Page 13 of Every Broken Piece
My hands halt over my keyboard as I process this. “Who are you and what did you do with my brother?”
“I’m serious, Gabe. Give her a chance. Exclamation points and all. I think she’d be good for you.”
“Good for me?” Oh, hell no. He’s not hooking me up with my virtual assistant. That’s unethical and HR would have a field day.
“Not to mention beautiful. Have you seen a picture of her?”
I recoil, yanking my hands from my keyboard as if typing an email to her now is somehow dirty. “No, I haven’t seen a picture of her because it doesn’t matter what she looks like as long as she can do the job.”
“And is she? Doing the job?”
I think about her seafood catch that could have been disastrous. “Yes, she’s doing the job.”
“Despite the exclamation points.”
I sigh, seeing where this is going. “Despite the exclamation points.”
He leans forward to dig out his phone from his back pocket. He swipes a few times then slides the phone across the desk to me.
“What’s this?” I glare at him, refusing to look at the phone because I know what I’m going to see. Jack did his hacking thing and found pictures of Ms. Theresa James and he feels I need to see them too.
“She doesn’t have social media,” he says. “Which is odd for someone her age. I had to dig deep to find these. Luckily, she has friends who post a lot of pictures.” He lifts his chin to the phone. “Go ahead. Look.”
“No.”
He narrows his eyes and smirks. “Why?”
“Because it doesn’t matter what she looks like.”
He settles back in his chair, leaving the phone where it is. I pointedly don’t look at it. I don’t know why I’m so opposed to seeing a picture of my assistant. It’s not like I didn’t know what my other assistants looked like. But Ms. James. Theresa. Tess. Something about her makes me uneasy. Not like she’s a psycho, stalker, shoot up the office, uneasy. A different uneasy, like she’s a danger to me in other ways. I hate it and that’s why I want her gone. Plus, I don’t like exclamation points.
She’s a people pleaser, wants to do a good job, but doesn’t require constant praise. She’s efficient and thoughtful and...
Hell.
I glance at the phone and draw in an involuntary breath.
Jack’s right. She’s beautiful.
Not in a glossy magazine model kind of way, but an everyday fresh way.
In the picture I’m looking at she’s laughing, her head tilted back. Long, dark hair falls way past her shoulders and out of the picture frame. Her eyes are also dark. Brown, maybe. It’s hard to tell in the picture. It looks like she’s at a bar but isn’t holdinga drink. There’s a tinge of olive to her complexion, like she has a bit of Italian in her.
And she’s too fucking young.
“Jesus, Jack, she’s a kid.”
“She’ll be thirty in a few months.”
I see what he’s doing, and I shove the phone back to him. “Knock it off. I could be her father.”
“Only if you fathered her when you were thirteen. I knew you at thirteen and you weren’t fathering anything with that pimply assed face.”
“Fuck you.”
I’m not forty-three yet but it doesn’t matter because I feel far older than forty-three. Losing your wife at twenty-five ages you. Becoming a widower and a single father when your friends are still doing the bar scene makes you feel ancient and worn down.
“Anyway.” Jack heaves himself out of his chair. Sometimes I wonder how he gets any work done when his sole purpose in life seems to be bugging me. “Gotta go get shit done.” He stretches his arms over his head and yawns before swiping his phone off my desk, tapping a few times on the screen, then walking out.
