Chapter 3
“N o Mom, I can’t make it. I’m up to my eyeballs in work right now. The company was just bought out and I’m going over every single financial statement with the new owner’s accounting team,” Lisa said putting the call onto speakerphone, so she didn’t have to hold the receiver any longer. Her mother had been lecturing her for the last ten minutes about missing Thanksgiving for the hundredth time and she was tired of it.
Then again, she was plain tired.
She was working her ass off running between the two offices with new information for each all on top of barely sleeping. Not that she was complaining on that side of it. The sex was absolutely incredible. Instead of dying down it was flaming higher and she really wanted to get this last bit finished so she could head over and see Corey. He’d had a meeting, but she was supposed to meet him at his place for dinner. They’d been doing this for a little over a week and it was simply better each night. She didn’t want to think about what it meant because she refused to let a man define her.
“Lisa, you haven’t been home in over a year and that was only a couple nights even. We only saw you for three days this past summer while we were in New York. It’s time you come home for Christmas. The last time you spent one here with us you were in high school.”
“I can’t Mother. I’m busy,” she argued getting frustrated.
“Doing what?”
“I already told you; I’m working.”
“They’ll be closed on Christmas Day and I’m sure you can manage to get off for a day or two without any issues if nothing else,” her mom stated making her hold in a groan.
“I’m sure I could but the simple fact is I don’t want to ‘come home’ as you put it. I didn’t over Thanksgiving, and I don’t feel any different now. Not for Christmas or any other time.”
“Lisa Gracelyn Branson!”
“I’m sorry Mom but this is where I want to be,” Lisa stated, knowing her mother would never understand. She wasn’t about to try to explain it to her though, that would simply make a mess of things. Worse than this by a longshot. “I don’t want to go to Colorado and see everyone.”
“Why?” her mother demanded, her tone growing angry.
“Because all I hear every time that I go back there is that it’s such a shame I can’t find a man. I don’t have to have one in order to be happy. I don’t have to have one to be respected either,” she tacked on knowing that was really her mother’s issue with her.
“Well then why can’t you find one? Colin was the sweetest boy you’d ever dated. You really should just move back and see if you two can’t rekindle things.”
“For pity’s sake Mother, I’d rather poke my eyes out with hot needles than ever go back or have anything to do with Colin again. The man is the biggest bore in the world not to mention that the sex was absolutely horrible.”
“Lisa!”
“Oh, come on Mother, I’m twenty-nine years old, it’d be a little crazy to think that I was still a virgin.”
“I know quite well you aren’t unfortunately. I don’t care what you think, no one will ever respect you if you don’t find a man because of your past and you know it. So when you have a chance to have something with someone like Colin, you should take it. I am tired of having to hide my head when people talk about you.”
“Then do us all a favor and disown me, why don’t you? Then it won’t matter what people say,” she fumed, wishing to reach through the phone to strangle the woman that’d given birth to her. The woman would never understand anything she’d done so what was the point of continuing with the pretense they were a perfect family?
“You’re my daughter Lisa. I just want you to find a bit of what your father and I have.”
“And I’d prefer to never be able to be compared to you because I’m not you . I’m me, Mom, and the me I am, doesn’t want to have any sort of life like you and Dad did or do. I’m not going to get married—ever. I don’t need a man to be happy or, so I’ll be respected by people that mean nothing to me. If I let a man into my life then it’ll be for one thing whether you approve of me sleeping with someone or not,” she stated getting ready to hang up as her mother started in on another lecture.
“Still at it?” Corey asked walking into the office he’d had set up for her beside his. “I think I’m going to have to have a talk with this boss of yours, beautiful. He’s stealing all of my girl’s time.”
“Shh,” she said hitting the mute button on the phone, with a groan.
“Sorry, it’s not a client or account, is it?” Corey asked, knowing quite well it wasn’t. He’d overheard the end of her little barb towards her mother and knew she was serious.
