by Claire Adams
“So, where’s all the money,” I asked.
“What do you care?”
I thought about it for a moment and realized he was right. I didn’t care about building a new business, and I certainly didn’t care about what happened to the money I’d given him; if I had, I’ve have been on top of the details from the get go.
“I just want to know,” I said.
“I made a donation to the library fund,” he said, looking away. Then quietly added, “Your grandmother was good to me, too, you know.”
I said nothing as I wrestled with conflicting emotions. I was pissed at Finn for betraying me by not doing what he’d said he’d do, but I also knew that he’d done the best he could. Finn waited for me to say something, and when I remained silent, he nodded and then turned and walked out.
Chapter Forty-Six
Epilogue
“Ellie Connor, get down off of that coffee table!” I shouted as I rounded the corner and found my three-year-old daughter effortlessly scaling the only living room obstacle she had yet to conquer.
It had been five years since Dax and I signed our contract, and in that time, we’d watched the Storm become NFC champions in their first season only to lose to the Bears in the playoffs. They’d come back stronger and faster than next season, and forged ahead to win the Super Bowl, beating the Seahawks in a nail-biting game that went into overtime.
“No,” she replied stubbornly, pulling herself up to a standing position and putting her hands on her hips. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing at her adorably defiant pose.
“Young lady, do not test me,” I warned as I walked across the room and lifted her off of the table. She stared up at me for a moment before heading right back to the table.
Dax and I had ended our official contract after that first season when he’d gotten down on one knee in the middle of an empty Storm Stadium and presented me with two boxes. One held the contract and the other a ring, he asked me which one I preferred and when I chose the ring, he tore up the contract and used it as confetti to celebrate our engagement.
“I do it,” she said as she began pulling herself back up. “You not stop me, Mommy.”
“David Connor, get in here and set some limits for your daughter!” I yelled in as stern a voice as I could manage.
“What in the hell is going on out here?” Dax said emerging from his office holding his phone and looking confused.
We’d gotten married in a surprise ceremony the following summer in the backyard of Gram’s house with a small group of close friends. Val, who was pregnant with her first child and finding monogamous married life with Sir Richard much more fulfilling than she’d anticipated, stood up as my matron of honor and cried through the whole ceremony. Dax and Finn had patched things up as much as they could, and had agreed to start a new venture that would provide low-cost groceries and dry goods to the folks in the Back of the Yards on a regular basis. Gus had stood in for my father and proudly walked me up the aisle to meet my groom. After the wedding, Gram’s house had been converted into a community meeting center where neighbors could come and tend the garden, cook meals, and sit on the porch sharing cookies and lemonade made by an older woman who’d agreed to live there rent free.
“Little ears,” I said, reminding him that he needed to watch his language.
“Eleanor Halas Connor, what on earth are you doing?” he asked our curly-haired daughter as she reached the top of the table yet again.
“Want to be tall, Daddy!” she shouted as she stood up and put her hands on her hips again. “Tall like Yonny!”
I’d kept my job at the Storm, but had hired several assistants and a team of scouts that helped keep the workload to a manageable level as I tried to balance my new marriage with my desire to see the Storm succeed. Dax was supportive, but we’d had to work through some rough patches during the draft when he’d felt shoved aside by my passion for the game. All of this had shifted once I had Ellie, but I’d found that since Dax and I had managed to negotiate enough of the difficult things before she arrived, we were better at splitting duties without much trouble. It wasn’t perfect by any means, and I often had to fight my own stubborn impulses, but with help from an adept nanny, we managed to cover all our bases.
“This is all your fault,” Dax said looking at me pointedly. “You passed on the gene and now you brought her to the club house to meet the players. I blame you.”
“Oh, no you don’t,” I laughed as, once again, I removed our child from the dangerous perch she’d chosen. “You’re the one who chose the furniture that demands it be climbed!”
“Mommy, no!” Ellie wailed as I gathered her in my arms and kissed her small head. She was a beautiful child and was the perfect mix of Dax and I, with dark, curly hair and bright-blue eyes. She’d also inherited our risk-taking natures and double the stubbornness.
I hadn’t been able to fully make peace with my mother because neither one of us could completely forgive the other for our betrayal. I’d spent a long time trying to decide if I wanted her at our wedding, but when I finally sent her an invitation, she’d declined. It stung, but I knew why she’d done it, so I tried to forgive her as best I could. The lawyers been unable to locate Dax’s father, so we put his inheritance money in a trust for Ellie with the stipulation that if her grandfather showed up, the money would go to him.
I handed our squirming girl over to her father and watched as he whispered something in her ear that immediately stopped her active resistance. When he set her down, she made a beeline for the kitchen yelling, “Come on, Daddy!”
“What did you promise her?” I asked as I watched my husband’s gaze follow our bright-eyed daughter’s movement.
