Beautiful Bitch (Beautiful Bastard, #1.5)(12)

I’d finally broken it.

“Sara,” I said, and my voice felt too loud in the silent room. Her eyes turned to me, wide and clear. “Thank you for coming to me that first day Chloe was gone. Thank you for giving me whatever updates you could. For that, and other reasons, I’m sorry to see you go.”

She shrugged, smoothing her bangs to the side and giving me a small smile. “I’m just glad to see you two together again. Things have been way too quiet around here. And by quiet I mean boring. And by boring I mean nobody screaming or calling each other a hateful shrew.” She coughed and took an almost comically loud slurp from her drink.

Chloe groaned. “No chance of that anymore, I assure you.” She popped an almond into her mouth. “He may not be my boss anymore, but he’s still most definitely a screamer.”

Laughing, I stole a peek at her ass as she stood and bent down to pull a bottle of water out of the bottom shelf of the fridge.

“Still,” I said, turning back to Sara. “I appreciate that you kept me up to date. I would have probably lost my mind otherwise.”

Sara’s eyes softened and, as she fidgeted, I could tell she was a little uncomfortable in the face of my rare display of emotion. “Like I said, I’m glad it worked out. These things are worth fighting for.” She lifted her chin and gave Chloe one last smile before leaving the room.

That giddiness I’d felt after Chloe’s return made it easy to ignore the whispers that followed us through the halls of Ryan Media Group. I had my office and she had hers now, and we were each determined to prove to ourselves as much as anyone else that we could do this.

We’d lasted almost an hour apart.

“I missed you,” she said, slipping into my office and closing the door behind her. “Do you think they’ll give me my old office back?”

“No. Much as I like the idea, at this point it would be blatantly inappropriate.”

“I was only half serious.” She rolled her eyes and then paused, looking around. I could almost see each memory coming back to her: when she’d spread her legs across the desk from me, when she’d let me make her come with my fingers to distract her from her worries, and, I imagine, each time we’d sat together in this office, not saying everything we could have said so much sooner.

“I love you,” I said. “I’ve loved you for a long time.”

She blinked up and then moved close, stretching to kiss me. And then she pulled me into the bathroom and begged me to make love to her against the wall, at noon on a Monday.

As I pulled into the parking deck at the offices and turned into my spot, I remembered Sara’s words. Shutting off the car, I stared at the concrete wall in front of me. These things are worth fighting for. Sara had taken her own advice home to Chicago’s most deplorable womanizer. She’d looked out for me when she knew I was broken and lost without Chloe. In contrast, I’d let Sara continue on with a man I knew was unfaithful, all because I felt it wasn’t my place to interfere. Where would I be if Sara had done the same?

Contemplating what that said about me, I climbed from the car and into the main lobby. The night security guard waved, then went back to his newspaper as I headed to the elevators. The building was so empty I could hear every creak and click of the machine around me. Wheels whirred along cables and the car gave a quiet thud as it settled on the eighteenth floor.

I knew no one else was here. The team was scrambling to find the newest version of the file, and in their panic were probably scouring their local document files on their laptops. I doubted anyone had thought to come in and check the work server.

In the end I’d had to leave Chloe for what amounted to twenty-three minutes of work, which effectively guaranteed my mood tomorrow would be thunderous. I hated having to do someone else’s job. The contract had been mislabeled and—exactly as I had suspected—put into the wrong folder on the server. In fact, a hard copy was sitting faceup on my desk, where someone actually competent might have noticed it and spared me this trip to the office. I forwarded the file to one of my executives in Marketing and made several copies of the document itself, highlighting the parties on the first page and pointedly placing one on the desk of every person involved in the account, before finally leaving the office. It was, in a way, kind of dickish of me to be so precise. But then, this was what they earned when they pulled me away from Chloe.

I knew these small inconveniences got me too worked up, but it was this type of detail that defined a team. Which was exactly why I needed someone on top of their game for New York. I groaned as I dropped back into my car and started the engine, knowing this was just one more thing I needed to accomplish in the next month.

In my current mood, I was in no state to return to Chloe. I’d only be surly and irritable . . . and not really in the fun way.

God, I just wanted to be with her. Why did it have to be so f*cking difficult? I had so few hours with Chloe as it was, and I didn’t want to waste them because I was stressed about work and apartment hunting and finding someone who could just do their f*cking job without being babysat. We’d complained about not seeing enough of each other, of working too hard, why didn’t we just . . . fix it? Go away? I knew Chloe thought the timing was all wrong, but when would it ever be right? Nobody was going to just hand it to us and since when had I ever been the type of person who waited for something to come along anyway?