Page 413 of The Parkers' Handsome Holiday
I backed toward my father’s office with both hands up. “My bad, Peele. My bad. Looks great, by the way. How long have you been at this?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
Chuckling, I kept backing up until my shoulder clipped the doorframe of my father’s office. My old man, Alastair Louis Renald Bamford II, cleared his throat and told me to watch where I was going. I turned, expecting to meet his eyes, but instead I found a petite blonde head level with my chest.
I looked down at Ms. Tinsely Miller. “Sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
She brushed a lock of blonde hair away from her face and clutched a red binder to her chest. “I’m used to it. It’s the curse of being the short girl.”
I patted the top of her head. “That’s the spirit.”
She rolled her big brown eyes, the same color of a polished oak table when the sun hit it just right and swatted my hand away. “Jokes when you’re an hour late for work? Must be nice to be the boss’s son.”
Speaking of my father, he rose from his leather chair and walked toward us. “Let Ms. Miller pass, my boy. She has a lot on her plate today and indulging you is not on her list of priorities.”
I pumped my eyebrows at her. “Maybe tomorrow. You, me, your desk. We’ll pick up where we left off.”
A smile curled the corner of her lips. She had a quirky mouth. I’d always thought so. Her smile was ever-crooked, as if the right side of her cheek had been pinned up by her dimple. Somehow, the smile was as adorable as it was sexy.
Something I could never, under any circumstance, tell her.
“I’ll be even busier tomorrow.” She brushed past me and patted the top of her red binder. “Some of us actually have to work for a living, you know.”
“You’re talking about Aleena, right?” I called after her.
Her hips swayed as she marched to her desk, and the muscles in her calves flexed with every step. She flipped me the middle finger over her shoulder and I grinned.
“What would we do around here without Tinsel’s unique brand of spice?” I asked as I turned to my father, who leaned against his desk with a disapproving smirk playing on his downturned lips. I closed the office door and splayed my hands wide. “What?”
“Must you always give the poor girl a hard time?”
“She likes it,” I said.
“You’re the boss’s son. If she didn’t like it, do you think she’s in a reasonable position to say so?”
“Come on, Dad.” I fell lazily into one of his lounge chairs and stretched my legs out in front of me. “Tinsely can handle herself. If she wanted me to back off, she’d say so. And let’s be honest, everyone around here knows you like her just as much as you like me, if not more.”
“That’s because she doesn’t talk back,” my father muttered as he paced around his desk and sat back down. “Or show up late.”
“I was… distracted.”
“Do you even know her name?”
“Whose name?”
“Whichever woman had you around her finger last night and this morning, giving you an excuse to be late for work.”
“It was something very nineties. Becky or Stacy or something along those lines. She’s a masseuse.” I winked.
My father held up a hand and shook his head. “Stop. I don’t need to know anything else.”
My old man had been somewhat of a player in his day, too. Before he met my mother, the daughter of a French diplomat, he’d been hell on wheels with women in his rolodex on every continent. He fell in love with my mother and changed his ways, and a short six months into dating they discovered they were pregnant with yours truly. They tied the knot at a lavish affair at the Bamford family estate here in New York City and had me. They tried to get pregnant again for years after I was born. My mother was desperate to give me a sibling after growing up as an isolated only child herself, and my father wanted a daughter.
No other siblings ever came. I grew up as an only child and the heir to the Bamford legacy.
“I want to talk to you about something, my boy.” My father leaned back in his chair and pressed his fingers together. He watched me over the tips of his fingers. “I want to talk to you about my retirement.”
That made my ears perk up. I sat up straighter. “Retirement?”