“Oh, you know, the usual,” he said, wrapping an arm around my waist and kissing the top of my head. “The moon, the stars, and a huge bowl of strawberry ice cream.”
“You are impossible,” I laughed as I wrapped my arms around him and looked up into his handsome face.
“I’m really not, you know,” he said, smiling as he kissed my lips. “I just specialize making dreams come true.”
Click here to continue to my next book.
Get Each of My Newly Released Books for 99 Cents By Clicking Here
Click here to get my book Swipe for free
BOSS’S VIRGIN
By Claire Adams
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 Claire Adams
Chapter One
Ian
This is what happens when you do favors for friends.
Jonathan asked if I’d do him a solid and give his friend an interview since we needed to hire a new secretary. What were the words he’d used? Smokin’ hot AND intelligent? I looked over my steepled fingers at the girl sitting nervously on one of the two chairs on the other side of my desk. The chairs were maple, straight-backed, very fine craftsmanship but no cushions, so whoever was sitting there would have to perched upright, slightly uncomfortable. At attention, if you will. My own ass was luxuriating in an ergonomic leather executive chair—Tuscan leather, mahogany accents, ability to recline, retractable footrest. I was reclining now, as a matter of fact, wishing that I had not agreed to do this favor for Jonathan. I mean, this girl, Daisy, was attractive, sure, but she dressed in such a way that was trying to disguise it, with her black A-line skirt that went past her knees, her blouse buttoned all the way up, those black, school marm oxfords. This girl didn’t need a job; she needed a goddamn crash course in fashion.
But we’d just sat down, and if I didn’t at least go through the formalities, I’d have to endure Jonathan’s bitching, and I already heard enough of that as it was.
“So,” I said. “You’re friends with Jonathan?”
“Yes,” she
said, her voice barely more than a whisper. She cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said again, a little more loudly. “We met at the gym.”
“And you were previously employed at . . . where?” I leaned forward and rifled through some papers on the desk, though there was nothing there that would give me any clues about her previous work experience.
“Shear Genius.”
“The hair salon?”
“Yes. I was the administrative assistant there.”
“You were the secretary.”
She shifted. “The administrative assistant. I handled all the reception duties, scheduling, payroll, filing, and some light bookkeeping.”
I nodded. “Okay, right. So you were the secretary.” I hated shit like that; it was like calling a janitor a custodial engineer. She was answering phones and making appointments and doing reminder calls; therefore, she was a secretary. Maybe she wasn’t fetching coffee or transcribing things on a typewriter, but she was still a secretary. “That’s essentially what we’re looking for here,” I said. “Someone to answer the phones, manage the calendar, keep the office in order.”
I decided not to mention that the reason for the vacancy was because I’d slept with the last secretary, and then there’d been this little misunderstanding about the true meaning of “no strings attached.” I had explicitly stated that, whispered it in Annie’s ear, in fact, right before I fucked her across this very desk, and she’d been more than agreeable.
“I did all of that at Shear Genius,” she said. “I’m a very organized person, and I think the best way to ensure that a business runs smoothly is to keep things organized and maintained.” She continued to espouse on what she thought a business needed to run successfully. I tuned this out and watched her talk instead. Watching someone talk can often give you a whole lot more of information about who they are than the actual words that are coming out of their mouths.
This was often how I’d decide whether or not my company, Hard Tail Security, was going to take someone on as a client. I was in the Marines for ten years, signing up for recruit training the day I turned eighteen. It was hell, of course, but paled in comparison to all the shit my dickhead stepfather put me through. I left the Marines at twenty-eight, after three deployments. Jonathan and I ended up reconnecting; he’d gone to college after high school and had graduated with a degree in business, but had taken an interest in Japanese jujutsu. We’d gone out to get drinks, had a few more than we intended, and started shooting the shit about how great it would be to start a security firm. Perhaps not the most glamorous or enlightened origin story, but there you go.
We started small but grew every year—last year we provided security for the community event when the Dalai Lama came to speak; our services were also used regularly for Seamus McAllister, who ran a high-stakes underground poker club, but also when he threw his daughter’s sweet sixteen. (Besides the poker, Seamus was the biggest mover of illicit drugs in the city, renowned for his ability to always be able to escape being sentenced, though the cops and D.A. had certainly tried.) In other words: our clients ran the gamut from the holiest of holy to the morally deficient. We didn’t discriminate. Well, we did, but it wasn’t based on the criteria that some other companies might have used.
I continued to watch Daisy talk, still not really hearing what she was saying. She was earnest, honest. She was the sort of person you could trust not to slack off if you weren’t around to oversee what she was doing. All good qualities, but the drama with Annie was still fresh in my mind—the tears, the pleading, eventually, the threats. I didn’t do well with anyone threatening me, and I finally had to tell her, in no uncertain terms, that she needed to back the fuck off. I’d never hit a woman, of course, but in that case, it had been especially tempting. She couldn’t take no for an answer. When a guy can’t take no for an answer, he’s a misogynistic asshole; when it’s a girl, she’s just persistent, or, as Annie claimed, in love.
