Sold on Christmas Eve

by Juliana Conners

  He smiles.

  Oh, this Garrett Mack is cheeky.

  He and I might be a match made in dirty girl heaven, I think, again sans Tourette’s. I have to thank the universe for special favors. I contemplate how brilliantly and authoritatively he had said, “you work for me.”

  Him and only him. And for that I’m very grateful.

  He leans in with such fire and determination, I almost fall on top of him. But I manage to keep it together. I lower my voice and let a little of the sexy girl come out. I uncross my legs and cross them the other direction and then whisper in a raspy voice, “I am very clear on that, Garrett.”

  Suppressing a pure animal attraction that is bubbling inside me for one gorgeous Garrett Mack, Esquire, is probably going to be the hardest part of this job. Just looking at his gorgeous face has my panties damp.

  I gulp. Only this gulp isn’t to hold back tears, as most of my gulps have been lately. This gulp is because my heart is pounding as I fight away the pure sexual urge and raw magnetism that is happening between us. I’m not winning the fight either, not even close, and it’s only day one— hell, hour one.

  But I’ll be victorious, I just know it. Because I hate to lose.

  Chapter 10 – Garrett

  3 Weeks Later

  Having Carolina as my assistant has proven to be everything I thought it would be. For one, she’s already turned out to be a much better legal assistant than Jeff or his male predecessor were. I don't mean to be sexist, but in my experience, I've found that women usually are.

  Also, she is smoking hot, with curves that go on for miles and a body meant for worshipping. And worship it, I do. I can’t help but want to touch, even though I’m only supposed to look. Ever since our first awkward but adorable meeting in my office, it is clear that the feeling is mutual.

  Since then, every time Carolina has to come into my office for something, she gives me a cute curtsy, while twirling a strand of her long brown hair. I can tell she wants me to pull on it while I take her from behind. I’m just waiting for the chance to do it without getting my partners up in arms.

  At first they were upset that I'd gone behind their backs and hired a woman, and not just any woman, but this woman— a brunette bombshell of curvy temptation. But I assured them they had nothing to worry about. And what were they going to do, fucking fire me?

  To the contrary, they've been quite pleased ever since Carolina started working here. I have found a renewed energy and vigor. My legal work is better, sharper, if only because my cock is always standing at least at half-mast when Carolina is around.

  But it’s about to backfire soon if I don’t act on my urges. My heart is pumping too much blood to my cock for me to handle. I have to do something with all that energy.

  I have to admit that having Carolina around is good for me. She isn’t like all the other girls who always let me hit and quit it. She is drawing out the game, teasing with me, flirting with me.

  I’m happy about that, because the chase is the best part of the game sometimes. I know that as soon as I conquer my prize, I'll move onto the next conquest.

  Won’t I?

  That's how it had always been in the past, but I have to stop and ask myself if this time is different somehow. When it comes to Carolina, well, she brings out something in me that I don't think any woman ever has.

  I love her charming Southern accent. She talks with a twang but it’s genteel, not hick. Her laugh is genuine and her smile lights up her whole face.

  Fuck.

  I better stop thinking this way before I do something silly and fall in love.

  This afternoon, after Carolina had just been in my office to take some dictation, I can’t seem to get her out of my mind. I try to tell myself my obsession is purely physical. I need to satisfy my desires with her soon, before I go crazy.

  I lock my office door and take my cock out so I can relieve some of the anticipation bubbling to the surface, both physically and mentally. I stroke my eleven inches of surging power and imagine her sucking eagerly on my cock, taking all of me down her throat like a good little slutty secretary.

  I want her to bend over my desk so I can spread her ass cheeks wide and get a good look at her little pussy. I just know it will be so tight and wet for me.

  I'll have to spank her ass for being such a bad girl at work and letting me corrupt her. Then I'll have to slide myself into her and have my way with her.

  As I stroke my cock, I imagine it going in and out of her pussy as she moans my name and cries out "Fuck me harder, Boss."

  I want her spread open wide and naked in front of me while I pound my cock into her pussy like I’m pounding it with my own hand just now, jerking off, thinking of throbbing and pulsing inside her while I claim her as not just my legal assistant but also my lover.

  Finally, my goal is accomplished. I think of her gorgeous face as I get my sweet release. Then I grab a handful of tissues and blow a big load of cum into my hand. God, I needed that.

  I slump back in my chair and think about going out to the balcony attached to my office to smoke a cigar and plan how to seduce Carolina so that she will let me do this with her in real life. I have a feeling it won’t be too hard.

  Instead, I’m overcome with the desire to be near her right thissecond—and not just in a sexual way. I want to hug her lovely curves up against me, smell her fresh scent— I swear she still always smells like saltwater, like the ocean from where she’d come— and run my hands through her hair that would no doubt be tangled and sweaty from the amazing sex we would have just had.

  Fuck.

