Dirk: A Stepbrother Romance(44)
“Alice! I’ll be back! I’m getting lunch!” she hollered to her supervisor, the lead at the grief counseling agency that she worked in. Entering the hallway and turning to the right, she shouted out “Hey! Hold the elevator!” just in time to see the arm of a tailored suit ending in a deeply tanned hand extend itself to hold the elevator doors open.
Houston Storm was feeling hungry as well, and so decided to go to Giglio’s for lunch. He quickly placed a phone call to his valet, asking him to bring a car around.
“Which car, Mr. Storm?”
“I think I’ll take the Viper, Steven,” he answered. Hanging up the telephone hotline to his garage, he walked out of his 1,000 square foot personal office, and across the floor of offices inhabited by the rest of his staff, who handled all of the “nuts and bolts” of his company, Larger-Than-Life-Love Inc. The company controlled seven of the top ten niche dating websites in North America. Their premier website, “largerthanlifelove.com,” was deemed the most profitable web based dating site for the previous three years. Nowhere was this fact more obvious than in the lifestyle choices of the company’s founder, Houston Storm.
Having been named the “San Francisco Bay Area’s Most Eligible Bachelor” for each of the previous four years was likely a byproduct of being named one of California’s “Top Ten Richest Men” for the previous five years by The Californian magazine. Whether it was the actual rankings, or just who he was, the fact was that he found woman falling at his feet seemingly everywhere he went. He had absolutely no problem taking full advantage of this fact either. As a result, and probably coupled with the fact that he still had not even reached the tender age of thirty five, the paparazzi had already branded him as a “bad boy”. They seemed to have no more favored task than proving their label by keeping the tabloids supplied with an endless series of shots of him and his many female guests inside his Los Gatos mansion compound.
The truth was, however, that he had created his first website in his second year of junior college—Larger Than Life Love—in order to actually find that perfect woman. The only problem was, instead of drawing to him the kind of small town girl he really desired, his being rich and powerful brought all kinds of disingenuous women to his door instead.
After he walked to the elevator and punched the ground floor button, he had expected an uninterrupted journey down the seventeen floors of the Yuanfen Building, which was normally quiet by this time of day, but he was wrong. On the sixth floor, his elevator car picked up a young intern from the law offices on that floor She rode down to four before getting off. The door was just closing when Houston heard the voice of a young woman, calling for him to hold the door. Extending his expensively clothed arm through the door, he beheld the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on.
Chapter 2
Immediately in awe of the breathtaking sight of the man wearing the suit, Amy found herself momentarily breathless. Everything about him—his custom tailored suit, his piercingly dark eyes, his deep tan, and the way his black hair carelessly waved to the right side of his perfect head—was simply … perfect. His eyes, a deep chocolate, were focused intently on her own.
His nose sat dead center of his perfect face, with a very deeply indented bridge sitting equidistant from both of his eyes. His black eyebrows, which arched down from the outside in, gave him a shrewd look, in addition to making him appear darkly mysterious. He had a very thin chin and pronounced cheekbones in addition to a black and well-groomed goatee. His neck was very muscular, with a well-defined Adam’s apple, with just the uppermost tip of a tribal style tattoo sneaking up behind his left ear.
His shoulders were broad, and betrayed a sense of careless athleticism, making it evident that he was once a formidable force in whatever athletic pursuit he participated in. The suit was made of the finest black fabric, and shined in the dim light of the elevator, betraying the presence of silk. Under the sporty suit coat, the dark man wore a simple beige button up shirt; with the top two buttons undone, the man looked as if he was intentionally displaying a tuft of his dark chest hair.
Amy was a sucker for chest hair.
For pants and shoes, the godlike man wore simple, dark blue jeans and pristine, gunmetal colored Testoni dress shoes.
Amy stepped inside, and the doors closed behind her. She immediately felt as if every molecule of air in the enclosed space had been consumed, leaving her in a vacuum, with only the well-dressed and gorgeous stranger as company. Time seemed to freeze, as she was suspended in the elevator, which seemed hell-bent on staying still. Finally, the stranger broke the thick silence, and asked,
“Which floor, darlin’?”
“Ground,” she said, sharply taking in a lungful of air.
“Where are you going this time of day?”
“I lost track of time, and didn’t get lunch,” Amy answered. Her chest was heaving with the stress of trying to swallow the suddenly thin air in the elevator.
“I am too, oddly enough. How would you feel about accompanying me to Giglio’s? It is rare that I get to have such a ravishing a meal-time guest as yourself.”
“Giglio’s?” Amy asked, shocked. The restaurant had been rated as five stars by no less than seven different renowned food critics. Tables were notoriously difficult to get, and were worth over $150 per seat. “I’d love to, but I don’t have that kind of money…”