by Abby Knox
She smiled, even more warmly and genuinely at him than Dorothea had. “Well, I hope so. But we haven’t done the interview yet.”
Shit, he did not want to do any other interviews. “You’re hired. Have a seat.” He gestured to the chair across from his desk. Dorothea swiveled around, peeked into his office, shook her head and mouthed the word “no.” She held up her hand. “Five,” she mouthed.
He got her meaning. He had to give all five applicants a fair shot. Hiring the first hottie who waltzed in probably wouldn’t sit well with Dorothea. Or Wynn. Or Cora. Or any of these other pale office-type people. Too bad, because this woman was so hired he wanted to go back in time and hire her before he even had the job.
Well, he’d just have to do his best to make it look fair.
Claire sat down across from him and placed her résumé on his desk. She smiled shyly and crossed her legs, and Devin spotted black tights and tall black boots, which would look incredibly sexy on the back of his horse.
On her lapel wore a sparkly red brooch in the shape of a Christmas present.
“I like your pin,” he said. God, what an idiot he was. She could see right through his attempts to buy time until he thought of an intelligent interview question. She had to know he didn’t belong here.
“Thank you,” she said. She smiled and looked down and touched it. “My good luck charm. It was my mom’s.”
“She give that to you for good luck?”
“I inherited it. She died. Recently.”
Truly, he was stepping in all of the shit this morning, with every female.
“Oh my god. I am so sorry.”
She shook her head. “Thank you for saying so. It’s all right. I’m fine. So, tell me about the job.”
But she was so obviously not fine. That much, Devin could tell. He was the last person to be considered an expert on women, but she was most definitely the opposite of fine. Everybody’s got a story, he thought to himself.
“My mom died when I was eight,” he said. “I never knew my dad. I grew up a foster kid on a farm not far from here. I found out when I was a teenager that my dad died in prison.”
She bit her lip. She was definitely holding more back. “My dad and mom both died. Together. Car crash. Last summer on their way home from their 25th anniversary cruise. At least my mom got to see the ocean before she died. That’s all she ever wanted, besides us kids.”
Devin’s heart went out to her. Well, here was somebody who didn’t just throw knowing looks around the room. She said exactly what she was thinking and talked about the painful stuff even if it made other people feel uncomfortable.
But she did not make him uncomfortable in the least.
He felt nothing but a sweet affection for this open book in the pretty green suit. She was tidy and sweet and honest. And drop-dead beautiful.
Had he not just said in the meeting earlier this morning that he didn’t mesh well with most people? Well, all of a sudden, he felt that if there was such a thing as mesh made out of humans, she and he would be nicely meshed. He let the slightly dumb part of his brain wander into the thought of how gross that could be, if taken literally, and decided not to speak it out loud.
He replied, “I am so sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. And yours too.”
“Thanks.”
And then that was it. They just sat there, smiling sadly and shyly across the desk from each other. This little quiet moment felt comfortable. And then she must have caught his gaze wandering down to her chest, because she bit her lip again and looked down into her lap. Devin thought for a moment she was starting to blush. She self-consciously brushed her hair aside and he caught sight of some sparkly red studs in her ears. He caught a whiff of her hair when she did that. She smelled really, really good.
Then reality came crashing back down. “Sorry, I smell like bullshit,” he said.
She laughed. “What?”
“I mean, I came here straight from the barns. I didn’t have time to wash up. So I smell like actual bullshit. Not figuratively. But hey, I might also smell like figurative bullshit, what do I know?”
She laughed again, a sound that gave him an intense desire to keep making her laugh. Instead he chose to attempt a professional question. “So, tell me why you want to come work for a redneck like me.”
But instead of laughing, she seemed to tense up. Uh-oh, he thought. Were her people rednecks?
“After my parents died, I quit college to come home to take care of my siblings. It was either stay in school and let them go live with relatives, or give up my scholarship and keep them all together. I think I made the right choice. But it’s been hard. I mean, we had my parents’ life insurance money helping us keep the house, but repairs and other things were out of control, so we sold the house and moved to a rental house, and now I have to get a job. I’m sure you know how hard it is to raise children.”
She had assumed he had a family because he was a few years older than she was.
“Oh no. I don’t have any kids. I’m single. Never married. Women hate me.”
He had done it again somehow, accidentally broken the tension and made her laugh again. “I’m sure that’s not true, you’re adorable.” Then she blushed deeply and covered her mouth. “Oh god, I should not have said that. That was totally unprofessional.”
He smiled and leaned across the desk. “I like unprofessional. I can’t stand this kind of environment. My sister stuck me here to keep the investors calm and make sure they don’t abandon ship. But you know what? This is the most comfortable I’ve felt since I started this new job.”
“Oh really?” she asked. “How long have you been doing this job?”
He checked his wrist, which did not have a watch on it. “About 25 minutes,” he said. “When can you start?”
Just then Dorothea knocked on his door and stepped in. “We have another candidate who has just arrived.”
Devin waved her off and kept his eyes on Claire. “Tell her we’ve already filled the position.”
