And the always classic: Over the desk now, Ms. Strickland.
Merely thinking of the things he’d like to whisper in his assistant’s ear shot a bolt of desire through him so powerful he had to shake his head to get back to reality. The reality that said devoting even one percent of his brain to those thoughts was a million percent wrong.
“You think she’s got some sexy unmentionables under that boxy suit of hers?” Flynn asked, like some kind of mind reader. His casual curiosity, though harmless locker room talk, pushed Brody’s recently hair-trigger fuse.
“I think you need to focus less on Ms. Strickland’s panties”—my f*ck
ing job, dude—“and more on the North Shore Development.”
While Brody thought about his own inability to close the deal with the union Jack Consortium. He was in delicate negotiations with Nigel Smythe-Osborne regarding the luxury hotels he wanted to build stateside. The limey shit was dangling the prospect of a partnership with Score Property, only to yank the carrot as soon as Brody came within nibbling distance.
The similarities between his stutter-stepping sex life and his failure to wrap up his latest business venture in a pretty red bow were a tad too close for comfort. He grabbed the ball, making sure he shoulder-shoved Flynn with more violence than strictly necessary on his way to the hoop. Shot released. Score.
If only releasing his pent-up sexual frustration was so easy. The guys were right. He needed to get laid tout de suite.
“So, Cross. Tell me more about the cock-destroying women.”
…
“If I wasn’t so sure I looked like hot shit in that dress, I’d have had a complex.”
“Uh-huh,” Emma murmured. Her coworker Serena liked to perch her tiny ass on Emma’s desk between eight forty-five and nine every Monday morning and fill Emma in, and anyone else within earshot at Score Property, about her weekend of grinding on some guy, screwing him unconscious, and sleeping off a Red Bull and vodka hangover.
“First he tells me I’ve got eyes he could drown in, then the next minute he’s ogling this skanky redhead with fake boobs and a skirt that shows her…”
Emma checked Mr. Kane’s schedule for the fifth time in ten minutes, assuring herself that she hadn’t made any mistakes. Checking, rechecking, and triple-checking her work was the reason why she’d kept this job as long as she had. Neither of her two predecessors had lasted longer than a week, so her three months was some sort of record, according to Mr. Dade. Now that Score Property was expanding and each of the partners had his own PA, she was exclusively at the beck and call of Mr. Kane.
And wasn’t that a lovely image? The little flutter between her thighs agreed.
“A skirt that shows her what?”
“Oh, you are listening!” Serena sucked dramatically on her iced mocha. “And here I thought you were putting in time off the clock. Workday doesn’t start for five minutes, yanno? You’re making us all look bad.”
“I just like to be prepared.”
Serena’s eye roll pronounced that notion a cardinal sin. “Maybe you should quit being such a Girl Scout and come out with me one of these weekends. Mess up that bun. Show a bit of leg. Give the girls some air.”
If she knew exactly what Emma got up to on her weekends—her weeknights, too—Serena would probably spit-take that mocha all over her brand-new Ann Taylor suit. Emma merely gifted her a serene upturn of her lips. As Granny Maude used to say, keep smiling, it makes people wonder what you’re up to. She’d had a lot of practice with that smile and with fobbing off girls who wanted to be pals. She wasn’t here to make friends.
Though if she’d made more of an effort with Serena or her other coworkers at Score Property, she might not be wading in the shit trough right now.
“I’m not really into that kind of scene,” said the girl who had invented that kind of scene. Being bad always tasted too good, and she’d lost her appetite while cleaning up after other people. Like Daisy. At twenty-two years old, three years Emma’s junior, her sister may as well be in diapers for all the maturity she’d demonstrated lately. Just thinking of the trouble she was in boiled Emma’s blood.
Serena wagged a finger. “One day I’ll get you to let your hair down and show you how to have some dirty fun. And speaking of dirty fun…” Her voice dropped several octaves and emerged husky. “If it isn’t the Lone Star State’s gift to Chicago.”