He was pleased to hear that he’d struck the right note between exhaustion and impatience. Even the dash of embarrassment that crept into his short speech helped rather than hurt.

  Hell, he was embarrassed. He was fucking humiliated. But not about the drinks he’d consumed—about something very different he’d devoured last night. Devoured and gone back for seconds.

  He swallowed hard. He could almost taste her pussy cream still on his lips.

  “You’re kidding,” Jay exclaimed. “You slept on your boss’s couch last night?”

  Ethan was more suspicious. “You sure it was the couch or was it really the bed?”

  “She has a live-in boyfriend,” Micah told them. His mouth involuntarily twisted. “I got to meet him.”

  “Oh.” Even Ethan couldn’t come up with any further comment.

  “That’s awkward,” said Jay. “At least it happened now when you’re about to leave, rather than earlier on. Not exactly the view you want your boss to have of you.”

  “No,” Micah agreed. “Definitely not.”

  He’d thought with his dick, and he’d ended up looking like a dickhead. It was exactly what he deserved.

  That was one mistake he wasn’t about to repeat.

  “Why don’t you, like, take the rest of the week off?” Ethan asked. “You’ve got the vacation time. Save yourself the awkwardness.”

  Micah nodded slowly. He could do it. Vacation requests didn’t have to necessarily go through his boss. He could go straight to HR.

  But what about Rowan? How would she cope?

  Fuck. He had to stop thinking about Rowan. She could handle a few days without him. God knew they both needed a clean break.

  * * * *

  “You can’t just skip the Beach Ball,” Linda Phillips lectured Rowan, her hands set on her not insubstantial hips. “No one does that.”

  Rowan scowled at her computer screen as she wished Linda and her muffins a thousand miles away. Bran muffins, too! Like everyone on Earth didn’t know that chocolate chips were the appropriate Friday morning pick-me-up.

  “I can’t, Linda. I’ve got a family function to attend.”

  But her colleague wasn’t buying that. “How? This event is scheduled six months in advance. It’s in all our company newsletters.”

  “I’ve got a life,” Rowan muttered, banging away at her keyboard at random.

  “Since when did that happen?”

  She looked up to see a smile flicker across Linda’s pleasantly plump face. Not a smarmy, ‘I’m everybody’s friend’ smile, but a real one, with real humor buried in it.

  “I got a life a while ago, Linda. If you weren’t so busy baking muffins, you might have one, too.”

  It was a low blow—Linda’s divorce a few years ago had been long, expensive and humiliatingly public. Not that she hadn’t been a people pleaser before, but since the divorce, she’d wholeheartedly adopted the friend-to-all persona.

  At least no one called her a bitch behind her back.

  Rowan’s fingers slowed. Has Micah ever called me a bitch? Or thought about me that way?

  God, why does it even matter?

  She redoubled her efforts at the keyboard.

  “Stop, please,” Linda begged, walking over to Rowan’s chair. “You’re going to type right through to the desk.”

  Rowan stopped and leaned back in her chair. Linda was disconcertingly close, but for once her perpetual look of worried concern didn’t irritate her. It was almost comforting.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on already?” Linda demanded. “Is it Stewart?”

  “Yes.” Rowan ran her fingers through her hair. “No.”

  “Come on,” Linda coaxed. “Tell Aunty.”

  She couldn’t tell her the truth. Linda was a fellow manager—a work friend, not a real one. They’d never even socialized out of the office.

  “I’m not happy,” Rowan heard herself saying. “I haven’t been for a long time, but recently it’s gotten worse.”

  “Worse how?”

  She struggled to find the words. “More distance. More silence. More, I don’t know…lonely.”

  “That’s a bad sign.”

  Rowan made a face. “I know that.”

  Linda leaned across to pick up the muffin she’d deposited on Rowan’s desk a few minutes earlier. She started to peel away the waxy liner.

  “Is there someone else?”

  “No…”

  Linda bit and chewed and said nothing. For her, that in itself was amazing.

  The silence stretched.

  “Yes,” Rowan admitted, “there’s someone…sort of.”

  “Sounds promising.”

  Rowan glanced up, expecting sarcasm, and saw only Linda’s guileless face.

  “How does that sound promising?” she demanded.

  Linda had to swallow another mouthful before she could respond. “You sound unsure. That’s what gives me hope. Usually, you have all the answers. Hell, you have the answers before the rest of us even know the question.”

  Rowan waved this aside. “That’s just work.”

  Work…the one place where she felt competent.

  Men—well, they required a master class.

  “Some of us find work harder than you do,” Linda pointed out. “For years, I thought my marriage was the easy part, until it wasn’t.”

  “Look, Linda…”

  The other woman put her hands up in the air in a gesture of exaggerated defeat. “Hey, don’t bite my head off. It’s just a bit of friendly advice, that’s all. Only the part about the Beach Ball is serious. The head honchos take the event very much to heart. Either you go or you can expect a black mark on your record. And if, as you say, this job is what you’re best at, then I can’t imagine you’re willing to let anything happen to ruin it, are you?”

  Rowan gritted her teeth. In spite of her awful taste in muffins, Linda was right—about the Beach Ball, at least.

