30
Mace
As soon as I saw Josie's presentation, relief flooded through me—and desire. Seeing her standing up there, dominating the room and being so authoritative, showed me a different side to the klutzy girl who was hell-bent on destroying my car.
I liked her, and while I found the klutzy girl endearing, this woman I needed. I wondered why she wasn't working at one of those hyper-creative, super-cool New York City marketing firms. What was she doing out here?
"When did you have time to put this together?" I asked her after we had spent hours in the meeting going over more of her vision for the marketing campaign and the rollout at the conference.
"I have a confession to make," she said, turning to look up at me. "I still haven't organized the CEO's supply closet or inventoried the snacks or—"
I wanted to kiss her to silence her, but I settled for holding a finger up to her mouth.
"None of that is in your job description. You're marketing full-time now."
She wrinkled her nose. "You haven't seen the state of the supply closet."
I wanted to push her against the wall, kiss her, stroke her, make her mine. Instead I watched her return to her desk. I ran my fingers through my hair in frustration and tried not to plaster my face against the glass wall separating our offices and stare at her like a creep.
I patted my hair back into place. Josie was eroding my self-control. But I had to act professional. I didn't want to be like my father. He would get so infatuated with his newest wife, then when she moved out to the desert with him and had a few kids, he'd ignore her for the next one.
But Josie was in my brain. It was like all the frustration and annoyance I'd felt toward her had flipped one hundred eighty degrees and turned into desire. I didn't know what to do. She was all I could think about.
The ironic thing? I had an excessive number of brothers and none I dared ask for advice about this.
* * *
I was assuredthat Josie had a handle on the gene therapy. But I still had another problem. The next day we had another meeting with Meghan about the factory. For that, I didn't think Josie would have a solution.
"Why are you here?" I asked Archer the next morning when I saw him sitting in my office, eating a bowl of gnocchi.
It smelled like the dinner Josie had made yesterday. I needed to talk to Jack about how he kept trim eating all of Chloe's food. If Josie was going to stick around, I needed to change my workout regimen. Would she stick around? Did I really want her to? I knew I needed her to.
"Where did you get that?" I asked my twin, pushing his feet off my desk.
"I made Adrian bring me some. He was raving about it on the group chat."
"Josie does make great food," I said, sighing happily.
"Holy smokes," Archer said around the mouthful of food. He jumped up, set the bowl down, and snatched my jaw, peering into my eyes. "You like her."
"I don't," I protested, trying to push Archer off me.
"Yes, you do! This is too much," he crowed. "You can't keep anything from me." He lowered his voice. "We're the same person."
"We are not."
"Tell the truth!" Archer thundered, pointing at me with the spoon.
"Fine. Yes, I think I like her."
"Mace has a girlfriend! My baby is all grown up." Archer wrapped his arms around my neck and pulled me into a half headlock, half hug. "Your first crush. You're a late bloomer, but—"
"I'm not a late bloomer! I'm never telling you anything ever again," I complained. "Why are you even here?"
"Mike wants me to sit in on the land-use meeting. He wants us to have a better heads-up on what happens when we go for the new conference center."
"Did you find a location yet?" I asked him. "There are a lot of old industrial sites around here, especially near the river, that would probably make really cool conference centers."
