HIGHLANDER: The Highlander’s Surrender Bride (Scottish Alpha Male Pregnancy Romance) (50 page)

Chapter 2             

Lanie followed her escort from the waiting room and through a series of hallways and corridors that were devoid of any other people.  Apart from this woman and the security officer that had shown her to the waiting room, Lanie had seen no other people.  They traveled up two more flights of stairs, made several turns, and crossed down long and wide halls without passing another living soul.  Nor was there any sign or sound that there were other people around and Lanie very much doubted that every door and wall in this place was sound-proofed.  It was like the whole top floor –
floors?
– of the building were reserved strictly for the man that owned this company. 

The thought made her feel very small.

The layout of the building made her feel even smaller.

She didn’t ask any questions as they moved; she only tried to take in the sight of everything that was around her.  The walls were made of mahogany, or maybe it was oak… she wasn’t sure, but it all looked pretty damn expensive.  None of it was faux either, the wood… she had seen enough of the fake kind to know the real thing when she saw it.  And there was enough wood in these halls to make her think that Ian Madison had cut down whole forests in order to make these walls… doors… even the floors in some places.

Along the ceiling there were crystal chandeliers that had been hung every ten or twelve meters.  The ceiling itself was ornately covered with more wooden paneling, decorated with golden trim.  The floor was covered in crimson colored carpets that were so soft that her shoes seemed to almost sink inside of it.  Along the walls there were potted plants, portraits of men, women, of animals, buildings, of scenes of battle, ships, and various kinds of artistic fare that would have been the rule centuries ago in the palaces and estate houses of the rich and supremely powerful.  And without needing to look too closely she could tell that they were all authentic… and priceless.  And yet Ian Madison had them hung up like most people hung their children’s art on refrigerators.

Until they passed a window that looked out over the city below them –
very
far below them – she would have thought that they were in a manor house somewhere in the country with rolling green hills, forests, and lush gardens surrounding them or some such place.  But outside she saw only what one would expect to find looking out the window of the tallest building in the world.

The great spires of buildings that had once been considered the sky scrapers of their time littered the ground so far below, like miniatures of the very edifice that she was now standing in.  Some of them had been two or three hundred stories tall at the time, but from where she now stood she knew that they were visible only when the clouds didn’t get in the way to block the view from so high above.  And flitting about between them were tiny dots that were close to imperceptible, but she knew them to be the air cars and sky trams that other people used to get around the city, like metal insects flying inside a concrete hive.

“Here we are,” said the woman that had shown her to her final destination. 

She brought her senses to bear as they came to stand in front of a pair of large glass doors.  She knew them to be glass, but they were completely opaque and the symbol for Madison Tech. was engraved on them both. 

“If you have any questions, now is the time to ask,” her escort offered.

Lanie tried to comb her mental vault for anything that she could ask but nothing came to her.  Whether this was due to her confidence or to nervousness she wasn’t sure.  She chose to take it as the former and stood up confidently.

“No,” she said gently, “I’ll be fine.”

The braided woman gave an accepting nod.  “Very well, good luck Ms. Church.”  With that, the other woman turned and left leaving Lanie standing before the glass doors of the office of the most powerful man in the business world. 

She took a short and calming breath and pulled on the handle of the door and stepped confidently inside.

The office was breathtaking and it was enough to make her heart skip a beat at the mere sight of it.  The floor… the walls… everything inside looked to be made of glass, save for a few knick-knacks here and there.  There were some potted plants… a single chair that the office’s owner sat on… and some bits of art that hung on the walls, but everything else was as transparent as the air around it.  Though everything else sat on glass – she was certain it had to be glass of some kind – and it seemed as if the few solid items in the office were hung in the air itself, so very, very far above the ground below.  Under such construction she thought for certain that the office looked as though it could have been
built
of air.  If ever there was a way to get physically close to Heaven, she was certain that this was it. 

She felt her nerves become lightly unsteady but she pressed on, trying not to let her nervousness show.  She walked on, her shoes clicking on the glass and every step she took she felt as if she were literally walking on air.  A furtive glance below showed her that every step she took was bringing her farther and farther away from the reliable steel and concrete construction of the building, like a goddess stepping off of a high mountain to converse with some other god in open skies.

And the other god sat ten meters away from the door.

She knew him at once and it felt as if she had been clubbed over the side of the head.  The man sat behind a glass desk, tapping away on an electronic tablet without looking up to see her, as if he received unexpected guests all the time.  He was thin, but handsomely so.  His hair was short and a shade of dark brown and his eyes matched, he had a pointed chin, his suit was English in design, and he wore shoes that looked to have been shined to the maximum.  And sitting behind his glass desk he really was the embodiment of a god.

The best kind, eh?

She ignored the little voice in her head as she walked closer and closer.  It wasn’t until she came to the foot of the man’s desk that she brought her heels together and waited.  Another sign that the man received visitors either infrequently or not at all was that there were no other chairs facing his desk… a sign that he was the alpha in this space and that he alone was privileged enough to sit while others should stand.

She counted a full twenty seconds before he paused from his work long enough to take a breath and speak, though he did not look at her. 

“What is your name?”
he asked, though he did so in Russian.

She felt calmer for the question.  Russian had been the first language she had learned to speak. 
“Lanie Church, Mr. Madison.”

Absently he nodded and went back to tapping away on his pad.  He asked a second question and in French. 
“Where were you born?”

