Well Suited (Red Lipstick Coalition #4)(48)

He frowned. “A beautiful, intelligent, driven woman?”

I shook my head. “I’m difficult. I’m inflexible. Calculating, cold.”

“Oh, I dunno. I think you’re hot.” He was wearing The Look, his eyes smoldering and his lips lush and smirking.

With a roll of my eyes, I laughed. “You are so strange for wanting someone as strange as me.”

He appraised my face, smoothing my hair. “You’re different, and every difference you have, I admire. Everything you consider difficult and inflexible, I understand. We’re very much alike, you and me.”

“I know. But…Theo, you could have a girl who’s beautiful and charming like you. You could have someone who would complement you, make you shine brighter.”

“Well, that’s the trick, Kate,” he said, angling for a kiss. “I don’t want anyone but you.”

His lips connected with mine at the same moment something in my chest twisted, the feeling foreign, only instigated by him and him alone.

Never had I been so affected.

He was comprised of things I didn’t understand, his presence alone enough to keep me both off-kilter and upright. But I couldn’t imagine any other way. I couldn’t imagine parting ways with him, going back to my old life. The woman I had been a few months ago was gone, an echo of who I had become. Everything had changed. And Theo had shepherded me through every step with patience and understanding, the incremental progress bringing us to this moment, this space.

He knew me. In an unreasonably short period of time, he understood me in ways I wasn’t sure I even understood myself. It afforded him the ability to anticipate my needs, to guide me into a relationship in such minute degrees that I hadn’t realized until that exact moment how deep we’d gone.

And the more shocking realization was that I wasn’t scared. I couldn’t be, not with Theo at the helm.

I wasn’t scared because I trusted him.

If magic were real, Theo was Houdini.

He broke the kiss, though the press of his cock into my hips belied his lips when they said, “Come on, I’ll feed you breakfast.”

“Sausage and eggs?” I said with a smile and an arch of my back that ground my body against his.

A laugh. “Did you just make a dick joke, Kate?”

“What?” I said coyly. “Hot sausage sounds delicious.”

“And I know how you like your eggs.”

“How’s that?”

“Fertilized.”

Before I could laugh, he kissed me and gave me all the hot sausage I could handle.





17





Makings of a Man





Katherine

19 weeks, 1 day

Two weeks had passed in a blur.

Phase Two of our relationship was in full swing. We were officially together and spent every spare second we had taking advantage of the newfound freedom.

That was how it felt—like freedom, not the shackles I’d thought it’d be. Beyond logic, it was a relief. There was nothing left between us, the rules checked off and retired, one by one. It was so strange to enjoy someone’s company so much. I usually had a hard two-hour limit with other people before needing to retreat, requiring solitude to recharge.

It almost felt wrong to feel so right. It was a betrayal of everything I’d thought I knew.

And yet, here I was, enjoying every second of it.

I’d been busy at work after joining a committee against my will, but if I was going to land the promotion as a researcher, the committee would help since it was being run by a shark.

Library staff could be sorted into one of three categories: the young idealists, the old grumps, and the sharks.

The idealists were out to change the world through community outreach with projects ranging from inmates and new moms to—no lie—the wealthy. Rachel, one of our newest pages, had been trying to get a program together to reach out to the underserved wealthy in Manhattan, and on its fourth denial, she had a very public meltdown, complete with open sobbing and a brokenhearted monologue about the good we could do if we could only reach the rich with the power of books.

The grumps were their own breed, mostly working in circulation where things were the same every day. There was a stability of daily repetition they seemed to prefer. They typically stuck to the circulation room, sorting books that had been returned, or, as pages like me, shelving all the books that had been sorted. They abhorred the committees the idealists and sharks created in abundance. And though the grumps were generally well over fifty, I was easily categorized here.

And then there were the sharks. For some reason, the library system attracted a cache of ambitious individuals who should have been working as CEOs or lawyers but instead chose to make fifty thousand a year in the public library system. They advanced quickly, clustering around the top of the administration of each branch, and approached their jobs with the micromanaging and enterprising attitude of a politician. They were the suits of our industry, more interested in numbers and performance than anything, seeking high-profile programs and always looking for ways to get the library more government money.

In essence, they thrived on making things as difficult as possible for the rest of us, all in the name of efficiency. All it took was one jackass going to a convention, and for two months, they’d try to instill changes that would inevitably fail at everything beyond pissing off everyone in circulation.