by Flynn, Avery
“Yeah.” I think back to crawling out of Nick’s bedroom on my hands and knees like a commando. “But that’s about the only thing I’ve done proud.”
“What do you mean?”
I shake my head as I turn for the stairs. “Long story and I’ve got to get ready for work.”
“You’ll tell me later?” She narrows her eyes at me in a way that says it’s more a demand than a question.
“What are sisters for?” I tease, even though I’m not sure I’ll be up to talking about it later. Or ever.
But right now I need to get ready for work, so I put Nick—and everything that happened between us last night—out of my mind as I shower and get dressed.
During the drive, my father’s words are a tight ball in my stomach. Because, while I knew from the moment I crawled out of Nick’s bed last night that I was going to have to break up with him—and even before, if I’m being honest—I didn’t think I was also going to have to leave the job that I’ve already fallen in love with. The job that I happen to be really good at and is the one thing, besides Nick, currently helping me keep my head above water.
I stop on the way to work to pick up some cookies for the office—we have a full day of clients planned on both sides—and to drop Nick’s shirt at one of those twenty-four-hour dry cleaners. It’s going to cost more than it should, but I feel like making sure I get his shirt back to him pressed is the least I can do.
I plan on quitting early, more because I can’t stand the knowledge that I’m going to have this hanging over my head all day than because I’m actually anxious to get it over with. But the second I walk through the door, one crisis after another starts and I don’t even have the chance to breathe until lunch.
First, Mr. Kinickey, who it turns out is extremely difficult on his best days, shows up an hour early for his appointment, though he absolutely will not admit that he got the time wrong. I get him settled talking to one of the paralegals, Marigold, because she’s really sweet and has a way with him, then bring him a cup of coffee and some cookies to keep him busy.
I barely drop off the tray when Gina starts yelling in Italian and, when I go to investigate, I find it’s because she’s at war with the laser printer over documents she needs ASAP—and obviously losing. I get her settled with a cup of coffee and some cookies before her first appointment, then spend fifteen minutes troubleshooting the laser printer before I figure out what the problem is.
It takes me another ten minutes to fix it—finicky machine—and I make a mental note to talk to the partners about replacing it before I leave. Thinking about having to talk to Nick about quitting depresses me, so I stop by Marigold’s office to check on her and Mr. Kinickey. They’re having a grand old time as he regales her with tales from his days of being a writer in Paris.
I relax and head to finally—finally—get my first cup of coffee of the day. But before I actually make it to the break room, Gina’s at it again, this time with her laptop.
“I’m sensing a pattern here,” I tell her as I ease the machine out of her death grip.
“Always,” she answers with a dramatic wave of her hand. “But usually it doesn’t happen all in one day.”
I get her login credentials, then look at her over the top of the laptop. “Your first appointment for the day is in fifteen minutes.”
“I know.” She sighs grumpily. “That’s why I was trying to go over my notes from last time.”
“My laptop is on my desk.” I write down my login credentials and hand them to her. “Why don’t you use it to look up whatever you need in the client files? Hopefully, by the time the client gets here, we’ll both be back to our regular computers.”
“You are a godsend, Mallory,” Gina says, blowing me a big, smacking kiss on her way out the door. “Whatever we’re paying you, it isn’t enough.”
Ten minutes later, I trade laptops with Gina—after making sure to pull up the client docs she’ll need for the meeting—and I bring her an extra cookie because she looks like she needs it.
After getting both her and Nick’s nine o’clock clients settled in their offices, I head back for that cup of coffee—and get waylaid by Marcus, one of the first-year associates, who has an irate client on the phone yelling at him about billing errors.
I head to my office, where I find out that Gina has somehow completely screwed my computer up in the ten minutes that she had it—and end up having to borrow Marcus’s laptop to look up any discrepancies in billable hours.
By the time I finally get off the phone with Mrs. Hart, Marcus and I both need a cookie. And then it’s back to my desk to try to figure out what on earth Gina managed to do to my laptop.
The whole day goes like this, so I manage to avoid Nick without even trying. Unlike last time, he actually makes it out of his office once or twice, but every time he stops by my desk to talk, I end up getting pulled into another emergency. He watches with bemused eyes several times—each time while he shoves a handful of cookies into his mouth before heading back to his office.
By four thirty, I feel like I’ve run a marathon and I’m pretty sure I look like it, too. My hair is a mess because I ran my hands through it so many times during the day, my feet hurt from all the running I’ve done back and forth to everyone’s offices who had a problem, and my stomach is churning—a combination of nerves and way too many cookies.
When Nick sticks his head in, the churning stomach turns into full-blown anxiety, something that the smile on his face and the softness in his eyes only makes worse.
“Can you stop by my office sometime before you head home?” he asks. “I want to talk to you about something.”
The anxiety ratchets up another ten degrees. “Yes, of course.”
I give him the best smile I can muster, which must not be that great because the softness in his eyes turns to concern. “How was your day?”
