by J. S. Scott
Ally gaped at him for a moment before she replied hesitantly. “So it wasn’t really for your convenience, was it?”
“Yes and no. It’s convenient knowing you’re safer and happier, but that isn’t why I did it. I do suppose there was some selfish motivation involved.” Hell, he couldn’t let her think that he was that altruistic, because he wasn’t. “But it wasn’t really about me wanting you available to me all the time. Ally, when have I ever demanded you be available after hours? I might be an asshole, but I usually do it during work hours.”
“Then why did you say that?” Her green eyes flashed a look of confusion.
“Because I’m an asshole?” he asked, trying to lighten the conversation.
Ally nodded. “Agreed.” She looked at him, her eyes searching his face. “Are you doing all this because we’re attracted to each other?”
Did she mean was he doing it because he wanted to fuck her more than he wanted to breathe? Maybe…or maybe not…he wasn’t quite sure. All he knew was that she’d been screwed over by her ex, and he wanted to make her life easier. “You deserve the raise. You’ve become more of an assistant than a secretary over the years, taking on more and more responsibility.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “You already pay me at the high end of the scale for my position.”
“For a secretarial position. I promoted you to executive assistant,” he told her calmly. “Now you’re on the high end of that scale.” Okay…that was a little bit of a stretch. She was still salaried higher than the top of the scale, but dammit, it was his company and Ally did the work of both an assistant and a secretary. He’d never needed anyone else. She was worth that and more.
She cocked her brow at him. “It’s still a secretarial position, Travis. It’s just a more important sounding title. Why are you really doing this?”
“I thought I already explained that,” he grumbled irritably. Christ! Couldn’t the woman just take the damn raise and promotion without arguing about it? “You’ve had to put up with me for four years. Before that, I couldn’t keep an assistant or a secretary.” That was totally true. He was an anal perfectionist, and nobody had performed like Ally had as an assistant or a secretary. She anticipated his needs before he even realized what he needed, on a professional level anyway.
“And you couldn’t have discussed all this with me first?” she questioned quietly.
“No. Then it wouldn’t have been a surprise.” And he hadn’t planned on letting her refuse.
“You just can’t go around arranging people’s lives, Travis. I appreciate what you were trying to do, but I’m a grown woman, and I make my own decisions.”
“Since when?” he challenged. “Every decision you’ve made over the last several years has been for your idiot ex, and he certainly never cared whether it was something you wanted or not. It was all for him. What the hell does it matter if I’m giving you something that you actually want?” Travis wasn’t used to being questioned when he actually did something nice, which he almost never did, and he managed people’s lives all the time, usually because they didn’t do it very well themselves.
She was silent for a moment, giving him a quizzical stare. “And what exactly are my new duties?”
Hell, Travis hadn’t really thought about that. She already did the work of two employees. “We’ll make it up as we go along.”
“I’m not sleeping with you,” Ally warned him with a frown.
Travis folded his arms in front of him unhappily and stared back at her. “You will. But when it happens, it won’t be because it’s part of your job description. You’ll do it freely because you want to.”
Ally took a swig of her soda before replying, “Don’t count on it.”
“And you’ll bring me my coffee every morning as part of your new duties,” he informed her.
She shook her head. “Absolutely not.”
He’d already known she’d say that, but he didn’t care. As long as she was safe and he could persuade her to come back to work for him, he could live with that.
When Ally awoke the next day, it was almost noon. How long had it been since she’d slept this late? She stretched, grimacing as her body protested the sudden movement. As usual, Travis was right: the scraped areas on her skin hurt more now than they had the day before.
Was he still here?
She got carefully out of bed, snatching up her robe to put it on over her skimpy nightshirt. Travis had sent her off to bed, telling her he’d be there if she needed anything. Had he really stayed just to make sure she was going to be okay? Really, the infuriating man was confounding her. One moment he was his same asshole self, and then a moment later he was making her shake her head in confusion. It pissed her off that he’d meddled in her life. Yet, what he had done was also one of the nicest things anyone had ever done for her, even if it was highhanded and arrogant. Strangely enough, she believed him when he said he hadn’t done it for himself. But the unselfish actions just weren’t consistent with the Travis she knew. Certainly, she’d see him do some amazing things for his family, things they probably weren’t even aware he’d done for them. However, she was hardly family, simply a valuable employee.
Curious, she wandered downstairs, passing all the bathroom and bedroom doors as she went, every room open and empty. Travis’s bag was sitting on the bed in the master bedroom, the same room that she refused to use because Rick had banged his girlfriend on that bed. The proof of Travis’s presence in that room gave her a sort of deranged sense of satisfaction, the thought of him tussled and sleeping in that bed somehow exorcising a few of the ghostly images of the past.
Ally stopped abruptly as she entered the kitchen, eyeing the piles of papers on her kitchen table, Travis sitting in one of the chairs, moving papers from one pile to the next. He grumbled, and then dumped a sheet of paper on one of the piles, moving to the next with the intense concentration she saw on his face every day at work.
“What are you doing?” she asked, perplexed, noticing her box where she filed all her papers sitting beside his elbow.
