Oh my God, where have you been?”
Claire frowned at her disheveled, out-of-breath assistant. Jamie had a friendly, open face and barely cleared five feet, even with the spiky heels she loved to wear. Today, the heels were scarlet, coupled with a matching leather miniskirt and a black feather boa-like shirt. Her naturally blonde hair was a shade of red rivaling her shoes.
“Whoa, Jamie. You look like a cross between a Dominatrix and Cruella de Vil,” Claire couldn’t help commenting. Pregnancy tended to do that to her, she’d noticed, making her say exactly what was on her mind, pointblank.
Jamie ran a red lacquered nail along the feathers lining the V-neck of her shirt. “It’s my latest phase, but we can’t talk about it right now. Save it for lunch. Where were you?”
“I overslept.” Claire shifted her leather laptop case onto her right arm. “Not to mention traffic was a complete nightmare. What’s wrong? You look like you’ve been running laps around the fourth floor.” Jamie had a bubbly personality that typically ran to dramatics whenever there was any sort of trouble. Claire groaned. “Don’t tell me the mice for the DC Satellite commercial escaped.” She shot a nervous glance to the floor, searching for little white rodents darting in and out of cubicles.
“No, the mice are fine,” Jamie assured her. “Although Leo did put one in Maria’s desk drawer for laughs and then it ran into the women’s bathroom, but…oh never mind about that. King Monroe emailed me that he wants you in his office in fifteen minutes or I’ll be fired.” She blew a wisp of red hair from her forehead and frantically checked her watch. “That was fourteen minutes ago.”
Claire blinked, trying to absorb all the information her assistant had thrown at her. “So did you find the mouse? Because we need exactly four, and the shoot’s this afternoon. I don’t want to have to run around pet stores all morning looking for a replacement mouse.”
Jamie rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t be the one who’d have to hit the pet stores, I would. But forget about the damn mice. I’m about to be fired here.”
Claire patted her arm reassuringly. “You know he can’t fire you like that. We’d slap a lawsuit in his face before he could say—”
“Claire. Just go. Please.”
“Fine.” It was Claire’s turn to roll her eyes at Jamie’s melodramatics. “I’m going.” She pulled her laptop case from her arm, handing both it and her purse to Jamie. “Put these in my office please.”
She made her way to the elevator, hoping she had yet to begin doing the pregnancy waddle.
“You have twenty-seven seconds,” Jamie called after her.
Claire grumbled under her breath and picked up the pace, stepping onto the elevator and hitting the button for the tenth floor. She knew exactly what this imperious summons was about. An instinctive reaction to avoid both it and Logan had probably contributed to her hitting the snooze button four additional times this morning. Facing Logan Monroe had always been a formidable task, but now it was nearly an impossible one.
He was the father of her baby.
Of course, Logan didn’t know that, and now he likely never would.
As the elevator doors opened to reveal the tenth floor, Claire smoothed her conservative, loose-fitting black dress down over her thighs and took a deep breath. She hadn’t seen him in several weeks. First, he’d been on vacation, then in despot mode, dictating orders from his lofty office via email. She hoped he wouldn’t notice the increasingly round bulge of her stomach. With each passing week, it grew more difficult to conceal from both him and her other coworkers.
That was exactly why she’d decided to quit LM and join another firm.
She smiled as Logan’s drab assistant came into view, all but cowering behind her desk. “Hi, Mindy. Logan wanted to see me?”
“Yes, Ms. Morton.” Mindy pushed her thick glasses up the bridge of her nose. Her blue eyes looked hideously magnified behind the prescriptive lenses, reminding Claire of Milton inOffice Space. “I’ll tell Mr. Monroe you’ve arrived.”
She waited for the formality to be complete, allowing her eyes to wander over Mindy’s desk. Predictably, it was spartanly organized, with no personal touches at all. Not even a photograph in a frame.
The outer office to Logan’s executive suite was formal and rigid, decorated with tasteful modern art to appeal to the clientele who came through for meetings and presentations in any of the three spacious conference rooms that consumed the remaining portion of the tenth floor. Only Logan and Mindy had offices here. In every sense, it was his floor, his domain. The throne from which he ruled his immense empire.
“Mr. Monroe will see you now,” Mindy informed her with almost no tonal inflection.
Honestly, Claire thought as she passed through the polished steel double doors leading to Logan’s inner sanctum. She was beginning to think Mindy was a robot. And the steel doors were too modern for her tastes. They reminded her of the door to the kitchen at a truck stop diner. But she wasn’t an interior designer, so what did she know?
Characteristically, Logan stood at his large window, looking down on the world below. Even with his back to her, his mere presence radiated power and sexual energy that she wasn’t entirely immune to, no matter how hard she tried to ignore it.
“Ten seconds to spare.” Logan didn’t bother to turn away from the window as he spoke.
“Maybe I wanted to call your bluff,” she told him, coming to a halt at his side, a few feet between them for sanity’s sake. Today, she wanted to meet Logan on even ground. She wouldn’t wait behind the imaginary line drawn by his massive desk and sit in one of the uncomfortable chairs arranged before it like a good little employee. By standing next to him, at his window, she broke an unspoken understanding that existed between Logan and all his staff members at LM. Give Mr. Monroe his space.
Well, Claire was encroaching, and she didn’t care.
“Legally, it may have proved tricky.” Logan turned to her then, his dark eyes meeting hers. “But I would’ve managed it. I don’t have the best law firm in Philadelphia on my payroll for shits and giggles.”
Claire blinked, taken aback. In all the years she had known and dealt personally with Logan, he had never uttered a single curse, regardless of the situation. She realized then that he was barely containing his anger with her. The instinct to step away from him rose inside her, but she resisted. His gaze held her in an intangible trap.
