Fifth Avenue Devil

Chapter 5

Five

Nate

W hen I enter the building where Gellar Industries maintains their offices and labs, I have a goal. I need to meet with little Annalise Gellar in the daylight, and make her see that the merger between her company and mine is inevitable. After meeting with Annalise, it is clear as glass that I can’t actually expect her to sleep with me because Archer wagered it. But our companies are going to happen eventually... and it will go better for her if she just submits to my will now.

I stride through the lobby, not bothering to stop at the check-in desk. The employee behind it is clearly asleep anyway, and doesn't rouse as I hit the button to call for the elevator.

The elevator door opens with a creak. I raise my eyebrows and step in. The doors wheeze closed. I press the button for the top floor. The light flickers for a second as the elevator's gears grind. Then it carries me up to Gellar Industries without further issue until it arrives at the designated floor. When it stops, something in the machinery overhead bangs loudly.

I dart out of the elevator, reminding myself to take the stairs on the way down.

Gellar Industries, despite being on the top floor of the building and apparently doing ten million dollars a year of income, looks outdated by several decades. The bright, fluorescent lighting shines harshly down on a single, nonplussed-seeming secretary. She is sitting at a peeling laminate desk that was probably new in the late 1980s. The secretary clicks a mouse on an aged desktop, looking quite bored.

Shooting my suit cuffs, I step up to her desk.

"Can I help you?" She doesn't even bother to look away from her computer. Click. Click. Click. She jiggles the mouse.

I peer around the tan box of her screen and see that she is playing a poorly animated game.

"Nate Fordham. Here for Miss Gellar."

The secretary looks at me and takes a second before answering. "Do you have an appointment?"

"I don't need one." I spread my hands wide. "Our companies are merging. I'm the new boss."

The secretary sits up straighter. Her eyes widen. "One moment..." She picks up a telephone and mumbles something into it. She glances up at me and continues her muttered conversation for a few more seconds. Then she hangs up the phone. "Miss Gellar will be here shortly."

I smirk at the secretary, walk to the shabby, laminate oak door, and yank it open. Inside, I find quite a few cubicles filled with listless employees. They’re either talking to their neighbor or playing computer games on outdated machines similar to the front-desk secretary’s. They ignore me as I head down the side of the building toward where I predict the CEO's office to be.

As I pass office doors on my right side, I attract the attention of one person. "Mr. Fordham!" A woman comes rushing out. She's probably in her late 50s, and is dressed as boringly as possible in ash gray slacks and a matching sweater. She thrusts her hand out to me, a first since I've entered this building. "Lori Parker. General counsel for Gellar Industries. It's nice to meet you."

I shake her hand, surprised at the strength of her grip. "Nate Fordham. I assume you know why I'm here."

Lori nods. "I assume that you've decided to take Archer up on his offer of a merger."

"That's right." I offer her a small smile and then look around the open room. "Is it usually like this?"

Her cheeks stain with color. "Just since Mr. Gellar fell ill. He used to rule this office with an iron fist."

I nod, digesting that bit of information. But before I can respond to it, Annalise comes storming over.

"What are you doing here, Mr. Fordham?" She doesn't look pleased to see me. Her hair is gathered in that same bun as she wore last night, and there are faint circles under each of her eyes. She wears a Chanel dress suit that makes her look twenty years older than her actual age.

"I'm here to check out exactly what I'm supposed to be merging with." I jerk my thumb over my shoulder. "Your employees seem to need something to do."

Annalise flushes and snaps at me. "They are doing fine. Why don't you come into my office? I thought I made my position on merging very clear last night. But I will explain it again if you need me to."

"Annalise!" Lori whispers. "You should hear him out at least."

Annalise gestures to the corner office. "This is just a chat between myself and Mr. Fordham. I'll let you know if I need any other points of view."

Lori nods her head and steps back to let us pass. It's too bad that Lori isn't the person that I'm dealing with. At least she seems willing to accept the inevitable.

Annalise waves me in her office. I walk in and I'm struck by how masculine the energy is in here. Very little décor other than a big oak desk and navy curtains. There are a few photos on the wall, each of Archer with his arm around a president or dignitary of some kind.

Annalise Gellar is nowhere to be found in this room. It's still a shrine to Archer.

