Chapter 2

• Married, and beautiful beyond words. Not that this should have mattered for much of anything, especially not to me. But whenever I saw his picture, in passing somewhere, my heart jumped a little. A brief quickening of my pulse, an intimate little trill of some private thought singing through my head, and…
• Back to work. I reached the office, pulled out the key the manager had given me, and unlocked the door. Stepping inside, I flicked the light switch on and closed the door behind me.
• Everything was amazing. He had a desk in the back, like any other office, but behind it was a large, bay-styled window with a reading nook built into the wall. Beside that, cornered off into its own alcove, was a set of floor to ceiling bookcases. A glass wall and door separated the main office section from a private meeting area, and opposite that was a chaise with a small table beside it. The entire office was probably bigger than my apartment, and I used to think I had a pretty nice apartment.
• I didn’t have time to admire the place, though. I needed to clean. I searched around for an outlet to plug the vacuum into, then checked for what I should or shouldn’t need to move beforehand. I would need to dust, but I’d do that after I wiped everything down first. God, this job was going to be so boring.
• And, everything looked perfect anyways. I tried, I honestly tried, but I couldn’t find anything that looked like it really needed cleaning. Maintaining the atmosphere, I guessed. I couldn’t clean a mess that wasn’t there.
• I should have just done that, should have finished cleaning and left, but I was curious. The bookcases called to me, like some siren of the sea from an epic poem. Just what kinds of books did Asher Landseer have? Probably typical business books, sets of legal dictionaries or how-to’s, or unopened and unread classics meant to impress some business associate into thinking he’d read this or that.
• He had all those and more. I browsed through his collection of literature, enthralled. The business books weren’t so interesting, but he had a section with newer publications(some from bestselling authors and others from vague unknowns), older classics like Alice in Wonderland and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and everything in between.
• My hand crept towards a copy of Dante’s Inferno. Leather bound, with a gold, gilt-stamped title on the cover and spine, and more gilt lining the edges, it looked like a book collector’s dream. I stared at it, rapt, letting my hand caress the cover, feeling the rough leather against my fingertips. The book had a crisp smell with a tinge of masculine warmth, like a man’s freshly worn leather jacket.
• There was no possible way Asher Landseer had read this. Absolutely none.
• Except when I opened it, it wasn’t stiff. And there were dogears on a few of the pages. I moved to the first, wanting to see what he’d found so interesting, and…
• “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straight forward pathway had been lost,” a calm, confident voice said from behind me.
• I panicked, tossed the book back onto the bookshelf, and turned to face the unknown speaker. That would have been it, except I was confronted by Asher Landseer himself. He stared at me with his cool, steel blue eyes. He looked none too happy with me intruding on his private space, browsing through his bookcase. His pristine, pitch black suit without a wrinkle anywhere, his short-cropped hair, barely an inch in length, and his sharp, powerful jaw making him look unlike anything I ever imagined a businessman should look like. I briefly imagined him stepping out of a helicopter in a spy movie, playing the role of a debonaire CIA secret agent.
• My heart skipped a beat, my pulse soared, and my stomach fluttered. My knees grew weak and I almost couldn’t stand to look at him anymore, like I needed sunglasses to stare at him head on. I tried to step forward and apologize but one of my high heels caught on a bevel in the tiled floor and I toppled forward.
• Asher swooped forward and caught me. This isn’t happening, I told myself. This is too strange, too unknown. I must have fallen asleep, or become delirious in his office.
• No, I wasn’t. No sooner than he caught me, the collector’s copy of Dante’s Inferno fell from the shelf I’d tossed it on. I watched it hit the floor, cover and pages splitting open as it descended, and then… crack!
• The book’s binding broke, spilling its contents all over the floor. Pages, separated, completely out of order, lay scattered around the bookcase alcove in his office. One of them, another dogeared page, escaped from the rest and landed at Asher’s feet. He set me aside like a bag of groceries and bent to pick up the page.
• “One ought to fear those things only that have the power of doing harm,” he said, reading a passage from the page. “The others not, for they are not dreadful.”
• Poignant, I thought, and absolutely correct. It was as if Dante had seen into the future, noticed this situation, and thought it amusing to write about it.
• Amusing for Dante, and horrifying for me.
• “I’m so sorry, sir. Mr. Landseer, I apologize. I don’t know what came over me. I…”
• He turned to me, rage in his eyes. I could almost see a tiny spark of red lighting up the very center of his icy blue irises. Tossing the page aside, he grabbed my wrist and dragged me through the open glass door into his private meeting room.
• “Sir, I—”
• Without listening, he tossed me onto his meeting room table and glared at me. I wasn’t sure what to do, wasn’t sure what to think. What was going on? I inched away from him, my hands pressed into the smooth, alder wood table as I tried to get away. He would accept none of that.