“Can I help you?” I ask.
She’s still flushing too, but her blush isn’t nearly as cute as Mara’s. It lights up her whole face a bright, unpleasant red, and she pats her cheeks a couple times as if she’s trying to calm it down. “Um, sorry, for interrupting.” Another nervous gulp, as if she’s thinking again about what she saw.
“Did you need something?” I press, eager to distract her from the scene she walked in on. My hands grip the chair in front of me a little tighter.
Her gaze drops to my hands. Specifically my left one, and I notice her eyes widening with surprise. Now this, I can tell by her reaction, is a girl who reads tabloids. A girl who knows how unceremoniously I broke off my previous relationship. Not to mention how recently ago that happened.
She knows I should be single, for all intents and purposes. And that alone makes me repress another grin. I do so love knowing more about my own life than the gossip rags and tabloids do. Staying one step ahead of them, especially when it comes to relationships, is no small feat.
The girl recovers from her shock, somehow. “I’m new here. Bianca. I missed orientation. I’m sorry, the trains were running late. It won’t happen again, I swear. But they told me at the front desk that you’d still be in the room and I should just come in and introduce myself, so I—”
I hold up a hand. I don’t like excuses. They bore me. “It’s fine,” I tell her. “As long as it doesn’t happen again.” But I’m also not without compassion for a new girl on her first day. “Is there anything else?”
She hesitates. Glances down at my ring, yet again, like she can’t quite help herself. Like she’s double checking to see if she imagined things. “Uh, no, sir, except it’s just… I’m supposed to be one of your assistants, so if there’s anything you need, please let me know and I’m happy to help.”
I finger the ring that she won’t stop eying. Unlike my mother’s ring, which I gifted to Mara, this one Mara bought me herself, rather drunkenly, at a pawn shop on the Strip. I doubt very much that she remembers that point in the night. But she insisted on buying me a ring with her own money, in spite of my protests.
It resulted in the ring I’m wearing, which has already turned my left ring finger an unpleasant shade of green, thanks to the mostly brass core under its cheap gold plating.
I don’t care. I don’t intend to ever take the damn thing off, no matter if it turns my whole hand green in the end.
I narrow my eyes at Bianca, daring her to comment. But she just forces a bright, bubbly smile and keeps on chattering, about her skills in Excel and how her previous experience as a concierge will help with keeping my schedule in order.
I respond with a bland smile of my own, unable to stop wishing that she was gone, and Mara was back here in this room with me, alone once more.
5
Mara
I can’t believe this. This is an actual nightmare. A disaster.
I finally get my dream job. The position I’ve been working toward my entire life. And I wasn’t lying about what I said to John earlier—no amount of money could make me quit this job. But I can’t stop running over his words in my head.
You won’t be quitting this job for love or money.
Why did he put it that way? The word love keeps reverberating through my mind. Chased by his other words. We’d still be seeing each other every single day, for hours and hours…
God, I love watching you come.
And the way he backed me up against the wall, his hands drifting over my chest. I could hardly breathe. I knew I should have told him to stop; I should have pushed him away and told him we were ending this marriage, and any potential for a physical relationship between us along with it. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make my body move, because my damn traitorous body didn’t want to move.
I wanted his hands all over me.
I wanted him to kiss me until I couldn’t think of any reason not to keep kissing him.
I wanted him to pull my skirt up around my waist and fuck me right there in that board room, against the wall of the fancy offices he built from the ground up. I wanted to feel his hands all over my body again, the way they did that night in Vegas, exploring me, touching me, drawing me out until I was putty in his hands, gasping and screaming his name.
I wanted his cock inside me again. And it makes my clit feel heavy with want again now, just to think about it. I’m sure I’m wet, though I’m too nervous to check my panties and make sure.
I suck in a deep breath—then two and three more, trying to steady myself. I’m supposed to be modeling some deer antlers out of clay for the first set project. My direct manager set me up with the kind of workspace I could only dream about in the past, complete with every type of power tool and supply I could possibly dream of, in order to create sets out of my wildest daydreams.
I’ve got my gloves on, and I’m elbow deep in modeling clay, shaping the antlers, coaxing them out of the mold and into a shape that will be large enough to be seen from the audience, but still a realistic size and complexity for the animal I’m mimicking. But even as I work, I can feel the scrape of this ridiculously huge ring inside the oversized gloves I’m wearing. And all it does is keep dragging my mind away from the task at hand, back in time to the board room where John pinned me against the wall, and where I wish he’d done so much more.
“Help! Somebody!”
I glance up at the sound, startled, and my eyes go wide as they fix on the young man across the room, a guy I vaguely recognize from our new hires meeting, currently pinned on the mold-press machine. It’s stamping out patterns for the walls, and his hand is stuck in the brace, the whole contraption currently dragging his fingers, with every deafening stamp, closer to being flattened.
“I can’t get loose!” he shouts, and I don’t have a second to think.
I drop the antlers—ignoring the crack as the clay, which had already started to harden in some points, breaks apart. Instead, I race across the room and grab the guy’s shoulders, yanking him backward hard just before the machine reaches his delicate fingertips.
