I could practically picture them curled up together in his bed. I remembered how Daniel had made breakfast for me that one night I had stayed over there. Did he do that for all of his women? At the time, that had seemed like such a sweet gesture, something so incongruous with the playboy personality that the press insisted on portraying him as having. But now, I wasn’t so sure. Maybe he just had a routine with the women he slept with. Maybe I had walked right into his act without even knowing it.
I spent the morning feeling worse and worse about the relationship between us. I couldn’t keep my eyes from straying to the door every so often, waiting for him to arrive. So that I could what? It wasn’t as though I could confront him about my suspicions. It wasn’t any of my business. The sooner I could get that through my head, the better things were going to be for me.
If I had this much trouble with the idea of Daniel sleeping around, I probably shouldn’t be working for him anymore, I realized around 11:00 a.m. I swallowed hard, glancing over toward Erin’s desk, and then opened a private tab in my browser. With the way that my desk was situated, no one would be able to see over my shoulder as I searched for new business positions rather than continuing to leaf through the files of information on our latest business proposals.
I closed the tabs guiltily when Daniel finally walked in just before lunch, however.
I watched him go into his office, noting how slowly he was moving. I glanced over at Erin, who gave me a meaningful look. I rolled my eyes at her and then headed into my boss’s office.
“Are you all right?” I asked Daniel when I had closed the office door behind myself.
Daniel groaned piteously. He looked even worse up close, deep shadows beneath his eyes and his skin sallow and sickly looking. I didn’t think I had ever seen him look this bad before, not in any of the photos the media had ever posted even.
He gave me a sheepish smile, though. “I’m sorry I left you to your own devices this morning,” he told me, his voice gravelly like he’d spent half the night shouting. “Hope you had enough to do?”
“Yeah, it was fine,” I said, opting not to tell him what I had spent the morning doing: staring at the same information over and over again while I thought about all the things he might have been up to the previous night with someone else, before finally deciding it was time for me to search for new positions elsewhere. “Seriously, are you okay? You look rough.”
The words were out before I had given them conscious form in my thoughts, and I winced, expecting Daniel to say something snide in response. I had basically just told Chicago’s hottest young billionaire that he looked like shit.
But he grinned at me. “To be honest, I had a few too many drinks last night with Austin.”
I frowned. It wasn’t like him to be late for work, no matter what the paparazzi had to say about his partying ways. For him to admit he was late because he was badly hungover had to mean that something else had been going on.
“Were you celebrating something?” I tried.
Daniel stared at me for a long moment, looking surprised that I had asked that. Slowly, he shook his head. “No. Definitely not celebrating.”
“Oh,” I said. Suddenly, I realized what he meant. Surely I was wrong, though? He wasn’t trying to tell me that he was this hungover, that he’d had so much to drink last night, because he’d been thinking about me? Surely he wasn’t telling me that he was as miserable without me as I was without him?
But from the way that he was watching me, I realized that it was. Oh.
I wished that there was something I could say to make things better. For both of us. But instead, all I could feel was awkward. I hated that I had taken this wonderful, kind man and turned him into the kind of guy who went on a Monday-night bender that affected his ability to make it to work on time the next morning.
Belatedly, I remembered that I still had some baby Tylenol in my purse from the last time I had watched Layla when she was sick. I slipped out of Daniel’s office, figuring that he probably wouldn’t go anywhere in the time it took me to find those and a glass of water. Sure enough, when I got back, he was still sitting there looking pathetic.
“So you’re probably going to have to take about eight of these to make any difference, but on the plus side, they’re all tiny,” I told him, handing him the whole bottle as well as the glass of water. “But next time, you might want to stick with the popcorn and marshmallows. I feel fine today.”
I couldn’t resist smirking at him as he stared uncomprehendingly up at me for a moment. Slowly, he reached out and accepted my peace offerings. He frowned at the bottle and then opened it, emptying about half the pills into his palm before tossing them all back at once.
“I didn’t realize you had children,” he said carefully as he put the lid back on the bottle. He wasn’t looking at me, but I could see a flicker of uncertainty in his gaze. It just drove home to me how ridiculous we had been, getting so far in over our heads so quickly. We still barely knew each other.
I shook my head gently. “I don’t have any children,” I told him. “But I do have a little niece and nephew. My brother’s kids.” I smiled at him before he could leap to any more incorrect conclusions. “Actually, that’s who I went to see the movie with last night: my sister-in-law and her two kids.”
“Oh,” Daniel said quietly, sounding properly chagrined. “You had a good time?”
“I did,” I told him, deciding it wouldn’t do any good to tell him that I’d been missing him the previous night as well. Better that he didn’t know that. Things already felt awkward enough right now. But there was nothing we could do to fix it.
Except that I was going to keep working, and working damned hard, so that maybe, eventually, he’d be able to think of just my work things when he thought of me. So that maybe, eventually, he would be able to write me a recommendation when I went to apply for other positions. I could only hope that he could do that one day.
I didn’t want to think about how badly I’d screwed up this position in the first weeks of being there. This position that I said I’d been waiting my whole damned life for. Looking through the job boards that morning, I hadn’t been able to find anything even remotely as interesting, that was the thing.
But if I wanted to keep this position, then I was going to have to work for it. I could do that, though. I was ready to do that.
“I’m going to take my lunch break now, but when I get back, we should have just enough time to go over how we want to attack this afternoon’s meeting with the board,” I said to Daniel, knowing that would also give him a little time to start feeling better, now that he had taken some Tylenol.
Sure enough, Daniel smiled at me. “Sounds like a plan,” he said as I headed for the door. “Thanks for everything, Abb
y.”