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“Okay.” I make myself not look at his hands. I try not to think too hard about him caring about people. Or turning out so different from Denny.
We have a late lunch at a sidewalk café in Soho. It feels like a date. He asks me a lot of questions about my life and my jewelry biz. He seems really interested in the makers studio, and I swell with pride talking about it, because it’s such an awesome space and an amazing group of people.
Then I remember he’s not my boyfriend. He’s not even my friend. He’s an entitled wealthy man who thinks I’m going to come to him and beg him to take me.
I keep my distance.
I tamp out every spark that lights between us. Sometimes I feel like Smoky the Bear, stomping sparks left and right. Too many to stomp out.
Day after day.
Biding my time.
The worst are those moments when he lets down his guard, when he stops being beloved playboy Henry Locke. When it feels real.
It’s a mindfuck when it feels real.
Here is the last guy you should ever trust or want. He’s fooling you. Fake seducing you. And you want him anyway!
The mindfuck of hanging out with Henry twists and contorts into confusing new shapes every hour over the following days.
The man is on this kick of showing me every aspect of the company. “You need to understand things to vote out of a place of knowledge,” he says.
This involves Smuckers and me getting picked up in a limo and taken to a different part of New York or New Jersey and meeting people and learning new things that a giant company does.
Building turns out to be a small part of the Locke activities. Every one of those companies that got listed off in the will reading has its own little empire of activity.
Henry does work in the car and discusses corporate things on the phone with the people we meet. He’s good at what he does. He really cares. Is this his new method of seduction?
On one outing we tour a nearly finished building that has a zero carbon footprint—it’s heated and cooled through underground circulating water. Super green. Henry’s excited.
It’s infectious.
On another outing, we tour a mammoth prefab facility in New Jersey where they make parts of buildings so they don’t have to build everything on site. He’s just as excited about that. Also infectious.
“How do you know everyone’s names?” I ask on one of our many limo rides.
“I make a point of it.”
“But how? You know so many names.”
“If something’s important, you find a way to do it,” he says.
Bird, I mumble.
He gets that amused smile that always annoys me. “What was that?”
I want to grab his lapels and yank him to me and say fuck you, lip to lips, and then kiss him.
But I know where that leads.
Instead, I lock my hands together in my lap and turn away.
The worst thing is the family feeling throughout Locke Worldwide. Like they really are one big happy family with Henry Locke as the strong, fierce leader, a man who’d go to the ends of the earth for his people.
It makes him twice as hot, how he fights for his people. How protective he is.
At times, tooling around the five boroughs with Henry, touring sites, meeting employees, learning new things at Locke HQ, I get this feeling like I’m part of that team, part of the family that Henry fights for and protects.
