“Thanks for the advice, Gus,” I muttered.
“Yeah, it’s my calling. Career advice for ex-special ops. I’ll give you this consultation on the house, but I’ll charge a retainer going forward. Before you ask, no, I don’t accept sexual favors.” He chuckled to himself, and then continued, “The night before the wedding, a few of us are getting together at The Pub for drinks. Bring your Shannon.”
I disconnected and stared at my hands. Aside from old scars and freckles, they looked like mirror images of each other but they couldn’t have felt more dissimilar. I never thought numbness would hurt this much. It was like I slept in a strange position and my arm didn’t wake up with the rest of me. I kept rubbing and stretching to shake off the prickly chill but it never stopped. There were moments when an avalanche of sensation hit me, and with it came dull throbbing or sharp, fiery pulses. It was awful, but I preferred it to the numbness.
I heard Shannon’s key slide into the lock, and when she stepped into the apartment, she was a whirlwind. Spitting fire and five different kinds of furious. She was yelling at someone through her earpiece, and she looked like the most beautiful tactical commander I’d ever seen. Her eyes darted to me without reaction.
“Well I’m sorry, Patrick, but shit happens,” she said. “Keep in mind that we’re not talking about highly experienced or highly paid personnel. People with years of executive assistant experience do not want to work for a guy who goes through support staff on a seasonal basis.”
She marched into the kitchen with her laptop tucked under her arm and started riffling through the refrigerator. It was full, a departure from her usual menu of yogurt and white wine. I took a strange amount of pleasure from engaging in domestic tasks like grocery shopping and fixing squeaky hinges. I even had dinner on the stove.
If all else failed, I was content being Shannon’s personal chef and sex slave. That was a life well lived.
“I cannot oversee every single thing your admin does,” she said, grabbing a bottle of Riesling. She held it against her body while she opened the laptop and started typing. “And as I’ve said before, if you can’t find a way to communicate without screaming or glaring or otherwise implying she’s dumber than stones, we’re not going to stop this cycle.”
God, I wanted to spend the weekend worshipping her. Tell hereverything. Find my balls and act like a fucking man.
Instead, I snatched the bottle from her hand and crossed the kitchen to where she kept the corkscrew and glasses.
“I’ll handle it. I’ll handle it. No—” She dropped her head back and groaned. “No.No, Patrick. I’ll deal with it, end of story. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to hang up now. My patience for your absurd quantity of assistants is exhausting, and if I have to listen to you complain about Roberta for another minute, I’ll find you and beat you with a brick.” She stabbed her phone’s screen repeatedly, and then tossed it to the countertop.
I set the glass beside her and grabbed the cheese tray from the bottom drawer of the refrigerator. There weren’t that many markets in Chestnut Hill, and according to Internet commenters, only one with a highly rated cheese department.
“The minions aren’t behaving?” I asked. I brought my hands to her shoulders, pressing my thumbs into the knotted muscles there. She leaned into my touch, sighing, and I dropped my lips to her neck. She released a slight purr, but before I could go any further, she shifted away.
“I have to go back to my office,” she said, raking her fingers through her hair.
Hands braced on her hips, hair disheveled, and lips twisted in frustration while she tapped her foot on the hardwood, and I’d never been so turned on. I couldn’t explain why I liked this girl fired up, but fuck, I did. I really did.
“And then I need to fire Patrick’s assistant if I don’t kill her first.”
Covering the pans and turning off the heat, I said, “I’ll come with you.”
“Will,” she sighed, swiping her hand across her forehead. “This isn’t a field trip. Just let me deal with this drama alone.”
“No,” I said. I tucked her laptop into her bag and swung it over my good shoulder.
She wrapped her scarf around her neck and reached for her coat. “Simple as that?No?”
“Yeah,” I said.
She wanted to argue with me, but crossed her arms over her chest, marched down the stairs to the curb, and walked toward the Derne Street office.
I followed her up and down several flights of stairs while she collected files, shuffled through a small desk outside a door emblazoned with Patrick’s name, and finally settled in a wingback chair in her office while she made a couple of phone calls. This was her kingdom, and right now, she didn’t look like a content queen.
She dropped her head to her hands after telling Roberta that she wouldn’t be required at Walsh Associates any further. She blew out a heavy breath and turned to her computer. “I just need to reset the garage and door codes, and then shut down her email—”
“You don’t have someone to do that for you? Where’s Patrick?” He was the only one I liked. He rarely came up in her rants, and he wasn’t sleeping with my sister. On that basis alone, he was tolerable. “Shouldn’t he be doing this?”
“No,” she said, her hands fisting on her desk. “At least, not right now. I handle this shit. That’s what I do, Will, I handle all the shit because I’m good at it. Patrick is busy doing his job, and this just needs to get done. I’m not calling any of my team in to handle anything when I’m right here.”
Shannon thought I wanted to change her, but that wasn’t accurate. Saving the world was her gig, and I wasn’t about to take that away from her. However, there was a difference between saving the world and cleaning out an assistant’s desk on a Friday night.
I knew her family was everything to her, and I knew she was convinced that tending to their every need was her only purpose in life, and that was where I couldn’t get on board.
While Shannon typed, I explored her office.
I was hungry for information about her, and since our conversations were only gradually moving out of superficial territory, I was forced to draw my intel from environment. I knew she had at least fifteen magazine subscriptions but didn’t seem to read any. I’d first encountered her sin drawer last summer, but I dedicated an afternoon last week to categorizing the firepower and style of her sex toys. She had seven different types of salt in her kitchen—Hawaiian sea, smoked sea, flaky Maldon, fleur de sel, kala namak, black truffle, and kosher—but neither cinnamon nor sugar. She didn’t like talking before dawn and changed out of her work clothes as soon as she got home. There were three different blow dryers and four different curling irons in her bathroom, and she kept a box of her mother’s journals in her closet. I wouldn’t have noticed the box if her pajamas weren’t piled around it.
