by Vi Keeland
“I just didn’t want you to miss the opportunity to try out. That’s all.”
Charlotte’s expression was filled with regret. It wasn’t my intent to make her sad. I just wanted to call her out on her lie. But God, the look on her face was making me want to just forget everything and . . . kiss her.
I wanted to kiss her.
I wanted to taste her lips and suck away that sour look on her face, yet I knew that if there was one set of lips on this earth forbidden to me, it was Charlotte Darling’s. She wasn’t just a pretty face and a hot body. She was someone who wanted inside my soul, and that was never going to happen.
I should have just walked out. Instead, I was completely lost in this moment. The most spectacular skyline may have been visible from right behind her, but there was nothing more spectacular than Charlotte’s heaving chest, the sweat beading on her forehead, the reaction she was having toward me. Her attraction to me was palpable.
We were standing about a foot apart, and her damn scent was all I could smell anymore.
A long moment of silence passed.
“What are you doing to me?” I muttered, the words exiting me like a hiccup I had no control over.
“What are you doing to me?” she whispered.
I looked down for a moment, and that’s when I noticed the pink-striped Victoria’s Secret bag on the floor by her desk.
My voice was gruff. “What’s that?”
“Iris made me take a break in the middle of the day to clear my head. It was the last day of the sale, so I went shopping.”
“Why did you need to clear your head?”
“Because you pissed me off.”
God, she was sexy when she gritted her teeth in anger. I wondered what else those teeth could pull on.
Fuck. Stop.
Yet I moved in closer. “Show me what you bought yourself on company time.”
Charlotte swallowed, then walked over to the bag. She bent down and took out the contents, removing a sticker on the tissue paper. Returning to the spot in front of me, she opened it up to show me several pairs of lace underwear in a rainbow of colors.
A black lace thong with a tiny silk rose sewn on the top of the waistband caught my eye.
Picking it from the pile, I held it in my hand, relishing the feel of the soft lace and imagining the black against Charlotte’s creamy skin. Running my finger along the back string, I also imagined what it would look like inside the crack of her perfectly curved ass. Folding my fingers over the thong, I enveloped it, gripping it in my hand in the same way I wanted to swallow her up whole.
Charlotte was watching me, almost as if in a trance.
And I knew I’d taken this too far. I was her boss, and I’d just demanded to see her underwear. I was fondling it. And if she looked down, she’d also see I was hard. I’d officially lost my fucking mind when it came to her.
A voice of reason inside my head warned me. Leave!
I chose to listen to it.
“Good night,” I said as I handed her the panties and swiftly exited her office.
Taking the elevator down, I seriously considered heading to a bar and getting piss-ass drunk, even though I rarely drank anymore.
Instead, I drove around for a while and somehow ended up on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Auditions were already halfway over when I slipped inside. Same as last time, I took a seat in the back row by myself and looked around. Over the years, I’d done a lot of business in this part of Brooklyn, so I knew the area well. I’d been a teenager when the church moved to this particular building—the former Loew’s Metropolitan Theatre. I must’ve been about thirteen or fourteen when they started a big restoration on the place. Iris and I had passed by once during that time. She’d pulled over to tell me all about the building. My grandparents had come here on their first date, when it was still a theatre. The way she told the story, how impressed she’d been that he’d taken her to a theatre that had thirty-six hundred seats—the biggest in the country at one time—you’d think my grandfather had built the thing. I smiled at the memory.
Looking up, I could see why she’d been so impressed. Ornate, intricate designs were hand-restored on the multilayers of ceilings, and a mezzanine soared stories high above the orchestra. I sat in awe of the architecture and all the grandeur of the building, something I hadn’t stopped to do in a long time. Until my attention was diverted to the front of the stage. A woman with the most incredible, powerful voice sang onstage. Damn. She could hold her own against Aretha Franklin. It made me question my sanity for even considering trying out. I was nowhere near as good as these people. Yet I sat there, content to at least watch the show.
During a fifteen-minute break, I was sorting through work emails on my phone when a familiar voice interrupted. “You’ll need these.”
Looking up, I found Terrence, the older volunteer whom I’d met last time I’d come, holding out some papers to me. I took them. “What are these?”
“Application to the church ministry.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the pew I sat in. “Scoot over. Been here all day, and my old dogs need a break.”
I slid over to make room but held the papers he’d given me back out to him. “Thank you. But I’m not joining the church.”
He didn’t lift a hand to take the papers back. “You have to be a member in order to try out for the choir. You’ll need to do a membership class and the water baptism, but they’ll let you try out if the application is in process. Just fill out those papers, I’ll stamp you in, and you’re good to go.”
“I’m not trying out.”
Terrence squinted. “You’re not trying out, and you’re not joining the church, yet here you are for the second time in a week. What did you come for, then?”
I shook my head and laughed at myself. “I have no clue. Wait, actually, that’s not true. I’m here because Goldilocks has me turned inside out.”
“Ah.” A look of understanding crossed Terrence’s face. “A woman. And one that makes you question yourself.”