He was just as serious in needing this to be the beginning of something because despite everything he’d fallen for her in the last week. It might only be sex to her but for him it was far more. He’d never expected to fall for her so quickly after finally getting rid of Donna, but he wasn’t about to let her run away from them. From what they could be, become.
“No, it’s my mother,” she sighed as the woman began to ask a million questions.
“Lisa!” she shouted when there was no response after three other times of her saying her name.
Lisa unmuted the line and said with little warmth in her voice, “What?”
“Who was that?”
“No one…just someone walking past the office.”
“Hey,” Corey said moving behind her, willing to use the woman’s attempts to get her daughter into a relationship to his advantage. “I’m not no one, Lisa.”
“Would you please be quiet?” she whispered to him her eyes shooting death glares that would have scalded a lesser man.
“You’re seeing someone?” her mom asked and the hope in her voice was enough to infuriate her.
“If I am it’s none of your business, Mother. What I do is mine and mine alone. It’s why I moved out here.”
“Just come home for Christmas, please. You can even bring your friend if you want.”
“No,” Lisa stated, and he gave her a smile as her jaw tensed.
“Why not?” Corey asked feigning ignorance. “I’d love to get away from the city for the holidays.”
Lisa hit the mute button on the phone again and stared at him. “Are you completely mental? I am not going home for Christmas.”
“Come on, let’s go. Get away from here for a bit. You can show your mom that you’re perfectly happy with what we have and stick it to your ex all at the same time.”
“We go home together, and they’ll be expecting a wedding this spring. You’re exactly the type of guy my mother would want me with,” she huffed, and he was willing to use that to his advantage as well.
“Your mom wants you to marry well?” he asked, lifting his brow a bit.
“She wouldn’t care about the money if you didn’t have it if you treated me well, but she’d be thrilled you have it. You could take care of me the way she thinks women need to be taken care of and be pushing for a wedding date. She’s a throwback to the nineteen hundreds where women stayed home and raised the kids. That is not me,” she laughed as her mother continued to talk.
“So, then we don’t tell her about that part of me,” he suggested seeing she wasn’t about to let herself be pushed into a wedding. From the look on her face, that would send her running as far and as fast away from him as she could get, and that was the last thing he wanted. “What would they think if you showed up with Corey the bartender?”
“They’d flip which granted would be hilarious, but you don’t know my family, Corey. They are completely crazy.”
“Whose family isn’t crazy in their own way?” he questioned lifting her up from the chair before sitting down with her on his lap. “Don’t worry, the building’s cleared out,” he added when she shot him a questioning look.
“I don’t think it’d be a good idea for another reason as well,” Lisa said her eyes showing she was still against the idea of it but not quite as much. “What if someone found out we both took the same time off? We agreed to keep this quiet around here remember?”
“I do and one of us can take an extra day off. You have plenty of time not to mention all of the overtime you’ve put in helping me go through the company’s finances. If we fly out on the twenty-first or twenty-second that’d give us Christmas Eve, Christmas Day…”
“They’d want us to stay through New Year’s,” she warned.
“Then we’ll stay through New Year’s. I’ll make sure your boss lets you off if you have any issues,” he added kissing her gently as her mother began growing more impatient on the muted line.
“This is crazy.”
“Not really,” he said as an idea came to mind as he tried to clinch her agreement. “If we go then your mother won’t be calling all night to argue with you about it, every evening until Christmas, then through New Year’s when she’s angry you didn’t come home. Those calls will simply disrupt us.”
“You do have a point there,” she said with a grin. “Alright, this is insane, but why not? Get the whole lot of them off my back.”
“Good, now tell your mom so we can get out of here and go home.”
She pulled back slightly at his wording and lifted an eyebrow his way.
“To my home and bed,” he corrected feeling her tense slightly. He wanted to go to Colorado with her to figure out why she was so adamant about never marrying.
“Okay,” Lisa said giving him a kiss before unmuting the call positive she would regret this at some point. Without telling Corey what she intended to do over Christmas, she wasn’t getting out of here alone though, so she’d figure it out later. If she did go home then it’d hopefully be a while before she got another demand. Especially if she could cause enough issues, get up to enough trouble with Corey while there. “Mom…”
“Lisa Gracelyn Branson…would you stop muting this phone?”