Not that Daisy was anything like Annie. Annie had put her goods on display from day one, favoring short, tight skirts, ultra-high heels, and blouses that her cleavage was just begging to be released from. Daisy didn’t have any of that on display, but my highly trained eye could tell that under all those prudish, dull clothing, she had a banging body.
Annie was still calling me, was the thing. She wasn’t calling from her number—I didn’t know whose phone she was using—but I kept getting these calls from random numbers I didn’t recognize. Sure, it could’ve been some scam or telemarketer, but I knew it was her. Daisy wasn’t like her in the least, I knew that, but I didn’t want the distraction.
Now she was looking back at me, the tip of her tongue coming out of her mouth to wet her bottom lip. She had stopped talking and was waiting for me to say something, maybe to respond to whatever it was that she’d just been saying, though I hadn’t heard a word of it. I laced my fingers together and stretched them, bending my fingers back, arms extended. This was a tactic I often used when caught in the situation of being expected to answer a question I hadn’t been listening to. Let a few seconds go by and then do something physical—it didn’t have to be anything big, it could be something as simple as smothering a yawn—and then respond however you felt. Your response didn’t even need to have anything to do with what the person had just asked.
“We’ve had a lot of interest in the position,” I said, relaxing my forearms. I leaned my head to one side, then the other, and felt a vertebrate in my neck crack. Ah. That was better. “I don’t know if Jonathan mentioned that to you or not.”
“No,” she said, looking down at her lap. “He didn’t.”
“I’m only telling you this because we’ve had a number of qualified applicants. So it’s not going to be an easy decision to make.”
“I completely understand.”
We sat there for a minute, neither of us saying anything. I leaned back in my chair. She was waiting for me to speak, but I was enjoying watching her squirm in the silence. Awkward silences can tell you a lot about a person. Some people will immediately try to fill them with chatter; others will shut down, and others will start fiddling with the nearest thing they can get their hands on. Daisy, while she looked a bit uncomfortable, folded her hands in her lap, looked me in the eye for a second, and then looked over my shoulder, toward the window, as though something very captivating had just caught her eye.
“Well,” I said finally. “Thank you for coming in and talking with me.”
“Absolutely. Thank you so much for taking the time to interview me. I look forward to hearing from you.”
She still looked nervous as all hell, though. “Jonathan or I will be in touch,” I said, not bothering to get up when she did. Instead, I watched her stand and smooth down her skirt.
“Okay,” she said. Cue two point five seconds of awkward silence. “Well, um. Bye.”
I steepled my fingers in front of my mouth again to hide my smile. “Have a good one, Daisy.”
She turned and left as though she couldn’t get out of my office fast enough, which at least gave me a fleeting view of her ass before she disappeared around the corner.
I wasn’t going to hire her. I’d hire the girl I interviewed yesterday, Lynn. I’d already decided I was going to do that anyway, though Jonathan hadn’t been privy to that information. I returned some emails and a few phone calls before I found her resume with her phone number.
“Hello?” she said after the second ring, though the way she said it, I could tell she already knew who it was. There was a hopeful note in her voice that she was trying to keep under wraps.
“Daisy,” I said. “It’s Ian Roubideaux.”
“Hi, Ian.”
“Hey. Listen. I just wanted to call and let you know that I’ve decided to go with someone else for the position.”
There was a pause. “Oh,” she said finally. “Okay. Well . . . thank you for letting me know so quickly.” There was another pause. “Was I . . . was I just not qualified? I know I can do everything you said
you were looking for.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “Based on your resume and what Jonathan’s said about you, you certainly seem qualified. But you’re not the only applicant in the pool, and I actually had many qualified people apply for the position. I’ll keep your resume on file though, okay? And if something opens up in the future, I’ll give you a shout.”
“Sure,” she said. “I appreciate it. Thank you. And thanks again for calling so promptly to let me know.”
“You got it,” I said.
I hung up. She had a nice phone voice.
I dicked around at my desk for a little while after I got off the phone because I knew Jonathan was out there lurking, wanting to know how it had gone, when she would start. When I finally stepped out of my office, he jumped up from his own desk and hurried over, an inquisitive look on his face.
“So how’d it go?” he asked. “Isn’t she great? When does she start?”
“Uh . . . she’s not, man, sorry,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “Really? What—did she totally bomb the interview or something? She can get a little nervous, but trust me, Ian, you’d be a fool not to hire her. Besides, she just got fired from her other job, and she’s really hoping to be able to move soon.”
“And all of this is my problem, why?”
“She’s got this stalker. This guy from the gym. He seemed cool at first, but then he just got real crazy, real fast. Totally outta left field; no one was expecting it. She used to work at that hair salon, Shear Genius. I’m sure she told you that.”
