The Billionaire Daddy's Virgin

Chapter 3 Episode 3

People talk about him like he’s a ghost.

Or something worse than both.

I’ve never met him before tonight. I’ve never even laid eyes on him in person. Now, he’s ten feet away, smoking a cigarette in a building where smoking hasn’t been allowed for decades.

And he’s looking at me like he’s deciding if he should pick up where Kir left off.

Kir clears his throat. “Father, I⁠—”

One word. That’s all it takes. Kir doesn’t even attempt to argue. Nor does he look at me. He simply hurries away, shoulders hunched, footsteps quick and quiet, like a dog that’s been kicked too many times.

The elevator dings. The doors close.

And then it’s just me and Lukas Lazarev.

He takes another drag of his cigarette. The smoke curls up toward the ceiling. I watch it drift, because I can’t look at him. I’m starting to fear that if I meet those eyes again, I’ll be sucked into them and I’ll never, ever get out.

“You can relax. I’m not going to bite.”

I let out a shaky breath, but the rest of me continues to tremble, my hands most of all. I tuck them behind my back so he won’t see.

“I apologize,” he says, “for my son’s behavior.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to⁠—”

“I do. I did. I am.” He finally detaches from the darkness and stalks closer. I could swear he doubles in size with every step, until his gray hair is practically grazing the ceiling tiles. He moves slowly, glacially, a man with infinite patience. “What he did was inappropriate. You’re his employee. He had no right.”

“I know.” I’m still pressed against the window. The glass is cold on my back, like I don’t have enough life in me to warm it up. “I mean, I was going to— Er, I tried to stop it, but⁠—”

I shake my head shyly. “No.”

He nods. Takes another drag. Blows the smoke sideways, away from my face. It’s almost considerate, in a strange sort of way.

“Kir has always had trouble with boundaries,” he says. “It’s a failing of mine. I didn’t teach him properly.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything.

Lukas is close enough now that I can see the fine-grained details of him that were lost in the shadows a minute ago. The texture of his beard, like silver silk. The lines of age stamped around his eyes. His shirt is an ocean of crisp, ludicrously expensive pima cotton, but it’s still straining to reach all the way across his broad chest.

He’s not traditionally handsome the way Kir is. Not nearly as pretty or polished. Whereas every line in Kir is lean, lithe, smooth, beautiful, the elder Lazarev looks like he was chiseled out of an iceberg with a chainsaw. He’s blunt and jagged.

His eyes move slowly over my face, as unhurried as his steps were. For as cold as his aura is, everywhere he looks burns like hellfire.

I tug my blouse down and try to smooth my hair. Nothing helps.

“How long have you worked here?” he asks. That voice again… When he’s this close, I feel it more than I hear it. A wave of icy air passing over me and leaving goosebumps in its wake.

“Five years altogether, sir. Eighteen months for Kir.”

“Has he done this before?”

“No.” That’s the truth. “Tonight was the first time anything like this happened. I swear.”

He studies me. I can’t tell if he believes me or not.

“You’re very young,” he says finally.

“Twenty-five. Yes.” His mouth twitches, but if that’s his version of a smile, it’s not like any smile I’ve ever seen before. “Very, very young.”

Twenty-five. It does sound young when he says it. And maybe it is, in some ways. I’ve never been touched like Kir just touched me. I’ve never had a boyfriend that lasted more than three dates. I’ve never done half the things girls my age are supposed to have done by now.

But in other ways, I feel ancient.

My parents died when I was nineteen. Car accident. One phone call and suddenly, I was the lone adult in the family. Gideon was fifteen and already starting to spiral, and losing Mom and Dad didn’t do him any favors in that regard, so I stepped up. I dropped out of college after one semester because someone had to work, to pay the bills. Someone had to drag my little brother out of whatever dank, poorly-lit basement he’d crawled into that week, and without Mom and Dad around, it fell to me to do it.

I’ve held him while he twitched and shivered and sweated through detox after detox. I’ve lied to countless landlords about rent checks being “in the mail.” I’ve eaten ramen for a month straight so I could afford his first round of rehab.

