Dirty Filthy Fix: A Fixed Trilogy Novella (Fixed #5.5)(24)

“You keep giving head like that,” he said when he pulled away, “I’m gonna want to keep you around.”

My chest constricted like he’d strung me up in a too-tight corset.

What he’d said—it was sweet and sexy and something that you said after you came when you were still high on the endorphins.

But the problem was, I was starting to feel the same.





Chapter Eight



As soon as we arrived at the event at the hotel, I realized this wasn’t just a “work thing” as Nate had said it was.

It was a wedding.

Nate Sinclair had taken me on our second public outing to a wedding.

I mentally erased every wonderful, amazing thing I’d thought about him in the last forty-eight hours. I took it back. It was null and void. All of it.

Weddings were the worst. Weddings meant commitment. Taking somebody to a wedding was making an overly bold statement. It meant you were serious about someone. It meant you wanted to be with them. At the very least, it meant you were dating.

And we were most certainly not dating.

I wondered if Nate knew that.

I made a note to tell him as plainly and clearly as possible. As soon as I got the chance. Unfortunately, it would have to wait, because we arrived at the wedding (a fucking wedding!) just as the ceremony began, and I had to keep my mouth shut.

The wedding itself was lovely—even I had to admit that. It was a simple ceremony between Weston King, one of the guys who owned the ad agency with Nate, and Elizabeth Dyson, a well-known debutante. But it wasn’t like I cared about either of them.

I made a note to tell Nate about that too.

But as soon as the wedding was over, everyone started to funnel past the divider in the room to the open space beyond. The reception began immediately, and with everyone crowding around Nate, I couldn’t yell at him then, either. I had to play it cool.

Fortunately, I had enough experience working at Pierce Industries to know how to put on the charm, and I did so, greeting everyone that came up to us with a smile and a nod. Engaging in conversation with polite small talk. I was familiar with the standard topics of conversation among the elite. Nate seemed to be somewhat bored with that, but it was his job, so I understood. He was charming, nonetheless. I could tell that he liked talking to people, liked mingling with them when the conversations got real, and occasionally they did. One couple engaged him in a conversation about a recent vacation they’d taken to Tibet. Nate, it turned out, had once spent a couple weeks there climbing and buying antique Buddhist statues. Just listening to that was a fascinating fifteen minutes.

I was still mad, though.

And then, just when I thought we had a break in the swarm, just when I thought I’d be able to give Nate more than a scowl, we bumped into the one person I never wanted to see in a situation like this—my boss, Hudson Pierce.

“Patricia,” Hudson exclaimed, as surprised to see me as I was shocked to see him. “I didn’t expect to see you here. Are you a friend of the groom or the bride?”

“Hudson,” his wife nagged him. “Leave her alone. She’s off the clock. Her private life is her business. Not yours.”

Alayna gave me a tired grin. Likely she’d been up late with her infant twins. She was still in the phase where she always looked exhausted when I saw her. Poor woman. I remembered seeing that look on my mother’s face in photographs from when I was young, and then seeing it replicated on several of my sisters’ faces when their own babies were born.

“You look lovely, Trish,” she said, with moderate enthusiasm. “That color brings your eyes out.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Pierce.” I shook my head, realizing that calling her Mrs. Pierce was maybe a little too formal for the occasion. “Laney,” I said at the same time as she said, “Laney.”

Nate turned to me with a flute of champagne he’d just scavenged off of some waiter’s tray. “Here you go, babe.”

I felt my face turn fifty shades of red. Well, Nate Sinclair had just outed us to my boss.

And there wasn’t even an “us” to out!

Now not only was I mad, I was petrified.

“You’re here with Nathan?” Hudson remarked, his eyes darting carefully from me to his newest ad manager.

“Yes,” Nate said at the same time as I said, “No, we’re just...”

But what were we “just”?

There was nothing to say. There was no answer I could give, no excuse. “We came together, yes.”

“I didn’t realize you knew each other outside of the office,” Hudson said pointedly.

I searched my mental files to see if I could remember if there were any rules about dating people that walk through his doors, but I couldn’t remember that there were any. Those had just always been my rules. But even if they weren’t official policy, it still felt like the wrong answer to say that I was on a date with Nate. It felt like a conflict somehow.

And truth be told, I did know Nate from somewhere else. But I wasn’t about to admit where from.

“We—” I looked to Nate, searching for help.

Nate studied me, sensing the source of my dismay. “We met at the party of a mutual friend.” He saved the day. Thank God.

“So you’re dating,” Laney said, trying to make the moment celebratory but inadvertently making it weirder because I hadn’t had time to let him know we weren’t dating.