His hand wrenches free, and he staggers back, until I wrap an arm around his shoulders to catch his full weight. He rebalances after a second, panting, and turns to face me, his whole face bright red. “Thank you,” he wheezes, eyes still wide with shock.
“Don’t thank me,” I tell him, shoving him away none too gently, and reaching past him to snap the emergency release to turn off the machine. It leaves a streak of grease on my gloves, which I wipe against my jeans. “You shouldn’t be using that equipment if you don’t know the proper safety procedures yet. You could have really hurt yourself.”
“I’m sorry.” His face, if possible, goes even brighter. “You’re right. I just got so eager, and I have one a little bit like this at home, so I figured I could guess… But the trapping mechanism is different, and—” He stops himself. “Doesn’t matter. Thanks. I won’t try that again.”
I roll my eyes. “Let me show you how it really works,” I say, pulling off my gloves one at a time. I’m about to demonstrate the proper usage of the machine when the doors to the workroom slide open, and a blonde girl around my age steps inside. There’s something familiar about her. It takes me a second to place her as the girl who walked in on me and John earlier, and my whole face flares bright red, though I suck in a deep breath in order to try and conceal it.
As for her, she doesn’t seem to have noticed anything. If she recognizes me, at least she’s too professional to let it show right now, something for which I’m deeply grateful. “Did I hear someone shouting help?” she asks.
I point my thumb at the guy, who ducks his head and introduces himself as Daniel. “I was using the machine wrong. She was just about to show me the proper way.”
“Mara,” I add, sticking my hand out to shake first Daniel’s and then this new girl’s hand.
“Bianca,” she answers. “Do you need any help?” Her eyes skitter around the room and then land on the disa
ster that used to be my carefully sculpted antlers. It’s half a pile of unfinished mushy clay and half a pile of shattered antler ends that will be melted down and remolded after I’m finished helping Daniel. “Maybe I could clean up a bit.”
“That’d be great, thanks,” I tell her. She sets off to clean up my area while I instruct Daniel on the proper usage of this tool. To his credit, after that initial mishap at least, he seems to be paying very close attention to every single thing I say. He even takes out a notepad to jot down some of the more important steps. By the time I finish explaining it to him, I’m at the very least not worried that he’s going to accidentally take his fingers off.
It’s still to be determined whether he can work the thing well enough to get some decent designs out of it, especially the kind of delicately shaped ones we’ll need for this particular set, which is half a hunting lodge (hence my antler designs) and half an outdoor scene, which will need not only trees and branches and a forest, but also stars and the moon overhead. It’ll be a tricky set to pull off without crossing over into cheesy territory. The last thing we want is to look like some high schooler’s play with second-rate set designs. I’m pretty sure none of us would last more than a couple weeks on the job if we turned out something like that—no matter how much of an in we might have with the boss.
The thought of that makes my stomach flip again, and I can’t help but steal another glance over at Bianca, who’s moved on to tidying the rest of the room after she finished sweeping up my antler mess. Does she know what she saw? Did she figure out it was me?
As if my situation couldn’t get any more awkward or embarrassing.
Bianca catches me staring at her and smiles, heading over to my side like I summoned her. Maybe I did. I’m still not really sure how this whole setup works. I know I’m supposed to have a couple of assistants on my team reporting to my same manager, to help out with tasks I set them. But I’m not sure if Bianca is one of them, or if she’s just so eager to prove herself on day one that she doesn’t care who’s giving her jobs as long as she can complete them.
“What should I do next? Anything more you need?” she asks, and I bite the inside of my lip, considering.
“Not sure. Er… do you have the time to help? I don’t want to keep you, if you have other duties…”
She shrugs and spreads her hands wide with a what can you do sort of laugh. “I’m not sure yet. Mr. Walloway is supposed to be giving me an assignment, but he told me he wouldn’t have anything put together until tomorrow, so he just said to help out for now…”
The sound of John’s last name makes my heart skitter in my chest all over again. How could I be this stupid? I’d googled John Walloway a thousand times before now, obviously. But I only ever read his work profiles, interviews about how he started this company and why. Those interviews, in magazines like the New Yorker and Economist almost never included photos—or if they did, they were moody Steve Jobs-esque photos in profile, where you could hardly make out John’s face, let alone any identifying features. It never even occurred to me to google pictures of the guy himself. Why would I? I figured he’d be some higher up I’d see but never actually speak to around the office.
Someone I’d eventually want to get to know, to have know me, but not… Not in the way you did, you idiot. My inner critic hasn’t stopped lambasting me all day. Of all the guys I could choose for a random Vegas hook up—let alone marriage….
But I force those thoughts from my head, hoping that Bianca won’t read too much into the extremely pregnant pause hovering in the air between us now. “Hmm, well, I don’t have too many more jobs around here, unless you want to help me melt down that clay and start reshaping a new set of antler designs—”
“Sure!” Bianca perks up right away, which makes my eyebrows rise.
“You really don’t have to.”
“Don’t be silly.” She elbows me. “I’d love to help. Sounds more fun than all the desk work I’ll be doing soon anyway, right?” Her smile is so open and earnest, I can’t bring myself to question it.