Walking over to her rather threadbare looking couch, I sit down, making myself comfortable. Annalise sits primly in the desk chair, looking like there are a million conversations she would rather be having than this one.

I cast a gaze over her. She's pretty, after a fashion. Her face is youthful, though she wears too much foundation and the muted colors she chose do nothing for her. If she wore a little color instead of the same damn pink nude color of her skirt and top, it would help.

"Are you going to explain what you're doing here, Mr. Fordham?"

The name brings a faint smile to my lips. "So formal, Annalise. Call me Nate."

Her green eyes study me for a second. "Fine. Nate, then. Why are you here? I told you last night that I am not interested in a merger."

"I'm here because I am interested. And I was promised a merger by your father. It's your right as CEO not to agree with it, but my team of lawyers will destroy you in court."

Her lips thin. "Yes, so you've said."

"Can I be candid with you?"

"I couldn't stop you even if I wanted to, apparently."

I smirk. "I am a man who is used to getting what I want. I would like you to agree. But I don't need you to." I stretch out on the couch, taking up space. "What I don't understand is why you wouldn't want to merge companies. I have seen your shabby little office and your unenthusiastic staff. Why would you not agree to a merger where you got much nicer offices, a person to do the heavy lifting for you and cut all of your dead weight, and a lot of money to boot?"

Annalise runs her tongue over her teeth, looking annoyed. "Because, Nate. First off, my father absolutely despises you. My job as his successor is to run things as he would see fit. He would never say yes to a merger. Secondly, I don't like you any more than my father does."

"And what about the undeniable benefits I'm offering?" I glance out her glass door toward the employees. I can see them standing and staring rather than working. "You need a hatchet man. Somebody unafraid to make bold cuts. Those people out there are not loyal to you, Annalise. They aren't driven to work hard for you. Let me be that person. Let me move you into much nicer offices in the ViaLife building. And for god's sake, think of your profits once I start making changes to the company structure."

She narrows her eyes at me. "I think you're missing something, Mr. Fordham."

"Nate," I correct her. "And what would that be?"

Annalise stands up and plucks a key card off her desk. "Let me show you."

Without another word, she leads me out of the office, to a stairwell, and down a floor. We’re headed to the company's lab floor, I bet.

What could be interesting about that, though?

Annalise scans her keycard at the door, then steps back to do a biometric scan. Once the door unlocks, she ushers me into a hallway with a series of same-looking white doors. One is propped open and strange light flickers from the room into the hallway.

"Left! I said left!" a man shouts.

I look at Annalise, arching a brow. She ignores me and hurries into the room with the strange, flickering lights.

I blink a few times as I follow her in; my eyes have to adjust to the darkness.

In the center of the room, a large, three-dimensional map hovers midair. The map is being navigated by a young man working joystick. He presses a button and the map unfolds to reveal several sections of the ground, complete with layers of topsoil, sediment, and rock. The young man sticks out his tongue as he deftly works the joystick, descending through the strata on the map.

An older man lounges in a chair beside him. He stands up when Annalise enters, rubbing his hands together. "Bossy lady!" he says. His accent is reminiscent of the Eastern Bloc. "You come to see us, finally."

"Hi Mikhail." Annalise looks to me. "This is Nate Fordham. Mr. Fordham, meet Dr. Mikhail Popov and Dr. Lev Alexeyev."

"Please, call me Mikhail," the older man says. He elbows his co-worker in the ribs. "This is Lev. We are trying to perfect the mapping software. It has many glitches, still."

"Is this a model that you're working with?" I ask. “Is this a hypothetical project?”

In the next second, the software glitches and the projection vanishes. I hear Lev mutter a curse in what sounds like Croatian or Estonian. Then he walks over to flip on the light switch.

Annalise, in the meantime, answers my question. "It is a model of an actual site in Utah. We have done extensive work with ground-penetrating radar and sonar. Now we just need to debug the software so that we can actually use it."

Lev nods, talking to me slowly, as if I will surely have difficulty comprehending this information.

"If you can see all the ground at one time, you can see patterns. And from there, you can predict and explore where there might be large deposits of any kind."

He leaves it there, but there is an unspoken, "duh" at the end.

The back of my neck heats. I'm not used to being dressed down by anybody, let alone scientists. Annalise glances at me, fidgeting, and chimes in again.

