An Act of Persuasion(20)

No, he imagined it wouldn’t be hard at all to spend a lifetime trying to make her smile. But, as was his pattern, Ben had gotten there first. This was Mark’s bad luck.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked.

“Uh...I was thinking of working for the rest of the day with periodic time-outs to eat saltines and drink ginger ale.”

“I meant about Ben. He proposed, remember?”

“And I said no. Actually I said hell no. He was pissed but he’ll get over it. When he calms down we can discuss our situation like rational people. Marriage isn’t the answer.”

If Mark’s gut was right, he didn’t think that rational discussion would happen. Not because Ben wasn’t rational, but because he’d broken his number-one rule and slept with his employee. For a man like him that was like a tectonic shift in his principles. And he would be immovable until he got the results he wanted. In this case, Mark suspected the results were marriage.

And that came back to Mark’s original assessment. Something about Anna was different for Ben. Given how sad she looked when she came into the office after having been proposed to, it didn’t take a professional observer to know how she felt about Ben in return.

Mark shrugged. None of it should be his concern. He’d hired Anna simply to piss off Ben, but he’d quickly grown to like her. Now, because of that, it seemed terribly important to him how all this worked out. Which, he realized, was nothing more than a stall tactic on his part from having to make the most important decision of his life.

Yes, Ben had beaten him to the punch in a lot of different areas in his life. But the one thing Mark had done first was father a child.

* * *

BEN WATCHED as Anna drove out of the parking garage into downtown Philadelphia traffic. He waited until she’d turned right at the first corner and was out of sight before he exited his car.

He entered the building he’d been in earlier that day gathering information. He stopped at the security desk briefly and flashed the badge he’d spent the afternoon forging before making his way to the elevators. He hit the button for the appropriate floor and felt a surge in his stomach as the sleek elevator climbed the distance so fast he could actually feel pressure against his eardrums.

Leave it to Mark to pick a flashy office. By contrast, Ben and his staff used a small, serviceable office in the Northern Liberties section of the city. Results were what mattered, not a slick image.

Once the elevator stopped, he made his way down the hall and wasn’t surprised to see Mark lounging in the doorway that opened to his office. So casually as if to suggest he could predict Ben’s actions and knew he would be arriving.

“Sharpe,” Ben said, acknowledging him.

“Tyler,” Mark replied, sporting his legendary smile.

Women went crazy for that smile. Hardened female foreign agents revealed secret information because of that smile. All Ben ever wanted to do was punch it.

Mark stepped back and allowed Ben to enter. He passed Anna’s desk—had to be hers because there was a small potted plant on the corner of it. She hated planting and hated having to remember to water them even more, yet held firmly to the belief that an office needed real life in it. Not plastic decorations.

He made his way past the glass partition to the larger space and sat in one of the two guest chairs available and waited for Mark to take his seat behind the desk. He would like the position of authority it gave him, Ben knew.

Mark sat in his high-back leather chair, knotted his fingers together and waited. It was a power play, keeping silent so Ben would speak first and state his purpose for showing up. Silence was better than asking a question that could potentially deliver an answer you weren’t prepared for. He couldn’t necessarily blame the man for the ploy. After all they both knew why he was here. And this was Ben’s move.

“You’re going to let her go.”

“Let her go?” Mark affected a confused expression. “If you mean as my employee, then, no, I’m not. If you mean it in another way...”

Ben knew Mark was toying with him. Using the one advantage he’d always had over him—his ability to seduce women. The interesting thing was Mark was hardly a Casanova. He was much too focused on his work to ever devote a lot of time to seducing women.

But when he did want a woman he made that a priority. The fact that he always seemed to want the women Ben showed interest in was no coincidence.

This situation, however, was different. Ben was confident Mark’s attention to Anna wasn’t sexual. Or if it was, there hadn’t been time for him to act on it. Not with all Anna had going on recently with Ben’s weeks of quarantine, finding another job and coming to terms with being pregnant.