69 Million Things I Hate About You

by Kira Archer

  “Hold on,” he said. He flipped her legs so she did a somersault over his arm, landing on shaky legs with his arms firmly around her as the song ended. She laughed, still holding on to him until her equilibrium returned. Their fellow dancers applauded. Kiersten looked around, her cheeks burning as she realized a circle had formed around them and they were currently the center of attention. While she’d completely intended for Cole to be front and center in the spotlight, joining him had not been part of the plan.

  He held out his arms, forcing her to do so, as well, as he still held her hand, and took an exaggerated, courtly bow. She managed a quick head nod and then tried to duck away, but Cole kept her hand firmly in his, bringing her closer to wrap her hand through his arm.

  “I think we should probably call it a night,” he said, leading her toward the exit.

  “What? But you just got here. The party is only getting started. Shouldn’t we stay a bit longer?” Being alone with him seemed like a bad idea. Then again, if he was angry, he might fire her, and wasn’t that what she wanted? She was so accustomed to demanding absolute perfection of herself in her job it was hard to remember that torturing her boss until he fired her was the whole point of all these shenanigans.

  “We came. We danced. You can send them a check in the morning. I think we’ve put in enough of an appearance.”

  “Yes, but…”

  He pulled out his phone, to text his driver she presumed. “I didn’t realize you were such a fan of electro swing.”

  “It’s growing on me,” she said faintly. Which was the truth, but not why she wanted to stay at the party. Now that the moment of her termination was upon her, she found it wasn’t quite as satisfying as she’d thought. She’d never been fired from anything in her life, and even though this is what she wanted, it still irked her sense of perfectionism.

  Cole was looking at his phone again, and Kiersten stifled an exasperated sigh. There were so many times she wanted to chuck that thing…

  Well. She was trying to get fired.

  She plucked the phone from his hands and tossed it over her shoulder in the general direction of the street. Cole stared after it, his mouth hanging open. She did the same. She couldn’t believe she had just done that. That had been…fantastic. Adrenaline coursed through her. She must be out of her mind, but holy hell, what a rush.

  He took a step toward the street, but it was far too late for that. A large truck hit it square on, followed by several cars, a tow truck, and a neon-green moped. Cole’s cell phone was toast.

  “What the hell was that?” Cole asked. She couldn’t tell from his tone if he was pissed, amused, or just seriously confused. Probably all the above.

  “I’ve been wanting to do that forever. You are always on that thing. Live a little.”

  The car pulled up and Luke, his driver and head of security, hopped out to open the door. Cole gestured for her to get inside first. She climbed in and scooted as far from him as she could. Just in case. He got in after her, yanking the wig off his head as soon as the door was closed, tossing it to the bench across from them.

  “Ahhh,” he said, rubbing his head. “It feels good to get that thing off.” He told Luke to take them to Kiersten’s place, and then stripped off his coat, unbuttoned the embroidered vest and undid the elaborately tied linen at this neck. By the time he was done, he looked like those male models on the cover of the supermarket romances, all tight breeches and chest hair blowing in the breeze. She’d always found the covers on the cheesy side, but faced with the real thing live and in person…well, damn. Romance publishers knew what they were doing. Her mouth practically watered, her hands itching with the urge to shove them through the open V of his shirt.

  He sighed and sat back, finally comfortable, or at least as comfortable as he could probably get in the back of a limo. She watched him warily. She’d just thrown his phone into oncoming traffic. Surely, he wouldn’t ignore that.

  He opened a console cabinet and retrieved another phone.

  Her jaw dropped. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me. Since when do you keep a stash of backup phones in the car?”

  “Since I dropped one in a puddle on the way into a meeting a few years ago. Always good to have a spare on hand.” He leaned to the center a bit so he could call up to Luke. “I’m on the backup line, Luke. Spread the word. And have someone forward calls from the old number to this one until it can be switched over.”

