His Absolute Assignment - Elise's Love Story: The Billionaire's Continuum (#1) (A Contemporary Romance Novel) (5 page)

I wasn't sure how truthful this statement was, but the person who came and told me about the security and the off limits things mentioned a document left on Jessika's laptop calling her a whore.  It made me sad to think about it.  I knew her situation and how she'd met Asher, and it was kind of cute and sweet in a weird way.  He'd been in a loveless, arranged marriage of convenience because of his upper class status, and he'd met Jessika because of that.  She was originally supposed to act as a surrogate mother for his wife, who was infertile (kind of), and...

Well, they'd had an affair, so that wasn't really the best of things.  But she was a really nice person!  Also, Asher's ex-wife had been up to some shady dealings, and she wasn't very nice, I guess, so I didn't think it was Asher or Jessika's fault for falling in love.

I used to be kind of jealous of that.  Jessika wasn't anyone important before meeting Asher, you know?  It was one of those weird Cinderella types of stories, except not really.  Sort of, a little bit?  A spiritual successor to Cinderella.  Yes.  That sounded fancier and did a better job of vaguely explaining it than I ever could.

Anyways, Jessika had been going through a lot, and I got the sense that she was having a difficult time dealing with it.  She really wanted Landseer Publishing to do well and take off.  I wanted it to, also, but I just wasn't sure how.  I probably didn't belong here, to be honest.  If Jessika was Cinderella, I was one of the mice or doves from the story.  Maybe I was in some other fairytale altogether.  Probably Beauty and the Beast.  That one seemed more apt towards my situation, and if all else failed, the Beauty had a library full of books to fall back on.  Books were rather wonderful.

After daydreaming and distracting myself, I pulled myself back together.  First off, I couldn't leave, because of suspicion.  Maybe.  Something like that.  I... didn't know if I felt safe here now, though.  Why had they broken into Jessika's office?  That was really strange to me, because she was the CEO's wife.  If someone wanted to break into an office and get away with it, I figured they'd do it to someone like me, because I wasn't as important.  Asher was probably livid and scouring Landseer Tower for the culprit by now.

Which might be me, because I was suspicious, and I'd been outside of Jessika's office before everything happened.  Ugh.  This was really bad, wasn't it?

No.  I didn't do anything, I had nothing to worry about.

Maybe... I should go see Lucent, though.  I could work there in his office.  I'd ask his permission this time, though the idea of punishment kind of appealed to me... hm... would he make me do the same thing again, or would he come up with another task for me to perform?

No, I told myself, stopping that set of thoughts before it started.  Yes, it might be enjoyable, but no, Lucent needed to work, too.  I couldn't distract him or be a bother, so I needed to not do anything that deserved punishment.  This might be really hard, though.  I wasn't good at being good; Lucent said I was too curious by far.

Well, I'd just go find him.  He should be in his office, right?  And I'd behave.  Properly.  I'd just work.  I'd bring my laptop with me.  I'd...

I went to Lucent's office but he wasn't there.  Weird?  He'd given me a key long ago, which was how I got into it previously, so I opened the door again and set my laptop bag and purse just inside and to the right, then locked it, left, and closed the door behind me.  Where could he be?  I supposed I needed to find out.

I wandered the upper level business floor of Landseer Tower, searching for Lucent.  Everything was quiet here, more brisk and sharp and formal.  While many of the lower levels had an air of business-casual about them, the upper level business floor contained anything but that.

Upper level business meant something more like the higher ups offices, or as I referred to it in my head the "we're a lot more important than you" floor.  Each of the directors and other members of Landseer Enterprises elite business team resided here, their offices situated along a long hallway, separate and different yet from the outside they all looked the same.

This floor did have a break room, as well, but instead of a nice and easy appearance, with a few tables and chairs, it had luxurious couches and an overlarge flat screen TV on the wall.  The fridge was permanently stocked with whatever any of the corporate directors preferred, and they had three separate Keurig machines plus a French press.  You also needed a special key card to gain access, which was sort of odd to me.  Anyone was technically welcome to come to this floor; there wasn't anything to stop them, at least.