"We are going to be able to find huge shale oil deposits. And any other kind of mineral or gas as well. Our project is mere months away from making us so much money that we don't even know what to do with it. That's why there are so many people upstairs playing solitaire. They are sales or support staff, waiting for the word to start making calls,” Annalise adds.

My eyebrows shoot up. If what she says is true, I could be coming into this merger at the perfect time.

"We need to talk about the best way to roll this technology out." I can see how profitable her technology will be. I can also see how partnering with ViaLife can feed this little two-person department a stream of top-tier computer programmers. What she thinks will takes months could take weeks if it is given the right resources.

Annalise thanks the two scientists and steers me out of the room. She makes certain that we are in the stairwell again before she speaks.

"ViaLife is going to be one of many partners that pay for our services as soon as we are up and running." She starts climbing the stairs ahead of me, forcing me to follow her. I scowl as I look at her fantastic ass in that overly conservative skirt and her sleekly muscled calves in those black high heels.

For the first time since I've been in negotiations with Annalise Gellar, I start to lose focus on the merger itself. Instead, my brain fills with questions about Annalise herself and what she might look like in something other than those boring Chanel suits she seems to favor.

Actually, I wonder what she looks like in nothing at all. She would probably look utterly stunning naked, lying in the middle of my black silk sheets. All that creamy skin, ready to be explored...

"Mr. Fordham?" Annalise prompts.

I blink. She is holding the door open to the upstairs floor, looking at me with vague confusion.

Did I just sexualize Archer Gellar's little girl? Yes, I believe I did.

Smoothing down my tie, I bound up the last few stairs. My mind is already working overtime. I need to continue this conversation someplace much less formal.

"Do you like the ballet?" is what I come up with, grasping at straws.

Puzzlement settles over Annalise's delicate features. "I do..."

"The NYC Ballet is showing Sleeping Beauty tonight. Will you come as my guest?"

She lifts her chin, eyeing me. "Why should I do that?"

"So we can continue to talk."

She hesitates for a moment. "I don't think that's a very good idea, Mr. Fordham."

I smirk. "What if I pay you?"

She rolls her eyes and turns away. "I have everything that I could want already, Mr. Fordham."

I catch her arm, tugging her back into the stairwell. Annalise shoots me an annoyed look.

"Are you going to do this every time I try to leave?"

I slide my arm around her waist. She sucks in a deep breath, perhaps surprised at my boldness.

"Yes." I grab her hand and trail my fingers to her pulse. Her heartbeat is like that of a jack-rabbit. "I think you like that I don't want to let you go, Annalise."

She blushes, two bright red spots high in her cheeks. "You barely know me, Mr. Fordham."

I cock my head, wrapping one of her blonde curls around my finger. "You really should call me Nate."

"No, I shouldn't." She looks up at me, her expression pinching. "I think you are a dangerous man, Mr. Fordham."

"You have no idea." My lips twitch with a sparse bit of humor. "Come out with me tonight. We can talk more business. If you still don't like what I have to say... I'll walk away."

I know it's a lie the second it comes out of my mouth. If Annalise keeps being stubborn, I'll eventually turn my legal team loose on her. But she doesn't need to know that.

"Really?" she says. "You'll back off?"

"Sure." I shrug. More lies. "Just let me try to woo you tonight."

Her hazel eyes study my face for a few seconds. She bites her lower lip, drawing my attention there.

I intend to be biting and sucking at her glossy lips soon. And if things go as I want, I plan to groan and clutch the back of her head while she swallows my cock soon too. The idea of messing up her perfect lipstick stirs my blood.

"Okay," Annalise relents softly. "I'll come."

"I'll send a car for you." My eyes skate down her bland dress. "Actually, I'll send a dress, too. I want you to fit in."

She rolls her eyes. "I've been to the fricking ballet before, Mr. Fordham."

I don't want to turn her loose. But I step back anyway, forcing my hands behind my back. "Be ready at six. I don't tolerate lateness."

Then, before I can be tempted further, I turn and thunder down the stairs. Only one thought rings through my head.

I'm going to have Annalise Gellar. I'm going to take Archer’s little daughter and pathetic his little company, too. I'm going to rub it in Archer's face.

Nobody gets revenge quite like I do.