I put my responsive grin on stern lockdown (he really liked her; I knew it!) and pivot to face him again, my expression carefully blank.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” he says, a dull flush rising over his face and settling in his cheekbones. He tugs on an earlobe that, I note for the record, is also red. “I thought she might have, ah, mentioned it?”
“I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to her yet,” I say. Please note, also for the record, that this is perfectly true. And that Ella and I always have each other’s backs. And that my late mother, rest her soul, didn’t raise any fools. Even if I do occasionally sleep with my boss. “Did you guys hit it off?”
“I thought we did. But I didn’t, ah, get the chance to get her number. I’m thinking of stopping by Valentina’s. Just so I can, you know, say hi.”
I frown, oddly charmed by this vulnerable side of Ryker, who usually doesn’t have this much trouble getting his words out. I don’t know him well, but I’m getting the feeling he’s pretty into Ella. And trust me, nice single guys are thin on the ground on the island of Manhattan. Nice single rich guys? Forget about it. Like finding a minotaur sunning himself on top of a Times Square billboard. That being the case, I’m inclined to throw him a bone and ease his way a little bit.
“I’m sure she’d love that,” I say.
He breaks into a relieved grin, a beam of purest sunshine. The kind of smile I would kill to receive from Griffin.
“Great. Thanks,” he says.
“Don’t make me regret it,” I warn him.
Hey. He’s one of my bosses, but she’s my best friend.
“I don’t plan to,” he says, turning to go with another grateful grin that seems to propel him down the hallway with an unusual bounce in his step.
Also grinning, I grab my coffee and head to my desk, which stands outside Griffin’s enormous corner office. I’m almost there when the worst possible thing happens:
The security guard in the lobby downstairs texts me.
He’s on his way.
I freeze, the victim of sudden catastrophic paralysis. But this is no time for panic, so I recover quickly and get onto the group chat for everyone on this floor. My urgent goal? To send the alert that I coined myself shortly after I began working here:
GYP.TBIOHW.
Grab your pitchforks. The Beast is on his way.
Like magic, a flurry of activity erupts across the floor. People stop their lazy morning chatter cold and zoom into their offices with the urgency of the Egyptian slaves as they gathered their families close and frantically painted their doorways with lamb’s blood before that final plague swept through the land. As for me, I gather the letters and documents that need his signature and put them on his glass and chrome desk along with his schedule for the day. I make another quick trip to the kitchen and back with the cup of blueberry Greek yogurt that he eats first thing every morning and his cup of black coffee. Both also go on his desk. Then I grab his newspapers, my phone, a legal pad and a pen on my way to the elevator. That’s all I have time for. Well, that and a few centering breaths to keep me from lapsing into a full-fledged freak-out.
Then the elevator doors slide open and there he is. My boss. Who is now fully cloaked in his focused and forbidding real estate mogul identity and who bears no resemblance to the man who possessed me so thoroughly the other night and whose lingering effects still have my body feeling aroused and agitated.
I go very still as our gazes connect. That split second of electricity as I stare into his impassive face feels like trying to catch a lightning bolt between my hands. It’s enough to make my cheeks burn and make me wonder if I can possibly uphold my side of this devil’s pact we made. What did I say when I called him with my indecent proposal? No questions asked? No regrets?
Riiiiight. Tell that to my thundering heartbeat.
Luckily, he’s already in motion.
“I see the place is still standing, Forest,” he says as he gets off the elevator, the same greeting he gives me every morning.
“So far, boss,” I say, handing him the newspapers.
He skims the headlines, his long strides eating up the distance to his office as I walk alongside him.
“I’m going to need to talk to legal. I’ve got some tweaks to the documents I reviewed over the weekend. Damon wants to play squash at lunch, but I’m not sure I can fit that in with my two o’clock meeting. I’ve been ducking my publicist for a couple days. We need to figure out what she wants. It better not be any more Page Six bullshit about me getting engaged to some woman I’ve never met. What am I forgetting? Oh, casual Fridays are getting out of hand. I saw someone last week wearing khakis. I hate khakis. No need for us to all look like a bunch of American tourists on vacation in Mexico. Next thing I know, everyone will be walking around in rubber flip-flops. Take care of that, okay? And get me Branson on the phone. I don’t like the vibe I’m getting from him lately. I think he’s trying to jerk my chain on the deadline.”
“You got it, boss.”
By now we’ve made it into his office, where he settles at his desk and reaches for the stack of letters that need his attention. I watch him scrawl his bold signature on the first couple, decide he’s done barking out orders for now and turn to go with a surge of relief.
Made it. So far so good. Whew.
“So…we’re good?” he asks quietly behind me.
I freeze, stifle a curse and arrange my features into something approximating polite puzzlement as I turn back.
“Absolutely,” I say in my crisp professional voice, doing my best to make eye contact for as long as I can stand without singeing my retinas. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
“Just…seems appropriate to ask.”
A semi-stare-off ensues, during which he keeps watching me with that patented unfathomable expression of his and I begin to feel a flare of annoyance. I suppose he thinks one night with him is enough to make me lose my freaking mind, much like the model he briefly dated several months ago. That nut job once called him thirty-three times here in the office and ultimately had to be escorted from the premises by security. Or maybe he expects me to shrivel into the fetal position and cry my little eyes out, or just be off my game at work.
Whatever. None of that’s happening.
“Don’t worry,” I say pleasantly, staring him in the face. “I know exactly what to expect from you. And what not to expect from you.”
Since I’m watching him so closely, I have the pleasure of seeing a tiny chink in his expression when his jaw tightens. That tightening jaw makes my day, I gotta tell you.
I walk off, secure in the knowledge that I’ve had the last word. A feeling that lasts a good, oh, thirty-eight seconds.
Until he unleashes a torrent of work on me, the likes of which I’ve never seen before and vehemently hope to never see again.
He sends me on errands that take me uptown and then uptown again the second I return to the office. Makes, cancels and rearranges meetings and appointments with whiplash speed. Complains about the spice level of the lunch he had me order for him, the air conditioning in his office and the speed of his computer, as if I can control any of that. He has me track down impossible-to-get tickets for the latest Broadway smash when I know he’s never voluntarily attended a musical in his life. He has me do everything for him but chew his food and flick the pee off his dick when he visits the bathroom, although I suppose there’s time for that tomorrow.