  I know absolutely screwed since I’m thinking like this. This has never happened to me. I’m not the type to enjoy cuddling up next to a woman. I’m all about the fucking— get in, get off, and get out.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  I had expected to want to fuck Carolina. I hadn't expected to feel this way about her. I hadn’t expected to not be able to get her out of my fucking head.

  Chapter 11 – Garrett

  I get up and pull up my pants and wash my hands in the sink of the bathroom that is attached to my office. I decide to call my brother and remind myself why I don't do relationships. A good dose of reality is clearly what’s in order here.

  "Hey, Brother, how's Mom?" I ask him when he answers.

  "Still at it," he says. "Here, I'll put the receiver up closer so you can hear what she's doing."

  There’s the sound of dishes crashing around and of my mom saying, "Of course you can't even manage to keep a clean house for your dear ma. You make me live in filth…"

  When my brother comes back on the line, he says, "The filth is her fault. I have a housekeeper come clean twice a week, but every time I go to work, Mom insists on making a big mess of things and then blaming me."

  "I know how she is. You don't need to explain," I assure him.

  I feel a pang of guilt for calling him just to be reminded of why I can't let myself fall in love. The men in my family have a habit of falling for mean, spiteful women. Our mom had been making our lives difficult ever since our poor dad finally divorced her years ago.

  "You know," I tell my brother, "My offer stands to pay for her to go to an assisted living facility. There are trained professionals we can pay to put up with her. We certainly make enough money. And if you want, I'll pay for all of it. It would be a monkey off my back to know she wasn't over there bothering you."

  "It's fine," my brother says, sighing. "It's not about the money. I just promised Dad I would take care of her should anything ever happen to him. So now I’m living up to my word."

  "I know."

  He'd told me that a thousand times. And I always reply by saying that his promise doesn’t mean he has to put up with my mom's abuse just because my dad had.

  “Taking care of her” could mean paying for her to live in a professional facility where she could be properly medicated— she sure seems to need it— and have companionship, or at least other people to boss arou
nd and mistreat instead of doing that to her own family members.

  But my brother is nicer than I am and feels obliged to let Mom live with him. There is nothing I can do about it except remind myself not to be so foolish in the name of love.

  And that's exactly what I had just done.

  "I just wanted to see how things were going. I'll call you later this week so we can go play golf," I tell him.

  "All right. I can't wait to get to work so I can get away from her," he says, as I hear my mom yelling, "You tell that no good son of mine I don't even want to talk to him!"

  As I hang up, I feel renewed strength in my goals and expectations. Perhaps it was mean of me to call my brother just to remember my priorities, but it worked. It’s his choice to end up a slave to our mother, but I refuse to do that. Nor will I be a slave to any woman.

  So this is what I’m going to do.

  I’m going to fuck the living daylights out of my new secretary, and she is going to love it. But we will not fall in love. Ours will be nothing other than a secret office romance: short, sweet, and— more importantly— temporary.

  Once we have that out of the way, we can move on to have a working relationship without all the sexual tension to distract us. That's why I have to get this out of my system once and for all. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

  Chapter 12 – Carolina

  The few weeks since I’ve been here have proved quite different than that first day when “Overwhelmed Carolina” moved to town. I learned to massage Erin, the beast. And I mean that both literally and figuratively.

  She insists on daily neck massages, and even though kneading her knots is a work out, I figure if it keeps her happy, it’s fine. In return, I get all the office gossip from her and Claude, who always know the scoop due to their central location and unassuming positions.

  They filled me in on all the office romances. Asher married his associate/mentee Madilyn, and Cameron married his legal assistant, Ruby. The firm’s biggest client, Damien Hudson, married a different legal assistant, Katie. And everyone is pretty sure that the third named partner, Jameson Reed, is carrying on an office affair, but he’s so good at hiding it— and every single female who works at the firm other than me seems so smitten with him, looking for every excuse to work overtime with him or otherwise go into his office for some alone time— that no one can figure out who it’s with, although there are some prime suspects.

  I enjoy getting the dirt. And it makes me feel better to know I’m not the only secretary who has ever had a crush on her boss. Apparently, at this firm— which Katie calls “Sugar Daddy Central”— it’s kind of a normal event, and things actually work out sometimes. Katie is friends with Claude and Erin— despite my initial impression, Erin seems to be friends with everyone, and as Garrett said, her rudeness is just an initial front she puts up— and has told me that when she first met Damien she was sure they were going to be together, but she just wasn’t sure how it was going to work out.

  She said that was a common theme she’d heard from Madilyn and Ruby— who is one of her best friends— as well. I didn’t tell her I was having similar feelings about Garrett, but somehow I felt she already knew.

  I’ve also resigned myself to listening to Erin’s criticism of every man she comes into contact with, from the partners in the firm to the teenaged kid who delivers sandwiches from the deli down the street. If there is one thing I’ve learned about Erin, it’s that she has unreasonably high requirements when it comes to who she wants to date. And, no offense, but she isn’t exactly a perfect ten. A trip to the salon and some carefully applied makeup would help a lot, but still, it’s a good thing she has a lively personality.