  “Yes, sir,” Luke said. He held his wrist up to his mouth and quietly spoke to whoever was listening on the other end.

  “It’s already activated?” Kiersten asked.

  “Of course. Doesn’t do me much good if it’s not.”

  “But…what about your SIM card, all your contacts?”

  “Everything is saved to a Google account and syncs automatically. It’s easy enough to restore my info. Plus, I usually back everything up to a memory card once a week, just in case. I’m good.”

  She shook her head. Typical. Backups for everything. She crossed her arms and looked out the window, not that there was much to see. The talk had to be coming soon. Maybe he was letting the anticipation build up as some form of weird punishment.

  After a few more minutes of nothing but him playing with his phone, she finally couldn’t take it anymore. “Are you really not going to say anything?”

  His gaze flicked up to her. “What is it exactly that you expect me to say?”

  “I don’t know, but…something. I totally screwed up with the costumes. I sent you into one of the biggest fundraising events of the year dressed like a…”

  “A buffoon. Yes. Well, under normal circumstances, I probably would have fired you on the spot, especially after the prank with the phone. But you’re right. I do spend too much time on the damn thing. However,” he said, turning the phone so she could see what he was looking at.

  Her eyes widened. She scrolled through image after image, on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and a few social sites she’d never even heard of. “The King of New York”; Eligible Bachelor Cole Harrington Rocking the Riches; #SexyinSatin; Bring Back Breeches; and a host of other headlines, hashtags, and gifs of them dancing, all drooling over the handsome prince dressed like every woman’s historical fantasy.

  “Got to love the internet. It still amazes me how fast shit goes viral. You’ve managed to pull off an incredible PR run for me with this little stunt. It draws attention to my charity work, shows off a few of my best angles, and got me three thousand new Twitter followers all in the last half hour. And we didn’t have to spend a cent on marketing. I should give you a raise.”

  Kiersten barely managed to keep from groaning into her hands. He should be chewing her out until her ears bled. Cole Harrington was a young man in a world mostly dominated by men who had been running the world since Cole was in diapers. Credibility and appearances were extremely important to him. What she’d done should have damaged both, though not so badly he couldn’t recover. But enough to give him a little taste of what the rest of the population who weren’t so pathologically confident felt like from time to time. Instead, at least according to the email he flashed at her, they were getting requests from magazines for full-on photo shoots, taking the whole bejeweled king thing and running with it.

  “But I tossed your phone into the street.”

  Cole shrugged. “Needed a new one anyway, though I would appreciate you not making a habit of that.”

  She almost threw her hands up in the air. He couldn’t be serious. Was saving some money on her severance package really that important to him? She’d love to tell him she had an appointment at the lotto office in a few weeks to officially claim her winnings and he could keep his damn severance package, but that would give up the game. And as he didn’t seem remotely fazed by her behavior, she’d have to step it up a notch.

  In the meantime, it was ridiculously quiet in the car.

  “You took dance lessons as a kid?” she asked.

  He gave her a small smile.
“I grew up in one of those small towns. Very Gilmore Girls.”

  “You’ve seen Gilmore Girls?”

  “It was on one night when I was stuck doing paperwork. Don’t judge.”

  She held up her hands but couldn’t keep her smile from popping out.

  “Anyway, you know the type. Everyone knows everyone. Not a whole lot to do.”

  Kiersten nodded, and he continued. “Well, one summer, my mom was helping out at the dance studio, teaching a few classes. You know, those sample classes designed to give kids a little taste of everything. She didn’t want me staying home alone all day, bored and unsupervised, or have me sitting around the studio bored, either. And they didn’t have a whole lot of boys signing up. So, I took a few classes.”

  Kiersten laughed, picturing Cole being dragged around a studio by his mother. “I bet that was a blast for you.”

  Cole shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad. Only boy in a class full of dancers? My friends were kicking themselves for not thinking of joining, too.”