“Good so far.” I force a smile I’m far from feeling. “Give me about ten minutes to finish what I’m working on and I’ll be in, okay?”
“Absolutely.” He starts to walk away, then stops and takes a couple of steps backward. “Are there any more of those cookies—”
“No,” I say and raise one brow at him. “There are no more cookies, mainly because you ate more than a dozen of them yourself today.”
“In my defense, they were really good cookies.” He gives me his most charming grin.
“Of course they were good cookies. They’re from Garimbaldi’s bakery. But now they’re gone, so…” I shoo him away.
He just laughs, but he takes the hint and heads back to his office.
I finish dealing with the access problem Marigold mentioned she was having, then log out of my laptop and lock it up in my desk drawer before heading back to Nick’s office. Once I get there, I take a deep breath and try to center myself as much as I possibly can.
Then I knock on the door.
Instead of telling me to come in, Nick pulls the door open and ushers me inside. The second we’re alone, he wraps his arms around me and pulls me into a hug.
“I’ve been wanting to do that all day,” he murmurs. “I missed you when I got up this morning. What time did you leave? And—if you don’t mind my asking—what did you wear when you left, considering your clothes were still all on my bathroom floor?” He wiggles his brows at me and it’s so charming and sweet that I kind of want to crawl into a hole.
“I couldn’t sleep, so I left a little after one. And I didn’t want to wake you, so I just grabbed your shirt from downstairs. I took it to the dry cleaner this morning, by the way, so you should have it by tomorrow morning.”
“Wow.” He rocks back on his heels a little. “Well, that’s very efficient of you.”
“I’m nothing if not efficient,” I answer with a grin I am far from feeling. But when he bends down to give me a kiss, I duck out from under his arm and make my way to th
e chairs in front of his desk—ignoring the sudden wariness in his eyes as I do. “Is there something specific you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Actually, yes.” He clears his throat and walks back toward his desk as well. But instead of sitting behind it—in his chair—he perches on the edge right in front of me.
“I got a call from Viola today. She’s still got a few weeks left on her maternity leave, but she’s decided she wants to stay home with the baby, so she quit. Which means,” he says with a grin, “we have an opening for a full-time office manager. And since you happen to be an amazing office manager, Gina enthusiastically agrees that if you want it, the job is yours. Permanently.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Short of saying that he loves me, it’s pretty much the worst thing he could tell me right now. Because I am already in love with the job. I love the people here, I love what I do, and I’m good at it—no matter what my father thinks.
But I also know my father is right about some things, too. Including the fact that taking a job where I am fucking the boss is a definite step backward. I’m determined to take my life back—to turn myself around—and falling into the same pattern I had with Karl would be a mistake. A big, giant mistake, one I would have no excuse for making. Not when I can see the problems coming from a mile away.
“Nick,” I say after several long, awkward seconds go by.
He lifts a brow, and now he does move to sit behind his desk, like he knows that, whatever’s coming, he’s not going to like it. “Mallory,” he responds in kind.
“I appreciate the offer, I do. But I’m going to have to pass on it. In fact, I came into work today planning to tell you that I’ll stay until you find someone to take my place but that I think it would be best if I don’t work here.” Meeting his eyes when I say that is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
But I’m not the same Mallory who never fought with Karl, the same Mallory who spent so much of her time running away from conflict that she couldn’t tell if it was there or not half the time. I’m working too hard to put that woman behind me. No way am I going back to her now.
So I meet Nick’s eyes when I say this—and because I do, I see the quick flash of surprise and the even quicker flash of hurt that he manages to bury as fast as they come.
“Is this because of Karl?” he asks, his tone even and eminently reasonable. “Because I would never behave like he does, Mallory. Your job is safe here no matter what happens between us.”
I take a deep breath and blow it out slowly, because this is the part I’ve really been dreading. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that, too.”
“That?” he says, arching a brow. “When you say that, you mean us, right?”
“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “I’ve been thinking—”
“So it wasn’t a matter of you not being able to sleep last night. You left—so worried about facing me that you didn’t even take the time to get dressed—because you were freaked out.”
“I wasn’t freaked out,” I lie. “I just thought we should have some space, and I didn’t want to wake you.”
“More like you didn’t want to face me.” He leans back in his chair and stares at me through narrowed eyes. “I’m curious. Were you so desperate to get away that you would have run home naked if you hadn’t found my shirt?”
“No! Of course not,” I tell him, ignoring the fact that he’s managed to hit uncomfortably close to what my thought process was. “I’m pretty sure I’d get a really big fine from the HOA for that.”
He ignores my attempt at levity. “What’s really going on here?”
There’s something about the way he says it—and the way he’s looking at me—that gets my back up. I’m not sure what it is, as he’s being perfectly polite and reasonable, but there’s something there that pisses me off and has me snapping back at him, “This isn’t working.”
“Really?” He lifts a brow. “Because I thought it was working pretty damn well.”
“But you’re not the only one in this relationship. And I happen to think it’s a really bad idea for me to be fucking the boss.”
