Chapter Sixteen Grant
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Grant
“YOUR TOP IS WET,” I repeat, slowly and clearly.
Rae’s big eyes stare at me, the limpid green-blue of her irises much brighter than they’d appeared in the darkness of the club.
Her hair is lighter too, the exact color of the leaves on the big maple out in front of my house.
Her roots have gone dark where sweat sheens her temples, which leads my gaze inexorably back to the lazy river of droplets easing its way into the intriguingly deep valley of her cleavage.
What does she taste like there? Salt? Perfume? Just how much of that warm, bright scent wafting over her desk to mine would I be able to nuzzle from that sweet-looking hollow? Hell, if she’ll just remove the damn shirt, I can taste her skin and—
“Well, hell-o.” Klaus walks in, large and red-bearded. He’s a developer. One of Dorothy’s very first hires. She’d trust him with her life, she told me, although after the fourth or fifth employee, the phrase lost its impact.
“Let me guess. Slip ’N Slide?” His lens-magnified eyes go from the puddle on the floor to Sunny’s top. “Oooooh, wet T-shirt contest? Yes! I’m in. Hose me down, boss man, and may the best contestant win.”
“How about you help us out here by grabbing the mop?” I grit out before the big guy does something dangerous, like upend an entire plastic water barrel over his own head.
“Fine.” He sighs heavily. “Where’s the mop?”
“Door behind you.”
He mutters something that sounds an awful lot like “Work Dad’s no fun” and marches over to the supply closet.
Meanwhile, my unbearably perky colleague has disappeared into our office, only to reappear seconds later, wet shirt, Mary Poppins bag, empty plastic bin, and all. With a mumbled goodbye, she heads out into the night.
I want to stop her, make her take that damp thing off, and put the sweater on, instead of holding it in front of her like that. I want her warm and safe and not out in the cool night air in that farce of a top.
It is with great difficulty that I hold my tongue.
The second the door slams behind her, I can breathe again.
After mopping up the water and seeing Klaus out, I take a quick spin around the office, which is now entirely empty.
Good. I’m alone. I can finally get some work done without the distraction of that woman sitting across from me, not to mention the staff’s eight million little interruptions.
Data, unlike humans, has a soothing regularity one can depend on.
And, contrary to buxom, redheaded submissives with a very obvious bratty streak, they do precisely what I tell them.
Did I really demand that she remove that shirt just now? Out loud?
What the hell was that? I’ve never—not once in my entire life—crossed that line. And I do not plan to start now. Whatever Dorothy’s put in the Kool-Aid here at Sugar, I will have no part of it whatsoever.
After fifteen minutes of staring at the screen, I give up.
I’ll work from home, where there’s no lingering smell of her tempting brew of flowers and baked goods and that scent from the club the other night.
If I close my eyes, I’ll see her pale neck, feel the warmth of her skin, her goose bumps every time I hit a good spot.
The swell of her deep, luxuriant breaths and those whimsical freckles, leading down like a fairy-tale woodland path straight to nipples that I can now—
“Dammit!”
I’m up, my hands fisted, my stomach rock-hard, along with parts farther south. I’ve never once let myself even think of sex at work, much less permitted my body to get involved.
I’m nipping this in the bud. Now. Tonight. Well, tomorrow.
No, actually. Now.
This requires rules. Clear-cut ones.
The second I open a fresh document and start typing, the tension flows out of me. Rules, like data, fix everything. Black and white. Yes and no. Ones and zeros. Those are the things that make sense to me, along with hammering nails into good, solid wood.
Once I’m done, I print the page out and set it on her desk, relieved at the sense of closure it gives me.
I then grab my computer, lock our shared office, double-check that the exterior doors are fully secure, and take off for home.
It’s a moonless night. In Richmond’s Fan District, where I live, the only light comes from sparsely scattered streetlamps and the warm glow from the front windows of the row houses on both sides of the tree-lined streets.
I didn’t think to turn my exterior light on this morning, which is why I feel rather than see the squish of something disgusting under my shoe. Smack in the middle of my welcome mat. Or where the welcome mat would be if I hadn’t trashed it after stepping on last night’s batch of animal crap.
I let my head thunk against the thick wood of my front door. “Are you messing with me?”
Someone snickers next door. “Cat shit on your doorstep again?” Dorothy’s voice wafts over, along with the scent of whatever new strain of weed she’s been growing in the greenhouse I helped her wife build out back last year.
Ostensibly for orchids, though by this point I’m pretty sure the entire neighborhood knows better.
“Did you see it?”
“It? You mean the poor little stray that keeps leaving you presents? Pretty sure it is a she.”
“Of course it is,” I whisper. “Next time, could you catch it, please? So I can take it to the SPCA?”
