Lawyer and the BOSS (Billionaire's Obsession Book 2)

by R. S. Elliot

  "Well," I said awkwardly. "I’m looking forward to working with you in the future."

  Aiden’s mouth twisted in the devastating old smirk that always told me when he was amused with me. It usually preceded a lingering, warm kiss. But now, he just extended his hand to me, controlled and businesslike.

  "Excellent. I look forward to having you on the team, Ms. Prescott."

  Not knowing what else to do, I shook his hand. The warm weight of his fingers around mine brought back a flood of memories of lazy summer days strolling hand-in-hand, or the way his fingers had moved hungrily over my body, touching and teasing, during that memorable night we shared in his parent’s house. He squeezed my palm slightly, and then let me go.

  I was out of the car in a flash, nearly stumbling over my own feet, because anything was better than staring into those soulful eyes and not being able to do anything about it.

  "Thanks so much again, I’m happy to get started," I blurted, almost nonsensically. I waved awkwardly on my way up the steps to the entrance to my apartment, and then let myself in without even looking back.

  I stood with my back to the door in the dark of the apartment, breathing heavily. I glanced out the barred windows just in time to see the taillights of Aiden’s Ferrari disappear around the corner.

  "God," I murmured, pressing off the door. I started up the stairs to my room in a tired daze. "What did I just agree to?"

  Chapter Nine

  Aiden

  I didn’t let myself have second thoughts about the offer I had made to Mia. In fact, I didn’t let myself have second thoughts about much of anything when it came to business decisions; I operated on experience and gut instinct and didn’t waste time fretting over my choices. If something I did panned out, wonderful. If it didn’t, I learned from my mistakes, regrouped, and acted again. It had gotten me pretty far in my career, and I had all but implemented it as a rule for life.

  But my off-the-cuff offer to set up my ex with a job in my company had me thinking plenty over the last couple of days, and I worried if it was prudent or wise considering all the history between us. If Mia was anything like she was when we went our separate ways, she still hated feeling beholden to people. I wanted her to understand that I didn’t view this as a gesture of pity, that she didn’t owe me anything, but it was possible she would drop the job in a few days because she just felt too uncomfortable with the entire arrangement.

  But honestly, I was most worried about the way I was processing this whole thing. I had set up old friends and classmates with jobs at Carrier before, no problem. Occasionally I would run into people with skills I needed and make them an offer. Other times a resume would come into my inbox from someone I knew in high school, and if they were a good fit for a particular department and if I thought them to be honest and hard-working, I would pass their name on with my recommendation to the hiring manager. I got great satisfaction in using my power and wealth to help other people better their lives, especially if they, like me, didn’t have the weight of a college degree behind them to help them land a job. I never expected to find Mia in that position. I never expected to find Mia again, period.

  I had done everything I could to put her out of my mind, building up a life without her, or any other kind of romantic partner, that was so full and successful. I told myself I never missed anything. But it was easier to convince myself that our relationship had just been a childish distraction when she wasn’t sitting in my car, warm and real, and looking at me with those huge green eyes, desperate for my help. Then all those old biological responses came back and started threatening to drive my decision-making. When she looked at me, my chest tightened, my head started to swim, and desire rippled through my subconscious. I was overcome with the urge to touch her, to lace my fingers through hers or cradle her cheek in my hand just like I used to do when she was scared or upset. Every protective instinct I had ever had around her flared back up with a vengeance, even though I thought they were long dead. This was highly concerning. It was a potential liability to my business.

  If I had any sense, I would have wished her goodnight and made sure she made it safely inside her house and left it at that. But I had invited her deeper into my life, into my place of work, and I had put myself at her disposal. It didn’t take a sociologist to see that I was building a very messy workplace dynamic for myself and potentially for Mia, but somehow, I hadn’t thought about any of this when I had her in my car.

  But it was too late to take anything back as I loitered near the entrance to Carrier Solutions, adjusting my cufflinks and glancing down at my watch. Any moment now, Mia would be stepping off the elevator onto the twentieth floor and into her new career, and I would have to be a perfectly professional and ever-gracious host. That meant no reminiscing, no old inside jokes, no asking about her personal life, and absolutely no touching.

  That last part should be the easiest of all, but I would be lying if I said my mind hadn’t wandered frequently to other areas over the last couple days. To her skin, and her hair, and how good it would feel to touch the translucent skin of her inner wrist and feel her steady pulse, or to brush my thumb across the rose-petal softness of her lower lip. Thoughts like these hounded me waking and sleeping, but I did my best to repress them or dismiss them as the stress fantasies of someone who apparently needed to get laid.

  Mia was just a friend. I was just doing her a favor. Whatever we had between us as kids was ancient history, over and done with.

  Then she stepped out of the elevator, and my heart skipped a beat. She was wearing a raspberry colored wrap dress and black stockings. A wine-rich lip color stained her beautiful mouth. Her green eyes were nervous and bright as she shouldered her purse and walked right up to me, like no time had passed at all since we last held each other in our arms, since I was still the person in the world she was the most comfortable with.

