My (Mostly) Secret Baby: A Grumpy Boss Romantic Comedy(3)
“Not only are you an asshole, you’re delusional.”
“Suit yourself. I’ve got more important things to do than argue with a B level tennis player.”
She huffed, then hurried after me when I went inside the hotel. I had the room number of the meeting on my phone somewhere but didn’t feel like slowing down to find it. I opted to just charge blindly ahead until little miss Barbie decided to give up.
No, the Barbie thing didn’t work anymore. If she was lucky, she was three inches over five feet tall, and I wasn’t sure how she saw over the net. She was more like Tinkerbell.
Why were the short ones always the most stubborn?
After taking a flight up a random number of stairs and veering through several hallways, I turned to find her trailing behind me. I spread my palms at her, feeling the first signs of my calm beginning to erode away. “What do you want, anyway?”
“I was guessing you knew where you were going if you were so important that you could ruin my career. And I assumed that place was the same place I was going.”
I stared. “You don’t even know where the meeting is?”
She swallowed, then shifted on her feet. “I know where it is. But I wanted to keep my eye on you.”
“I’m sure you did.” I started off in another direction, suddenly wishing I’d just looked at where the damn meeting was. “Would you stop fucking following me, Tinkerbell?”
“Tinkerbell? And no. I said I’m going to keep my eye on you, and I plan to do that. If you try to talk shit about me to some big agent, I want to be there to explain that you’re just the asshole who steals balloons from kids.”
“I didn’t steal it. I let it fly away, and the kid learned a valuable lesson.”
“Yeah. Next time, she should kick grumpy men in expensive suits right in the balls?”
I couldn’t deal with this. I yanked open the first door I saw and went inside, closing it before she could follow.
I shouldn’t have been remotely surprised when she threw her shoulder against the other side of the door and came flying in before I could lock it, sending us both to the ground in a heap.
2
Chelsea
You know those moments in life when time slows down? Those crossroads points where you have a chance to look at your life and wonder how the hell you wound up right here at this particular moment? Where all sounds become a ridiculously deep, slow rumble of hilarity? Like the way he was saying, “Whaaat the fuuuuck” and I was giggling like a madwoman while we hurtled through the air.
This was one of those moments, I thought, as I rode the asshole in the suit through the air like a very expensively dressed toboggan. He braced my fall about as much as a rock, and my knee might’ve slipped between his legs as I came down on top of him. He crunched in on himself, rolling and tossing me to the side. That would teach him to drop the green smoothies and enjoy a little ice cream, next time.
“Hey!” I shouted, giving him a shove as I got to my feet.
He popped up with almost comical quickness. His dark eyebrows were squeezed together like he was already imagining all the ways he wanted to dismantle me piece by piece. For a child kicking, foul mouthed asshole, he was admittedly handsome. Even if I deducted something like ten or twenty points off the attractiveness scale for obvious personality faults, he still clocked in at a ten out of ten, and that made me hate him even more.
He was one of those guys that was obnoxiously blessed by nature. He had the posture of a soldier with a straight back, neck, and the sort of lean muscularity I’d always preferred on men. Basically, if they couldn’t wipe their own asses, they needed to take a break from the gym, and I was fairly sure Mr. Grump could reach his ass just fine with those long… Stop. And please, Chelsea, for the love of God, never picture a hot stranger wiping their own ass again. That’s not good for anybody.
The point was, the more I looked at him, the more I found for my eyes to enjoy. He had a defined nose, a little mole to the side of his mouth that was, of course, oddly appealing. He even had this sort of bow shape to his full lips that was doing dangerous things in my brain. To top it all off, he had nearly black, perfect hair and a pair of blue eyes bright enough to read a book by under the blankets.
“Hey?” For the first time, he didn’t sound icy and calm. “You have got to be the most insane, f—”
“Who shuts a door on someone in the middle of a conversation?”
“It wasn’t a conversation! I was trying to get away from you.”
“Which one is it? You want to get away, or you want to prove to your fragile ego that you can make me say ‘yes?’”
His eyes narrowed into little slits, which made the corners of his cheeks crinkle in a frustratingly sexy way. And just like that, all the fuming anger I’d felt—not just toward him but about the whole situation that led to me coming here today—seemed to flicker and shift inside me. My belly went hot, and my knees threatened to turn soft.
Stop it, knees. We’ve practiced this whole standing thing a couple times, so don’t pretend to be incompetent on me now.
“I should leave you alone,” I said quietly. I reached for the door, but he pressed his palm to it, stopping me.
“You don’t get to talk to me the way you did and walk away, Chelsea.”