“Okay.” He released me and hit the start button. “I’ll see you Friday. We can discuss our date for Saturday then.” He kept his eyes on me as he moved to the other side of the elevator.
I leaned against the wall and inhaled several times to bring my breathing back to normal. “I know you don’t work in HR or anything, but I was the only director who wasn’t invited to the mock-up meeting this afternoon. You said no one was losing their job but...Am I being let go? Are you trying to soften the blow by being nice to me during my last week here?”
“What? Why would you even think—Of course not.” He laughed. “How else was I supposed to get you alone?”
The doors opened on twenty four and he stepped off.
“Oh, and Miss Gracen?” He turned around and held the doors open. “Before I forget...When you were thirty and expanding your marketing career, I was nineteen, but I wasn’t picking out my major. I was dropping out and starting my own software company, the very company you hate working for today.” He moved his hands from the doors and they closed on his seductive smile.
I went back down to my office and changed my panties in the bathroom for the second time this week. I knew my stash of emergency panties would come in handy at some point, but I was thinking more along the lines of wasting coffee on my pants, not getting aroused as soon as I looked at Jonathan Statham.
This is not good...This is not good...
Chapter 4
Jonathan
I walked into human resources and pulled Claire’s file. Her resume was impeccable. She had a Business degree from the University of Pittsburgh, a master’s in marketing from Carnegie Mellon, and she’d worked on several high profile ad campaigns—Ralph Lauren, Versace, Microsoft, Google. Before coming to work for me, she’d spent four years directing projects at Cole and Hillman Associates in Pittsburgh, the largest advertising firm on the East Coast.
Why would she ever leave there to come here? Her position here is a major downgrade from that...She’s probably only being paid half of what she used to make...
I took the elevator to my floor and sighed. Even though her birthdate was clearly marked on all her files, I couldn’t believe she was about to turn forty. She didn’t look forty. At all.
Not that I gave a damn; I actually found it quite funny that she thought her age would be a problem.
“Mr. Statham?” My secretary looked up as soon as I walked by her desk. “I have something for you.” She handed me a card:
Jonathan,
I’m sure you noticed that I wasn’t at the board meeting today and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I’m going to Paris for a while to do some serious wedding planning with my best friend, Joanna—remember her? She’s the one who said you and I would make a cute couple at last year’s charity ball :-) Anyway, I was doing some thinking, and if I need to vacate my seat on the board for you to give us a chance, I will definitely consider it.
I’ll be thinking about you while I’m away.
Hope you’ll be thinking of me,
Vanessa.
I hadn’t noticed she was absent from the meeting and I was pretty sure I never alluded to the possibility of she and I having a chance to be together. I’d lost count of how many times I told her that I only saw her as a friend, nothing more.
I unlocked the door to my office and hit the lights. Tossing my jacket on the couch, I lay down and prepared to take a nap, but I saw my ex-girlfriend sitting at my desk.
“Audrey?” I sat up. “What are you doing? How did you get in here?”
I thought I had you banned for life...
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“About?”
“Us...”
“There is no us. There hasn’t been an ‘us’ in over a year.”
“Just hear me out please.” She motioned for me to sit in front of my desk.
I sighed. I pushed a panel in my wall and took out a bottle of bourbon. I poured myself a tall glass and offered her a bottle of water before sitting down.
“Go ahead.” I tried not to sound annoyed. “I’m listening.”
“Well, I was doing some thinking the other day. Do you remember how we talked about marriage a few times?”
“We broke up a year ago. I don’t keep a listed file about every conversation we had.”
She leaned forward in the chair and bit her lip. “It was going to work out perfectly because our careers were set, neither of us wanted children, and we wanted to travel the world every year once we tied the knot...” She started unbuttoning her jacket. “You don’t remember any of that?”
“No.”
“Well, I do. You and I were pretty serious at one point and then we just fell apart...”
“Was this before or after you called all my ex-girlfriends? Before or after you lied about being pregnant and dragged me to a fake doctor?”
She slid her jacket off, revealing that she was wearing nothing underneath it but a lacy pink bra. Before I could stand up, she’d walked around the desk, showing off the matching panties.