Just Bob (Assassins Inc. #1)(2)

My cheeks heated as I shook my head. I watched with a sense of astonishment as the man sat down, placing his cup of coffee and a newspaper on the table in front of him. I peeked up at him again, growing mesmerized by the gray of his eyes. They were stormy gray, like what winter storm clouds looked like just before a blizzard.

When he looked directly at me, I quickly dropped my eyes, the heat in my cheeks burning even more. As pale as my skin was, I had no doubt the stranger could see how red my cheeks were getting.

Curse of being Irish. It would have been marginally okay if I had had the fiery red hair to go with it, but no. I got mouse brown hair.

Thank you, Mom and Dad.

I sent the man a friendly smile as I pushed my wire-rimmed glasses back up my nose. I didn’t think this chance meeting was going to go anywhere, but it never hurt to be friendly, especially with a man that could probably snap me in two like a dry twig.

Unable to hold the man’s intense stare, I glanced back down at my book. I wanted to stay right where I was and bask in the aura of such a perfect specimen of manhood, but I also wanted to run for my life before I did something really stupid and got myself punched, or worse, and with as big as this guy’s muscles were, there could be a lot of worse.

I sighed when my watch went off. My break was over and no matter how much I wanted to stay, I knew I couldn’t. My job wasn’t much, but it was mine. I had a little cubicle and everything.

I closed my book and set it down. I made sure to wipe down the table in front of me. I’d had a pastry with my coffee and didn’t want to leave behind any crumbs. I hated it when people didn’t clean up after themselves. It took like thirty seconds to wipe down the table and gather up my trash.

I grabbed my garbage and my book and stood. I gave the man another friendly smile. “Have a good day,” I said. Wishing the man a good day was the least I could do. It also allowed me to look into his turbulent gray eyes one last time.

The guy didn’t smile back. He didn’t even lift his head to acknowledge my words. Just stared down at his newspaper.

Figures.

It was a cliché to say all the beautiful people were mean, but damn. The least the guy could do was acknowledge my existence.

Whatever.

I tossed my garbage in the trash bin on my way out of the small coffee cafe. I forced myself not to look as I walked outside and around the front of the building. That worked really well until I was passing by the window where I had been sitting. I looked in and found gray eyes staring back at me. I stumbled in shock before catching myself and then hurrying along at a fast pace.

Great, now I had humiliation to go along with my embarrassment.

This was turning out to be a stellar day.

It didn’t get much better when I got back to my office to find a crowd of my co-workers gathered around the receptionist’s desk, all of them talking in hushed tones. I didn’t know them well. I never really had the time or the patience—or the mean bone in my body—to stand around and gossip about others.

Usually, I was the one being gossiped about.

Still, it was a little disconcerting when they all stopped talking when I stepped inside the office and just turned to stare at me. I swallowed tightly. I seriously hated when they looked at me. It was almost as if they knew something I didn’t.

Someone snickered.

I sighed and kept walking. No good came from standing around talking. Certainly no work got done, and I had a lot of work. As a junior accountant at Bixby and Kent Accounting, I got the brunt of the grunt work. My immediate supervisor tolerated me because I made her look good to her supervisors.

As soon as I reached my desk, I wished I had stopped to gossip, or run out of the office the second I stepped foot inside of it. Hell, I would have settled for a taxicab hitting me as I crossed the street from the cafe to my office.

“Mrs. Staudemeyer.” I eyed the two security guards standing behind her. They were huge. And mean looking, with muscles on top of muscles and no necks. I found it odd that they both had the same crew cut. Maybe they were related.

Did I mention that they were mean looking?

“Is there a problem, ma’am?” I asked as I looked back at my supervisor. I always tried to be polite to the woman no matter how much I disliked her. She did have power over my continued employment after all.

“Mr. Mills, your employment with Bixby and Kent has been terminated. You will pack up your belongings and leave the premises. These gentlemen”—she waved her hand back toward the two no-neck security guards—“are here to ensure you do not take anything that does not belong to you. They will escort you off the premises.”

“What?” I knew my eyes had grown as large as saucers when my supervisor smirked. “Why? What’d I do?”

I couldn’t think of anything I had to warrant losing my job. I needed my job. How else was I supposed to feed Mustachio? I was pretty sure my cat ate his weight in cat food on a daily basis. He was the biggest damn cat I had ever seen. Which was odd, considering he had been no bigger than the palm of my hand when I found him in an alley three years ago.

Mrs. Staudemeyer clasped her hands in front of her as she tended to do to try and intimidate people. It worked. I was intimidated. “It has been brought to management’s attention that you were falsifying accounting records for a former client.”

“I most certainly was not.” I couldn’t believe the volume in my voice, but I was pissed. I worked hard to get where I was and I would be damned if someone was going to accuse me of doing something so unethical. “What proof do you have?”