Chapter Eighteen Grant
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Grant
RAE HAS TALENT. I’LL give her that. Although talent isn’t the right word. Is it charisma, perhaps? She’s somehow managed to make an incredibly dry subject entertaining, which is quite a feat.
It’s her ebullience, I think. Or enthusiasm?
Yep. That’s it. The exact thing that caught my eye at the club on Friday.
The thing that kept me eavesdropping on otherwise dull conversations between her and prospective Doms. A couple of the guys mistook her wide-eyed excitement for innocence or naivete, but I knew better.
This presentation, if anything, proves that Rae knows what she’s doing and is more than capable of communicating it to others. I can’t help but feel grudging respect.
I’m still pissed at myself for this morning. I did not want her to see those rules.
After a late night spent digging through the company’s data management systems, I’d planned to get here before her and scrap the damn list, which, with a little distance, was clearly a terrible idea.
But then Devil Cat struck again, this time shitting not in front of my door but inside one of the shoes I’d forgotten to clean and bring in last night, which meant my entire morning was screwed.
Those shoes are gone. In the garbage, along with the welcome mat and a pair of my favorite socks. Today I’m wearing Vans, the shoes I usually Dom in. There’s some cognitive dissonance happening. Wearing the flat, soft-soled Vans at work feels like a contradiction in terms. My body’s confused.
I look up at where Rae’s standing by the whiteboard, grinning at someone’s question about a new hire, her thick curls up in that clip, her neck delicate and vulnerable without the tumble of hair to shield it. The various chords of dissonance melt together like different colored waxes on skin.
Aw, hell. Don’t think about it. Not wax, dripping slowly onto her back. Not the way that nape would feel if I bit her there or how she’d look kneeling on the floor between my splayed legs, begging me for one taste of my—
“Does that work, Grant?”
“Sorry, what?” I blink back to the meeting and hate that it takes actual willpower to turn to Dorothy instead of focusing on Rae’s naked nape. Shit, have I been staring?
“You wanted to talk to Jade about gaining access to employee computers? Passwords? I suggested you could chat this afternoon.”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Okay.” Jade gives me a look that contains zero friendliness. “Any reason you need to get into—”
“It’s for the audit. Let’s schedule an exact time.”
“Well, as IT manager, I should be in on—”
“Just a routine thing, dear,” Dorothy breaks in. “Did I hear someone mention cupcakes?” She looks around as if baked goods might have magically popped into the room in the last few seconds.
Fair enough. There is something sort of fairylike about Rae. If anyone could make a plate of cupcakes appear with the wiggle of her nose, it’s her.
Right now she’s regaling Sugar’s leadership team with details about the succulents—the word frankly sounds dirty when she says it—she spent this morning piping on top of each cake.
What does she not do for these people?
Wait. Does she pay for the ingredients out of her own pocket?
She’d better not. With a staff of just under two dozen, that’s a lot of flour and butter and whatever else goes into cakes.
Our eyes meet, and her face goes immediately from animated to… What is that expression? Glaring and mean.
People stream out of the room. A couple give me dirty looks. I guess I cramped their style yesterday when I requested that food no longer be allowed in meetings. Or maybe it’s the whole mystery auditor thing. They never like that.
Across the room, Rae mouths something at me. I shake my head.
Again, she opens her mouth and says whatever it is, slower this time. Howard? Yo, Howard?
You coward?
I mouth an exaggerated What? and watch as she rises in a poof of mustard-yellow skirt and caramel top, gathers her things, traipses over to me, and then bends into my space to stage-whisper, “I said glower. You’re glowering, General. That’s against the rules.” Then she sails out.