Dorothea cleared her throat pointedly. “It’s a man, sir.”
“OK, then tell him to go home.”
“Sir.”
Devin grunted. He gestured to Dorothea and said to Claire, “She’s my handler. I gotta do what she says or Wynn will have my hide. That’s my sister. She owns all of this. Started it herself. She gave me a job about ten years ago when nobody would hire me on account of having just got out of rehab.”
Claire’s eyes widened. He couldn’t tell if it was shock or judgment. She was certainly processing something about him.
He stood and shook her hand again as she prepared to leave. “I’ll be calling you.”
She smiled, less wide this time.
“I’ll understand if you don’t. As you can tell by my résumé I’m not experienced in much of anything except writing term papers. But if you hire me, I will work hard to do…whatever an assistant does.”
She hurried to leave, a little too quickly. But he had managed to shake her hand again. It was warm and soft and fit nicely in both of his. When she left, he instinctively sniffed his hand and smelled her lotion. Like he was a damn dog or something. She left a grassy, floral scent that reminded him of summer out on the range.
After Claire left, Dorothea poked her head in. “One down, four to go!” she sang.
Shit. It was going to be a long day.
Chapter 2
Claire
The time on her phone read 5:55 p.m. Claire couldn’t believe the work day had flown by.
But that’s what happens when you have a little crush on your boss. You dread the moment you have to leave and go home to your real life, no matter how many cute faces and comfy pairs of stretchy pants await you there.
And she had more than a little crush. That might have been the case on the day of the interview, when she walked in on him smelling like cow shit. Now, the week after Thanksgiving, she had a massive, serious, all-encompassing, mind-consuming infatuation with
her boss, Devin Halpert, Regional Vice President of WX Genetics.
In an ideal world, she might have objected to someone hiring her based on physical chemistry. But under the circumstances, she needed the job. And his unbelievably hot, bad-boy good looks and simple, sweet nature made him irresistible to her. There was no way she could say no to the job, no matter how under-qualified she knew she was.
To say that Devin Halpert cleaned up good was an understatement. His snap-front cowboy shirts reminded her of those seriously hot Chris Isaak videos from way back. He had the same kind of lips and dreamy eyes.
Not to mention the way his slim-cut Wranglers hugged that ass of his, which she got to see plenty of today as he waltzed in and out of the office with visiting investors and clients.
Today’s investor had come from Des Moines to meet with Devin in person to make sure his loan to the company was indeed going to be paid back with the promised interest. Devin was giving him a whirlwind tour of the operations. He was pouring on the cowboy charm, with his boots and hat and his particular way of saying “ain’t.” To some people it might seem like a put-on, but Claire could tell it was 100 percent real.
Anybody else in Devin’s shoes would have held this meeting in his office, but Devin had asked Claire to arrange for a horseback tour of the ranch. When the investor was hesitant to get his clothes and overcoat mussed on the back of a horse, Devin had convinced him by saying, “Yeah, I understand, the stiffs at the bank never want to take a meeting with me on the back of a horse in the sunshine either.”
Now the truth was Devin had never taken a single meeting with any person from a bank, ever, as far as she could tell. But it was an impressive little bluff, and it worked. No private investor wanted to be conflated with a banker. Especially not in rural Iowa, which in many ways still felt the sting of the farm crisis of the 1980s.
After the investor had left, Claire made a daring move by going into his office, closing the door, and telling him, “Devin, I just wanted you to know, I think you handled that really well. I don’t think he’s going to recall the money. I think your sister is going to be really happy.”
Devin had stared at her, dumbfounded. For a few seconds, she was nervous. Had she been being too presumptuous in assuming he didn’t know what he was doing? Was she overstepping bounds as an assistant? She bit her lip and waited for him to respond.
A bad-boy smile slowly spread across his face and reached all the way up to his eyes.
“Thanks, Claire.”
The way he said her name perked up something that lay dormant inside her. Nobody had ever said her name like that. Low and intense. Like a storm was brewing. This was an entirely new feeling for her.
“Well, I just wanted you to know. A lot of people call here in a panic. Evidently, Pete did a lot of damage, but you are doing really well at keeping everyone happy and the money flowing in. You said when you met me you didn’t know what you were doing here, but I think you’re brilliant. Don’t sell yourself short.”
They shared another one of their comfortable silences as they stared at each other. This time, she did not look down at her feet and blush.
And then he had asked her to go to lunch. In the moment she was thrilled and had a wonderful time eating burgers with him at Hawk’s Diner and listening to his ranching stories. And she had fun watching him listen with interest to her stories about her younger siblings.
Upon returning to her desk after lunch, her happiness had dissipated a bit, noticing the side glances, and the conversations among groups of coworkers suddenly stopping when she walked by.
Now, almost quitting time, Claire was pretending to work by compiling a list of Christmas gifts for her little brother and sisters. Pretending to work was more for the benefit of the others and not so much for Devin. He honestly did not seem to care want she did. Just as she was starting to type out her list, her desk phone was ringing. That’s odd, it was coming from Devin’s office.
