generally speaking, and it pissed him off that it had been happening to him more and more often. People tasked with running a multi-national company like Seaver Tech didn’t have time for daydreaming and navel-gazing. It was the kind of behavior Drew had given other people shit for in the not-so-distant past - his friend Cam Seaver, inparticular.
He was pretty glad Cam had been too busy to pop in on him much over the past fewweeks.
“Sorry, Peter,” he said, sliding his legs under the desk and looking up at his assistant. “Continue.Please.”
Five-and-a-half feet tall and lean-framed, Peter wasn’t intimidating physically, but he didn’t need to be. He could communicate displeasure with a raised eyebrow more effectively than Drew could in a paragraph of text. He was fiercely loyal to Drew, and one of the few assistants he’d ever had who could counteract Drew’s frequent habit of micromanaging. But Peter was way too professional to ever sit around and chit-chat.
Which made it all the more bizarre when, after observing Drew for half a minute, Peter sat down in the chair across from Drew’s, folded his hands atop the tablet on his lap, and narrowed his dark browneyes.
“What’s going on with you thesedays?”
Well. That was a loaded question. Drew could start with the plane crash a year and a half ago that had killed three people he loved, though that was old news. His parents’ subsequent divorce and his dad’s retreat to Thailand with a woman younger than Drew was also well-known. Hmmm… He could mention how his mother, God love her, had no concept of money other than how to spend it, and needed Drew to handle her life for her, but that sounded too self-pitying. He could talk about the horror of learning Emmett Shaw - one of his father’s oldest friends and a man Drew had thought of as an uncle - had financed the plane crash, or the absolute mind-fuck of finding out that Shaw had been acting on the orders of some Russian crime syndicate no one had ever heard of, but both those things were secrets that could get someonekilled.
Or, he could talk about what was really bothering him these days: that his best friend Sebastian had stopped talking tohim.
Exceptthatwas just too pathetic todiscuss.
He grabbed a heavy pen off his desk, running his fingers over the textured satin finish, feeling the comforting heft of it in his hand. “Not a thing is going on,” he told Peter finally. “Nothing atall.”
Peter clearly didn’t believe him, but he was far too professional to do more than give a small head-shake before returning his gaze to histablet.
“Well, then,asI said,” Peter continued with the air of a long-suffering martyr, and Drew felt his lips twitch, despite himself. “Paula Drake’s mother fell and broke her hip, so we should probably push back the Tekko meeting until next week, unless you feel the burning need to get yourself up to speed and handle it yourself, in which case I canask…”
“No. God, no,” Drew said, waving a hand through the air. “Wait for Paula. In fact, let’s see if we can push it back to the fifth or even later. Give her some breathingroom.”
Peter nodded and made a note on his tablet. “Done. Ah, Margaret stopped by earlier and mentioned getting a couple of emails from a guy who used to work with Levi Seaver back in the day. Looks like he needs a job or a recommendation? I’m having her forward me copies of theemails.”
“A job inquiry?” Drew asked. “Shouldn’t that be an HRthing?”
“The guy says he was a close friend, and he’s been pretty insistent. She didn’t want to push it off withoutchecking.”
“Margaret is Cam and Sebastian’s assistant,” Drew pointed out unnecessarily. “If they’re the ones getting the emails, shouldn’t she check with one ofthem?”
“Yeah, but Cam’s been crazy busy for the past couple of weeks and hasn’t had time to check into it. And Sebastian, well. I guess he hasn’t been checking his email.” Peter shrugged, once again managing to convey volumes in a singlegesture.
Drew rubbed a hand over his forehead and nodded, understanding all that Peter was too diplomatic tomention.
Sebastian Seaver was a genius - with all the wonderful and really, really terrible things that entailed. He thrived on logic, but hated rules. Was single-minded in his focus to the exclusion of all other things, but somehow made intuitive leaps in a heartbeat. He was stubborn as hell, and the funniest, most generous human being Drew had everknown.
