Total pages in book: 112
Estimated words: 106596 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 533(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106596 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 533(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
“She does now.” I smirked.
“You disgust me,” she said.
“You have a weird way of showing it.”
“Weren’t you the one who gave me a twenty-minute lecture about never mentioning that night again?” She darted up and stomped her foot, her hands balled into fists.
I would pity her if I didn’t remember how I’d felt when I’d realized my wallet was missing. She actually thought we were playing by the same rules. We were toe-to-toe now, and even though the room was empty save for her and me, I could feel it burning up with our anger. I liked her hot and bothered, but that didn’t mean I was going to dip my dick into her again. I didn’t break my rules for anyone.
Let alone an employee.
That didn’t interfere with the fact that my balls tightened, though. My muscles tensed, too, with the frustration of not being able to remind her that she might hate me outside of bed, but inside it, she’d been purring like a kitten.
“Judith.” I clasped her chin between my fingers, angling her face to meet my gaze.
“Jude,” she corrected.
She wanted me to be like everyone else. That ship had fucking sailed the minute I’d spotted her in the bar, and all I could see were her pink-Chuck-clad feet wrapped around my shoulders as I drilled into her.
“Let me be clear about one thing: my title may be news director, but sometime in the next five years, I will be the president of this company. Better yet, I will be the owner of every single floor in this sixty-story building, top to bottom, staplers and coffee machines included. The rules do not apply to me. You have laws, but I operate in my own little dictatorship. As long as it’s legal and does not cross the employer-employee relationship, I can say whatever I fucking want to you. Since I have a rich legal background—Harvard Law, in case you were wondering—I know where the line is drawn, and I intend to walk it like a tightrope if you cross me.”
Her breath caught in her throat, a caged, helpless animal, and my eyes focused on her big, russet hazels, knowing that if they drifted downward, to her cleavage, I was liable to rip her clothes off and fuck her against the desk.
“Ambition,” she whispered, running her hand along my dress shirt.
What?
“I wore the black Chucks because black represents ambition. Motivation. I want to work here. I want to prove myself. I have a lot to offer, in and out of the newsroom.”
What the fuck was she doing? Touching me in the office? She wasn’t exactly trying to seduce me, but she wasn’t not-trying to, either. Turned out two could walk that tightrope.
“You’re playing with fire,” I warned.
Her hand crawled up, touching my mouth, her thumb hovering over my lower lip, tracing the seams, reminding me of three weeks ago. “Maybe I want to get burned.”
I grabbed her wrist and lowered her hand, as gently as I possibly could without pressing it against my raging hard-on. “I don’t shit where I eat.”
“Give yourself some credit.” She licked her rosebud lips. “You weren’t that bad.”
I chuckled, shaking my head. Say what you want about this girl, she had balls the size of watermelons.
“You can join my ship.” I grabbed my new wallet and phone, tucking them in my back pocket. “As long as you realize I’m your captain, and that there will be no more fucking around, literally or figuratively.”
Instead of giving her the pleasure of formulating a response, I turned around and walked away, muttering under my breath. “Just don’t expect me to help you when you drown.”
Things got progressively and methodically worse in the week following my move (Grayson: “deportation!”) from Couture to the newsroom.
The place was a zoo made out of silver chrome desks glued together in a wave pattern, circling huge monitors that broadcast different news channels from all over the world.
The newsroom was round, with glass walls. Nearby was another conference room—made of glass as well—in which fresh pastries and fruit sat in fancy baskets and elegant glass water bottles were lined together neatly. There were hundreds of monitors, switchboard phones, keyboards, and cables running from side to side. There was a stairway to the seventh floor that led to a door with a plaque plastered on it: Magic Happens Here
This referred to the actual studio, where the prime-time news show was recorded.
But I couldn’t feel the fairy dust on my skin, because I was too busy trying to survive my life as I knew it.
Milton was the first to kill my mojo.
My cheating ex had decided that the fact he’d been boning his editor was not, in fact, grounds for a breakup. First came the flowers and text messages. When those were ignored or given to the lonely, attractive neighbor upstairs (the flowers, of course. Forty-something-year-old widow Mrs. Hawthorne didn’t need to read the douchecanoe’s apologies for dipping his sausage into a different ketchup tub first thing after coming back from a grueling shift as a nurse), Milton started asking our mutual friends to be mediators. Said friends, who were neck deep in kissing his ass for landing a job at a prestigious magazine, explained that Milton was the one. My one. That we had something special going on, and it would be insane to throw it away because of one mistake.