“What the heck are you doing?” Tiff hisses in a whisper when she sticks her head into the room and finds me on my hands and knees. “It was supposed to be an in and out job.”
I glare at her. “I dropped some papers, and now I have to make sure they are all in the right order so he doesn’t know I was here.” My teeth clench together.
“You are ridiculous, you know.” She laughs as she walks over and starts throwing things in different files. “And you worry way too much!”
Holding up a white paper in her hand, she crows triumphantly, “See! I think I found it!”
Just as relief courses through my body, the ping of the elevator shatters the silence. Our eyes widen as we leap up and look out the window in the door to the cubicle area, and I gasp. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” I chant
“Um, Chloe, is that who I think it is?” She looks over at me, and no words come out of my mouth. The fear has made my voice disappear.
I try to stay calm, but I’m surprised she can’t hear my heart beating in my chest. “Oh yeah, that’s my boss.”
My heart pounds even harder now. “We have to hide.”
I look around the office. “Quick, behind the couch.” I point at the couch right in front of the tree.
I get there first, and Tiff practically falls over my head as she trips in her rush to hide. “I told you this was a freaking bad idea.” She winces as we duck down, and the tree teeters back and forth. “A bad fucking idea,” she hisses again as we steady the tree.
Just then, the door opens, and he walks to his desk without bothering to turn on the lights. I have to wonder if it’s a Christmas fucking miracle that he doesn’t catch us. “Fuck,” Zach curses, “where the heck is it?” He sorts through the papers impatiently.
His phone rings. “What do you want?” he says, answering it. “Yeah, sorry, I am just looking for something I lost.” He pauses. “How the heck did you get your car keys stuck in your car?” Another pause. “Yeah, I know how stressed you are, dude. I’m coming.”
He ruffles through the papers a bit longer until finally he huffs and leaves the office, slamming the door behind him.
I lean my head down, letting all the stress leave my body. But then I look over at Tiff and feel like the biggest jerk. She has tears rolling down her face. “I think I broke my foot,” she whispers.
My eye heart sinks when I see that her foot’s turning purple. “Oh, my god! I told you to put on boots and not that ballerina shoe you said looked cute.”
She glares at me now, her teeth clenching. “Get me out of here,” she half begs, half snarls. I nod, wrapping my hand around her waist and pulling her up with me. “You owe me so much for this,” she says, and I swallow, knowing I’ll owe her for the rest of our lives. She hops on one foot as I hold her steady on the other side.
We are standing at the elevator with my arm around Tiff’s back to hold her up when I guiltily ask, “Can I have the letter?”
She hands it over, and I suddenly notice that yes, it is my letter, but there is handwriting on the back … Zach’s handwriting.
I only have a chance to read “Dear Chloe” when the elevator finally arrives. The doors open, and Zach is standing inside.
Zach
Jingle Bell Rock
“Chloe.” The elevator door opens, and I come face-to-face with her.
“Um …” Her eyes go wide when she sees me. She has her arm around her friend and seems to be helping her stand. “Um …”
“Get in the elevator,” the woman beside her hisses, and I notice her foot then.
“What happened?” I ask, worried. The elevator doors start to close, and I stick out my hand to keep it open.
“She hit her foot,” Chloe says, “walking to my desk.”
“My foot feels like it’s being suffocated by a shoe,” she says and then turns to me. “Hi.” She glares at me. “I’m Tiff.”
“Um, hi,” I say to her and then look down at her foot. “It’s purple.”
“Yup,” she says with a nod. The elevator door opens, and I help them both out of the elevator.
“How did you get here?” I ask, knowing that Chloe doesn’t have a car.
“We took the train,” Chloe says, and I can see the tears now forming in her eyes. “I’m going to get a cab.”
“Nonsense,” I say. “My car is right outside. I’ll drive you.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Chloe says, and she is acting nervous.
“This is so cute,” Tiff says, “but I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
“Okay, let’s get her in the car,” Chloe says, and I lead them to my truck parked at the curb.
Chloe opens the back door and turns Tiff around. “Okay, fall back on the seat, and I’ll go on the other side and pull you in.”
“Or,” I say, watching them, “you can sit down and then turn, and we can lift your foot on the seat.” I watch them as they think about my suggestion. We get her into the truck, and Chloe gets into the front seat. It’s the first time we’ve been in my truck together. I try to act cool by not looking over at her every five seconds.
I hired her last year after one meeting. I knew she would be perfect for the job, and I was not wrong. What I wasn’t expecting was to fall for her. “I’m going to get a wheelchair,” Chloe says. She jumps out of the truck and runs into the hospital as soon as I pull into the parking lot.
I get out of the truck, and I’m opening the back door when Chloe rushes out with the wheelchair. “Thank you so much,” she tells me and turns to walk in with Tiff.
I’m about to follow her when the phone rings in my pocket, and I pick it up. “When you said you were coming, did you mean this year, or are you at the North Pole with Santa? I don’t understand,” my best friend, Jax, says.
“Shit, sorry,” I say, taking one more look at the door and then getting in my truck. “I was with Chloe.”