  Kiersten rolled her eyes and let loose an exaggerated sigh. “Typical male.”

  He chuckled. “It wasn’t like I had too much choice in the matter. But I was used to being around it. My sister used to dance, and I’d always liked watching her.”

  His eyes grew distant, sad. She’d never seen that look on his face before and wondered what caused it. He didn’t talk about his family much. In fact, that was probably only the second time he’d ever mentioned his sister. Kiersten thought about being pushy. Obnoxious. Pry some more details out of him. But that was the last thing she wanted to do. It was one thing to forget his coffee or trick him into dressing up in front of everyone he knows. It was another to pry into whatever personal pain he was obviously feeling.

  She changed the topic. “So, how do your feet feel?”

  The sorrow cleared from his face and he snorted. “Whoever invented these things should be shot. Why the hell do women wear these on a regular basis?”

  Kiersten laughed. “They make our asses look great.”

  He leaned over like he was trying to get a peek of hers. She glared at him, and he held his hands up in surrender.

  “Hey. I was just seeing if it was true. You should always be able to back up your claim.”

  “Noted. Now stay on your side,” she said. How had they gone from personal revelations to mundane chitchat to flirting in the space of twenty-three and a half seconds? Flirting? Ah, hell no. She was not flirting with him. Or…not much anyway. Which would stop immediately.

  Back to mundane. No. Scratch that. Maybe a tad inappropriate was better. She was still trying to get fired, after all, and the man was being stubborn about that.

  “Well, heels aside, you are a surprisingly good dancer. I bet that serves you well with the whole notorious ladies’ man thing.”

  He frowned slightly. “The tabloids call me a ladies’ man. That doesn’t mean I am one.”

  She gave him her best seriously look. “I’ve seen the parade of women. Put a few in cabs the next morning myself. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the same one twice. Seems like typical ladies’ man behavior to me.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that I’m not the one who is at fault here?”

  “Not really, no.”

  His eyes widened, and she shrugged. “You look at your relationships with all those women and how they end, and the common denominator is you. So…”

  Cole chuckled and shook his head. “No one has ever put it to me quite like that before.”

  She shrugged. “They are probably afraid to make you mad.”

  “And you aren’t?”

  She met his gaze and debated how truthful she should be. But hell, no reason not to speak her mind now. “Not anymore.”

  He leaned in a little closer. “But you were once?”

  Admitting any kind of weakness was not something Kiersten did often or easily, and she wasn’t going to do it now.

  “I believe we were talking about you and your apparent fear of commitment.”

  “I’m not afraid to commit.”

  Kiersten’s brows went up at that.

  “I’m not. I just haven’t found a woman who wants to commit to me.”

  She snorted. “Says every commitment-phobic man in the world.”

  “Maybe they all say it because it’s true.”

  “I very much doubt that. You’ve been in People magazine’s Sexiest Man issue three years in a row now. You’ve got women literally throwing themselves at you, begging you to marry them.”

  “Exactly. They don’t even know me. I go out on a first date and these women are already talking honeymoon destinations and baby names. They don’t want to commit to me. They want to commit to my bank account.”

  Kiersten didn’t answer for a moment, momentarily surprised into silence.

  “I…I guess I never thought about it that way,” she said.

  He looked at her like she’d missed the most obvious question on an open-book test. “I don’t know if it’s even possible to know for sure if a woman is interested in me for me.”

  She really had never thought about it in that way, and now it was a problem she would face as well. Once she and the girls claimed that money and everyone knew who they were, they’d have the same problems as the people they used to make fun of. How would she ever know if a guy liked her for who she was and not what he could get from her?

  “That’s kind of depressing.”

  He laughed, though there was little amusement in the sound. “Yes it is.”

  “Well, in the meantime, you are now a hashtag on Twitter and Instagram. Hashtag MrSexyPants. So, that’s something to be proud of at least.”

