by M. S. Parker
That was probably the longest speech I’d ever heard her give. Generally, she was more of an action person than a talking person.
“Do you need his approval for any of the tasks you’ve completed?” she asked briskly. “Anything you’re waiting on?”
“No. Once I finished my list, I left it on his desk to review. He’d already given me permission to look into all of the requests…” I paused, realizing I was saying too much. “Sorry, ma’am. You didn’t ask for details. The answer’s no, I’m not waiting on his approval for anything.”
“What did he have you working on?”
“Seeing how many of Unraveling’s requested perks are feasible.” I kept my answer concise.
She gave me a searching look. “How long have you been his assistant?”
“Three months, ma’am.”
A long pause, and then she nodded as if she’d decided something. “I have something I’d like you and Flora to do.”
I listened as she explained the task, asked two clarifying questions, and then went out to find Flora. The two of us knew each other, of course, and we’d talked in passing as well as when we were waiting on our bosses. We’d even both worked on the same project, but we’d had our own individual tasks and had barely interacted. I didn’t think she was the kind of person I’d ever really be good friends with, but I figured we could work together without a problem.
“She wants us to do what?” Flora asked.
She was pretty, with fashionably-short caramel-colored curls and the type of slender figure that she enjoyed flaunting. She wasn’t like the catty girls I’d gone to school with, but she did seem to enjoy the attention.
“We’re supposed to check out whatever musical acts that are going viral,” I repeated, “and make notes. She wants to know a summary of the comments, both positive and negative. We’re also to make suggestions for possible ways to market each act, as well as what we think are their biggest strengths and weaknesses.”
“Is that really an assistant’s job?” Flora asked as she perched on the edge of my desk. “I mean, I get that’s what A&R does, but doesn’t it seem weird to you?”
I shrugged. “Not really. I mean, as assistants, isn’t it our job to do what our bosses tell us?”
Flora leaned closer, a gleam in her cyan eyes. “I like Ms. Lamas and Mr. Hancock as bosses, but you have to admit, wouldn’t it be amazing to work under the big boss?”
She didn’t have to say his name because, even though, technically, Manhattan Records was owned by both Nate Lexington and Finley Kordell, everyone knew that Mr. Lexington was ‘the big boss.’ And I had a feeling this particular conversation wasn’t going to go anywhere good.
“Could you imagine what it would be like to be under him?” She wiggled her eyebrows.
I rolled my eyes. “Really? That’s the innuendo you’re going with?”
“I can do a lot better than that,” she said with a grin. “He can boss me around anytime, especially if it means I get to find out just how big the boss is.”
“You do realize that’s not innuendo, right? There’s no subtext there. Just text.” I clicked on a popular video, then cursed under my breath as it tried to load.
I needed to call IT to check the network. Something had been making the connection screwy for the past two weeks, and everyone was tired of it, but the only thing any of us could do was call IT and wait for them to do whatever it was they did and hope it worked.
Personally, I had a theory that they were messing with us as some sort of massive practical joke that was going to get the entire department fired soon. In all honesty, I didn’t understand how they hadn’t been fired already. Mr. Lexington wasn’t known for being the most understanding of bosses. He wasn’t a monster or anything, but he expected his employees to do their jobs and do them well.
Maybe it was Mr. Kordell who was keeping the IT guys around. Since he was the co-owner, he might’ve used his position to prevent Mr. Lexington from doing a mass firing. He was probably that sort of guy. I’d never met him, but I’d heard good things. He’d been the original financial backer, taking a chance partnering with Mr. Lexington, but didn’t want to be in the public eye. He came to the company Christmas party every year, but mostly kept to himself. I didn’t think it was out of a dislike of people but what did I know?
“You’ve got it bad, girl.” Flora pushed my shoulder.
“What?” I blinked up at her. “What do I have?”
She leaned closer to me and put her hand to her mouth as if she intended to tell me something private. “You were thinking about how big Nate’s cock is.”
“Flora!” Heat flooded my face. “You can’t talk like that about our boss!”
She shrugged and smoothed down her skirt. “Come on, Ash. You can’t tell me you haven’t fantasized about him.”
“Ashlee,” I corrected her for what felt like the thousandth time. “And no. I leave work at work.”
A lie, but a little white one and not something that had anything at all to do with Nate Lexington. I figured that meant it didn’t really count.
“Not even with those rumors?”
I frowned. “We really shouldn’t be talking about this. It’s completely inappropriate.”
“Heaven forbid we do anything inappropriate.” She rolled her eyes and then ran her pinky finger along her bottom lip, as if she needed to smooth out her burgundy lipstick. “You don’t really want to sit here staring at videos of people desperate for attention and then have to write some massive report like we’re in high school. I’ve got some seriously juicy gossip. It confirms a lot of what people say about him.”
I ignored her and opened my desk drawer to get my earbuds. Ms. Lamas had given us both this task, but if Flora wasn’t going to take it seriously, I’d have to do it myself.