If you came here... or when I came here... nothing actually welcomed me, though.  It looked foreboding and wrong, like it shouldn't exist.  When my feet touched the carpets, step by step, walking forward, the sound echoed through the hallway, too loud by far.  My shadow seemed to stretch across the entire length of the hallway, always behind me, always trying to flee in the opposite direction from where I was headed.  No lights flickered—this wasn't a haunted house—but constant light seemed equally as frightening.  The fluorescent bulbs hidden behind opaque sheets of crystalline plastic glared at me, never faltering, never blinking, always there, always intensely radiant.

I didn't belong here.  I knew this, and I'd thought about it before, but right here and now I realized it once again.  Not just here, not just on the upper level business floor.  I didn't belong anywhere in Landseer Tower.  I didn't belong in a corporation, or an office building.  Everyone here was different.  Even Lucent was different, and while I liked how he was different, it didn't make the rest of it better.  I found comfort in his presence, yes, but more often than not it seemed like a prison, too.

I couldn't just go around and wander.  First off, there was nowhere to really go or wander to.  While, yes, Landseer Tower had a multitude of entertaining features to it, with the breakrooms, and the strange business meeting rooms that took the form of ski lift cars or garden shacks or camp tents.  And, true, it offered some really nice benefits like a great cafeteria with fresh and healthy eating options, lots of vending machines and snacks, and other choices.  They gave me a free laptop, too.  I mean, sure, it was a company laptop, but I got to use it for whatever I wanted.  I wrote on it, but I also played around on it sometimes.  It wasn't anything bad, I wouldn't get yelled at for doing that, but...

I was Elise Tanner.  I'd recently graduated from college with a bachelor's degree in Creative Writing and a specialization in fiction, but before that (or, sort of during that) I'd also worked as a librarian.  The library I used to work at was nearby, too, just a block or so away.  It was a historical building, smaller and innocuous, previously the mansion of some rich person over a hundred years ago or so.  While the building remained mostly the same, being renovated and repurposed into a library later on, everything around it changed.  Not everything, no, but the city grew and the library didn't.

Asher Landseer's father had built Landseer Tower decades ago, gaining an office building and an empire in the process.  He wasn't exactly the reason why the surrounding area was the way it was now, but he was a part of that.  The city would have become this way with or without the Landseers, but Landseer Tower was the closest important building to the library and so it had the most meaningful effect on the neighborhood.

I liked the library, though.  I loved it, actually.  We didn't get our own computers there, we had to use the old and somewhat outdated desktops that were provided for us.  They had public use ones for library patrons, but they also had the private librarian ones behind the front desk.  I used to sit there and wait for someone to come in so I could help them find a book.  Or else sometimes we needed to reshelve returned books, or stamp and stock newly purchased ones.

I liked all the books.  I liked the new ones and the way they smelled, fresh and crisp like an inky forest.  The old books were nice, too.  They were worn but I thought that gave them character.  There were very old books that we didn't allow people to access without supervision, which I thought were some of the most exciting.  And then all sorts of other books, fitting somewhere and everywhere in between, all with their own lives and stories, all with their own lifecycle.  Sometimes they grew too old, too worn, too tattered, and they needed replacing, but then there were new books that came.

All books were good books.  Even e-books were good books, I thought.  Not quite the same, but I liked them nonetheless.  You couldn't smell the scent of them or feel the weight of them like a regular book, but they allowed a certain sense of privacy that let you read whatever you wanted without feeling like you shouldn't; no one needed to know what sort of book you had in your hands.

Landseer Tower had books, but they didn't seem even remotely the same as the library's stock.  I used to be able to wander the library for hours, and that was a part of my job.  I could go down the aisles, move from the children's section to the adult section, from fiction to non-fiction.  Going from the wide open room where people sat and stayed and researched, then to the bean bag seats in front of a small stage area where sometimes one of us read stories to younger children.  We had events and bake sales, and even a little cafeteria snack nook area.  No one was supposed to bring books in there, but my manager let people do it anyways.  You could get coffee and a healthy snack choice from our special vending machine, then sit in a small chair around a quaint circle dinette table and read.

