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Oh, that was a good idea. I could pick his brain about the best way to present new ideas to the group, since directly stating them didn’t appear to win me any followers. Eager, I agreed at once.
Resettling at my desk—only six feet from the marketing trio’s cluster, but far enough to feel separate—I nodded at my desk mate, a middle-aged woman named Helen, in charge of purchasing. Helen did not small talk. Or regular talk.
“Long day, huh, Helen?” I said as I sat. She acknowledged me with a brief look, a nod, then returned to her work. I was fairly certain her face lacked the muscles required for smiling.
Toward the end of the day, I sensed the Door That Must Not Be Watched open. I wasn’t entirely certain what Cam’s job description entailed, or even what his title was, but he appeared to be involved in most things, speaking to everyone in the office.
Well, everyone except me.
Not that I’d noticed.
Footsteps traveled my way, and I couldn’t stop my eyes from lifting. Camden hesitated as our eyes locked. He smiled politely. “Honeycutt.”
I gave him a formal nod. “Shepherd.”
The frosty blue in his eyes sent a shiver from my neck straight to the small of my back.
“How are you settling in?”
I glanced at my computer, open to Henley’s socials, then the notepad of half-formed ideas I’d started and abandoned. “Um. Well…” I peeked up at him. “Would you roll your eyes if I said great?”
He raised a deceptively welcoming hand. “Try it and find out.”
“I’d rather not have to witness your stark disapproval of my choice in vocabulary.”
Standing beside my desk, sandy hair coiffed in something stylish and tousled and annoyingly sexy, he gave me a lopsided smile. “Your lack of variety in vocabulary, to be specific.”
The advantage of his height was oppressive, like he stood on some unreachable pedestal, but I fought the urge to rise, to narrow the distance between us. Instead, I contorted my face into an expression I hoped was rather impertinent. “What I lack in variety, I make up for in emphasis.”
He hummed and perched himself on the side of my desk. “Speaking of, I hear you’re already rocking the boat.”
It occurred to me then where Booboo must have gone when he marched off earlier. “What a baby,” I muttered under my breath, “running to daddy to get me in trouble.”
Camden laughed, sharp and abrupt, but I couldn’t tell if it was amusement or disbelief. “Daddy?”
“Isn’t that why I was hired?” I asked, ignoring him. “To rock the boat?”
His head tilted back and forth, an action that made me wonder if, for him, it wasn’t that simple. “That’s open for debate. But you may be getting the silent treatment from Booboo for a while.”
I leaned close to him and lowered my voice. “Oh, no. I’m so sad.”
“Indeed.” Glittering blue eyes held mine. “I hate to inform you that my mother was deadly serious about tea, Honeycutt.”
A surprised and incredibly unattractive snort escaped my nose. “You hate to inform me? Or you’re secretly gloating because you know I was terrible at the manners part of cotillion and will sweat through my clothes worrying I’m breaking all the rules?”
“Still a rule follower?” he said, as if it were an insult, when clearly it wasn’t.
I pressed a hand over my heart. “That part of me will never die, Shepherd.”
A beat passed. “Then I admit it’s the latter, though I’ll also admit that of all the women I know, I believe you may be the only one who’d come out of a confrontation with Vanessa Shepherd with all your faculties intact.”
A smile threatened. “Was that…a compliment?”
He hummed in a vague way. “Just don’t wink at her.”
My scowl didn’t deter his stare in the least, so I turned toward my computer, clicking absently on my mouse. “She’s got a sharp mind, I take it?”
“Like a whetted diamond.”
