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That early morning, we stood inside a thirty-million-dollar property, and that wasn’t even the most expensive unit I’d be showing in the coming weeks. It was a double-height duplex penthouse, and to put it mildly, it was fucking insane. The penthouse was almost nine hundred feet in the sky, giving the owners views of New York City that felt surreal. There was a 270-degree panorama of the city that featured the Hudson River, the Statue of Liberty, and the Manhattan skyline. Five thousand two hundred square feet of wealth. Four bedrooms, six bathrooms, a theater room, and a custom Bulthaup kitchen. All the appliances were smart devices, and the hidden pantry that led to a reading nook with a setup for coffee and tea was the icing on the cake.
Not to mention the private elevator, fitness room, private yoga room, and private spa suites, along with the swimming pool.
Needless to say, the modern space was unmatched, and I was ready for the offers to start rolling in.
“It’s unreal, right?” I agreed. “We have our staging crew come in and make it shine with all the furniture and accent pieces. We also have caterers and bartenders come in to serve the guests.”
“Connor.” She breathed out. “What the heck?”
I smiled. She was in a state of shock, and I couldn’t blame her. I remembered the first time I walked into a property like the one we stood in. I had dreams about the damn place for weeks.
“People really live like this?” she asked.
“A very small, small percentage of people.”
“With very big, big amounts of money,” she muttered under her breath as she swept her fingers against the sofa cushions. She quickly pulled her hand away and turned toward me and whispered as if caught doing a bad deed. “Am I allowed to touch this stuff?”
“Touch away.” I laughed. “You can even sit on it if you want to be wild.”
“Oh, no. I don’t have a wild bone in my body.”
“Why do I find that hard to believe? You did, after all, once run around New York City with a superhero.”
She looked my way and gave me a smile. Why did my chest always tighten when she gave that smile to me?
“Connor, everything’s a go. We’ll have about fifty potentials filtering in and out. A lot of talk about offers being made today. We’ll see what happens,” Damian said, walking up to me and breaking my stare away from Aaliyah.
“Good, good. Only a bit more time before things get busy. Damian, let me reintroduce you to Aaliyah. She’ll be around over the coming weeks because she’s doing a piece on me.”
He cocked a brow. “A piece of what?”
“You know…a piece. Like an article. For Passion Magazine.”
He blinked repeatedly. “You’re doing an interview?”
“Yes.”
“You? The man who thinks interviews are the devil?”
“Yes. Me.”
“The one who’s turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid doing interviews?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You do know your last offer was for half a million, right? Is this the half-a-million interview?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s not.”
“How much are you paying him?” Damian flatly asked Aaliyah, who was still rubbing down the sofa.
She looked at Damian and smiled. “Oh, only ten thousand but he asked for it to be donated to charity.”
Damian shot me a ‘What the hell is going on?’ expression, and I shot him a ‘Shut up and drop it’ glare—to which he gave me a ‘You’re a fucking idiot’ stare. I followed that up with an ‘I know I’m a fucking idiot’ look. Aaliyah didn’t even notice that we held a whole conversation with just intense eye contact.
Sometimes, I felt Damian and I communicated better without words than we ever did with them.
“My boss is convinced Connor is one of the hot topics of this time,” Aaliyah explained.
“The topics must be very underwhelming this year,” Damian replied.
Aaliyah laughed, tossing her head back. “Yeah. We were really scraping the bottom of the barrel with this guy.”
Hell, her laughter was beautiful, too. She had that intense kind of laugh that vibrated off the walls and into people’s spirits. It was an infectious sound, the kind of laughter that made other people chuckle, too.
“Makes sense. I’m sure you asked others too and they declined the offer of being interviewed,” Damian said. “Honestly, that’s the only thing that would make sense.”
“He was actually the third billionth person we reached out to this time around,” Aaliyah chimed in, playing along with Damian. Most people didn’t pick up on Damian’s dry humor since it read as rude and dismissive a lot of the time, but Aaliyah fell right into place with it.
“You should’ve kept searching,” Damian said.
Aaliyah shook her head and crossed her arms. “I know. I told my boss that over and over again, but alas, we had to settle with this one.”
Damian almost smirked, and—holy shit how did she get him to almost smirk? What kind of witchcraft was Aaliyah into?