She snorts. “Not on your life. That cat’s courting you.”
“With turds?”
“Maybe your house used to be her place, and she’s just coming home to take a dump.”
Dorothy lets out a long, slow lungful. By the time the smell makes it to me, it’s mixed with a blend of woodsmoke and autumn leaves that reminds me of the year Mom married that guy from Vermont—Blain something.
He took me cross-country skiing a couple of times, just the two of us, in a misguided effort to bond with me.
Poor guy had no idea he’d married a serial bride—serial matrimonialist?
—and, in the process, taken on a serial stepson.
He must have been Mom’s fourth or fifth? Who the hell knows. I liked that guy.
That was the last divorce I cried over. The last time I made the mistake of thinking relationships could last past their predetermined sell-by date.
I shake the memory off, annoyed that I let it in at all.
“I’ve lived in this house for four years,” I remind Dorothy. It’s the longest I’ve ever spent in one home, and I immediately get that itchy feeling between my shoulder blades. Keep moving. Keep going. Don’t sit still.
The house needs work, and until I finish it, I won’t be going anywhere.
“Maybe it’s like The Incredible Journey,” Dorothy reminisces. “You remember that movie?”
“No.”
“Must have been before your time. I’m getting old.” Another drag, followed by a steady exhale. “So. What’d you think? Of my team?”
“You mean the rabid monkeys running circles back at the office?”
“Oh, come on. They’re good people.”
“But are they good at their jobs? And is one of them responsible for your breach?”
“They’re good people,” she says, with more force than usual.
It gives me pause. Dorothy, on the whole, appears flighty, but she’s a fighter.
A woman who married early and raised a child.
Then she turned a neighborhood matchmaking business into an online success.
She is not a pushover, no matter how many times a day she loses her glasses.
“Fair enough.” Nodding, I shut my eyes hard before reopening them. “I’m not sure what I think yet.” This is a lie, obviously, but being an asshole to Dorothy serves no purpose at this juncture. The whole point of this project is to help her. “For the moment, I’ve found no specific issues.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“Yeah, well, it’s early days. I’ll figure it out eventually. There’s always a bad apple to root out.”
She pauses to suck in smoke. Her next sentence emerges in the kind of tight, half-coughing vocal fry I associate with hard-core stoners. “You are the most cynical human being I’ve ever met.”
“Comes with the territory.”
“You ever get tired of it?” Dorothy’s voice is wistful.
“Security consulting?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll stop when I’ve reached my objectives.”
“Objectives. Shit.” Another long drag. “You gotta learn to relax, kid.”
Relax. Right. I can’t help but smirk. “That’s what the club’s for.”
“Oooooooh, the club. Yeah. I’ll bet. Maybe I’ll go check it out sometime.”
“Oh lord.” Picturing her and Malika all gussied up in leather and vinyl is enough to morph my smile into a full-on grin.
She giggles. “I could turn out to have a latent penchant for whips and chains.”
Malika, I can absolutely envision wielding a whip in spike-heeled boots. Dorothy’s a little harder to picture in anything but flowing hippie dresses.
Rae would look good in PVC, my mind unhelpfully supplies. I think of her eyes, her lips, that little divot in the middle of her freckled chin. The way she’d light up, bright red, if I spanked her just right, and how loud she probably moans when she comes.
My stomach rumbles, snapping me out of it. I toe off my shoes and quickly shove my key into the lock. “Night, Dorothy.”
“Hey.” She shuffles up to standing and walks over to where our banisters almost touch. “Any more news on our data breach?”
“We’ve got one guy talking about it over on Reddit. That’s it. My dark web monitoring hasn’t detected anything from Sugar. No leak sites or data dumps. No sign of it anywhere.” I shake my head. “Right now, far as I can tell, the breach is just a rumor.”
“You think that little bastard made it up?”
“He might have. I plan to find out.”
“I know you believe there’s someone on the inside—”
“There often is.”
“But my employees are not like that. I trust them. Totally.”
“I’ll figure it out, Dorothy. And I’ll keep it under wraps until I’m sure.” I suppress a yawn. “No one will guess what I’m doing at Sugar.”
“I know. Thank you.”
“Just doing my job.”
“You could’ve gotten a lot more for the office space. I know that.”
“I wanted to fill it.”
“Grant.” Her mom voice shuts me right up. “In twenty-one days, everything I’ve built could come crashing down because of that parasite my daughter married.”
I nod.
“What you’re doing is more than just a job. More than renting out an empty office. You’re saving my ass.”
“Don’t worry, Dorothy. I’ll fix it.” I shove open the door and head inside, grab a beer, and settle in for a long night of work, hoping to god I can keep my promise.