Devastated (Anger Management, #1)(21)

“I see,” Ryan murmured as he glanced back towards the kitchen. “And is there a reason why we’re stalking her ex online?”

“Boredom,” Hunter drawled, clicking on the next tab only to cringe when he saw the hooker sporting track marks that the little prick was bragging about fucking.

“Ah, hookers,” Ryan noted, sounding disgusted.

“It’s one of his favorite pastimes.”

The other was tearing Kylie apart, something that Hunter noted that he did when he wasn’t bragging about how many hookers he’d fucked, posting questionable porn, complaining about how fucking stupid his boss was, or bashing his clients, something that Hunter found interesting since it looked like he was logging onto this site multiple times a day from different IP addresses. He also couldn’t help but wonder how his clients would feel if they knew the electrician they’d hired was breaking into their computers and taking screenshots and sharing their files on this website.

“So, what exactly have we learned about Miss Davis?” Ryan asked, sounding amused while Hunter clicked on the next post and-

“Oh, that’s fucking disgusting,” Ryan said right around the time that Hunter decided that he’d had enough for one day.

“She married a sick fuck and her family hates her,” Hunter said, sighing heavily as he cleared the history before closing his laptop and leaned back in his chair as his attention shifted back to the woman who he still couldn’t figure out.

He wasn’t sure how it happened. One day, he was giving her busy work to keep her out of his way and the next, she was color-coordinating his files, commandeering his desk, taking over all the bullshit that he had to deal with every day, slapping post-it notes all over the fucking place, taking over the morning meetings, and shoving memos at him to look over morning, noon, and night and—

She was also the only reason that he hadn’t lost his fucking mind.

Every time the walls started to close in on him, she was there, shoving another memo in his face, keeping him company in the morning during his workout, going over memos with him during breakfast, hunting him down at lunchtime, and bugging the shit out of him to give final approval on all the shit that she did during the day that he didn’t want to do at dinner time so that he didn’t have time to think about how badly he’d fucked up his life.

Over the past few weeks, he’d found himself even more intrigued with his own personal mystery, trying to figure her out. She was quiet, kept to herself, always greeted him with a smile that looked less forced these days, was severely uncoordinated, hardworking, never complained, bitched, or pissed him off, never left the house unless he needed something, and she was too fucking kind for her own good. He still wasn’t sure why that bothered him, but it did.

When he’d first asked her to help with the files, he’d expected her to do it with another one of those determined smiles that he really fucking hated, but instead, she’d devoured everything he’d shoved at her and seemed to be enjoying every single minute of it. It didn’t matter how much work he gave her, she’d do whatever he asked and get it back to him with a greedy look in her eye, desperate for more. Every morning he found her waiting for him in his gym, sitting on the floor, iPad in hand, and looking so damn eager that he-

“Are you sleeping with her?”

“Not all of us fuck the help,” Hunter drawled, shifting his attention to the thick envelope that Ryan was toying with.

“Really? Because I find that it’s a great way to improve morale,” Ryan said, as Hunter gave up waiting for the asshole to fuck him over and grabbed the envelope.

He tore the envelope open and felt his brows arch to his hairline as he took in the face sheet written up by his men, letting him know that there was so much more to his assistant than he thought.

---

Maybe she should take this as a sign that it was time to buy a new car, Kylie thought even as she gave up hope that her car would start on its own. With a heavy sigh and a prayer that this wasn’t as bad as the last time, she reluctantly popped the hood and reached for her phone only to have it fall between the front seats. Resigning herself to searching for it later, she climbed out and made her way to the front of the car with absolutely no idea what she was doing. But that was fine, more than fine, Kylie decided since she also didn’t seem to have any idea what she was doing with her life either.

“What the hell am I going to do?” Kylie asked, sighing heavily as she reached under the hood and released the latch.

She should buy a new car, she told herself, but she’d been hoping to put it off for as long as humanly possible since that meant that she was either going to have to empty her bank account or get a loan, something that she really didn’t want to do. It had taken her seven years to fix the damage that her parents did to her credit and four years to pay off the credit card debt that her ex left her with, and she wasn’t exactly in a hurry to start the process all over again. But she might not have a choice, she realized, as she stared down at the engine that was most likely on its last leg.

It took her a minute to find the rust-colored stick, another minute to get it to lodge in the slot correctly, and ten minutes before she finally accepted the fact that she had absolutely no idea what she was looking for. Maybe she needed to top off liquids, she hoped, as she checked the windshield wiper fluid, the coolant, and finally the oil only to decide that she probably shouldn’t have skipped her last oil change.