Taste of the Dark - A Billionaire Romance

ELIANA

a·muse-bouche: /əˌmo͞ozˈbo͞oSH/: noun

1: a small item of food served as an appetizer or teaser before a meal.

2: an unexpected little taste that leaves you hungry for much, much more.

If I’m gonna have the worst day of my life, I would’ve appreciated at least a little heads-up. The universe should have the decency to warn you when bad sh*t is coming, you know? It wouldn’t be hard. A little heads-up text from the cosmos. Maybe a fortune cookie that says, Buckle up, buttercup, because tomorrow’s going to kick you right in the hoo-ha.

But no. Nothing.

Instead, I wake up at 5:45 A.M. to an alarm whose noise I hate with every fiber of my being. I swing my legs out of bed with my usual Monday morning enthusiasm (which is to say, none whatsoever) and promptly trip over my laptop charger. It sends me careening face-first into my dresser with a very unladylike grunt.

Things go downhill from there.

It’s a gray day, wet and bitter and unforgiving the way only Chicago in February can be. A UPS truck splashes me with a cold puddle of street juice. My coffee shop is out of caramel syrup for my latte. I stub my toe on the staircase leading into my optometrist’s office, and then when I get into my appointment, Dr. Haggerty tells me something I never, ever wanted to hear.

In ninety days or so, you’re going to be blind.

Oh, yeah.

That.

That actually happened.

It’s comical, isn’t it? It’s ludicrous—the adjective, not the rapper. It’s straight-up outrageous for someone to be able to look you in the eyes and say that.

You have ninety days left to enjoy sunsets and pretty flowers and goofy Western movies.

You have ninety days left to memorize the faces of your loved ones and the happy smile of a stranger’s baby on the L.

You have ninety days to gaze at everything you’ve ever cherished, before it all gets taken away from you by a genetic disease that you cannot stop and everything goes black forever.

But he did say that. Dr. Haggerty looked me right in my eyes, in the eyes that have been failing me little by little for a very long time and are soon to be failing me a whole lot more in a very short time, and he said, I’m sorry, Eliana, but there’s nothing I can do.

I suggest you make the most of the time you have left.

Impossible.

Preposterous.

But real.

The rest of the day goes by in a surreal daze. I’m like a robot. An emotionless, unfeeling robot. So when Kyle, my least favorite coworker, sends a cryptically worded mass email implying that it’s my fault that some requested documents were late, why should I care? When the elevator is down for maintenance and I have to walk up seventeen flights of stairs after my lunch break, why should I be bothered? When Kyle’s industrial-political backstabbing means that I have to stay late to compile a report that he should’ve compiled weeks ago, why would it matter to me?

I didn’t care.

I wasn’t bothered.

It.

Does.

Not.

Matter.

Hell, I don’t even have the energy to translate Screw you, Kyle into corporate-ese. As 5 P.M. strikes, I just sigh and watch everyone else file out of the office while I stay chained to my desk.

Now, with the sun long gone beneath the surface of Lake Michigan, I sit alone in the twentieth-floor offices of Hale Hospitality, bathed in the cold glow of my computer monitor.

My eyeballs hurt. That normally wouldn’t feel like a five-alarm fire—after all, I’ve been nostrils-deep in a spreadsheet all day—but with this morning’s bombshell, every single floater and blink is a disaster in the making. I can’t help but panic.

Is this it? Is this when the lights go out?

I grit my teeth and send the report to the printer at the far end of the floor. Then, while I wait for it to print, I minimize the spreadsheet and open up a new tab.

Leber congenital amaurosis—that’s what Dr. Haggerty called it. “It’s extraordinarily rare for it to manifest this late,” he said. “You’re actually quite the medical anomaly.”

Great. Just what every twenty-seven-year-old wants to hear. Hey, at least I am special.

The office is tomb-quiet. Everyone else, all those happy normies, have gone home to their normal lives with their normal problems and their normally functioning retinas.

Twenty floors below me, downtown Chicago goes about its Thursday night business. But up here, it is just me, the hum of the HVAC system, and the weight of my impending doom.