“We were discussing some things,” she stated trying to hold onto her annoyance at the use of her full name. “We’ll see if we can get off work but I’m not making any guarantees.”
“Oh sweetie, that makes me so happy! I’ll make sure to fix up the guest room downstairs for your friend.”
“No need for that, we don’t mind sharing the double in my room,” she replied knowing it’d irritate her mother even more.
“Lisa…”
“Mother, if you want me home for Christmas then you’ll simply have to be a bit uncomfortable, because I don’t plan on spending that many nights alone when I could be at his place every single one of them if I stayed.”
“We’ll see,” her mother stated, and she knew it was the closest she’d get to yes from her.
“I’ll let you know when we have more answers,” she said even as Corey pulled up the information to book them flights. “I still have to make sure I can get off.”
“We’ll see you next week then,” her mom replied before she hung up resting her head back against Corey’s chest.
“This isn’t going to end well you know that, don’t you?” she told him.
“Christmas at your parents’ place or us?” he asked, kissing the side of her neck as he entered his credit card info, and she laughed to herself when he told her computer to save it.
“Christmas with my family; there is no us. You know you shouldn’t save your information to someone else’s computer, never know what a girl could order with it,” she warned.
“Order whatever you want, beautiful, I’ve got no problems with it. You know why? Because that’s what a man in a relationship does, buys his girl things, even if he doesn’t know he’s buying them until he gets the bill.”
Lisa let out a sigh, doing her best to ignore the pinging of her heart at his words. “We’re not in a relationship, just like there is no us.”
“No? So, what would you call what we’ve been doing?”
“Having sex,” she said, ignoring the look that crossed his face at her statement. “Incredibly amazing sex yes, but it’s still just sex Corey.”
“Exclusive sex, so that makes us an ‘us’,” he countered stopping her when she began to argue again. “If you plan on sticking it to your ex then you’d better start thinking of us that way too. What we do is our business but everyone else needs to think we’re together completely to make this work, right? If I’m just the guy you’re screwing, me being a bartender won’t matter as much, won’t make them that crazy, will it?”
“Alright I see where you’re coming from, but it is just sex,” she said, mostly to remind herself that’s all it could possibly be.
“I know that and I’m certainly not complaining,” he said letting his hands stray up her sides. “What do you say we head to my place now? Get a jump start on the weekend bliss?”
“I like that idea,” she agreed and once they were there, she let everything else go and simply enjoyed being with him.
The next morning, she started out at Corey’s office before heading over to her own to let them know she was taking off. She knocked on Donald’s door and went inside a bit surprised to find Corey there already. So much for him having a late meeting through lunch, she mused.
“Lisa, we were just talking about you,” Donald stated as she moved into the room.
“Good things I hope.”
“Only the best,” Corey replied letting his eyes turn darker as his gaze lingered on her body. When he did it, it made her pulse quicken but when Donald did it, it made her mad. “I actually was telling Donald that you’d mentioned possibly taking off from Christmas to New Year’s.”
“You’ve only taken a couple days off the last two years, so I don’t see any issues with you taking it off this year,” Donald stated, and she knew Corey had done it to make sure she didn’t back out. “Corey wanted to let me know that it was fine with him as he’s going out of town for most of the next two weeks.”
“Sounds great,” she lied as she sat down, going over a few things with both of them before heading back to her office there slightly annoyed.
Corey walked into it just before five as the others were clearing out for the weekend and she ignored him while she finished the files she was going through. “Okay, what’d I do?”
“I don’t know Corey…what did you do that possibly annoyed me because you overstepped?” she returned finally looking up at him.
“This is about me talking to Donald about you taking off?” he said, his tone surprised which simply annoyed her more. “I didn’t say anything that would have him wondering about us. I simply wanted to make sure you didn’t have any issues with him, that he wouldn’t ask more questions that could lead to us being found out.”