“Your assistant?” he asks, and I close my eyes. “Have you declared your love for her yet?”
“That was a secret,” I hiss into the phone, and he laughs.
“I don’t know how she doesn’t know with the way you look at her with those puppy dog eyes every time you talk to her.” He snickers.
“Why are we best friends again?” I ask. “Oh, I know, because you have no one else.”
“Yeah, whatever, Casanova. Can you just get here? My nuts are freezing.”
“I hope they fall off.” I disconnect the phone call and make my way over to him. I think of Chloe the whole time I’m pulling away from the hospital when I see a paper in the back seat.
Reaching between the seats, I find the folded letter from this afternoon.
Chloe
Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow.
“What do you mean, you don’t have the letter?” I shriek as she gets the cast on her foot set. The doctor looks up at me. “Sorry,” I say to him and then turn back to glare at Tiff.
“I’m saying I had the letter in my back pocket, and now it’s not there,” she tells me, and I pace in the middle of the hospital room. “Relax.”
I look over at her, and she laughs. “It could be anywhere.” Closing my eyes, I don’t say anything else to her because it’s no use. She’s been loopy ever since they gave her the pain pill. “Shit,” she says, and I look at her. “I could have dropped it in his truck.” I don’t say another word to her.
“This is worse than I thought,” I say when the doctor walks out of the room.
“How much worse can it be?” She looks at me. “He obviously read the letter.”
My stomach sinks down to my feet. I put my hand to my stomach. “Nothing you’re saying is helping,” I tell her. “Nothing.”
“It’s finally out of there,” she says. “Yay,” she cheers with her hands, and I close my eyes and pray for the floor to open and swallow me whole.
I tossed and turned all night, dreading coming into work today. I step out of the elevator and see Sharon at the desk with a Christmas light
necklace and dangly snowman earrings. “Ho, ho, ho,” she says, and I just smile at her.
“Morning.” I nod and make my way to my desk. The office looks very different from last night. I put my purse on my desk and see that Zach’s door is open, meaning he’s in. I shrug off my jacket and make my way over to the closet to hang it.
I’m on my way back to my desk when Zach comes out of his office, and I stop walking. His black hair looks like he just ran his fingers through it. His white button-down shirt is already rolled up at the sleeves, showing off his silver Rolex. “Chloe.” He addresses me, and his blue eyes are darker today.
“Morning,” I say, my stomach flipping. On the first day I started here, he was wearing a blue suit, and I kept thinking about how good-looking he was. Every day, we worked side by side on mergers, and I learned so much from him, but I ignored my feelings for him. Yet when our hands touched by accident or he put his hand at the base of my back when I walked ahead of him, I couldn’t ignore that I had fallen for him.
“If you have a minute, I’d like to talk to you about something,” he says, putting down a file on my desk. He turns to walk back into his office, and I follow him.
“How is Tiff?” he asks, and I stand there with my hands in front of me.
My heart starts to beat faster and faster. “She’s okay,” I say. “She broke her foot.
“What were you doing here?” He looks at me, putting his hands on the desk.
“Um,” I start to say, “I work here.” I try to play it off as if nothing.
“Last night.” His finger taps on his desk.
“Oh.” I try to steady my breathing and pray I don’t have a full-blown panic attack. “I forgot my key,” I tell him, trying to be as cool as can be, “to my apartment.”
“Don’t you live with Tiff?” he asks, and my hands get clammy again. What is he, Sherlock Holmes all of a sudden?
“She lost her keys,” I lie, hoping it doesn’t sound dumb, “and we were at dinner, so I came here to get mine.”
He nods his head. “It’s funny because I was here too,” he says, and I swallow, but my mouth is suddenly dry. “I was here a couple of minutes before, and I didn’t see you.”
“We must have just missed each other,” I say. “We also went to the bathroom.” I snap my fingers. “We must have been in the bathroom when you were here.”
“Is that so?” he asks, tilting his head to the side.
“Well, where else would I have been? I obviously wasn’t at my desk, so I must have been in the bathroom.” I laugh nervously, putting my hands on my hips now.
“When I came in this morning,” he says, “my Christmas tree was knocked over.”
“Oh, no,” I say. “That is so weird. There must have been a draft,” I say, thinking that was the dumbest thing I have ever said. “I should call maintenance about that. I’ll ask them to come and check it out.” I look around, then feign a shiver. “I think I just felt a draft.”
“Did you?” He chuckles as he walks to me and stands beside me. I smell his scent, and I just look down. “Oh, I feel it,” he says, and I side-eye him. “You should call maintenance.”
“I will do that right now,” I say, not moving, and I feel him step closer to me.
“Do you have any Christmas plans?” he asks, putting his hands in his pockets.
“No,” I say. “Tiff is going away, and my parents are taking a Mediterranean cruise.”
A knock on the door has us both turning toward it. “You guys are late for the meeting,” Tom says. “We’re waiting on you.”
“We’ll be right there,” Zach says. Tom nods and walks out.
“I’m going to get my stuff for the meeting,” I say, walking away from him, and only when I’m out of his office do my legs stop shaking.