I scoffed. “She makes me question myself alright—mostly whether I’ve lost my mind.”
He smiled. “She sees you for who you are, and it makes you want to be a better man. Don’t let go of her.”
“It’s not like that.”
Terrence put his hand on my shoulder. “Would you be here, sitting in this church, if it were not for her?”
I thought about it. “No, probably not.”
“Has she made you question how you should treat others?”
Dorothy instantly popped into my head. A few months ago, I’m not so sure I wouldn’t have fired her. “She has a unique way of looking at things, which seems to have caused a lapse in my judgment on more than one occasion. But she’s an employee of mine, maybe a friend in a loose sense of the word. Nothing more.”
Terrence scratched his chin. “What if I told you your Goldilocks was out on a date tonight with a strapping young bachelor?”
My jaw clenched, and Terrence’s eyes zeroed right in on it. He chuckled. “That’s what I thought. You’re still fighting it. I bet you’ll come around. And my guess is, this isn’t the last time I’ll be seeing you in this pew, either.” He stood and held out his hand. “But until then, keep the application and take some advice from an old man who has learned from more mistakes than you even realize you’re capable of making yet. One man’s overlooked blessing is soon another man’s gain.”
CHAPTER 19
CHARLOTTE
“Reed Eastwood’s office. How may I help you?” I answered the phone via my headset and took another giant stride into my next lunge as I waited for the caller to speak. It was my lunch hour, but no one was around to answer the phone, so I’d eaten the salad I’d brought at my desk and then proceeded to do lunges and squats in my office. If the president of the United States could find time to exercise, damn it, so could I.
“Is he in?” the caller snapped.
I scrunched up my nose at the attitude from the
woman on the other end of the phone and pushed farther down onto my back toe to tighten the lunge. “No. Mr. Eastwood won’t be back until later this afternoon. Can I take a message or assist you with making an appointment?”
The breath of sour air on the other end of the line sighed loudly. “Where is he?”
What a bitch. I stood between lunges. “I’m sorry. I’m not at liberty to disclose that information. But I’d be happy to assist you by setting up an appointment or taking a message.”
“Tell him to call Allison as soon as he gets in.”
I knew the answer but asked anyway. “May I have your last name and ask what this is in reference to, please?”
Another loud sigh—although somehow I doubted it was because she was doing lunges on her lunch hour while answering a phone and trying to hold her patience with a rude person on the other end. “Baker, and it’s in reference to our honeymoon.”
Well, that last bit of information was confusing. “Umm . . . okay.”
Click.
The bitch had hung up on me.
“Well, you have a nice day, too,” I mumbled.
After that, I plugged my headset into my iPhone, turned the music up, and lunged with renewed vengeance.
Chin up.
Chest lifted.
Back straight.
Long stride.
Heel pointed to the ceiling.
And . . .
Hold positioning. God, that woman had nerve. What the hell did she have to be so pissy about? She’d had it all—the feather dress, the gorgeous and wealthy fiancé, a man who wrote her romantic notes. I should be the pissy one. What did I have? Her bad-luck dress that I couldn’t zip, no man in my life, and her romantic fiancé had turned into a man that now wrote hate notes on his same haughty stationery.
Bitch.
What a bitch.
I’d been lunging around my office for at least a half hour, and my legs were starting to give. Deciding to call it quits, I took one last lunge, closed my eyes, and held my position until beads of sweat formed on my brow and my legs began to shake.
After a minute or two of strenuous balancing, I had the strange sense of being watched. My eyes flashed open to find I wasn’t wrong. The door to my office was wide open, and Reed was staring at me. Startled by the unexpected visitor, I lost my footing and fell straight on my ass.
Reed was at my side practically before I hit the floor. “Jesus, Charlotte. What the hell? Are you okay?”
I slapped away his extended hand and ripped off my headset. “No. I’m not okay. You barged in here and scared me half to death. And this isn’t the first time you’ve knocked me over.”
His brows lifted. “I didn’t barge in here. I knocked. You didn’t answer. So I let myself in to leave something on your desk. Maybe if you were a little more connected with the world going on around you, you would’ve been aware of my presence sooner. What the hell were you doing anyway?”
“Lunges.”
“Why?”
“So my ass won’t look like cottage cheese, that’s why.”
Reed closed his eyes, mumbled something, and shook his head. “I didn’t mean why would you perform lunges in general. I do understand the theory of exercising. I meant, why were you doing them in your office in the middle of the day?”
I stood from the floor and dusted off my hands and skirt. “Because if the president has enough time, so do I.”
“I have no fucking clue what that means.”
I glared at him. “What did you need, Reed?” Although I was annoyed, I also couldn’t help myself. Unintentional rhymes were just funny. I cracked a small smile that I thought I’d hid pretty well.
Reed squinted at me. “You just amused yourself with a rhyme, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Good guess.” I flaunted a full-blown grin at how entertaining I could be.
