Page 20 of Playing with the Boss
“No. I don’t think I am,” I say calmly with a frown. “Just yours.”
“Pardon?” He inclines his head, rising to full height.
I slouch further, legs wide to show I’m not intimidated. “Your spend is a little over double your best sales executive.”
“Of course it is,” he sputters. “Where do you think the buck stops with a lot of purchasing requests out of hours?”
“Yeah,” I say with a slight grimace. “But Carl takes your top spenders out for lunch once a month. That’s ten key accounts. One every second day, pretty much.”
“Your point?”
“My point,” I say as Alf stifles a snort beside me, “is what the fuck do you spend your money on?”
Tony’s jaw flaps, words failing the moron.
“Are we done here?”
I take his silence as agreement.
“Great. Because I’ve got some real work to do.”
***
It takes me ten minutes of wandering the office before I manage to find out where the hell Lisa went: client meeting offsite. Ten minutes of eavesdropping, and eventually distracting the receptionist with a stationery request so that I can take a peek at her group planner.
I sit at the hot desk I’ve been assigned to while I’m here, building a metal man out of the bulldog clips I didn’t really need. A stack of credit card bills sits to my right, sorted and filed into five manila envelopes. To my left is a pile of expense sheets that would bore the pants off even the most dedicated numbers geek.
I didn’t take up this job because it was fun. Fuck no. I fell into the career progression, and when I was offered my first upwards shift on the ladder complete with a six-figure salary, well, my previous plan to ditch the corporate life and start over suddenly seemed rather fickle.
Plus, by that stage, I’d met Louanne. Pete’s niece.
I still sometimes wonder if the whole thing was a trap gone wrong. Hook me in, make me want to stay, and all that.
Ugh. I ditch the metal man, leaving the poor bastard with one arm, and drag a hand over my face. Why the fuck did I go there? What the hell attracted me to that witch in the first place?
The sex.
Fuck my life. Of course, it was.
Tension wracks my chest when the realization hits. The sex—or at least promise of—is what hooked me to Lisa first, too.
Fuck off. No way. I am not making the same mistake or comparing her to my goddamn ex. Lisa’s an entirely different woman.
Isn’t she?
By the time the woman in question saunters her lusciously curvy ass past my open door, I have a family of bull-clip people lined up against the wall. I abandon Little Timmy with his half-formed limbs and dash out the door to catch Lisa.
She startles when she realizes who matches her pace down the hallway. “Can I help you with something… again?”
“I can’t get fuck all done,” I whisper as we reach her office.
She turns and body-blocks the doorway. “And that concerns me how, Mr. Roberts?”
Jesus. Stop calling me that in public. “Because you keep distracting me.”
“But I’ve been out of the office,” she says with a frown, playing dumb perfectly. “How could I be doing that?”
“Move.” I shunt her with my thigh, forcing her back into her office.