Zach
Underneath the Tree
I shake my head when she walks out of the room. “A draft.” I watch her shake her hands, and I know she’s nervous when she does that. Her long brown hair falls forward when she looks down to get the files she needs. Her tight black skirt fits like a glove and goes right up to her knees. Her black and white striped long-sleeved turtleneck molds to her body. Every single day she walks in like she owns the world, and yes, every day, I get here before her just to watch her walk in. Just to have those moments while she gets settled for the day to watch her. I also spend a good minute after to make sure my cock goes down, and I don’t embarrass myself.
“Are you coming?” She sticks her head in, and I pick up the folder that I need.
We walk side by side, and I get a whiff of her citrus smell. Our hands graze each other’s as we walk into the conference room and head to the two empty chairs. I wait for her to sit before getting settled and open my file. “Sorry I’m late,” I say, laughing and looking around the table. “Let’s get started.” I look down at the papers in the file and see that it’s all different.
“Is everything okay?” Chloe asks me when I flip the papers over and over.
“This whole file is mixed up,” I tell her, looking at her and seeing her eyes flicker.
“You can use my file,” she says, handing me her own file, and we go over the notes I had.
When I walk back into my office, I go straight for my files when I hear Jax’s laughter. I look out to see him sitting on Chloe’s desk, and I get irritated. He does this every single time he stops by. “Stop flirting with my assistant!” I yell, and he looks into my office and gets up.
“Well, I see you woke up on the right side of the bed,” he says sarcastically, sitting down in the chair in front of my desk. “Is it the blue balls that have you so bent up?”
I look out toward Chloe’s desk to see if she heard him when I hiss, “I don’t have blue balls.” He tilts his head to the side.
“You haven’t had sex in over a year,” he reminds me, and I glare at him. “If they aren’t blue, they are fifty pounds.”
“I’ve been …” I don’t even know what to say.
“I know you’ve been saving yourself.” He looks at me and then turns his head toward Chloe, who is getting up now.
“I’m going to head down and get something to eat. Do you two want anything?” she asks. I shake my head, and Jax looks at her and smiles as he shakes his head.
“Are you still going away for the week?” Jax asks, and I nod. “Are you still going to spend New Year’s Eve there?”
“I haven’t decided,” I tell him the truth.
“You know what you need to do.” He folds his arms over his chest, and I lean back in my chair. “You need to get laid. Find a girl and bang the shit out of her for the whole week.”
“It’s not always about sex,” I tell him. “It’s about …”
“If you even mention the L-word,” he says, “I’m going to …”
The knock on the door has us both looking up. “I got you a protein shake,” Chloe says, coming in and handing it to me.
“Thank you,” I say, and I just smile as she walks out.
“You need to fire her,” Jax says, and I look at him as he gets up. “Fire her, and then you can have sex with her.”
“She’s the best assistant I’ve ever had.” Ignoring the fact that the thought of not seeing her every day is worse than I can put into words. He turns and looks at the tree and then back at me.
“Your tree is tilted to the side,” he says, and I look back at the tree.
“Yeah, it was draft,” I tell him, and he looks at me, his eyebrows going together.
“A draft?” he says, laughing. “What kind of draft is going to knock down a Christmas tree?”
“A strong one,” I say, and I look out the doorway to see Chloe at her desk typing away.
He shakes his head and walks out, giving Chloe a smirk. I watch her to see if she watches him as he walks out, but instead, she turns her back to him and goes over to the files she has next to her.
It looks like the same stack of files she handed me yesterday right before she left. The same stack o
f files I found her letter in. I open my drawer and see the letter. It’s crumpled from being shoved into Tiff’s pocket.
I grab a file and flip it open and see that all the pages in this one are wrong too. “Chloe.” I call her name, and she gets up and comes into my office. I watch her walk to me and see that her green eyes are a touch darker. “All these files,” I say, flipping the second one open, “are all mixed up.”
“Oh, no.” She comes to my side and looks in a couple of them. “Did you knock them over?” I look at her, confused. “I’m just asking. Maybe you knocked them over when you left, and the cleaning crew just picked them up for you?”
“I think I would hear files falling to the floor as I leave,” I tell her, and she tilts her head. “It must be that draft.”
Her eyes fly back down, and I can see she’s trying to think of something. “Why don’t I take these”—she grabs all the files in her arms—“and sort them and then bring them back in?”
“I’d be careful if I was you,” I say. She looks back, holding the files against her chest. “I just felt a draft.” She doesn’t say anything. She just nods her head and turns around to walk out of the room.
Chloe
Santa Baby
Unlocking the door, I walk into the apartment and see it’s almost pitch black in here. “Tiff?” I enter the living room and find her on the couch. “Why are you in the dark?” I turn on the light, and she looks over at me.
“I can’t move,” she says, pointing at her foot. I plop down on the couch before I even take my jacket off. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I just spent the past five hours fixing all the files that fell last night.” I look over at her face with wide eyes. “Oh, and he found his tree on the floor this morning.”
“What did he say?” she asks, her eyes wide.
“I blamed it on a draft,” I say, and she throws her head back and laughs.
All I Want For Christmas Is You Page 22