Unfortunately, my earbuds weren’t in my right drawer, which meant they were in the left one, and Flora was in front of it. I’d just have to try to block her out. That, however, was easier said than done.
“My best friend, Naima, is cousins with this girl who dated Nate for a few weeks last summer, and the things she told Naima about what Nate likes in the bedroom…it’s like something straight out of one of those kinky erotic novels.”
She said it with disgust, like she didn’t have one of those novels in the bottom left drawer of her desk. If she wasn’t gossiping with her friends when she was supposed to be working, she was reading.
“Naima said it’s not just like handcuffs and blindfolds either. I guess he tied her cousin up with ropes until she couldn’t move, and then he did all sorts of things to her. He even made her give him a blowjob in a restaurant.”
I stared harder at the screen and pretended that my entire face wasn’t burning with embarrassment. I wasn’t a prude, but this wasn’t workplace conversation. Besides, I didn’t want to think about my boss that way. Sure, he was gorgeous, but I’d have needed to be blind or dead not to realize that.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Flora watching me and wondered if the entertainment had turned from her gossiping to her trying to see how far she could push me. She was going to be disappointed. I wasn’t a combative person. I’d told her I didn’t think the conversation was appropriate, and now I was going to ignore her. If she couldn’t get a rise out of me, she’d most likely stop.
“Could you imagine it? Being at a restaurant with him, and then he tells you to pretend you dropped something under the table, get down on your knees, and go down on him right there?” She sighed. “I get horny just thinking about it…”
Her voice trailed off on the last word, and I raised my head, assuming that she’d decided that we needed to get our work done.
That wasn’t it at all.
The reason Flora had stopped was the glowering man in the expensive Italian suit.
Shit.
“You two. My office. Now.”
Fuck my life.
Six
Nate
I never pretended to be the boss e
veryone loved, and I certainly wasn’t the boss known for having close, personal relationships with his employees. I didn’t ask for ass-kissing, and I quite frankly didn’t want it, but I did believe in respect.
And what I’d just heard wasn’t even close to respectful.
“You two. My office. Now.”
I didn’t wait to see if they would follow me because, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t even get the chance to try to save their jobs. Not that they had much of one anyway, but any chance was better than no chance.
“Shut the door,” I said as I walked around my desk and sank into my chair.
I left them standing as I gave them both hard looks. The short one with the long, henna-red hair looked mortified, her eyes darting everywhere around me but never actually looking directly at me. Her friend’s face was red, but there was a defiant jut to her chin that told me she wouldn’t go easily.
“Names?”
“Flora Watts,” the taller one said, folding her arms.
“Ashlee Webb.” The redhead’s voice was soft.
Their names were enough to confirm that it had been the first young woman who’d been speaking. I hadn’t heard the other one speak at all, not even to tell her friend to be quiet. She could have been speaking before I’d gotten there.
“That was quite an interesting conversation I walked into.” I started in without asking either of them to sit down. “Would either of you like to explain? Or perhaps just give me a reason why I shouldn’t fire both of you right now?”
Flora didn’t wait more than a few seconds to start talking. “I don’t know what you think you heard, Mr. Lexington, but Ashlee and I here were just talking about this book she was reading about this employee sleeping with her boss.”
Ashlee’s head snapped up, eyes wide enough for me to be able to identify the color of her irises as turquoise. “I-I–”
“Maybe the subject matter wasn’t entirely workplace appropriate,” Flora continued, “but how is discussing literature a firing offense? There’s nothing in the company’s policies about not talking about books.”
“I wasn’t reading a book!” Ashlee blurted out. Her cheeks colored.
Flora shot her one of the dirtiest looks I’d ever seen, and if the attitude she’d been showing hadn’t already been convincing me that she was full of shit, that would’ve done it right there. Still, I waited to see if Ashlee would clarify her statement, but she said nothing.
“What about it, Miss Watts?” I asked dryly. “Were the two of you discussing a book, or is there something you would like to amend about your statement?”
Flora’s mouth twisted into a scowl. “It’s not like I was saying anything mean.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I think I’ve heard enough. You’re suspended for the remainder of the week. I’ll be speaking with Stu and Suzie regarding your usual work to determine if you’ll be on probation when you return.”
She opened her mouth, then snapped it shut again.
Wise move.
“Out. Now.”
Flora scurried away, leaving Ashlee standing in my office, looking like she wanted to be anywhere but here.
“What about you?” I asked, leaning forward and putting my elbows on my desk. “What do you have to say about what I overheard?”
To my surprise, she finally looked at me, her expression smoothed out and blank. Her cheeks were still red but seemed to be completely under control now. No more impromptu statements from her.
“I was working on the assignment Ms. Lamas gave me.”
I wondered if I could get under her skin again, enough to get a genuine reaction rather than something thought out and calculated.
I raised an eyebrow. “And…?”
She shook her head. “And nothing. I was working.”
