Page 3 of Unexpectedly Wanted
He was talented as hell.
A way better hacker than I’d ever be.
Not that you heard the H-word come from me.
“Nope,” I said out loud to myself, doing my best to ignore the lady giving me a strange look as she scurried to pass me. I tried to smile, but that only seemed to make her move quicker, holding her purse close to her body like she was in danger of getting it yanked away.
I sighed.
I wasn’t crazy.
I didn’t even think I looked like someone that would wish to harm anyone. That wasn’t me.
Shaking my head, I hurried down the block to the little deli I frequently ate at. Most of us at the office would end up grabbing something from here a few times a week. If I hadn’t been in such a weird mood, I would have asked Austin, or maybe even Milo, to join me. Not that Milo had ever taken me up on that offer. I usually liked being social. But today, I just wanted to get my turkey sub and potato salad, and go back to my hole in the office so I could hide away.
“Hey, Remy,” Sandy called from behind the counter the moment I stepped inside.
Sliding up to the end of the line, I gave her a little wave. It was lunchtime, and the place was hopping.
I smiled as I took a deep inhale through my nose. The scent of fresh bread was like the best mood lifter ever. Probably because it reminded me of better times. Of times before I knew how cruel the world could be. Times when I was just a boy in the back of a small shop, helping my grandpa bake fresh loaves to sell for the day.
The line moved quickly, as it usually did, and it wasn’t long before Sandy was tellingmewhatIwas there for. I laughed, but inside, I wondered if that made me boring and predictable.
“You takin’ this with you today, honey?” she asked.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said as I stuffed a ten into the tip jar.
She smiled, the lines around her mouth deepening, showing that she was a woman who spent a lifetime of pulling a happy face. She reminded me of a sweet grandma, and I often thought about what it would be like to have someone like her as mine. My own grandmother had been cold, quite the opposite of her quirky husband. I’d spent a lot of time wondering how the two of them even ended up together, since it wasn’t just me she acted cold toward.
I stepped to the side and pulled out my phone. People shuffled around me as I scrolled through emails, hoping it would keep my mood from rubbing off on those near me. They didn’t need that shit, that was for sure. I couldn’t understand why I was having such a hard time shaking off the grumpiness of the morning.
“This place is… lovely,” I heard someone say behind me. The way she said “lovely” sounded as if she thought it was anything but. “I don’t understand why you can’t take time off of work. We told you two weeks ago that we were coming down.”
Oh, boy.
I kind of felt bad for whoever she was talking to.
She hadthattone. You know the one. Condescending, but sounding sweet, as if they didn’t mean to cause conflict when really, they did.
“I told you, Mother, I can’t just take time off. I don’t want to. My work’s important.”
Hearing that voice, my spine went ramrod straight.
I casually turned my head to look over my shoulder, trying my hardest not to grind my teeth.
I wasn’t sure why I looked. That voice couldn’t have belonged to anyone other than Milo.
Fucking Milo.
Nope.
I wasn’t going to let him pull me back down.
It didn’t matter that he’d snapped at me in front of a few of our coworkers. It didn’t matter that I was actually slightly embarrassed by his asshole behavior, despite the fact that I hadn’t done anything but offered to take some of the smaller cases off his hands so he could focus on whatever he seemed so intensely into lately. It didn’t matter that, though Milo was usually wound pretty tight, the coil of stress seemed to pull tighter recently, and it had begun to show more and more. I wasn’t going to let my mood turn even more sour than it already was.
As stealthily as I could, I took in the woman sitting in the booth opposite Milo. She was facing me, which allowed me to see her perfectly done-up features. Her nicely fluffed, Southern woman hair. Her blouse and cardigan which was too much for this summer heat, in my opinion. She sat there looking like she had a stick shoved so far up her ass it was poking her brain. But it was the look of disgust that got to me, and the way it appeared as if it was permanently etched in her features.
She did not make me think of a happy woman.
