Page 40 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

But instead I’m back in the shower, trying not to imagine the spray is his fingers, sliding between my legs.

One touch and you’d explode.

Did he masturbate this morning, too? I feel like he wasn’t jacking off during the call; his attention on the phone felt so strong and fierce. No way was his focus divided. Nothing about him was distracted.

That’s part of what made it all so hot. Like he was hyperfocused. The way he hyperfocuses on his chemistry.

He’s found me out,I think.He knows.

“Mr. Drummond,” Betsy says. “How can I help you?”

He comes up to the desk, immobilizing me with his eyes. He should be focusing on Betsy, but he’s focusing on me.

Sex with me is a dirty, savage affair. Utterly uncivilized. It’s the opposite of civilized.

Fourteen

Theo

Turnip Truck standsin the front reception area of the marketing and HR department, clutching a sheath of papers, pretty green eyes gone wide, gaping at me. More than gaping; she seems positively frantic with alarm.

You’d think I sprouted fangs, that I might bite her. And for one long and very strange moment, the idea seems enjoyable.

My pulse kicks up. It’s the wake-up-call girl, scrambling my mind. Suddenly even Turnip Truck is enchanting.

She wears another one of her plain dresses. Like she stepped out of a black-and-white picture, and all she needs to be complete in this life is a bonnet and a flock of ducks.

Even so, she’s beautiful.

I force myself to think about what Sasha told me about her being a moron, so incompetent that Sasha has to do her work for her.

I don’t believe everything I hear from Sasha, but I don’t see what advantage there would be to her telling me she’d hired a moron if the woman wasn’t a moron. It’s too bad, because there really is something about her. Something indefinable. Which doesn’t make sense, as I have zero interest in moronic women who are easily impressed and frightened.

Turnip Truck is the opposite of my type.

The opposite of the wake-up-call girl.

It’s just my lack of sleep. My lack of progress on the formula.

I turn to the receptionist. “I need to see Sasha.”

“Let me see where she is,” the woman says.

I set my hand on the desk. Turnip Truck’s alarmed gaze falls to my fingers.

In the tight moments that follow, I flash on something I haven’t thought about for years—a strange cardboard book I had as a child. The pages were cut into thirds—heads, outfits, and shoes, so that you could turn the parts independently of each other and put a clown’s head with a ballerina’s body and firefighter boots, for example. Or a clown head could have a suit and tie over ballerina shoes.

I always hated that book.

I hated that you could rearrange the clothes to lie about the person. I preferred to arrange it so that the correct heads went with the correct outfits. I remember trying to tape the pages into their rightful configuration, much to the anger of my little sister, Willow, who preferred to mix it up. She thought it was funny to put a ballerina head on a clown body with lumberjack boots.

Turnip Truck glances up. Our eyes meet, and again I have the sensation that her clothes are flipped wrong. That her stare is flipped wrong. But then she turns away and busies herself with whatever she was doing.

“Sasha’s on the phone with IT,” the woman says. “Should I ping her?”

“By all means. Ping her.”

Ping her.

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