She reads from the back of the clipboard.
“Vendors / Quigley & Sons / 2024. I made a separate folder for each vendor—the old system had three Quigley invoices stuffed in with artist receipts.”
“You alphabetized the vendors?”
She caps her pen with her teeth and moves to the next shelf.
“It seemed like a good idea.”
“Thanks.” I knew we needed help, but I didn’t realize just how much someone competent with all the admin bullshit would make my life easier. I should have hired someone a long time ago, like Waylon suggested. But then I probably wouldn’t have Clarissa looking like the sexiest fucking angel I’ve ever seen, so maybe all the past grief was worth it.
“I also put due dates on the calendar,” she says, not looking up from the shelf she’s working on. “The Oaker account runs net-thirty, so I set a flag at day twenty-five. The ink supplier flagged on the twenty-eighth. I repurposed the reminder column on the booking system—hope that’s okay.”
“Yeah.”
“Carmine?”
“Yeah.”
She taps the clipboard with her own pen twice. “Are you going to write that down, or do I need to?”
She turns the page and reads off the rest—cartridges, ink, grey wash—without looking at the boxes more than once. When she gets to the bottom shelf, she bends forward to check behind a case of black, and her ass goes round and high under that skirt, and my cock throbs hard enough that I have to shift my weight against the doorframe.
“How was your weekend?”
She looks up, and some of the light has gone out of her eyes.
“Could’ve gone better.” She caps the pen. “My father is mad at me.”
“How come?”
“Didn’t go to church Sunday.” She sets the clipboard on the shelf and pushes herself up off the floor. “He takes it personally.”
Her skirt catches on her knee on the way up, and she smooths it without thinking, one hand flat against her thigh, fingers spread wide over the curve of it, and my brain short-circuits. I set the mug on the supply shelf and keep the supplier sheet in front of my hips because I am visibly, painfully hard, and she is two feet away from me.
“What’s the big deal about one Sunday?”
She brushes the back of her skirt off. Looks at me.
“My dad’s the pastor. Pastor Hayes? At the white church on Elm.”
Fuck. Holy fucking fuck.
She makes a small gesture, palm up. “So it’s kind of—it’s not just church. He gets mad if the whole family isn’t there, except for when I was away at college, obviously.”
I have been fantasizing about bending the pastor’s daughter over my desk and railing her until she’s whimpering and coming on my cock. I’ve been thinking about her naked in my bed, about the sounds she’d make, about what her tits look like hanging over my face, about her kneeling in front of me and sucking my cock until I exploded in her mouth. I am definitely going to hell, but I always knew that.
“Huh.”
“Yeah.” Her hand lands on my forearm as she leans past me into the hall to grab an empty box for recycling. Her hip presses against mine on the way through—the full, thick curve of it against my thigh, one second of her body against mine—and every thought I have goes white. I angle my body so she doesn’t brush against my boner. “Anyway. Liam’s first asked to push fifteen—I told him I’d check.”
“Fine.”
She goes down the hall with the box. I take the mug and walk back to the office without looking at her because if I watch her walk away I am going to stare at her ass and her thighs and the way that skirt moves and I will not be able to work unless I jack off.
And jacking off is really not what I should be doing at work. Ever.
The cross at her throat. I clocked it the first day and ignored it when I wanted to put my mouth on that spot. I have wanted to since Clarissa first walked in the shop, and the cross wassupposed to be the thing that kept me in line but it turns out the cross is attached to a pastor and the pastor is the kind of man who would take one look at me—the ink, the shop, the everything—and know exactly what I’ve been thinking about doing to his daughter.