  Every time she complains about a guy, Claude pipes in with a comment along the lines of, “I will never understand straight people. If you don’t like the guy, don’t talk to the guy.” Or, “If you like the guy, just let the guy know!”

  These two are so much fun together, and they make working here interesting. Well, that and the fact that I have a huge crush on my boss that I get to work with all the time.

  I love how Erin knows everything that goes on in the firm. She’s like a law database and the neighborhood gossip rolled into one. I look forward to our daily routine, as it helps me to get the lay of the land.

  After the first day, I began arriving an hour early every morning. This was partly because I thought Eric could help me with my training during my off time before Garrett showed up, and partly because on or about the third day, I realized she knew everything and wanted to share it all with me. Although she was friendly with everyone, she didn’t seem to have any close female friends in the firm, so I was drafted to fill the position of her BFF.

  Also, I wasn’t loving this new city. While it’s true I had come from a small town with not a whole lot going on, Stone was my home. It was quaint, and I knew just about everyone, so weirdly enough, I was never bored.

  Erin likes to listen to my stories about small town life. More accurately, she likes to ridicule my stories about small town life, but beggars can’t be choosers. She is someone to talk to and bounce ideas off of, and as time passed, we’ve learned to appreciate each other’s company.

  In Albuquerque, my new home, while there is a ton to do compared to back home, I can’t help but feel lonely. I know no one, and I find myself constantly alone and bored. I’d dialed Martha a few times out of desperation. Being a military brat, she’d lived in New Mexico on one of the military bases when she was younger, and she’s insisted I go see the sites— Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands, Old Town Santa Fe— by myself or through joining a meetup, but it has just never felt right.

  Maybe I wanted this to be temporary or maybe I just wanted an excuse to fail. Whatever the case, I’m often alone, which only makes me sad. My townhouse is near University of New Mexico hospital, and the sound of sirens at all times of the day and night outside my window make me realize things aren’t so bad. At least I’m not in the back of an ambulance with its lights flashing, suffering some horrible disease or accident. But that’s little consolation, to be thinking “at least not that.”

  Maybe my fascination with Garrett just stems from boredom. Maybe I think he and I will get together when really it’s all in my head. But I have a feeling I’m about to find out.

  Chapter 13 – Carolina

  Despite the neck massaging and bitching about men, Erin and I have forged a nice little work relationship. She makes my cappuccino for me every morning, and I start to think her crooked teeth are cute.

  Around the end of my first week, she told me that Garrett was facing some serious backlash from the other partners. Some of them were all really old and could barely walk, so at first, I just thought they were jealous. But apparently, not so much.

  According to Erin, the all-knowing receptionist extraordinaire, Garrett had been warned many times to stop his behavior with female assistants in the office. Of course, I did sort of walk in on one apparent warning, so I was starting to put things together even without her explanation.

  Erin said he was a serial womanizer. She told me the last temp agency paralegal, some well-endowed skirt named Selinda, had quit because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself, or so she said.

  I couldn’t decipher if Erin was just trying to keep me away from him, or if it was all a little bit overexaggerated. And she did admit that it seemed Selinda was as much into Garrett as Garett had been into Selinda, so her leaving the firm may have been due to sour grapes on her part. So initially, I tucked it away under “I need absolute proof” in my brain.

  Soon enough though, she would be proven right. Not only was I resisting Garrett’s advances from about day two— although I was probably different than most of his office conquests since I wanted him more than I could ever admit— but he would come in late and hung over quite often.

  Erin leaned in one morning and whispered to me, “Look, you should know that Garrett spends way too much money on women, drinks to excess, and f
orgets about his work. And they all know it. Especially that old curmudgeon, Arthur Friedmont. He points out constantly that Berg and his team over in Patent are creaming Garrett in Civil Litigation. I mean, I shouldn’t tell you this, but the only reason he’s not gone is because of his dad. So yeah, nepotism is alive and well. I mean, you really can’t repeat this but you should know since you are his exec ass.”

  “His exec ass?”

  “Executive assistant.”

  “Oh.”

  “So, you know, you may have to anticipate fires to put out is all I’m saying. He is performing the most poorly of any partners here. It’s sad, really. I mean, I like Garrett. He’s just in his own way. His emotional IQ must not be very high. And they think— the partners— it’s because he’s too much of a player. They have told him in no uncertain terms to stop chasing women as a national pastime.”

  She rolled her eyes as if to indicate that was never going to happen.

  “I did try to defend Garrett early on,” she continued. “I’m not afraid of him. Please! This place is peanuts compared to my old firm.”

  Here, she shrugged, as if I’d worked a lot of firms myself and would know. But, I didn’t know. I was clueless and just starting to learn the ways of entitled law firm partners.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I told Artie that I knew many terrific lawyers from my last firm who had like three mistresses and not a loss at trial, not a misstep to be had. But he just grumbled something like, ‘Well, clearly they can think with both heads. Mr. Mack cannot.’”

  As the words left Erin’s mouth, I started laughing so hard I snorted.