  "Hi," she said with a little blush in her cheeks that made me want to kiss her in front of God and everyone. I clasped my hands behind my back, hoping that would quell the instinct to reach out and touch her. This was not going to be easy.

  "Good morning," I said in what I hoped was a brisk, professional tone. The sort of tone any boss would use on his employee. "Ready to start the day?"

  "Absolutely. Thanks again for this opportunity. It means a lot to me."

  "It’s nothing, really. Can I show you where you’ll be working?"

  She nodded, smiling at me with total trust. I turned from her and led the way through the sleek glass doors emblazoned with my last name etched into the glass by 3D laser printing. It was a lot easier than looking her in the face. Inside, my employees glanced up from their phones or stole a few stares from their places at computers or water coolers. I was known to be a bit of a micro-manager, oftentimes involving myself in issues that most CEOs wouldn’t bother with, but I had never handled the onboarding of a new employee before. It was highly unusual, but I knew that if I carried myself with confidence, they wouldn’t ask any suspicious questions. Most things in life could be won by asking for them as though you deserved them, and carried off by simply acting like you had every right to them.

  I had allocated Mia a small secretarial desk in the east wing of Carrier’s floor, close enough to my office that she could easily come over to pick up papers or ask me questions, but not close enough to cast aspersions on our relationship. I had never spent so much time thinking through the way any of the other new hires I had onboarded looked in relation to me, and that worried me. Why did I care so much about Mia, and what people thought of her?

  She set her bag down on the desk and looked around with poorly concealed wonder. The office wasn’t impressive by any high-end luxury standard, but it was large and clean and bustling with people in suits and dresses, and that might not have been an environment she had worked in before. She had probably imagined working in a sleek urban law firm that felt something like this during her days in school, during those not-so-glamorous long nights full of messy buns and
ramen noodles. I had gotten used to my surroundings, but I remembered how taken aback I had been during my first few weeks working in the city. I let her have her moment, averting my eyes so as not to stare while she took it all in.

  "Think this will work for the time being?" I asked eventually.

  Mia smiled at me, so brightly I was nearly blinded. How anyone ever managed to look away from her when she had a smile so entrancing, I would never know. I nodded at her, tucking my hands into my pockets to keep them from wandering. They seemed to have a mind of their own around her.

  "Great. I’ll send someone over for your onboarding in a few minutes. Feel free to get settled in and have a look around. And don’t be nervous. If you can handle basic office tasks, you can handle your first day of work here. I won’t give you anything you aren’t ready for."

  I couldn’t help but remember the last time I had told her something like that, and I couldn’t help the hot desire that curled through my stomach. I had to get out of here before I made a fool of myself.

  "Thank you, Aiden. I’m excited to get started."

  "Good. I look forward to working with you."

  With that, I turned from her and was soon weaving my way through the cubicles back to my corner office. Eyes followed me, but I brushed them off. People could talk all they wanted to; I still ran this business. They didn’t need to know that I was feeling unsure, possibly for the first time in years. Mia could get under my skin like no one else, but I couldn't let that happen as long as she was working with me.

  I was going to have to be a rock around her and keep my thoughts from wandering back to her perfect smiling mouth and touchably soft curls of hair during the day. Something told me that would prove a whole lot easier said than done.

  Chapter Ten

  Mia

  My first day at Carrier Solutions passed in an overwhelming but exciting blur. A few minutes after Aiden left me at my desk, bigger and cleaner than any workspace I had ever had before, I was approached by Cassandra, one of the onboarding specialists from human resources. She walked me through the basic tasks of my job, which were, as Aiden promised, pretty standard for a secretarial role. Cassandra was warm and good-humored, and if she knew anything about how I had secured this position, she didn’t mention it. She didn’t treat me like a china doll either and expected me to learn fast and be ready for pop quizzes on the fly about the proper procedure when answering calls, scheduling meetings, or running messages throughout the business. This was a great comfort to me. I was used to people having high expectations of me, and I liked the satisfaction of hopping on a learning curve to meet them.

  Within an hour, any lingering hesitation I had about the ethics of taking this job, or whether I was going to be able to set my pride aside enough to rise to it, had vanished. I was too busy to care about whether I had gotten the job out of pity or not and happier for the busyness. It was so nice to have my mind engaged in my work after months of ferrying french fries and Coca Cola like a worker bee at Gino’s. I didn’t even glance down at my phone or worry about the kind of messages I might be getting, even though I knew I would probably clock out of work to find a lot of pissy text messages, maybe even some strongly worded emails, waiting for me.

  The other people who worked at Carrier seemed to mostly be driven, talented young professionals like myself. Some came from a tech background or a sports background, and there were some fashionable PR types in the mix as well, but they all seemed to move together like the cogs of a well-oiled machine. They were the kind of people I could see myself getting drinks with after work or gossiping with around a water cooler. Or at least, they seemed to be as I surreptitiously spied on them from my desk near Aiden’s office. I didn’t know why he had seated me so close to him, maybe just to keep an eye on me and make sure I didn’t screw up, but I was grateful for it. There was something comforting in knowing that he was right there, behind a door, if I really needed him.

