Page 8 of Takeover
He didn’t bother lying. “I don’t have much choice, so yes.”
Michael furrowed his brow. Obviously not the answer he’d been expecting.
Sam held Michael’s gaze. “I’ll be fine.” That wasn’t a lie. It would take a bit of time, but he’d manage. He had to. There was a new job waiting for him once he left Curaçao. A new challenge. A company to rescue and money to be made. He didn’t have the time to be an emotional wreck. William and the board would be watching.
Michael’s expression softened. “You’re an extraordinary man. You’ll find someone.”
Sam tried to keep the bile from his face. He had found someone. If his life had been different, he’d exchange numbers and try to see if there was more beyond extraordinary sex. But the person he was in this hotel room wasn’t the person he’d be once he stepped back onto a plane. “Thanks.”
Michael let go, stepped away, and started to dress. Sam didn’t have to. Didn’t want to—that meant slipping the mask back on. He bent to pick his clothes up off the floor and winced as the skin of his rear pulled and stung.
Right. “How bad is my ass?”
Michael’s chuckle sent a shudder through Sam. “No broken skin. I made sure of that. But you’ll be sore and quite bruised for a several days.”
“So I’ll remember you every time I sit.” Sam huffed a laugh. “I’ll have that, I suppose.” The memories.
Flip-flops were the last item Michael donned. Sam had been right about the footwear. Parrots. Shorts. Glasses. Perfect. “I’m glad I met you.”
Michael stepped forward and claimed a kiss. “Me too.” Then he headed toward the door. When that closed, everything would go back to the way it had been. A sick lurching gripped Sam’s heart and he couldn’t breathe. There had to be some change. He needed a reminder of this night so it would remain real. “Michael!”
The call halted Michael at the door. He turned.
Sam scooped up one of the cuff links, crossed the room and pressed it into his hand. “Take it. Please.”
For a moment, Michael looked as if he might protest. Instead, he nodded. “Good-bye, Sam.”
“Good-bye.”
Michael turned, opened the door, and left.
Sam stood in the entryway for a long time after the latch clicked, staring at the door handle. Then he shook himself and locked the hotel door.
Enough. His life was what he’d chosen it to be. He had a job to prepare for and a company to pull back from the brink of mismanagement. And one fewer cuff link.
It was the last thing that gave him the most hope.
Chapter Two
Michael tookoff his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The numbers and letters on his screen kept blurring into each other. Sleep would have helped, but he hadn’t had the time for more than three or four hours a night since he had come back.
The price of a week away from work should not be two weeks of sheer hell. But here he was. He picked up Sam’s cuff link and rolled it between his fingers. Some of the stiffness between his shoulders eased. At least he had that night to remember. The taste of Sam’s skin, the sound of his abandonment when he came, and the way his tight ass had milked Michael’s cock—that memory kept him from going apeshit all over the office.
The problems had started on the plane when he’d turned his computer back on. Damn the in-flight wireless because e-mails hadpouredin. Not even a day after he’d left—and of course he’d been dumb enough to tell his coworkers he’d be out of contact—that asshole Vince had instigated a release of routing software for a cellular backhaul customer. As VP of Engineering, Vince had the authority to fire the guy Michael had left in charge. Frank bent to Vince’s will and certified the release as tested.
Theyhadtested the release before Michael left, but there had been so many problems with regression, integration, and interoperability, he’d thrown the whole lot back to development with a laundry list of bugs to fix, but Vince only ever saw testing as the bottleneck to release.
Once Michael had left for the tropics, Vince broke the bottle and let the release go out into the wild, with disastrous results. Three customers put the code into production and their networks went down. Support was swamped with angry calls 24-7. Vince blamed test for not doing their jobs and Taylor, the CEO, called a meeting and threatened to fire everyone in test—including Michael—until one of the other test engineers, Jennifer, had shut Vince and Taylor down.
God, part of him wished he had been here to see that. At five foot nothing, she’d climbed up onto a table with a fist full of e-mails and the voice of an opera singer. The truth of Vince’s doings came out and that had opened the floodgates. Eventually Steve from development admitted they were still working on the bugs and that the code had huge issues.
By the time Michael had stepped off the plane in Pittsburgh, both Vince and Taylor had been sacked, the angry customers had been downgraded to the last stable release, and the board of directors was ready to hang Michael for having the audacity to go away for a week of vacation, as if the entire episode had been his fault.
He didn’t even bother reminding the board if they’d left Michael as VP of Engineering and Test, the whole episode wouldn’t have happened in the first place, but no, they’d demoted him after he’d been left high and dry by Rasheed and Susan.
The board had brought on Taylor and Vince over Michael’s objections.
Fucking suits.