Travis looked up at her, his dark eyes roving over her body and coming to rest on her face. “Contemplating how much I’d like to put your ex in the hospital for an extended stay. He’d be there right now if I didn’t think it would just cause more problems for you.”
Ally opened her mouth and closed it again, taking in the frustrated look on Travis’s face. For once, he didn’t look immaculate. He looked dangerously disheveled, his hair mussed as though he’d been running his hand through it over and over again. “Are those my personal papers?”
Travis shrugged. “How personal are bills?”
“Why are you going through my bills? How dare you?” Her outrage and curiosity were warring with each other as she asked.
“You said you needed to clean up the mess your ex made of your life so you can move on. So I’m cleaning it up.” Travis stated the fact with utter calm, giving her a questioning look like he didn’t understand why she’d protest. “You made it quite easy to find everything, by the way. You’re very organized. Everything was alphabetized. Although I’m not quite sure ‘asshole ex’ is quite the way you’re supposed to label and file certain bills.”
Ally took a deep breath and let it out, not knowing whether to laugh or strangle Travis. “I said I need to figure everything out. I can’t believe you’re going through my bills.”
“I’m finished, actually,” Travis stated calmly, picking up the piles and replacing them into her filing box. “And if you were engaged, why is it that the asshole never bought you a ring? Or did you just not wear it?”
“He didn’t. He said we couldn’t afford it.”
“He bought one. He charged it.” Travis gave her a concerned glance. “After you split up. Why the hell didn’t you take him off your accounts?”
“He bought it for her,” Ally said flatly, nausea starting to rise from her stomach to her throat, horrified once again because she’d been so stupid. “I only looke
d at the balances. I couldn’t bring myself to see what he bought. He never bought me a single piece of jewelry the whole time we were together. Yet he used my cards and credit to charge thousands on things for her?” Ally paused for a second to get her emotions under control. “I was naïve. I guess it never occurred to me that a man I spent five years with would ever run up debt in my name after he’d already betrayed me.”
“Stupid fucking bastard,” Travis growled, closing the top on the box with a gigantic slam.
Ally felt her eyes well up with tears, an overwhelming sense of worthlessness leaving her stunned. “I wasn’t important enough. No matter what I did, it wasn’t enough.”
“Don’t cry,” Travis told her ominously. “He isn’t worth it. It’s over. Everything is paid and you can move on again, Ally. He was a leach, a bloodsucker who doesn’t care about anyone except himself. It had nothing to do with you. Most men would kill to have a woman like you. It’s him, not you.”
Travis’s voice was so matter-of-fact, so sincere that it made Ally want to cry even more. “I have to pay you back. I’m not your family, Travis. You can’t just move in and take over my life.” She wanted to tell him off, be angry that he’d butted into her business. But really, what he was doing was one of the sweetest things anyone had ever done for her, so she was having a hard time getting pissed off at him. Travis was bullheaded, and he was used to managing everything. But when had a man actually listened or cared about what she wanted, offering—or actually demanding—that she let him help make her dreams come true?
“I thought you wanted everything in the past.” Travis sounded confused. “And no, I’m not family, which is really a pretty disgusting thought when you take into consideration how desperately I want to fuck you. That would be awkward.”
Ally sighed. She had no doubt that Travis did want to screw her, but she had no idea why. “Is that why you’re doing this?” Men just didn’t run around paying their employees’ bills and organizing their lives for them to make things better for no reason.
“No,” Travis answered huskily. “I guess I just wanted to make you smile at me.”
That answered floored her. She searched Travis’s face, the scrapes he’d gotten from saving her life the day before still evident. With his hair mussed, his face littered with red marks, his clothes consisting of casual black jeans and a dark pullover, he looked almost…vulnerable.
Her lips trembled for a moment as she caught her breath, astounded. And then, she just couldn’t help herself; she smiled like a madwoman. Yes, she was pissed that he’d pawed through her personal files, but his desire to please her was there on his face, and that made her heart sing. Travis Harrison, billionaire extraordinaire, had actually taken the morning to help her, wanting nothing more than to see her happy. “Is this good enough?” she asked him, still smiling broadly as she made her way over to the coffee pot. “And we are going to have to talk about how I’ll pay you back and about how wrong it is to rifle through personal papers.”
Travis squirmed. “That smile was good enough for an all-day boner.”
Ally giggled as she poured herself a cup of coffee. She couldn’t help it. “But you wanted it,” she reminded him.
“I still do. But it will be damn uncomfortable. I guess I’ll just have to spend another night in your bed jacking off to fantasies about fucking you,” he said bluntly. “But I can guarantee just my fantasies about you were better than his sex with his bimbo could ever be.”
Ally nearly choked on her coffee. Her body heated at thoughts of Travis’s ripped, naked body, and him stroking himself in her bed while he thought about doing wicked things to her. “You didn’t,” she denied.
“Oh, I did,” Travis replied evilly. “And it was immensely satisfying to know that I was probably getting more pleasure in that bed with my fantasies about you than he ever did with his girlfriend.”
