He chuckled at the audacity of that statement. I smiled brightly at him as he took my hand in a firm handshake, but as our hands connected, the insides of my sex tingled and clenched again. It was as though the touch of his skin was sending a direct message to my erogenous zones. It took a terrific deal of effort not to gasp, but I managed it. To this day, I am ridiculously proud of that accomplishment.
Dante stared into my eyes for a moment and then smiled. I mean he really smiled. It lit up his whole face, made him look young and carefree. His smile reminded me of a cloudless sky on a sunny day. Instead of letting him know he was turning my body to Jell-O, I stood straighter and maintained eye contact as I returned his smile with one of my own.
He looked surprised for a moment, but then he smiled at me again, bigger this time before he said, “Miss Tyler, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I suddenly feel tremendously hopeful about trying out assistant number eight.” I raised an eyebrow at him, cocked my head to the side and laughed.
Dante gestured to a chair in front of his desk, and I took a seat. We spent the next forty minutes talking and going over job duties and expectations. I was surprised at how friendly he was, considering how quickly all of the other temporary assistants had defected after claiming that he was too difficult to work with. He didn't seem difficult or cold, and the things he was asking for weren't ridiculous at all. Dante seemed totally reasonable to me, pleasant even. He revealed to me later that I was the first of the assistants not to stutter, stammer or flirt my way through the interview with him.
"I could never fucking work like that," he told me.
I understood what the others had been reacting to, I just happened to be lucky enough to have a few moments to school my reaction. My week as his temporary assistant turned into a month. After the month, I got offered the job full time. The salary was double what I’d been making as a junior assistant, the benefits were amazing and I would get a top of the line company car every two years. I was delighted to take the job.
At the conclusion of my first week as his official Executive Assistant, Dante had taken my sister Brooke and me out to dinner to celebrate my promotion. We’d had so much fun that he took us out twice more, and a few weeks after that he brought the two of us along to a family dinner with his brother Damien, his twin sisters Delilah and Dominique, and his honorary brother, Spencer. I didn't see it as odd that he asked us to go, but my sister asked me if I thought maybe Dante liked me. I laughed and told her no, but inside my answer was that I wished he did.
I loved his family immediately. His brother Damien was twenty-five and a total joker. Dominique and Delilah were twenty-one year old twins, and beautiful as they were, they could not be nicer girls. They had an honorary fifth sibling, Spencer Cross, who was Damien’s best friend. He and Damien were quite the pair, and I loved how funny they were. They were both just younger versions of Dante as far as personality and outlook goes, even Spencer who obviously wasn’t related by blood.
For all intents and purposes, Dante and Damien have been like parents to the girls, and I knew that Spencer had been through everything with them as well. Mrs. Hart committed suicide when the twins were just toddlers, and their father was a drug addict who died of an overdose when Dante was seventeen, Damien was fourteen and the twins were ten.
Dante and Damien flatly refused to speak about their parents in any detail. If either of the parents was brought up in more than a fleeting way, one of them shut the conversation down immediately. Their reactions made it obvious that whatever happened, it wasn't good—and I knew better than to press. The fact that Spencer wont speak of his parents either tells me that whatever happened back then wasn’t good, and having met his mother, I shudder to think about what that means.
After Dante and Damien’s father passed away, they all lived with their mother’s younger sister, Sandra. She'd moved from across the country to assume guardianship, even though they had never even met her prior to their father’s death. Somehow she wound up with Spencer too, but no one has ever explained how that came to be. Whatever the reason, I think that her taking him in likely saved him just the same as it saved the others. Sandra Thomas is an amazing woman, and both Dante and Damien credit her with providing the first stable home they’d ever had. Because of her, the twins grew up from then on in a secure environment—something that it’s clear was the most important thing to Dante, Damien and Spencer.
As if taking care of five children weren’t enough responsibility, Sandra also saved their grandfather’s company. Drugs and legitimate business decisions didn’t go hand in hand, and their father had almost destroyed the company in the years between his father’s passing, his wife’s suicide, and his own death.