It was perfect.

Not truly perfect in some common sense of the word, but it was perfect to me.  Perhaps Landseer Tower was more architecturally perfect, but the library was a lot more comfortable.  I felt safe there, happy and secure, surrounded by friends.  Even if I didn't know someone, I knew that they loved books, and that made them easy to relate to.  I didn't know a lot of people here, except for Jessika and Asher and Lucent.  Everyone else, the ones I didn't know as well, I knew nothing about them.  I didn't know if they liked books, or what sorts of books they liked.  I didn't know if they enjoyed anything.  I was sure they must like something, but... what?

How do you talk to people?  How do you understand them?  I had no idea.  I felt so awkward and confused and alone sometimes, which made me feel more awkward and confused, because why should I feel that way?  I was an adult, and I needed to do adult things, like work in an office, maintain a steady job, do this, do that.

I needed to...

While wandering, both mentally and throughout the upper level business floor, I'd walked up and down the halls more than once.  I hadn't seen Lucent, but after my first pass I didn't think I'd really been looking for him, either.  If he was back in his office, I would have noticed him in the halls—or so I thought.  Since I hadn't, he must be somewhere else.

Soon, I found myself standing outside of Asher Landseer's office door.  Asher Landseer, the door stated, CEO of Landseer Enterprises.  He was a billionaire, rich beyond belief, and someone I'd never expected to talk with ever in my life.

I really liked Asher, though.  This sounded foolish, but I liked him because he liked books.  One day, a long time ago, I met him, sort of.  He came into the library and asked to speak with Rob, the library manager, about a book restoration.  Asher took out the book, showing it to Rob.  It was an early, limited special edition copy of
Dante's Inferno
.  I stared at the book, rapt and in awe.  It was so beautiful in the most unlikely of ways.

First off, it was broken, shattered and worn.  A book can't shatter in the typical sense, but the pages weren't all connect to the spine's binding, and the spine and book cover weren't connected at all.  It needed some serious work, but this was the sort of book that a person would want to keep.  Some books weren't worth it to repair and restore, because they could be easily replaced.  This...

Well, it was expensive.  I didn't know off the top of my head how expensive a book like that should cost, but I would guess many thousands of dollars at the very least.  It could be more or less depending on a lot of different factors.  I stared at the book, eyes narrowing in on it, brow furrowed.  I wanted to touch it, even though it was broken.  It sounds silly, but I wanted to comfort it as if it were an injured animal.  Rob would be able to fix it, I knew.  It might take some time, and it might be expensive, but...

Asher smiled at me then.  He saw me staring at the book and he beckoned me over.  "What do you think?" he asked, smiling.

"I think you need to take better care of your books," I said without thinking.

His eyes widened for a moment, taken aback, but he didn't seem angry.  "True.  I'm not the one who did it, though."

As an addendum to my previous statement, I added, "I think you need to stay away from the person who did this to your book."

He laughed loudly, breaking all rules of companionable quietness in the library.  I liked it, though, and I smiled.  Libraries should be happy places.  Happy silence was good, but a little laughing now and again didn't hurt anyone.

"I think you might be right," Asher said.  "Unfortunately I'm not sure I can.  I think I might have fallen in love with her."

I nodded knowingly.  I didn't know what it was like to be in love with another person.  Not in the way he was speaking of, at least.  I knew what it was like to love books, though, and to fall in love with the characters in the books.  I think I might have loved a lot of people, but a majority of them were fictional.  Would I rather love a book or a person?  Preferably a person who loved books, but I doubted it was as easy and simple as that.

"She won't do it again," Asher said.  "She's assured me of that."  He nodded, feigning seriousness while a soft smirk played at his lips.

"Good," I said.  I didn't know what else to say.

Rob smiled from behind the counter.  "Can you help me with this one?" he asked me.  "Mr. Landseer has agreed to spare no expense on reviving his copy of
Dante's Inferno
, and I could use your help, Elise."