Melt for You (Slow Burn #2)(73)

“Yes. I’ll call it Mountain Man Unmasked. It’ll be an instant bestseller.”

“Okay. I’ll approve it. But only if you include the sonnet about my eyes.”

Our gazes catch and hold. I look away first, blushing.

Back at the office building, he asks me if I want him to come up, but I tell him no. I’ve got visions of a mob of salivating females lined up in front of the reception desk, waiting for him to emerge from the elevator so they can pounce.

We hug on the sidewalk, then he’s gone. I stand there waving at his taxi until it turns a corner and disappears. Then I trudge into the building and onto the elevator, bracing myself for whatever might await me on the thirty-third floor.

It’s a bloodbath.

First, I’m accosted by Kim, the receptionist. She leaps up from her desk the instant the elevator doors open and runs up to me, flapping her hands, the tic in her eye going so fast it looks painful.

“Oh my gosh, Joellen, I didn’t know who that was when he came in. I only knew he was big and handsome and oh!” She bites her fist. “So hot! But then Shasta told me who he was and showed me the picture of you guys on TMZ and geez, are you dating him? How long has this been going on?”

“He’s my neighbor,” I say wearily, headed back to my desk. Kim follows beside me, skipping every few feet in excitement.

“So you’re not dating him? Oh gosh, that’s a shame, that man is just”—she fans herself—“scorching! But he’s your neighbor, you say? Maybe I could come over and hang out sometime, you know, like tonight? Are you free?”

Shasta spots me from a distance and bolts from her cubicle like she’s been coughed out. She races down the hallway toward me while I brace myself for impact.

“Joellen!” she shrieks, grabbing my arm. “Holy fucksicles that man is ten times hotter in person than he is in pictures! And he’s huge!”

“Don’t ask me about his ju—”

“You have to tell me what he looks like naked! Please? Pretty please? Just give me a hint how big it is! Like this?” She holds her hands about a foot apart, then adds a few more inches. “This?”

Irritated by her lewd questioning, I scowl at her. “You’re deranged, Shasta. He’s not a piece of meat. Let it go.”

I toss my handbag onto the floor, sit in my chair, and start straightening things on my desk in an attempt to look busy, but I’ve got two females in heat hovering over me who aren’t about to let me off the hook until I tell them more about their newfound stud. Their excited clucking and flapping stirs up all the other chickens in the henhouse, until suddenly I’ve got a crowd of women at my cubicle door, squawking like mad.

Sue Wong, she of the razor-edged bangs and enviable dimples, wants to know how Cam and I met. Another acquisitions editor, Bethany, wants to know if he has a brother. Questions fly at me from every side until my head is spinning.

“You guys!” I shout above the fray. “Chill out! He’s just my neighbor!”

“What’s going on here?”

Portia’s freezing voice cuts through the noise like a samurai sword. The hens scatter in terror until it’s only me and Portia left, looking at each other in silence.

Portia’s wearing a lovely sheath dress the color of a new penny. With her perfect gold hair and steely silver-blue eyes, she looks like she was recently minted.

“Sorry about that. I, uh, think everyone was a little . . . overexcited by my visitor.”

A ghost of a smile softens her normally pinched mouth. “One can hardly blame them. The last time we had a male visitor on the thirty-third floor was when Theodore Scanlon came in to negotiate his new contract.”

Theodore Scanlon is one of Maddox Publishing’s most infamous authors. He’s older than dirt, has halitosis that could kill a grown man at ten paces, and has made ogling cleavage into a spectator sport. His crime novels—all excellent sellers—include a disturbingly high incidence of sex between siblings. Which makes the old publishing maxim “Write what you know” take on a whole disgusting new meaning.

“Did you have a nice lunch?”

I warily eye Portia, not trusting her innocent question and bland, nonwitchy smile. “Yes, thanks.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I meant it when I said you deserved it, Joellen. You really do.”

This is so weird. Why is she being so nice? What’s she up to?

She turns to leave, but I call her back. “Portia, didn’t you want to talk to me about my workload?”

She blinks, obviously confused, but then her look clears. She says airily, “Oh, never mind. I found what I was looking for. Just . . . moving things around.”

She leaves without explaining what those cryptic words meant. I ponder her strange behavior until something so horrible occurs to me that it steals my breath.

Portia is in love with Michael.

Oh God. That has to be it! She’s been an unrelenting bitch to me for ten years, always watching me like a hawk, always appearing suddenly whenever Michael appears, like she’s keeping an eye on me. Like she’s guessed how I feel about him. It couldn’t have been hard—I follow him around like a nursing calf after its mommy. Then the one day a man shows up to take me out to lunch, she does a one-eighty that could cause whiplash and is nice—because I’m no longer a threat if I have a boyfriend.