Page 5 of Loathing My Boss
Why.
How.
I wasjustover there.
I wasjustbeside her.
She was sleeping, peacefully, during my entire hour-and-a-half-long interview.
She was in thecenterof my California King bed.
How in the world did she kamikaze herself off in the last minute?
The woman is a mystery. A beguiling, intoxicating, mind-altering mystery.
With really, really, insanely nice legs.
A cuss slips through my brain as I tear my attention off her thighs the second her lovely deep brown eyes locate me.
My heart trips, picking up the pace, so I pretend she didn’t notice me staring as I check the monitor with my plot outline and feed the next line or so into the document pulled up on my other monitor.
A buzz slithers up my spine as her steps approach. Graceful and commanding, she takes hold of the back of my chair, leans over my desk, and grips my mouse. Yawning, she checks my word count as though her birthmark isn’t inches from my mouth and her shirt isn’t a gaping chasm, baring more than the shoulders it’s designed to.
Self-preservation, who?
She’s never met the guy.
I cut my eyes squarely off the mysteries of femininity and close them as I free a taut breath.
“Hm.” She closes the word count box. “Subpar.”
Clearing my throat, I rub the stubble on my jaw, inhaling only once she’s pulled away and her hand has left my chair. Nevertheless, breath fills me too soon. Lavender—thick, heady lavender—lingers, cloying. Desperation constricts a fist around my heart, and I plunge my fingers into my hair as my eyes follow her retreat to my bed, which is also going to smell like her tonight.
Normally, she sits pretty at her little desk in the corner furthest from mine. She brings me water, vitamins, and mymeals at precise times during writing days. She handles anything that might distract me from getting words down—including matters relating to the upkeep of Sunset, West Virginia, the small town that fell into my and my brother’s hands upon the death of our parents.
Normally, she doesn’t throw an entire bucket of ice water on top of me in the morning and need to remake my bed around noon. Previously, she’s thrown acupof ice water on me or stuffed a handful of ice directly down the back of my t-shirt. Once—in the past few weeks of this early to rise, early to bedproductivity experiment—she found Kyran’s cat, Ender, and let him lick me awake.
Luckily, Ender is not often accessible in this sprawling manor.
Or, perhaps,unluckilyif the bucket option is going to become her new favorite technique for getting me up. I’d prefer sandpaper tongues.
I don’t know why I’m allowing her to test out this new idea of hers where she wants to see if I’m more productive on an earlier schedule. It’s clearly abuse. And if I persisted in rejecting it, she would have to let it slide. She does manage to possesssomeinterest in job security whenever I sayabsolutely not.
I’m not aware I’m watching her until she bends to get something out of the laptop bag by her desk in the far corner, and I recallexactlywhy I’m allowing her to test out this new schedule.
I…
Am weak.
Painfully, painfully weak.
And her eyes? They’re very, very brown.
Yet again, I force my own eyes to close and stop ogling. Pulling my reading glasses off, I rub the bridge of my nose, up to the scar cutting across my right brow, andrefuse to look at the full heart of my assistant’s perfect backside. This is torture. Torture worse than the physical abuse all four of my brothers and I faced at our father’s hand.
Thirty-five years I’ve lived celibate. Thirty-three years I focused entirely on my work, no problem. Thirty-threeyearsI had more important things to deal with—like healing from twenty-eight years of trauma.
But two years ago, Crisis hit me like a storm, changing the chemistry in my brain. Even after everything she’s put me through, the violent feelings I’ve harbored for her have only gotten worse.