  This time his laugh was amused. “I might change my email signature to reflect that,” he said.

  She grinned. “I’ll get that updated first thing Monday morning.”

  “We could make it a whole campaign. Maybe I should leave the pants on and we could get some photos. Do a whole photo shoot.”

  Time to kick the flirting up a notch. Her inappropriate work environment skills were sorely lacking. She gave him what she hoped was a sultry smile. “Only if you take a few with the shirt off.”

  His gaze roved over her face, focusing for a moment on her lips. She sucked the bottom one into her mouth, more to wet it from the sudden desert her mouth had become than to be sexy, but if it worked for both, more power to her.

  “You know, I’m happy to take my shirt off for you anytime. You just have to ask. I know how much you enjoy the view.”

  Oh hell yes, she did. Wait. She frowned slightly. “What do you mean, you know I like the view?”

  “The day you became my first assistant,” he said, leaning in closer. “You came into my office and I was on the treadmill. Sweaty. Shirtless.” He leaned in even closer and took her chin in his fingers. “You couldn’t keep your eyes off me.” His voice had hit a husky, low level that had her belly tightening.

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” she said, though her voice came out far too breathy for someone who wasn’t supposed to be affected by her boss. “I was merely concerned you were getting dehydrated. With the amount of sweat I saw, I was afraid you were going to dry up like a cockroach and die.”

  She smiled sweetly at him. He hadn’t released her face yet. He opened his hand to trail his fingers along her jawline, cup her cheek. “It was good of you to be concerned. No worries though. I have amazing stamina.”

  Her face was so hot he could surely feel it flaming in his hand.

  “I’m…sure you do,” she said, trying to force herself to stay unaffected. Mind over matter and all that. Her mind, however, was going AWOL. Along with the rest of her traitorous body.

  The car pulled to a stop at a light. Cole gave her a slow, sexy smile that had her toes curling in her four-inch heels. It was a damn good thing she wasn’t walking. Although she was going to have to get out and walk up to her door, while he watched her ass sashaying away.

  He leaned in the rest
of the way and gave her a sweet, gentle kiss on the cheek. Her eyes met his again. That hadn’t been at all what she expected. And, if she were honest, not at all what she wanted. She wanted him to pin her back against the seat cushion and take advantage of the floofy skirt she wore. She’d even gone through the trouble to wear authentic undergarments, complete with a garter belt and silk stockings. It seemed a shame to waste them.

  But it would be such a bad idea. Horrible. Catastrophic. Right?

  He leaned over her, his face so close she could feel his breath on her face. His lips were just a fraction of an inch away from hers. Did she want this? She’d been fantasizing about it, sure. But real life would probably have some ramifications. Big ones.

  And if she stayed in that car any longer there wasn’t going to be any way she’d be able to stop what might be about to happen, because she just wanted it too damn bad.

  She reached behind her, opened the door, and made a run for it.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kiersten could hear Cole calling after her, but she kept going.

  “Kiersten.” Cole was hanging out of the car and staring after her like she’d lost her mind. Which, frankly, she probably had.

  “Sorry! I forgot I have to be somewhere.”

  They were near the park, so she darted up one of the paths and followed the sounds of applause to a small stage that had been set up where actors dressed in Elizabethan costumes were performing an odd pseudo-Tudor type dance to rock music, like a scene out of that Heath Ledger knight movie. Several posters set up near the area proclaimed the performance the work of a local drama club, who had thankfully drawn a decent crowd.

  She wound her way through the people, glancing over her shoulder every now and then. Surely, he wouldn’t bother…

  Someone grabbed her arm and she gasped, trying to pull away.

  “Hello, my fabulous retro woman. You’ll be perfect.”

  One of the actors had hold of her and was pulling her toward the stage.

  “No, thank you,” she said, trying to politely extricate herself. All around her, other audience members were also being pulled onto the stage. Wonderful. She’d managed to wander into an audience-participation production.