Chapter 25
JEREMIAH
“Well then, fix it.” I snapped into the phone, slamming it down in its cradle without another word. Why was everyone incompetent today?
And why the fuck was I dealing with all this shit instead of my secretary?
Again.
I thought after I hired a replacement for the train wreck my last secretary turned into that I was free from all the administrative crap. Boy was I ever wrong. It was only Stephanie’s second week on the job, and she called in sick, forcing me to handle all the day-to-day calls on my phone—which I sucked at.
I did it for nearly two weeks before I hired Stephanie. I couldn’t have been happier to pass all that stuff back to its rightful place: the office of my secretary.
Of all my talents, dealing with admin was not one of them. Especially since I had to balance it along with my normal schedule. I’d been late for two meetings already, suffered a scathingly angry phone call from my father and skipped lunch.
My stomach growled loudly, letting me know what it thought on the matter of skipping lunch. I paced the length of my office, half wondering if I had time before my next meeting to have a sandwich sent up while also thinking about the terrible fucking call from my father.
Nothing I did was good enough for the man. I didn’t want or need his approval, but it would be really fucking useful if he could keep his ranting opinions to himself. A dull headache started at the base of my skull. A consequence of having been subjected to him delivering a tirade for thirty-two excruciating minutes.
A piece of glass crunched under my foot, reminding me of the other reason the day started out catapulting me into the foulest of moods only to become worse from there. There was still glass embedded in my carpet from the broken picture I found of my brother when I came in this morning.
Anger, frustration, and annoyance mingled in my blood, heating it. I marched to my office door and stuck my head out.
“Would someone bring a damn vacuum into my office to clean up this mess?” I yelled, silently cursing the stabbing pain the volume of my own voice caused in my head. “And make it fast.”
Lifting my foot to my knee, I pulled the fragment of glass that got stuck in my shoe free. How the hell had this happened?
When I left my office yesterday, the picture was next to my computer screen as always. Yet when I arrived at the office this morning, the frame was shattered and lying against the opposite wall, and the picture of my brother lay face up on the carpet in the middle of the carnage.
I didn’t know how it was possible, but it looked like it had been done on purpose. Thrown or smashed against the wall. My thoughts drifted to my father. He was livid on the phone earlier, but he couldn’t be responsible for this.
Jack was his golden boy, his heir to the throne. Whatever his frustrations with me and my alleged failings, he wouldn’t have taken it out on a picture of Jack. Would he?
I shook my head. He wouldn’t. If it had been a picture of me, all bets were off. But it wasn’t. It was a picture of my late brother, the man my father groomed all our lives to take over from him when the final bell tolled for my father.
Until the bell tolled for Jack first and my father was left with me as Jack’s replacement. The disappointing spare to Jack’s heir. Running my hands through my hair, I gripped the base of my neck and sighed, flicking my eyes around my office.
It was sparsely decorated, luxurious. A large glass-top desk sat in front of a bank of windows that formed one corner of the office, a slim computer screen usually the only permanent fixture on it.
By this time of day, my secretary usually would’ve cleared out the files I’d worked on to make her notes or whatever and packed the rest away or stacked those that were standing over to the next day in the filing cabinet against the wall. If there was a paper file at all.
Mostly we tried to keep our files electronically, no thanks to dear old dad who still insisted everything he had to look through be printed. Without Stephanie being at the office today though, my desk was littered with paper, and a red light flickered on the printer situated on a low table next to my desk. Figured it would run dry today, and I just hadn’t gotten to ordering a refill from the office supply guys downstairs.
I crossed my office to my white couch, leaning back until my head rested against the wall as I ignored the chaos on my desk and focused on the city’s skyline in the fast-approaching dusk. Hiring Stephanie last week was like getting a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart.
She made my pulse race when she came to work wearing something that hugged her glorious curves. Her feisty, yet sweet nature and humor infused the atmosphere at the office. And hearing her laugh from her desk at jokes people made when they passed by took the edge off my endless, draining days.
Despite having no prior experience in secretarial work, she was doing great in her new position. Or at least she had been until she hadn’t shown up this morning. Maybe it was foolish of me to have hired the girl I was most attracted to instead of one of the candidates who was more qualified for the job.
Those people had all driven me crazy during the interviews, but maybe I would’ve gotten used to one of them. It was impossible to know.
UnlessSteph pulled something like this again because then I would have to let her go. Much as I enjoyed having her around, I couldn’t deal with an endless stream of days like today. Her referral letter from the bookstore where she used to work praised her relentless dedication to her job and her reliability. But from where I was sitting, she didn’t seem all that reliable.
Thinking about her, my mind wandered back to yesterday, to the moments right before I left her standing breathlessly in my office. It had killed me to walk away from her. And left me with a painful case of blue balls.
It wasn’t just the kiss that lingered in my mind but the entire encounter leading up to it. Sure, the kiss itself was hot as fucking hell, but the way she called me out just before it matched its heat.
I’d been a total jerk to her, and unlike every other woman who had ever been in my life, she hadn’t stood for it—not for one second. She picked up the gauntlet I threw down confidently and without hesitation, putting me in my place with a fervent passion.