Page 305 of The Parkers' Handsome Holiday
I nodded at her, and suddenly, it all became too much. As though my hands were magnets, I found myself reaching out to her, pulling her close to me, and kissing her with everything I had. She opened herself to me, moaning quietly, making it very clear that she wanted this nearly as bad as I did. Her arms came around me, pulling me even closer, her fingers teasing the bare skin of my lower back as she pushed my shirt up a little.
I was so focused on her tongue curling against mine that I barely heard the door to my office swing open. But the cleared throat was impossible to miss.
We sprang apart, both looking guiltily towards the door. I felt my heart plummet to my feet. Because it wasn’t one of the employees that had found us. No, standing in the doorway was none other than Bailey’s brother, Ian.
Ian who had asked me to make sure that Bailey was okay. Ian who probably wanted to kill me now, having seen me wantonly making out with his sister in my office while we were both supposed to be working.
Because in all my worry about whether I should act on my interest in Bailey, there was one thing I had forgotten. It wasn’t just my relationship history. It wasn’t just the fact that she was my boss. But it was also the fact that she was my good friend’s much younger sister.
I didn’t even know what to say to him anymore.
CHAPTER 24
ADAM
I winced as Ian walked out of my office, slamming the door shut behind him. To get caught kissing one of your friends’ younger sisters? That was pretty bad. There was no explaining it, nor was there any excusing it. I mean, sure, you couldn’t help who you were attracted to. And Bailey was, well, Bailey. She was kind, cute, determined, intelligent. Everything that I could want in a woman, really.
But it was the kind of thing that I should never have acted on. Even leaving aside all my other personal reservations to starting something with her, this was a terrible idea.
I glanced over at Bailey to see how she was taking this. To my surprise, she started laughing. “Well, that wasn’t the way I expected that to go,” she joked.
And I guess she could joke about it. Ian was hardly going to kill her. But he had asked me to look out for her, to help her around Brooks Mountain Resort as much as possible. And instead, here I was, shoving my tongue in her mouth. What a mess.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Bailey. “Your brother looks pretty pissed.”
Bailey tossed her long blonde hair and shrugged. “I hate to say it, but let him be pissed. I’m not a kid anymore. I know what I want.”
I shook my head. “He’s always been protective of you,” I reminded her. “He actually asked me to look out for you here. And I’ve totally violated that trust that he had in me.”
Bailey made a noise of protest. “Well, he should never have asked you to look out for me in the first place,” she maintained. She shook her head. “Like he thinks that I have no idea what I’m doing.” I raised an eyebrow at her, and she laughed. “All right, I don’t really. But Ian has no right to interfere in any of this, and he should know that.”
“I don’t think he was trying to interfere so much as just make sure that you had a friend here,” I said, shrugging.
“Yeah, I guess,” Bailey sighed. She cocked her head to the side. “Can you and I continue this another time? I think I should probably talk to Ian alone.”
I knew that I should probably protest. I was the one who had gotten us into this mess; it was my responsibility to deal with whatever Ian wanted to throw at me. But at the same time, she was probably right that it was better for her to talk to her brother. I had a feeling a lot of her argument was going to come down to the fact that she didn’t want her brother to continue to be so protective of her, and that wasn’t an argument that I wanted to be in the middle of. That was between the two siblings.
Not only that, but things might go better if I didn’t join Bailey in talking to Ian. He was probably pretty frustrated with me, and my presence during that conversation would only stoke that anger even more. Better that I let Bailey calm him down some before I faced him.
Part of my trouble was that I didn’t want to walk out of this room without knowing just where Bailey and I stood. But I knew that the longer we kept Ian waiting, the more frustrated he was going to get.
So I nodded at Bailey. “Sounds like a plan,” I said.
“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?” Bailey suggested. “It’s probably better that you’re not here at the resort during this.”
I frowned at her. “You know I can’t do that,” I told her. “There’s a bunch of things that I need to get done today.” It was the busiest time of the ski season, after all, and when I had tried to take off a day earlier that week to stay home with my sick son, one of the ski lifts had randomly quit working and I’d had to rush over to prevent a major PR disaster from happening.
“All right, I’ll put it this way,” Bailey said. “As your boss, I’m telling you to ignore all projects that will keep you visible down here in the base area. You want to go out and check on Dasher or any of the other lifts, be my guest. But everything down here is off limits to you for today.”
I started to protest, but Bailey gave me a look, and I sighed. She was the boss, after all. She was the owner of the resort. And I trusted that she would call me if she really needed me for something. Fingers crossed that nothing major would happen that day anyway. What were the chances that two lifts would go down in one week?
So I nodded at Bailey. “All right,” I told her. “I do want to check on a few of the lifts just to make sure they’re doing okay. Dasher in particular since it had the problem the other day. And I don’t care that Ian’s here; if you need to call me, then I need you to call me.”
“I will,” Bailey promised. She glanced at the picture she was still holding in one hand. Ethan had drawn it, of him and Bailey skiing together. Bailey smiled now. “Tell Ethan thanks for me,” she said. “And I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” I told her.
She leaned up on her tiptoes, and for a moment, I thought she was going to kiss me on the lips again. But this time, her lips brushed against my cheek. It might have seemed like a friendly gesture and nothing more, but I knew this wasn’t usual behavior for Bailey. And the shy look in her eyes as she pulled away let me know exactly what she was thinking.