She let out a full sigh, glaring at him harder. “I don’t need you to take care of things for me. I am more than capable of diverting personal questions.”
“Are you such a feminist that you find fault with everything a man does for you?” he questioned, his tone harder than normal.
“Only when it oversteps my personal boundaries,” she stated in frustrated return. “I am not going to complain if you open the door for me or order my favorite wine at dinner. I will complain if you make choices that I can make myself, do things that I am more than capable of doing myself such as requesting time off. You want to know why I can’t stand Colin? Because he didn’t listen to a word I said, treated me as though I were nothing more than a pretty face that wasn’t capable of original thought. I am not a Barbie doll just waiting for some big man to play with me.”
“Got it and I promise, from now on I won’t do anything to try and make it easier for you,” Corey said as the first bit of understanding came to him. “I’m guessing this is why you were irritated with me yesterday and the phone call thing?”
“Yes, while I have conceded that you’re right, that us going will get my mother off my back, I don’t like being pushed into something. I like having a choice.”
“Then I’ll make sure that you’ll always have it,” he promised moving towards her even as she held up a hand to stop him.
“Which means that here the outside stays just that. The last thing we need is for the office grapevine to find out we’re sleeping together. I worked my ass off to get to where I am. I’ve had to bypass the dumb blonde stereotypes and female prejudices in order to be in charge of what I am. I don’t want people downplaying that with whispers that I only got it by sleeping with the boss—or implying that it’s been multiple bosses because it’s completely untrue.”
“So does that mean goodnight?” he asked, hoping the answer was no.
“It means pick me up at my place in about fifteen minutes,” she said shutting down her computer as she grabbed her things. “If we’re going to Colorado then I need to dig some stuff out of the closets and since you pushed then you can help with the heavy lifting.”
“Alright,” he said holding the door open for her to leave. He followed her out and kept an eye on her as she headed across the lobby towards the front doors before going to his car. He parked in the visitor’s lot at her building and waited until he saw her moving to the front door, before getting out to join her.
He quickly found out she wasn’t lying about the heavy lifting. She had an entire closet full of tubs, each clearly labeled, and the ones she needed were naturally on the bottom of the stacks. “You couldn’t take things from your current closet?”
“Nope, it’s not made for a Colorado winter trip. Don’t worry you’ll enjoy part of this,” she said with a smile as she pulled out a couple pieces.
“I think you’ll freeze your butt off in that,” he said staring at the miniskirt. He nearly swallowed his tongue imagining her in it.
“That’s why it’s not coming. Ah, here it is,” she stated taking out a dress. She shook it out and he stared at the zipper that ran down the front of it while she grabbed a cropped cardigan that would go over the top of it. She added several sweaters to the pile, and he wondered why they were in the tubs instead of things she regularly wore.
“Is there a reason behind taking these things?”
“Some of them…these are all things I like to wear while skiing, speaking of which do you?” Lisa asked, glancing up at him curiously.
“I do,” he said, thankful he did when she smiled at the answer. “I take it there’s spots close to where we’re going?”
“There are,” she said putting a few things into a bag.
“And the dress?” he asked as she stuffed it into the bag with the rest. “You have plenty that are far more revealing than that if you’re trying to cause a stir with it.”
“This one’s more about a specific stir than just a general one,” she said making his brow lift curiously. “This dress is to remind Colin that he still doesn’t control me. He told me I couldn’t wear it.”
“You’re kidding; the guy really told you that you couldn’t wear a dress?”
“Too easy for other guys to try something while wearing was his reasoning behind it,” she said with a nod at his question. “But if you act like you enjoy it and stay close to show him how much…”
“It’ll torture him knowing that I’ll be the one to slide that zipper down at the end of the night and have you naked in seconds,” he said seeing the glint in her eyes.
“Yup…so what do you say we drop this bag off at the cleaners then go see how fast you can get these off me,” she suggested, and he wasn’t about to argue over that.