Young enough to be a virgin.

Old enough to feel like I’ve already lived a dozen lives.

I don’t say any of this to Mr. Lazarev. I just stand there and gulp.

“I have a proposition for you,” he says abruptly.

I blink. Add that to the list of words I don’t have the capacity to process right now, like “Stop,” “No,” and “Please don’t.” Proposition. What’s that?

I decide to ask that exact question. “A proposition?”

“A special project.” He taps ash from his cigarette onto the floor. No one’s going to tell him he can’t. I sure as hell am not. “You would report directly to me.”

My brain continues to stutter. “To you? But I work for⁠—”

“Kir.” He says his son’s name like it tastes sour. “Yes. I’m aware. This would be different.”

“You’d be transferred to my office. Better title, better compensation.” He pauses, looks around, and adds, “Better hours, presumably.”

I almost laugh. Then I almost cry. Fortunately, I don’t do either one. I get the feeling Mr. Lazarev wouldn’t appreciate something as mushy as female feelings. “And what would I be doing, exactly?”

His eyes don’t leave mine. “Nothing you can’t handle.”

It sounds like a promotion.

It also sounds like something I should probably run very far away from.

“Can I think about it?” I ask.

“Fair?” There’s that twitch again. It’s no closer to a smile than it was the first time around. “No. You’re right. It isn’t.”

He waits. The cigarette burns down between his fingers.

I realize, with a sinking feeling, that this isn’t actually a question at all.

“I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“Everyone has choices, Ms. Everett.” He drops the cigarette on the floor and grinds it out with the toe of his shoe. “Some are just less pleasant than others.”

He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a card. It’s plain white, heavy stock, with nothing on it but a phone number in raised black ink.

“Monday morning,” he says. “Eight o’clock. Fiftieth floor.”

I take the card. My fingers brush his. His skin is warm. Warmer than I expected. Almost scalding, actually. That’s surprising: I would’ve expected the man who looked like winter incarnate to be as cold as winter, too.

“And if I don’t show up?” I ask, shocked even as the words leave my lips.

I wish I could take them back. Am I insane? Why am I rebelling against a man who (a) just saved my life and (b) could crush my skull between his fingers like a grape?”

Lukas is already turning away and walking toward the elevator. But when he hears me speak, he pauses and looks back over his shoulder. And for the first time, his lips curve into something that’s tantalizingly close to a smirk.

“I think you know better than that.”

The elevator doors open. He steps inside. Turns to face me.

BUILDING SECURITY ACCESS LOG - 12:39 A.M.

Floor 40: Kir Lazarev [EXIT]

Floor 40: Lukas Lazarev [EXIT - unauthorized smoking detected]

Floor 40: Rae Everett [FROZEN IN PLACE]

I’m not sure how long I stand there after Lukas has gone before I snap back to my senses.

I look down at myself. Despite my best efforts, my blouse is still untucked and my hair is still an ungodly mess. The card he left in my hand feels like it weighs about a gazillion pounds.

What the hell just happened?

I replay the last hour in my head. Honestly, it’s a lot for a girl to process. Especially a girl whose brain has been reduced to lukewarm banana pudding by one hell of a bad day.

It all just happened so fast. One second, I was trying to remember whether the Tokyo office is thirteen or fourteen hours ahead of us here in New York; the next, Kir’s hands are on me, his mouth sealed to my neck, he’s purring filthy things that don’t belong in an office, my n*****s are puckering out of sheer physical reaction to a man grinding himself into me, and even though I don’t think I feel that way about him, he’s still a gorgeous man, objectively speaking, and the longer I went without shoving him off, the closer he came and the more my stupid, virginal body wanted to just melt, melt, melt…

Appearing out of nowhere like smoke. Like a bad dream. As if the universe decided my birthday hadn’t been humiliating enough already, so why not throw a gorgeous, intimidating older man into the mix so I could embarrass myself in front of him?