He rolled his eyes, but I could see the corners of his lips twitch. “I’ll just leave you the invoices that I need processed.” Reed made his way to my desk and then turned back to the door. I’d almost forgotten all about the phone call that had lit a fire under my exercise routine.
“Umm . . . you had a call while you were gone. I didn’t get to email you the details since I was in the middle of my lunch lunges when it came in.”
“That’s fine. You can just tell me. Who was it?”
I locked eyes with him to watch his reaction. “Allison Baker.”
Reed’s jaw flexed, and a scowl marred his handsome face. “Thank you.”
He turned and headed for the door again. But I never could leave well enough alone. “She said to tell you it was in regard to your honeymoon.”
Hours later, I felt bad about the way that I’d treated Reed. I hadn’t even asked him if he’d gone to his audition last night, and then I’d zinged him with news about a subject that I knew was a sore one, just so I could watch his face. Basically, I was rude because I was jealous from that one stupid call from Allison.
As I started to close down my computer for the night, I noticed the green dot was lit next to his name on the company internal email, which meant he was still signed on, too. Without overthinking it, I typed using the chat feature.
Charlotte: Hi. I was just about to head out for the night. Can I do anything for you before I leave? Some coffee or anything?
A minute later, a response popped up.
Reed: No, thank you. I’m good.
I chewed on my nail for a minute, then typed:
Charlotte: Are you busy? Can I ask you something?
Reed: Not busy at all. Just doing lunges in my office.
My eyes widened.
Charlotte: Really??
Reed: Of course not, Charlotte. What kind of a nutjob do you think I am?
I actually laughed out loud at that response.
Charlotte: So . . . about that question . . .
Reed: Spit it out, Darling.
Of course, my last name was Darling, and people had called me by it often growing up. But when I read that last sentence, I’d read it as Reed calling me darling—as in, honey, sweetie, baby, darling. I smiled to myself, liking the sound of that, and closed my eyes to try to hear Reed’s deep voice calling me darling without it being capitalized.
When I reopened my eyes, there was a new message on my screen from Reed.
Reed: I hope you know I was calling you Darling as in your last name . . . not darling as in the term of endearment.
As much as the thought would kill him, there were a lot of times that our minds were simpatico. I decided to feed him his own line.
Charlotte: Of course not, Reed. What kind of a nutjob do you think I am?
Reed: Touché.
Charlotte: Anyway, about those questions . . .
Reed interrupted with another message as I typed.
Reed: So now it’s “questions,” not “question”?
I ignored him.
Charlotte: How did your audition go last night?
Reed: I was starting to worry about you. It’s been almost twenty-four hours, and you hadn’t asked yet.
Charlotte: Aww . . . that’s sweet. You worry about me. So how did it go? Did you make it to the next round?
Reed: I went. But I didn’t try out.
Charlotte: What? Why?
Reed: To be honest, I’m not good enough. I listened to some of the auditions and realized that it would take hard work to get myself to the point where I would have a legitimate chance of making it.
I was disappointed. But it sounded like he’d at least done some soul-searching by going.
Charlotte: There’s always next year. Start on some lessons!
Reed: Maybe I’ll do that. And thank you, Charlotte. As much as you annoyed the crap out of me over this, I actually did enjoy going to watch the auditions.
Charlotte: You’re welcome. Glad I could put my annoying-as-crap skills to good use and be of some service.
Reed: It’s late. Why don’t you go home?
I didn’t think he was ask
ing a question that he wanted an actual answer to, yet I answered out loud talking to my computer. “Because I have nothing to rush home to.”
Charlotte: Can I ask you one more question?
Reed: Why of course. I love personal questions at seven at night that interrupt me while I’m working.
Charlotte: I’m going to guess you meant that sarcastically, but I’ll ask it anyway. Where were you planning to go on your honeymoon?
Reed didn’t respond. After a few minutes, the green light turned red, indicating that he’d signed off the company email. I’d clearly overstepped our invisible boundaries again. So I finished shutting down my computer and packed up my desk. I was surprised when Reed appeared at my door, although at least I didn’t fall over this time.
He had his jacket over his arm and his leather bag slung over his shoulder. “Hawaii,” he said. “We were going to honeymoon in Hawaii.”
I must’ve made a face without realizing it.
He arched a brow. “You don’t approve?”
“I’m sure it’s beautiful. I just . . . I figured you for something a little more unique. Hawaii doesn’t seem to suit you.”
Reed scratched at the five o’clock shadow on his chin. “What does suit me?”
I gave it some real thought before answering. “Africa. Maybe a safari.”
He smiled. “That’s actually where I wanted to go on our honeymoon.”
“I take it Allison didn’t?”
“No. Allison’s idea of a great vacation consists of a five-star spa with daily massages and tanning on the beach while drinking fruity drinks with umbrellas out of a coconut.”
“So you did what she wanted to do?”
“I compromised. Her initial choice was worse. At least in Hawaii, I could rock climb while she sunned herself on the beach.”
“You rock climb?”
“I used to.”
“Why did you stop?”
Reed shook his head. “Good night, Charlotte.”