His eyes narrow even further at my deliberate crudity. “Is that what you think this is? You fucking the boss? Me fucking a hot employee?”
Again, there’s that tone—direct, demanding, brooking no argument—and it makes me want to throw something at him. And then it hits me. It’s his cross-examination tone.
“Don’t talk to me like that.” I spring out of my chair.
“Like what?” The second brow goes up.
“Like I’m some witness for the other side and it’s your job to poke holes in my story. Karl used to talk to me like that, coming at me like a lawyer every time I disagreed with him. I hate it.”
“That’s not what I’m doing—”
“That’s exactly what you’re doing. I put up with it from Karl for our entire marriage because I didn’t think I deserved better. There’s no way I’m putting up with it from you, too.”
“Don’t.” Nick’s voice cracks like a whip. “I am nothing like your ex-husband and you know it, so don’t you dare use some bullshit comparison between us to justify what you’re doing here.”
“What I’m doing here?” I repeat, incensed. “Please, Nick, tell me what it is I’m doing besides objecting to being talked to like some kind of criminal.”
“I’m not that kind of attorney, Mallory,” he growls. “I don’t fucking cross-examine witnesses. I file tax paperwork and write letters. And how the hell did I suddenly become the bad guy? You’re the one breaking up with me here—and comparing me to your limp-dick sleaze of an ex-husband while you’re doing it.”
“Yeah, well, you’re acting a hell of a lot like him right now,” I shoot back. “Do you always throw a fit when you don’t get your way?”
“I do when the woman I’m falling for hands me a line of bullshit a mile long and expects me to buy it.” He comes out from behind the desk so that we are standing nose to nose and toe to toe now. “You want to know what’s really going on here?”
“Oh, please.” I gesture magnanimously. “Enlighten me, oh wise one.”
“You’re scared.”
“Scared?” I squawk even as my heart beats thunderously. “Of what? You?”
He nods. “Damn right, of me. And of you feeling something for me whether you want to or not. But because you haven’t learned nearly as much from your bad marriage as you think you have, you’ve decided to blow everything up instead of sitting down and having a conversation with me like a normal person.”
“Excuse me? Are you saying I’m not normal?” I demand.
“Are you kidding me?” He snorts. “Honey, you are a lot of things. Normal isn’t one of them.”
“Don’t call me honey in that tone.”
“Oh, sorry. Did Karl do that, too?” he asks.
My head threatens to explode. “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”
“Maybe.” He inclines his head. “But I’m also a pretty decent guy, which you’d know if you ever let yourself talk to me without an agenda. But you’re too busy running away from whatever you think this is to bother asking me what I think it is. Or what I want from you.”
The weight is back, pressing on my chest like a bad marriage and the thousand mistakes that killed it. “So what do you want?”
“Too late and not enough, Mallory.” He walks over to his office door. “But I’ll tell you one thing. It probably wouldn’t be to fall for a woman who comes with an entire eighteen-wheeler full of baggage attached. Someone who makes you realize that—before her—you weren’t really living. That you’ve just been existing in a world without color since your wife died. Or one who’s too scared to turn all that color into a real, authentic, beautiful life.”
His words are still hanging in the air between us—painting pictures in t
he empty spaces of the room and the even emptier spaces of my soul—when he yanks his door open. “Goodbye, Mallory. Have a safe life.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
I spend the next two hours after Nick kicks me out of his office driving around aimlessly. It’s probably not one of my better moves, considering Jimi Hendrix doesn’t get the best gas mileage. He does, however, have a fantastic compilation of CDs to wallow to, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t taking full advantage of that during my drive.
Eventually, though, I have to go home, and as I turn onto my street, I can’t help glancing over at Nick’s house to see if the lights are on. They are, which means he’s home, and for a second I can’t help wondering what he’s doing.
But that’s not my business anymore—if it ever was—so I force myself to stop guessing and look away. On the plus side, the full dumpster appears to have been replaced with a new empty one, so at least I know what I’ll be doing tonight. Purging the final guest room and my messed-up head at the same time.
I’m wondering about dinner—and whether or not I’m going to need to cook something or if my mom or Sarah did—but when I make it around to the back door, it’s to find my mom’s and Sarah’s suitcases lined up right outside. And the two of them sitting on the couch drinking lemonade.
“I’m going back to your father, Mallory.” My mom says it quickly, like she’s ripping off a Band-Aid. Which maybe she is, because God knows, I feel the sting. “And I’m taking Sarah with me.”
“Sarah? Why?” I glance between the two of them, and I can’t help noting that they both look…hopeful. How can that be possible after everything that’s happened?
“Because it’s high time your dad gets to know his daughter. Compartmentalizing her to one evening a week for pretty much her entire life is not an acceptable way to treat his daughter and it is not any way for him to get to know her,” Mom says crisply. “So she’ll be moving in with us for a while. I’ll be able to help with the baby after it’s born, and we are all going to work on being a family. Something we should have been doing for a long time now.”