She responded in kind. 
“Chicago, Illinois.”

“Do you have family there still?”
  Italian.

“No.  I don’t.”

“Where did you attend university?”
Greek.

“I attended my undergraduate studies at Stanford.  I attended graduate school in Oxford.  I did my post graduate work at Moscow University.”

“If I were to tell you that my profits are down by ten percent in retail sales, how would you propose that I make up for the loss?”
Spanish.

“The simplest solution I could offer would be to reduce the price on older products and make up the difference in units.”

“What’s the computing rate for an N2-20 hard drive?”
Mandarin.

“The N2-20 is a military device and according to the last article I read it computes at 900 milicycles per millisecond.  Though that was two months ago, so the information may not be reliable any longer.”

“If I were to host a breakfast banquet for visiting dignitaries… say the Family of D’vesk… what warm entrees would be prepared?”
Cantonese.

Lanie smiled inwardly at the question.  She could sense that he was really beginning to test her knowledge of such things. 
“The D’vesk family hails from Norway, and culturally speaking they don’t eat “warm” meals for breakfast.  Though for breakfast I’m given to understand that they actually enjoy sandwiches that include meat cuts, cheeses, jams or jellies.  Sometimes they eat oatmeal or porridge, or even yogurt mixed with freshly cut fruit.  Though the D’vesk family might be inclined to break their usual cultural layers and desire something else.  I understand that Freya D’vesk, the wife of Bjorn D’vesk is partial to French toast.”

Mr. Madison gave an approving nod. 
“How many new varieties of private flight cars were released last year by my company?”
Icelandic.

“Twenty-seven were released to the open market between 2189 and 2190… though there would have been twenty-nine if Flight Vector hadn’t poached your designs.”

“A horrible scandal that was,”
he replied in Vietnamese. 
“How could I have prevented such a disaster?”

“As I recall the ground-floor of your industrial facility in Murmansk was hacked electronically and all of the digital watermarks on your designs were removed.  In my own experience digital information is the easiest to procure and I have often found that creating hard copy designs is an ancient – but effective – means to keep personal information from falling into the wrong hands.”

“Hard copy?”
he asked in Urdu. 
“You mean
paper
documents?”

“Easy to make… harder to steal… and one cannot make digital recreations of them without scanning wet-ink watermarks into them, thereby nullifying any potential issues over rightful property.”

“What is your favorite pastime?”
Swahili.

“I enjoy reading most… though I do enjoy the occasional trip to the cinema.”

He gave a second approving nod.  “I like it.”  He said so with an English accent that she found nothing short of charming.  He set his pad down and finally looked up at her, crossing his hands in his lap. 

If he was a god in any sense of the word she felt privileged to be under his gaze.  He sat in his chair, looking so haughty, so confident, that he could very well have passed for a god sitting so high above the rest of the world. 

“Ian Madison,” he said formally.  “I’m pleased to meet you at last, Ms. Church.”  He turned his head slightly as if trying to observe her from a new angle.  “I must say that I admire your gumption in applying for this position.  Most people who approach my company are of the mind-set that they must start at the bottom and work their way to the top.  That sort of thinking has its uses, but there’s a reason why I put that application out as I did.  Do you know why that is?”

He wasn’t testing her, she could tell by the pitch of his voice.  He was being honestly inquisitive.  She shook her head.  “No, sir, I don’t.”

He steepled his fingers together, resting his elbows on the armrests of his chair.  “Because I believe in the power of intelligence, that’s what I was taught ever since I was young… ever since I… first came here.”

She didn’t speak.  She was able to tell that he had more to say.

“If a man or a woman works from the ground up, they learn the system from its lowest level all the way up to the administrative positions.  Such people are useful, to be sure, but that’s hardly the kind of person that I’d like in my inner circle.  If one believes that they are intelligent enough to shoot straight for the top and bypass all that goes on beneath them and they
prove
that they can, then
that
is a person that I should very much like to have as my aide.”  He began to swivel from side to side lightly in his chair.  “What did you think of my little questions, Ms. Church?”

Again, she could tell that he wasn’t being testy.  He was simply looking for honest answers to simple questions.  She gave him an honest answer.  “They’re not what I was expecting.”

He arched a curious eyebrow, but there was nothing disapproving in the expression.  “No?”

“No.”

“What were you expecting?”

She let her fingers slide along the edge of her portfolio.  “Perhaps some ideas on business plans… prototype presentations… book keeping… appointment scheduling… things of that nature.”

He waved her words off.  “Anyone with access to a tablet and knowledge of how to operate a calendar could do as much.”  He stood up and she saw that again, like a god, he towered over her, by at least 30 or so centimeters. 

Domineering as well and handsome, eh?

She barely managed to keep herself from whispering ‘shut up’ to the voice in the back of her mind again. 

He rounded the desk and she felt her heart quicken at his approach.  As he drew nearer the air around her suddenly felt warm, as if it were being brought to a boil and she felt her skin dancing and tingling as she never had felt it before. 

“When it comes to the selection of those in my inner circle, I like to get a more personal experience.  You can read all that there is to know on someone through public records or some other means, but I find that you never really know someone until you speak with them face-to-face.  Do you not believe so?”

She nodded.  “I can understand the merit of such a thing.”  Then she caught the subtext of his words.  “You’ve obviously read my files.”