Okay…maybe he actually did. And that made Ally even hotter. If the ghosts of her ex screwing another woman in that room hadn’t already been exorcised, they certainly were now. Changing the subject, she sat down next to him at the table. “Can we talk about my new job title and repayment terms?” She certainly couldn’t spend one more moment thinking about Travis touching himself.
“No,” he answered simply, picking up his own coffee and taking a slug. “Consider it a bonus. Although I wouldn’t argue if you let me be the first person to read the second book in your fantasy series. You left me hanging.”
“You actually read the first one?” she asked, amazed. He had to have read the manuscript almost immediately to have already finished it.
“I said I wanted to read it. It’s good, Ally. Really good. You need to finish it. Does the young hero eventually get his princess?”
He’d said he wanted to read her book, but people said those things all the time. They didn’t necessarily mean it. Obviously, he had read the story if he knew about the hero and the princess. “My hero is a little young for that right now.” She took a small sip of her coffee. “You don’t strike me as the type of guy to read young adult fantasy.”
“I grew up reading fantasy,” Travis answered thoughtfully. “The Chronicles of Narnia series was one of my favorites. I remember looking in every closet we had, trying to find a secret door so I could take Kade and Mia away somewhere else after reading the first book.”
Ally’s heart began to bleed for him, thinking about a young Travis trying to escape his horrible childhood. “I loved that series.” It had been one of her favorites too, liking it for much the same reasons as Travis: to escape her miserable childhood.
“You need to write, Ally. Finish the books. You’re talented. I have no idea why the book was rejected, but books like yours brighten the lives of a lot of young people. They can escape into a dream when everything else in their life isn’t so great.” Travis eyed her with a pensive expression before digging into his pocket and pulling out a velvet box. “I missed your birthday, but this made me think of you. I meant to give it to you yesterday.”
Ally stared at the fancy box Travis was holding for a moment before reaching out a trembling hand to take it. She wasn’t used to getting gifts, and especially not from men. “Why?” she asked nervously.
“It’s a reminder to follow your dreams. And a belated birthday present. It’s nothing really,” Travis told her tensely, as though he felt a little awkward.
Ally popped the lid, gasping as she saw the contents. There, nestled in a bed of red velvet, was the most exquisite necklace she’d ever seen. But it wasn’t the diamonds or the sapphires that immediately caught her eye, but the design. It was a small unicorn, the entire body sparkling with white diamonds, the horn and eyes made of small blue sapphires. “My unicorn,” she said breathlessly, taking in what was almost an exact tiny replica of the unicorn from her books.
“It doesn’t talk like yours does, but I’m hoping that you’ll remember to write every time you wear it,” Travis told her huskily.
Tears rolled down Ally’s cheeks as she fingered the delicate, beautiful beast on the gold chain. “I don’t know what to say.” And she didn’t. No one had ever given her such a thoughtful gift. “The first piece of jewelry I’ve ever gotten as a gift,” she mumbled tearfully. “It’s beautiful.” She also knew it was expensive. “Travis, it’s too expensive of a gift for me to accept.”
“Bullshit. I said it was nothing,” he rumbled. “I’m not taking it back unless you don’t like it. Then I’ll get you something else.”
“I love it,” she cried anxiously. “But I don’t get gifts like this. It’s too much. But it’s incredible.”
“It’s nothing compared to what I want to give you, Ally. And I still want to be the first to read the next book,” he demanded.
Ally looked up from the sparkling unicorn to look into his eyes, eyes that were turbulent and uncomfortable, as though he wasn’t quite sure how to express himself. “You believe in my writing that much?”
“Not just your writing. I believe in you,
” he admitted, his tone sincere.
Her heart ready to pound out of her chest, Ally rose and went to Travis, putting her arms around him gently and kissing him lightly on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered, unable to express how much his faith meant to her. She wanted to tell him, wanted to let him know how much his support meant to her after what she’d gone through with her ex, but the lump in her throat wouldn’t let her say anything else. So she just hugged him, tears still rolling down her cheeks. “I love this, and I’m keeping it. It will always remind me that one person actually liked my book,” she told him lightheartedly, knowing emotion wasn’t something Travis dealt with easily. “And we will talk about repayment for the bills.” She let him go reluctantly and sat back in her chair.
“No, we won’t,” Travis answered in a graveled voice. “And that hug was good for an all-week boner.”
She laughed, amused by the disgruntled look on his face. She highly doubted Travis got excited over a simple hug, but he was good for her battered ego. Travis Harrison could get any woman he wanted, any time he wanted one. But she let the compliments wash over her, let the fact that he found her attractive warm her soul. “I can’t believe you didn’t go into the office today. Are we working tomorrow?” she asked, knowing Travis never missed a day of work.
“Hell, no. And I’ll need to bandage those wounds again later. You aren’t going to feel like working for a while. You’re starting vacation early.” Travis shot her an obstinate look.
Ally rolled her eyes. “I’m fine. You don’t need to take care of me.”
“I’m going to,” he replied irritably. “So get used to it.”
Ally crossed her arms in front of her, secretly loving his protectiveness, but confused by it at the same time. “Why? I’m just an employee. It’s not like I’m Mia or Kade. I can understand that you meddle in their life. But why me?”
“I don’t meddle in their lives,” Travis answered grumpily.