So together we cross over to the ovens and set about putting together some new clay molds that I can shape into the huge antler sets we’ll need. As we work, we chat about our backgrounds and how we got started at Pitfire. Unlike me, Bianca comes from a marketing background, so she’s not interested in the actual set design part of what we’re doing here. But she talks a lot about how much she admires “Mr. Walloway”’s business strategies, and how she really wanted the assistant job so she could learn from him about getting ahead at work.
“If there’s anyone who can teach a girl how to rise up through the world with the cards stacked against us ladies, it’s him, right?”
I stifle a smirk. “Why, because he had so many cards stacked against him?” I roll my eyes. “Isn’t his whole family wealthy?”
“You didn’t read the profile they did of him in Vogue?” Bianca’s gaze sharpens, then widens in disbelief when I shake my head. “Well, his family lost all their money when he was young. He’s the one who pulled them all out of borderline poverty—paid for his younger sister to go to college and bailed out his parents from huge debt, too.”
My eyebrows go up. I can’t help but feel a tiny pang in my chest, a shift, as I realign my opinions of the man I mistakenly married, just a little. Maybe he’s not entirely the rich cocky businessman he seems. Okay, no, he’s definitely still cocky. But maybe there’s more to him than just that.
Maybe you haven’t given him a real chance.
But even that thought is insane. How can I give a guy I accidentally eloped with a chance at marriage, when I barely know him? Much less when he’s my boss, and as he himself pointed out, we’re going to have to work in close proximity for… well, hopefully for a very long time, if my career plans pan out.
“You really don’t know much about him?” Bianca’s brow furrows, and I shake my head with a shrug.
“What can I say? We don’t talk much.” I pull off my gloves absently, about to go and wash my hands at the sink, having finished sculpting one half of the antlers we’ll need, and figuring now will be as good a time as any to call a lunch break for the shop.
But Bianca stops me with a single question. “How long have you been married?”
My heart jump starts in my chest. My veins turn to ice. How does she know? I think, my pulse racing, afraid she’ll use this against me, or spread rumors around the water cooler…
But then I notice her gaze fixed down, on the ring I’d forgotten was still attached like a limpet to my left ring finger, and my muscles relax. Oh. All she saw was the ring. She doesn’t know about me and John.
Well, unless she saw more this morning than she’s been letting on. Still, I clear my throat, and force the easiest smile possible onto my face. “Oh, uh…” I can’t tell the truth. It’s too humiliating. And it’s the last thing I want all my new coworkers to think about me: that I married John for his money, or that John only hired me because I’m his latest fling, his new Vegas wife. “Not too long. It’s pretty new. Keep forgetting this is here,” I add, laughing, a little bit edgily, though at least Bianca doesn’t seem to notice.
“That’s great.” She smiles and sighs a little wistfully. “I want to marry young, too. I just think there’s no point in waiting until you’re all old and gray, right? Might as well have kids early, so you can have more fun with them when they’re grown up with you.”
My stomach flips. I never thought about that. I never gave much thought to kids, period. I mean, I think I want them eventually. But it always seemed like such a far-off possibility, something to worry about years and years down the line.
Not something I might have to consider now. Much less after one drunken night of blowing off steam in Sin City.
I force myself to smile. “Yeah, I guess so. I hadn’t really thought about kids yet, but… good point.” Bianca grins back at me, and I nod toward the clock. “Lunch?” I ask, mostly to change the subject. To my relief, she nods,
and she and Daniel file out, leaving me to unpack the lunch I brought with me from home.
I eat in silence and get back to work quickly. Thanks to all the stopping and starting, I’m much farther behind than I hoped I’d be by the end of the day. I’m still sculpting when Daniel clocks out and Bianca waves goodbye, off to go get some actual office assignments from John himself.
I’m still sculpting when in a far end of the shop, someone flicks off the light.
“Still here,” I call, and footsteps approach, the light flicking back on. I don’t turn around or look up from my project—I’m at a particularly delicate part of the procedure, trying to attach one set of antlers to the base of another. I hold my breath, leaning in, just about to make the connection…
“You’re behind.”
My stomach plummets. Luckily, I catch my hands before they shake too much, and I’m able to finish pressing the two halves together, the seriously heavy-duty glue I used making them stick. I grip them while the glue finishes processing, and glance over my shoulder toward John, who’s standing at my back, arms folded, a cocksure grin on his face that both annoys me and sends a bolt of desire straight to my core.
Fuck. I still want him.
But that’s to be expected. It doesn’t change anything.
It doesn’t mean I can have him.
“I had to save someone’s hands earlier,” I respond curtly, refocusing on my work.
He chuckles.
“Not a joke,” I add. “You really should have more strict safety guidelines introduced before you let people start running around playing with these machines.”
“I had you here,” he replies, coming over to lean against my table, in my line of sight this time. “Seems like you had it all under control, from what Bianca tells me.”
I shoot him a narrowed glare. “Did you send your secretary to spy on me?”
“Hardly.” He chuckles. “She seems to have wanted to do that all on her own. I wonder why. It’s almost as if she seems jealous of you about something…”
Marry Me Now: An Arranged Marriage Collection Page 27