Tapping The Billionaire (Bad Boy Billionaires #1)(48)
New Yorkers scoffed and jumped out of the way, burning me with their dirty looks and judging eyes. The yellow of a cab shone like a beacon in front of me.
I ran for it without thought or pause or respect for my surroundings. The heavy leather of a handbag may have even grazed my shoulder in a glancing blow, but I didn’t care. Words thrummed in my head in time with the memory of her heartbeat, building and buzzing around my brain until I almost couldn’t stand it. The not knowing, the unlikelihood—it was all too much.
“The Winthrop Building. Fast as you can go,” I demanded abruptly to the cabbie, but he didn’t bat an eye at my brusque delivery—grunts and commands were the nature of more than half of New York City.
I dug in my bag for my wallet and fished out the first bill I came to. With a swift thrust, I dropped it through the plexiglass window and jumped out while the last notes of his screeching tires still rung in the air.
Pigeons panicked and people swerved as I wove my way through them, and a woman strummed a guitar on the corner.
The building was locked after hours, but being the CEO afforded me access to the keyless entry code on the main door. Until today, I could honestly say I’d never broken in to my office building before.
Sixteen smashes of the elevator call button, another code, and a fidgety ride later, I stepped off onto the fifteenth floor in all of my sweaty glory and strode straight for Human Resources.
The lights were dimmed, and once again, the outer door to Cynthia’s office door was locked, but nothing could stop me at this point. Not a lock and certainly not my morals.
I ran to my office at a near sprint and around the back of my desk, yanking drawers open one by one in search of my old master key that opened all of the individual office doors. I hadn’t had a need for it in years, so it took me several minutes of digging through pounds of junk to find it.
Priority for tomorrow: My desk needed to be f*cking reorganized. Stat.
Mud under my fingernails from practice, I clutched the key tightly and jogged back down the hall.
With a turn and a click, I was in, moments away from officially violating half a dozen privacy laws.
I breathed a sigh of relief when the drawer of the filing cabinet slid open with ease, laughing maniacally to myself before trailing into words.
“Of course it’s not f*cking locked. It’s not like she was expecting a f*cking psychopath to break into her office and dig through it.”
Like fluttering wings, my fingers shuffled through the labels, knowing Cynthia followed an unbreakable filing system. Nothing was ever out of order or place, and finding it would be easy enough.
Not knowing the actual wording of the label challenged me a little bit, but it wasn’t more than five minutes before I was pulling it out of its spot and cracking it open.
Tracing the lines of the employee names, I ran my finger down the page, muttering through last names until the one I wanted stood out in stark relief.
“Cummings, Georgia.” I slid it across the page in some kind of slow-motion daydream until the other column sealed my fate in undeniable bold text.
TAPRoseNEXT.
Some Kind of Wonderful.
Gary clicked to the next PowerPoint slide, stating something about the cost effectiveness of blah blah blah… Who knows what he was talking about by that point? We’d been in the meeting for over two hours, and I was seconds away from losing my cool.
My stomach growled its irritation.
I glanced at my watch and noted it was five minutes past three, which meant it was five minutes past my daily scheduled sugar fix. I had a Greek yogurt and a leftover piece of cherry cheesecake sitting inside the break room fridge with my name on it.
Conclusion: Someone needed to end this or I was going to end Gary.
It was Thursday afternoon, and it’d been five whole days since I’d had any real private interaction with Kline. We’d texted a lot, snuck a few minutes to chat and say hello here and there, and even had lunch together twice, but he’d been unbelievably swamped with work and activities and I was still one hundred percent determined to keep a professional relationship in the office. The combination of all that crap had put the kibosh on substantial alone time. And let me tell you, the memory of last weekend had my anticipation riding at an all-time high.
Gary plodded over to his laptop, tapping around on the keys. The man moved like a turtle. He was a genius when it came to numbers, but a moron when it came to social cues. While everyone in the room was moments away from falling face first into a coma, he appeared to think we had all the time in the world to discuss more goddamn numbers.
I was numbered the f*ck out.
“And if you’ll just give me a minute here,” he mouth-breathed, licking his lips and clicking away. “I’ll pull up another spreadsheet that documents how effective we’ve been in narrowing down our target ratios for the last financial quarter.”
Jesus Christ in a peach tree.
My stomach roared its impatience. Hunger pangs. Crazy, loud hunger pangs. It’s a mystery no one else heard it over Gary’s droning.
The flash of a text notification caught my eye.
Kline: Was that your stomach, Cummings?
Okay. Obviously, someone heard them.
The handsome bastard was sitting beside me. Honestly, I had no idea why he was subjecting himself to this meeting. It was solely for my marketing team. I glanced at Kline out of the corner of my eye, scratching the side of my face with my middle finger. His body jerked noticeably with the effort to conceal his laugh.