She picked up the receiver and pushed line 5. “Hi,” she said, grinning.
“Hi,” he said. “This is Santa.”
“Umm, OK?”
“Listen, I’m supposed to do some goody-goody community stuff on behalf of the company, so can you do me a favor tonight?”
“Anything,” she said, her voice almost catching in her throat. She would do literally anything he asked her to do.
“Great. Can you go down to the square and collect all the rest of the stars on the Helping Star Tree? I’ll give you the company card and you can go buy all the gifts.”
She replied, “Absolutely. That’s very generous of you.”
He chuckled. “Well, it ain’t my money, it’s the company’s money.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice low. “But it was your idea. It’s very sweet of you. You deserve credit for that.”
There was a pause. She could hear him breathing. “Do I?”
This was getting ridiculous. She turned around and swiveled around and looked at him through his open door. She couldn’t help but smile shyly as he was staring at her, his ear still to the receiver.
“Yes, you do.”
Then he lost his smile and looked at her differently. There was smolder in his eyes. “It makes me very happy to hear you, of all people, say that.”
Their eyes continued to connect after they both hung up their phones. He really was terribly handsome, and when he stared at her like that, it made her think about things. Things she had never done before.
It made her wonder if he would be the one to give her some experience in the bedroom. He liked her, she had no doubt about that. But maybe he was only flirting with her because he didn’t know how else to relate to women.
Whatever it was, she wasn’t going to parse it. She was 22 and didn’t feel like being suspicious of any man’s motives anymore. At this point, she wanted to get the job done and move on with her life.
Maybe if they did something about this sexual tension, she could get him out of her head.
Chapter 3
Devin
For the first time since they met, Devin felt something in return from Claire. There was definitely a spark coming off her, and he could feel it all the way back at his desk.
He liked talking to her on the phone. Something about only him speaking into her ear for nobody else to hear made him excited.
He would like to be alone with her, and very soon.
Since he’d gotten out of rehab, he hadn’t dated anyone seriously. He chalked it up to a dry spell on account of all his old acquaintances being bad for his recovery. He knew in his heart of hearts that this was more than a dry spell. His whole life was now about work and pulling himself together. He hadn’t had any time for women.
Well, he was about to make time. Hopefully sooner than later, because the more he thought about that girl with the raven hair biting her lip and crossing her legs self-consciously, the more he was ready to claim her for himself.
Chapter 4
Claire
This can’t be right, she thought as she picked the last star off the tree.
There were only about seven stars left on the tree. She loved shopping, so this would be a snap to accomplish in one night. Tomorrow at work, she thought, maybe the other office workers could help her wrap gifts. They could perhaps have a wrapping party at lunch break.
But when she had picked the final remaining star off the tree, she stopped. It read:
Girl, 13; clothes, 5 misses.
Wants: socks, batteries, freeze-dried meals, flashlights, backpacks, gas cards.
Girl, 7, wants markers, pens, pencils, paint.
Boy, 5: stickers.
These three kids were absolutely, 100 percent hers. This was her family. How did this happen?
Her blood started to boil. Her heart rate sped up.
She had not applied for any kind of assistance. She had not made it known to anyone about their situation. Yet somebody had seen fit to put her family on the Helping Star tree.
However this
happened, she couldn’t have her boss buying these things for her family.
The store clerk was watching her carefully. She couldn’t throw it away or pocket it. What if it wasn’t actually by her siblings? What if this was some other family, by some wild coincidence?
She couldn’t decide what to do, so she quickly put it back on the tree, just as the clerk came over to ask if she could help her with anything.
“No, I’m good, thanks.”
Claire walked away, grabbed a buggy and got to shopping.
She would just have to hope for the best that somebody else besides WX Genetics would grab up the star, and she would have to live with the fact that somebody, perhaps a teacher, decided their family was in need. They weren’t exactly not in need.
Claire cleaned her mind of all the negativity and focused on the good things. Like this first list on the top of the stack.
Boy, 17, wants: Xbox One and games to go with it. Clothing: size men’s small.
Devin had given her free rein to buy everything on the list and also add on as many extra things as she wanted. She would have to drive over to the big-box store on the other side of town to get the Xbox, but there were certain things she could get here at the general store. In the clothing aisle, she picked up some hoodies in all the sizes listed for each child on each of the stars in her hand. Some packs of leggings for each of the girls’ sizes, everybody got socks. That was a no-brainer, whether they asked for it or not.
In the bare-bones humble sporting goods section, Claire picked up the 17-year-old boy a baseball mitt, bat and glove. He was going to need some outside time to balance out all that Xbox time.
She picked up a few of the requested sports jerseys and hats, then she hit winter gear and tossed in some knit hats, gloves and scarves for everybody.
Some of the kids, as her youngest sister had, asked for art supplies. That was easy to fulfill here. For a country general store, they had a pretty amazing selection of pens, charcoal pencils, brushes, paint and good paper. It probably had something to do with some local place that offered art lessons that she’d been hearing about lately.