  “I’ll be there.”

  Chapter Four

  He was killing himself thinking about her. Then his friends became convinced that he was just killing himself.

  Micah was at the gym early in the morning, right after it opened. That was where Jay met him most mornings when he came in for his hour-long workout. By then, Micah had been at it for two hours and was pouring sweat, but he pushed his body to keep up with Jay and even managed to beat him most days in reps.

  Then after work he was back again, focusing on cardio for an hour or two, settling onto the stationary bike like it was going to take him all the way home.

  Home. What a fucking joke. He was far from home, in the big city where he’d always wanted to be. Climbing the ladder. Earning the big bucks.

  He wasn’t anybody’s assistant anymore. He wasn’t her assistant anymore.

  Except the solid gold success had turned out to be hollow milk chocolate.

  He wasn’t even in the job yet, and he hated it. This wasn’t fear or stress or anything like that. He hated it. He knew what this rung in the ladder would do to him—and if not this rung, the next one, or the next. It would eat away at his insides until he was hollow, too, until all he knew how to do was climb and climb and climb, deep down knowing that he would never get where he wanted to be—not in his whole lifetime.

  He would end up being like her.

  Rowan.

  He didn’t even say her name anymore. No, not didn’t—couldn’t. Couldn’t listen to his friends commenting on her outfit every day, noticing how her skirts always seemed to hug her butt. He’d grabbed that ass while pumping wildly inside of her. But he wasn’t thinking ‘been there, done that’. He was thinking he would love to be there again—in her bed, in her arms, wrapped between her legs.

  Fucking Rowan Lacy.

  The only time he forgot about her was when his adrenaline was flowing, and that took a while to kick in. Sometimes two or three hours didn’t do it, so he stayed longer and longer, chasing that high, that forgetfulness.

  “You need to get out, man,” Jay told him, admiring Micah’s form on the free weights but frowning, too. “Don’t get me wrong… Your body is tight, but what’s the point of an incredible body if you don’t share it with the ladies?”

  “Not interested,” Micah said, as he’d been saying for a while now.

  Jay tilted his head questioningly. “In coming out with the guys or in the ladies? Because you know, if you wanted to go pink, I would be right there with you.”

  Micah regarded his friend closely. He suspected Jay was only half-joking. Maybe his friend was partly in love with him.

  Finally, he smiled. “I believe you, buddy.”

  They lifted weights in silence for a few minutes, developing that strange camaraderie that came from sharing sweat. It wasn’t unlike the bond that was formed over breaking bread, although it was of a different, more punishing, strain.

  “It’s a woman, isn’t it?”

  The question came out of nowhere, and for a moment Micah was left blinking in the impact.

  A woman. He realized in that stunned instant that Rowan was a woman to him the way the Mona Lisa was a painting.

  She wasn’t any woman or even in the category of women anymore. She was Rowan, a type, species and category of her own.

  Christ, that wasn’t lust or even obsession. That was a fucking four letter word he wanted to say even less than he wanted to say her name.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Jay asked, keeping his face tactfully averted. Jay being tactful, that’s a first. It told Micah just how bad off his friend considered him.

  “I…can’t,” he said, his voice shocking him with its broken quality. Maybe his friend would chalk it up to the exertion.

  “You know, Ethan said it was a woman who was making you so moody,” Jay said, “but I told him it was impossible. Where would you meet a woman? All you do is work and work out—and this is more or less a men’s-only gym. Only the hardcore buff ladies come here, and any one of them could snap you in two, so nothing’s happening there.”

  Micah dropped the weights then picked up his towel and pretended to be mopping up sweat from his forehead. It let him hide his face, where he was afraid the entire story was written in fluorescent letters.

  “No one decent at work would look at you a second time,” Jay joked, lightly punching him in the arm. “Where else does that leave?”

  Micah didn’t answer him directly. “It’s just a woman, okay?” Just a woman. It actually hurt him to say those words. “She was broken up with her boyfriend, we hooked up, then she got back together with him.”

  It was a short story he wanted to believe was relatable and common enough to get his friend off his back. They’d all picked up women like that in bars, someone looking to score a point against a recent ex-boyfriend, only to hurry back to the sure thing afterward. Those women always seemed to know that Micah and his friends weren’t in that category.

  Jay looked at him closely—with suspicion, Micah thought. “Where did you two meet?”

  “She lives in my building.”

  “With her boyfriend? Awkward.”

  “No, he lives across town,” Micah supplied, glad to see that the bit of embellishment seemed to make the lie more believable.

  “Not smart,” Jay told him. “What’s the number one rule about hook-ups? You don’t fuck where you live, work or hang out.”

  That was a piece of good advice Micah could have used just a short time ago.

  “Must have been some babe if she has you still thinking about her after she dumped you like that,” Jay observed.

  Micah hefted a pair of kettlebells. “Just drop it, okay?”

  “See what I mean? This bitch has got you acting all touchy.”

  “She’s not a bitch,” Micah said in a low voice that carried a warning. “We never planned on it happening, and we didn’t make any promises. I can’t be mad at her because she wanted some other guy.”