  In my casual eavesdropping, I heard plenty of talk about Aiden, albeit spoken of in delighted, hushed voices. It was like listening to children swap swear words or gossip about their teachers when the adults’ backs were turned. It wasn’t the weirdest workplace dynamic I had ever seen, but it made me wonder about what kind of sway Aiden had over his employees. Plenty of people never even saw the CEOs of the companies they worked for, but they talked about him like he could appear at any moment to audit them. I was picking up some serious micromanagement vibes, which didn’t surprise me. Aiden had been the biggest team player of them all in high school, but he also had a tendency to delegate and direct when on the field, sometimes so much that he’d butt heads with his coach. His instincts were rarely wrong, but he definitely had a problem not being the one calling the shots.

  "I hear he hooked up with some girl from marketing last week," one of my female co-workers said as she strolled past with a friend. She was using a manilla folder to partially block her mouth and the gossip coming out of it, but I still managed to catch it. Maybe she wasn’t being very careful around me because I was new and not yet embroiled in office politics.

  "No way! He’s not that messy. It’s never anyone from work."

  "Well, I heard that whoever she was, she looked an awful lot like a girl from marketing."

  "Listen, I wouldn’t be mad about it if it were me," the other woman, a tall brunette, said. They had come to a stop at the corner of two empty desks a few feet away from mine, dawdling before going their separate ways back to work. I could barely make out what they were saying, but I strained my ears while trying to appear as inconspicuous as possible.

  "Oh, come on."

  "What? He’s smoking hot, you can’t deny it. You’ve seriously never considered a little office romance?"

  "Maybe if it was actually a romance. There’s nothing romantic about Aiden Carrier. I can’t stand those lay ‘em and leave ‘em guys. They make my skin crawl."

  "Well, I wouldn’t mind if the sex was good."

  "And that’s the difference between you and me," her friend said with a laugh, tucking her manilla folder back under her arm. "I say sex is always best when there are feelings involved. And commitment, preferably. Otherwise, I’m just stressed the whole time about whether or not I’m going to get treated like shit in the morning."

  "Seriously, we must be from different planets. Anyway, I’ve heard he’s perfectly polite the morning after. Just not very sappy."

  "Well, that’s nice at least. How about you take a swing at him and then report back so I can decide whether or not it’s worth my time?"

  The two women giggled, lowering their voices to a whisper when people glanced over and then scurried off to their own desks with wicked little smirks on their face. I ducked my head down before any wandering eyes could land on me, pretending that I had been absorbed in learning the internal call system the entire time.

  I had no idea Aiden had developed such a reputation. It seemed absolutely improbable to me that sweet, smitten Aiden, who had only ever had eyes for me when we were together, had suddenly developed the appetites and habits of a bottom-of-the-barrel New York casanova. I would never have called that in a hundred years and yet here was the proof, snickering and gossiping on the clock. Just how many women had Aiden picked up and slept with before never calling again? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  I didn’t see any more of him for the rest of the day, but I had plenty to keep me busy. No one was taking things easy on me just because I had been hand-hired by the CEO, and by the time I caught my subway home at the end of the day, I was pleasantly exhausted from a day of hard, gratifying work. I wouldn’t be saving the world as a secretary, but I did have an essential role to play in a large, dynamic organization, and that beat working the graveyard shift at Gino’s any day. It would take me some time to feel perfectly at home at Carrier, and I was sure to mess up plenty on my way there, but for the time being, I was satisfied. Even more, I had nearly cried when my onboarding manager had mentioned my salary. It wasn’t lavish by any
means, but it was way more than I had been bringing home as a waitress, and it was so freeing to not have to rely on tips to put food in my refrigerator and keep a roof over my head. I still needed a roommate. But this month, I was going to be alright.

  I treated myself to a big plate of rice and curry from my favorite Thai food cart on my way back to the apartment and carried it under my arm as I rummaged around for my keys. Tonight, I decided I was going to do something kind for myself. Maybe watch an old movie or take a long bubble bath with a book or a podcast. I wasn’t going to think about work or the diner, and I wasn’t going to let myself get caught up wondering when the next time I was going to get to speak to Aiden was or if he was thinking about me too.

  I shouldered open the door to my apartment and was surprised when a small envelope went skittering across my floor. It looked like someone had slipped the envelope under my door while I was at work. It was entirely unmarked with no handwriting or return address on it. I stopped to pick it up and turned it over in my hands, discarding the bag of Thai food on the kitchen counter. I had no idea who might be slipping me letters under the door when I had a perfectly fine, working P.O. box right downstairs. Maybe it was my landlord with some announcement or request to be let into my unit for repairs. I hoped it wasn’t another rent increase.

  I tore open the envelope with my thumbnail and found that the only thing inside was a large glossy photograph of a city at night. For a moment, I had no idea what I was looking at, my brain so baffled that it could hardly place the familiar streetlight, brown brick building face, and the well-known stretch of gutter. Then it dawned on me. I was looking at a photograph of my own apartment building, taken a few nights earlier. I could tell it had been taken a few nights earlier because Aiden’s Ferrari featured prominently in this picture, and I could see myself chatting away with him through the prying, zoomed-in eye of the camera lens.