I push back from my desk. Kyle’s stupid report can wait. Googling the gruesome particularities of my future can wait. It can all wait, can’t it? In the grand scheme of things, does any of this matter?

Standing up, I close my eyes.

The darkness is immediate and absolute. My heart rate kicks up a notch, but I force myself to keep them shut. If this is going to be my reality in T-minus ninety days, I might as well start practicing now.

Baby steps first. I know this office like the back of my hand—or at least, I think I do. Three steps forward ought to put me at the edge of my cubicle. I shuffle forward, hands extended like a zombie in a B-movie, and immediately bang my hip on the corner of my desk.

“Okay, correction: two steps forward, not three.”

The sound of my scared, nasally voice makes me cringe. I am talking to myself in an empty office while playing blind woman’s bluff.

If this isn’t rock bottom, it’s at least basement-adjacent.

I try again. This time, I successfully navigate out of my cubicle and into the main hallway. My bruised hip is very grateful.

Ten steps to the break room. I count them out, running my fingers along the wall for guidance. The texture changes from painted drywall to the smooth surface of the glass partition⁠—

“Sh*t!”

I accidentally kick a waiting bench outside a VP’s office, in the exact same spot I stubbed my toe at Dr. Haggerty’s this morning. The pain makes me want to quit. It’d be so nice to just assume the fetal position on the ground and cry ‘til the cows come home.

But I do not quit, or cry, or tuck my head between my legs like a frightened little baby.

I keep going.

Because that’s what Eliana Hunter does. She keeps going—when her dad abandons the family, when she has to work three jobs to put herself through community college, when everyone says she’ll never make it past reception at a cutthroat company like Hale Hospitality with a cutthroat boss like Bastian Hale.

And she keeps going now…

… even if she can’t see where she’s headed.

The break room is easier. I know where the coffee maker is by smell alone (mostly because nobody ever cleans it properly). I successfully avoid both the refrigerator and the microwave that someone has definitely used to reheat fish again, despite my endless guerrilla campaign of passive-aggressive sticky notes.

Emboldened by my success, I decide to venture further. The executive wing is just down the hall. It’s usually off-limits after hours unless you are working directly with one of the C-suite.

But what are they going to do, fire me?

Well, that’s certainly an option. God knows Mr. Hale has fired enough people for far more minor infractions. There’s practically a trail of tears permanently inked into the carpet leading out from his office.

I glide my fingers along the wall, counting doorways. Conference Room A, Conference Room B, the supply closet where I once caught two sales associates in a decidedly non-professional embrace, and then⁠—

The wall ends. I know this space. It is the informal lounge area outside Mr. Hale’s office, complete with gleaming leather couches and a view of the lake that I have never properly appreciated until right this moment when I can’t actually see it.

Bastian Hale. The head honcho himself. He’s six-foot-something of blond-and-blue perfection wrapped in Tom Ford suits and an ego with its own gravitational field. To be fair, it’s sort of earned—the man built a hospitality empire from nothing before his fortieth birthday.

The first problem is that he knows he’s a genius.

The other problem is that he never, ever lets anyone forget it.

He goes through assistants like tissue paper and, if the rumors are true, he goes through romantic partners even faster. Given the way half the women on staff look at him, the rumors are probably understating things.

Not that I look at him. Much. Okay, I’m human and possess functioning eyeballs—for the next ninety days, anyway—so yes, I have noticed that he is unfairly attractive in that way that makes you angry at genetics for being so unequally distributed. He’s taller than seems necessary and smells better than the job requires.

But I have also noticed he is an absolute nightmare to work for. The project manager position I currently occupy only became available in the first place because he gave the last girl a mental breakdown when she used the wrong shade of cream in a menu layout.

Fortunately, his office is vacant right now. It is past nine, and even Bastian Hale has to go home sometime. Probably to his Gold Coast penthouse with its wraparound views of Lake Michigan and whichever VS supermodel is gracing his bedsheets this week.

Assuming he has bedsheets, that is. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sleeps in a coffin like Dracula.

I move forward, gaining confidence littl