“Which means your friend was the one running her mouth about things she had no business talking about.”
Even though I didn’t need her to tell me that Flora had been the one talking about me, having a witness would make things easier if Flora decided not to take her punishment quietly. While I didn’t like hearing anyone talk about me, I knew that plenty of people suspected the sort of person I was like in private. If Flora wanted to lie, she could make my life extremely difficult.
“I asked a question, Miss Webb.”
“Actually, no, you didn’t.”
Okay, not as soft-spoken as I’d thought. She wasn’t talking loudly, but there was nothing soft about her resolve.
I rephrased. “Was your friend the one running her mouth about things she had no business talking about?”
Nothing.
“Are you going to claim I didn’t ask a question this time?”
“No, sir.”
Her quiet words hit me with a punch of lust. I took another look at her, this time letting myself see her as someone other than an employee.
She was more than a foot shorter than me, with fine features that could have made her look delicate if they’d been paired with a slender body. Instead, she had curves that my hands itched to explore. Normally, my women were thin, brittle in ways that went beyond physical.
Not that she was my woman.
Nothing even close to that.
And yet…
I stood up and came around to stand in front of her, leaving barely enough room between us to be appropriate for employer / employee.
“Are you going to answer my question?”
She didn’t look up at me, but she didn’t look down either. Instead, she stared at the center of my chest. “No, sir. I am not.”
I took a half-step forward, crossing into almost-inappropriate territory. I was toeing a line here, and I knew it. I had grounds to fire Flora for the way she was talking, but I’d only suspended her. If I suspended Ashlee without cause, and she reported it to HR, she might have a case for wrongful dismissal, especially if I kept going the way I was going.
But I wasn’t done with her yet.
“What about what you were doing? Will you tell me that?”
“I was working on the assignment Ms. Lamas gave me.”
“Which was?”
Her eyes flicked up, then back down. “Find viral videos online and make notes. Basically.”
That sounded plausible. Part of A&R was finding new talent. It made sense that Stu and Suzie would have their assistants searching the internet. I’d never required them to do their work any specific way.
“So, you were doing your work, but your friend was talking about me?” I made an educated guess and took her silence as affirmation.
She wasn’t intimidated by me.
I’d never met anyone like her before, and it intrigued me. It’d been a long time since I’d been curious about anyone, especially a woman. It made me uncharacteristically reckless.
“Do you know anything about an event we’re having this weekend?”
Her head came up, confusion written on her face. “Yes. I handed off Unraveling’s requests to Mr. Hancock this morning.”
I remembered Finley saying something about Zed and perks. “Unraveling had requests?”
She seemed relieved that we were veering away from the original topic. “Yes, Mr. Lexington. There was a message left for A&R last night.”
Curious to know how well she did her job, I asked the question even though I already knew the answer. “Who left the message?”
“Mr. Hipwood,” she said. “Mr. Hancock said he planned to speak with you about it.”
I nodded. Stu was a good employee. If he said he’d talk to me about it, he’d do it. I didn’t need to worry about it. I could turn my attention to something else.
“I have a…proposition,” I began. “I…lost my plus one for the event, and I need someone to accompany me. If you do that, I’ll forget that you were a part of a conversation that caused one of your co-workers to be suspended.”
Her jaw dropped. “I wasn’t part of that conversation.”
I shrugged. “I don’t care.”
End of preview
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Also by M. S. Parker
The Boss
Big O’s
Rescued by the Woodsman
Sex Coach
The Billionaire’s Muse
Bound
One Night Only
Damage Control
Take Me, Sir
Make Me Yours
The Billionaire’s Sub
The Billionaire’s Mistress
Con Man Box Set
HERO Box Set
A Legal Affair Box Set
The Client
Indecent Encounter
Dom X Box Set
Unlawful Attraction Box Set
Chasing Perfection Box Set
Blindfold Box Set
Club Prive Box Set
The Pleasure Series Box Set
Exotic Desires Box Set
Pure Lust Box Set
Casual Encounter Box Set
Sinful Desires Box Set
Twisted Affair Box Set
Serving HIM Box Set
About the Author
M. S. Parker is a USA Today Bestselling author and the author of over fifty spicy romance series and novels.
Living part-time in Las Vegas, part-time on Maui, she enjoys sitting by the pool with her laptop writing her next spicy romance.
Growing up all she wanted to be was a dancer, actor and author. So far only the latter has come true but M. S. Parker hasn’t retired her dancing shoes just yet. She is still waiting for the call to appear on Dancing With The Stars.
When M. S. isn't writing, she can usually be found reading– oops, scratch that! She is always writing.
For more information:
www.msparker.com
[email protected]
Acknowledgments
First, I would like to thank all of my readers. Without you, my books would not exist. I truly appreciate each and every one of you.
A big THANK YOU goes out to all the Facebook fans, street team, beta readers, and advanced reviewers. You are a HUGE part of the success of all my series.
