I was so fucked.
14
— • —
Finneas
I was supposed to be reading a market report. I’d been on the same paragraph for four minutes because Andrea was at her desk on the other side of the glass wall with a pen behind her ear and her top button undone and I could see her collarbone from here.
She got up and crossed the floor with my briefing folder. Set it on my desk, leaned down to point at the first item, her hair falling forward, and I could smell her shampoo, the vanilla one she used every morning, and my hand landed on her hip before my brain caught up to what my body was doing.
“We’re at work,” she said. She didn’t step away.
“Door’s closed.”
“Glass wall.”
“Frosted on the lower half.”
“That doesn’t help.”
“Helps a little.”
She smacked my hand off her hip with the file and walked back across the floor to her desk. I watched her the entire way. My wolf was purring.
This had been my life for the past week and it was the best goddamn week I’d ever had. I slept at her house most nights, woke up with her hair across my chest and her leg thrown over mine, drove her to work, spent eight hours pretending I wasn’t counting the minutes until we were alone. My wolf was calm for the first time in two years. The pull in my chest had settled into warmth, my head was clearer than it had been in months, and I felt like I could actually breathe without forcing it.
I resolved a trade dispute yesterday that had been stalled since last quarter, made a clean call on a vendor contract my team had been going back and forth on for weeks. The company work was easier when my wolf wasn’t tearing at me every second, when I wasn’t sitting behind a glass wall wanting a woman I couldn’t have.
Now I had her. That was the problem. Because the sharper I got about work, the more useless I got about keeping my hands to myself. She’d walk past my office, I’d catch her perfume, my whole train of thought would derail. Or she’d lean over my desk to show me a report and I’d lose five minutes staring at her collarbone. It was pathetic. I was a King, a CEO, being brought to my knees by a five-foot-three blonde with a dimple and a pen behind her ear.
A few days later she came into my office to argue about a client presentation. Standing next to my desk, file open, pointing at a chart, in a skirt that stopped above her knee with her hair down and jasmine perfume filling my office and I was trying very hard to focus on what she was saying.
“The revenue split is wrong,” she said. “If you present it this way they’ll think we’re padding the margins.”
“It’s not wrong.”
“It is. Look at this column versus this one. The numbers don’t track.”
She was right. I could see it clearly, didn’t give a damn about the numbers because she was leaning over my desk and her collarbone was right there and my wolf was shoving at me.
“Are you even listening?”
“Yes.”
“What did I just say?”
“Revenue split.”
“I said that forty seconds ago. What did I say after that?”
I reached for her. She stepped back and pointed the file at me like a weapon.
“No. You don’t get to kiss your way out of not paying attention.”
“I wasn’t going to kiss you.”
“Your hand was on my waist.”