  It was true. He’d only just realized it himself. Rowan hadn’t planned to sleep with him any more than he had planned to sleep with his boss. It had just happened.

  It wasn’t her fault either that he’d felt something deeper than she had.

  His friend gave him a frankly disbelieving glance. “How could she want some other guy?”

  Yeah, it was definitely something close to love he saw sparking in his friend’s eyes, love and righteous anger on Micah’s behalf. In love with him or not, Jay was a loyal friend.

  “Believe it or not, Jay, it happens…even to me.”

  Now he only had to find some way to get over it—to get over his anger and get over her.

  * * * *

  Rowan attended the Beach Ball solo.

  Unlike other members of the staff, she didn’t use the excuse of being right on the edge of the city’s waterfront to don her swimsuit and cover it up with even less material.

  For one thing, the Ball was in the evening, and without the sun to warm it, the air was positively chilly. For another, she was always highly conscious of her position in the organization and the fact that she was younger than the others occupying her role, even if the bosses did seem happy to see their managers letting their hair down, both literally and figuratively.

  Her only allowance to the tropical theme was the peach color of her maxi dress. The dress was filmy and revealing, but she countered that with the white shawl twined around her bare arms and shoulders. Her hair remained securely tied up.

  The Ball was a strange mix of casual and formal, with the younger and more active staff members spending the first hour or two diving for volleyballs on the private beach just below the clubhouse where the evening’s dinner and dancing agenda would take place. The older people watched and commented on the games while sipping fruit-draped cocktails.

  Rowan didn’t really want to watch the volleyball, but she was equally loath to sit in the deserted dining room looking forlorn and open to flirtation. It was safer in the crowd.

  A set of heavy shoulders jostled her own as she leaned against the wooden railing. “Found your next assistant yet? Looks like the Head Office team could use a boost.”

  They both watched as the volleyball went sailing over a young woman’s head while she flailed uselessly at it. Micah’s energetic dive from behind failed to keep the ball in play.

  Rowan smiled but did not turn to address her unwanted companion. George Ephraim from Human Resources had a reputation for exactly the kind of flirtation she wanted to avoid.

  “I sent out an offer,” Rowan said, referring to the top candidate from the three Micah had vetted for her. “But you would know the result of that better than I would.”

  “He accepted,” George said with an unapologetic grin. “He starts on the Monday after this one.”

  “Great.”

  “I didn’t interview any of the candidates,” George went on, “but I assume they all kept up the Lacy Legacy.”

  “The Lacy Legacy?”

  “Young, fit and male,” said George. “You know, if you had been a man, we would have probably had a dozen complaints about you by now.”

  “If I had been a man,” Rowan said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You would have winked at me and moved on.”

  Her comment rendered George silent for a few minutes, long enough for the volleyball players to pack up and head in. They passed those on the balcony on their way to the change rooms where they would put on their evening finery. Sand still clung to their sweaty limbs and bare skin. Micah looked particularly good with his blond hair tousled and sunkissed, his muscular chest and arms flushed from exertion.

  Rowan didn’t turn her head as he passed, and he acknowledged her with the barest of nods, no doubt for the sake of George and the others.

  “Ouch,” George said heartily once the players had disappeared into the building behind them. “So that’s why you’re hiring a new assistant. What’s with the ice between you and Grant? Did he make a pass and get shot down?”

  Rowan narrowed her eyes against the sun that was just starting to set on the other side of the lake. Soon the balcony would be filled with couples admiring the view—and twisting her heart in the process.

  Even though none of the men she’d dated in her thirties had ever been the romantic kind, she was feeling nostalgic. She missed all the clumsy clichéd gestures she’d never actually experienced.

  “No one makes passes in my department,” she told George. “That way no one gets shot down. It’s simple, really.”

  George Ephraim nodded knowingly. “Right. You’re kind to save the boy’s pride, but I saw the way he looked at you. He’s better off away from your perennial charms.”

  Somehow, Rowan managed to resist the urge to yell at him. She was relieved when, a few minutes later, the guests started wandering over to their assigned tables for dinner and the inevitable speeches. The sooner she got through dinner, the sooner she could go home.

  Not that there was anything for her at home. Actually, she strongly suspected that Stewart would be waiting, as he had been most days now when she came home, but she didn’t have the energy to face him…not tonight.

  Stewart had been putting in a real effort to spend time with her these last few weeks, sometimes even going so far as to prepare dinner and clean up afterward without any prompting. Instead of charming her, the new improved Stewart made her uncomfortable. The more overtures he made, the more she realized how little reason they had to continue sharing an apartment.

  The feelings she’d once had for him had started dying the moment he’d asked her to open their relationship. Her agreement hadn’t slowed the decline. Now those feelings were dead, and Stewart’s continued presence was merely a reminder of the loss.

  She wished that he would go back out on his whirlwind of dates. Persistence, or the fear of finding a younger man once more occupying his bed, had kept him close to home and under her feet.

  Yet again, her solution was to stay later and later at work, but when she did that, Stewart called frequently and spoke strangely during those calls, as if he were straining his ears to catch the sound of a male voice in the room with her.

 

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