“May I have your name?”
“Yeah—Blake Millen.”
“Millen… Millen,” she repeats, manicured fingers flying over the keyboard, before she peers back up at me. “I feel like I know that name.”
I stay silent, as I always do when this question crops up, settling instead for a bland smile.
“Never mind… You’ve got a meeting in boardroom three, is that correct?”
“Uh—” I shrug. Whatever I’ve got to do to get out of this glass building the quicker the better. “Yeah.”
“Great!” I watch while she picks up the phone, bringing it to her ear. “Tom? Mr Millen is here to see you…”
The sharpclickof heels on the marble flooring has myattention pricking up its ears. I can’t stop myself from looking for the source of the sound, wondering,hoping, that it might be her, even though I know I shouldn’t.
I shouldn’t even be entertaining the thought. But my thought process is a slippery slope; one in which I can’t seem to gain purchase in order to stop the fall.
The clacking sound of heels doesn’t belong to Calla, but rather another woman who smiles warmly at me, her eyes quite obviously flicking over my tall frame. I don’t repay the favour, I can’t, keeping my eyes fixed on her face as my brain reminds me with a not so subtle jolt, that somewhere, in this very building, is Calla.
I feel my pulse pick up at that thought.
I wonder what she’s doing. Maybe sat at her desk, long legs crossed beneath her tight-fitting pencil skirt, watching the time tick closer to five o’clock with each pass of its hand.
The image of those smooth legs wrapped around my waist flashes through my mind, quickly followed by the sight of Calla spread out over my bed. I wonder if she thinks about that night and our quickie in the apartment. I wonder—
“Mr Millen,” a familiar sounding voice calls my name. It takes a second, as it always does, that they’re talking to me and not my younger brother… never mind.
I stare ahead at the man walking towards me, cataloguing the way his hair is gelled into a perfect coif, his tie sitting perfectly in the centre of his crisp white button down.
He even smells expensive, too, I notice, as he sticks out his hand for me to shake.
“We spoke on the phone this afternoon. I’m Thomas McAvoy.”
My hand is less than an inch away from his before the words register in my brain.
“We spoke this afternoon…”
I grind my teeth together, feeling the muscle in my jaw tick, because, here, standing right in front of me, is the smug sounding twat who spoke about Calla like he could. Like he had the fucking right too. Like he knew something I didn’t.
Chapter 12
Blake
I’m trailing mud all over the pristine white floors, but I don’t care.
I scowl at the back of Thomas McAvoy’s head as I follow him to boardroom three, bypassing at least ten small office cubicles.
I try – and fail – to not search for a familiar looking blonde in the sea of suit wearing worker bees; each of them diligently typing away at their respective keyboards, looking like carbon copies of one another. As if they’ve been copy and pasted and placed behind blue light screens, forced to work for the power-hungry man until they can’t no more.
I can’t repress the shiver that goes through me at the very thought. Although, it’s very quickly followed by a surge of realisation. It’s time like these, when my neckline feels too tight around the collar and I begin to feel claustrophobic at the prospect of sitting day-in day-out confined within the same four walls, that I recall just how privileged I am.
Because thank God, I’m not tied to a desk, tucked away beneath man-made florescent lights.
My eyes flick back and forth, but I don’t see Calla anywhere.
“After you, Mr Millen.”
Peering over my shoulder one last time, I slide past Thomas with a silent nod of thanks. He closes the frosted glass door with aclick, gliding past me to take a seat at the head of the large, fourteen-seater, mahogany table, while I stay standing, arms folded.
