Chapter Two Maddie
Chapter Two
Maddie
There is now what appears to be frog goo on the toes of my thrifted camel-brown Coach loafers, the ones I was very proud to debut last year at Gentry’s grandmother’s birthday party (proud until his mother complimented me on my Burberry dupes, at least).
Which was really just one of the many moments of foreshadowing that brought me here—to the doorstep of my hot, nameless hookup who also just so happens to be my new boss. Great.
“Okay.” I press my fists into my eyeballs as though I could literally shove the memory of last night into the furthest recesses of my mind.
Except . . . nope. It’s all still there.
Fresh as a daisy. Giant, burly, bossy daddy pulling and yanking on my ponytail as he filled the first of three condoms. Him eating me out from behind—a terrifying but thrilling first for me.
Me coming so hard my scream might have actually been loud enough to compete with the bar noise below.
Walking back to my car, sore and absolutely content. (Content until now.)
“Okay,” I say again, pulling my fists down as my vision slowly blurs back into focus. “This cannot be—”
“Porcupine!” screeches a little girl with unruly dark brown curls, wearing oversized high heels and a superhero cape. A silent but equally adorable and nearly identical girl tromps down the steps of the porch after her.
“Not the street!” Bossy Daddy bellows as he barrels past me after them and into said street.
I spin around to see the frog bounce back onto the sidewalk and in the direct path of an oily teenage boy on a scooter slurping a Mountain Dew Baja Blast.
“Fucking frog,” I mutter, and sprint down the steps to the sidewalk, where I jump out in front of the boy, sending him flying into the grass just before he flattened the stray amphibian.
“Hey!” he snipes at me.
“Maybe you should watch where you’re going next time,” I say as I retrieve the frog (blech) and give him the same withering glare I’d used on opposing counsel during various moot courts and mock trials.
The boy practically melts into the grass before silently retrieving his scooter and walking it past me.
I wish—not for the first time—that I’d mastered that glare in high school.
“Porcupine!” the girls sing as they crowd around my knees like little cult followers who have chosen me as their idol.
I gladly hand the frog off to one of them before wiping my hands down the front of my floral dress. And then think about how I’ll manage having a wardrobe that’s mostly and ill-advisedly dry-clean-only in my current circumstances.
“Dad! She saved Porcupine,” says the first girl who ran out into the street. She looks up to me. “You’re our hero. Thank you!”
“And you’re so pretty,” the other girl says softly as she takes possession of the frog, who I can only assume is named Porcupine.
Bossy Daddy swallows as he nods, and the way his Adam’s apple bobs reminds me of my tongue on his neck last night.
I look down to the girls. “You’re welcome and thank you.
” My style is more on the bland side than it once was, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t live to impress little girls.
I glance over at their father (who I have to stop mentally referring to as Bossy Daddy before it slips out). “This isn’t going to work.”
He roughs his fingers through his still-damp hair before smiling down at his girls. “Letty, Berry, can you girls head inside and put Porcupine back in her aquarium?”
The pair skip off to the front door, leaving us alone. Just the two of us and a wall of sexual tension.
I take a step back. Not that I would pounce on him in broad daylight in his front yard. No, my life is messy enough without this further complication. “So, yeah,” I tell him. “Your kids seem really sweet, but this can’t happen. Good luck.”
I turn to walk back to my car, parked across the street.
I need this job, but my horny, heartbroken ass had to go ruin it all because I was feeling bad for myself on my birthday.
Now, what felt like a harmless and truly memorable hookup is setting me back even further.
I immediately regret even letting myself go out last night and spend money on frivolous things like shots and cheese fries and a cupcake from that food truck between the shots and cheese fries.
It had been my first birthday alone, and I was convinced that it was no big deal and that it hardly mattered .
. . until I had no one to share my cupcake with and it suddenly felt like it mattered a lot.
“Wait,” he calls, and that same commanding tone sends tingling sensations down my spine. I hate myself for stopping and turning around the moment the word leaves his mouth.
“Just come inside for a minute while I call the agency, okay? Maybe we can get this sorted out.” There’s a hint of desperation in his expression that there was definitely no trace of last night.
“Fine,” I concede. Maybe a client call would at least be faster than contacting the agency completely on my own and waiting to be reassigned.
He steps aside and waits for me to walk up the stairs ahead of him. “There must be some sort of mix-up. The agency had said that the childcare provider they were sending over was a lecturer here at Astra.”
I turn back. “Do I not look like academic material?”
One single brow arches in a no-nonsense way. “That’s not at all what I said.” He redirects his gaze to the California plates on my car. “I’d just made the incorrect assumption that they’d already be settled here.”
Ugh, fine.
“My name is Maddie, by the way,” I tell him. “I don’t think either of us thought to get each other’s names.”
“Well,” he says, and then . . . he blushes. It’s cute on such a large man. “They did announce yours before your birthday . . . spanking, but I guess I had other things on my mind than giving you mine. I’m Bram Loe. I’m a professor of ecology at the university.”
“I’m adjuncting in the political science department. I suppose fucking my coworker is better than fucking my boss.”
The edges of his ears are glowing now too, but he is otherwise unruffled, which feels like a challenge, honestly. The last three years of my life have been dedicated to being as palatable as possible. But something about Bram makes me want to get a rise out of him.
Bram’s home is lived-in. Not in a hoarder sort of way, but in a way that unspools the tension in my shoulders.
Gentry Cooper Wade the Third and I had lived in a townhouse that was tidier than the model home we toured before he bought the place.
Other than the tasteful portrait of us from our first Christmas together, there was no evidence of life.
Our toothbrushes were put away every morning and night.
There were no stray glasses of water and he squeegeed the shower door every day after his morning rub and tug.
(Sex was strictly reserved for the hour of nine thirty to ten thirty in the evening.
Morning sex was not conducive to focus.)
As Bram scrolls through his phone before pulling it to his ear, I realize he’s in a threadbare Astra University shirt instead of a repeat of the button-down he wore last night with the rolled-up sleeves.
The vein coiling up his forearm and past his elbow disappears into the sleeve of his T-shirt as he waits for an answer on the other end of the line.
And all I can think of is the way that same vein twitched when he pulled me to him with my back flat against his chest and reached around, flipped up my skirt, and molded his hand to my pulsing center.
As I begged him to pull my panties aside and slide a finger through my wet folds.
Woo. Okay, I need some air. And maybe a splash of cold water to the face.
Even when Bram is no longer officially my boss, hooking up with him again would be a bad idea.
I need this job, and while I’m sure the university has some highly specific human resources song and dance for romantically involved faculty to adhere to that will make it permissible and aboveboard, a one-night stand—was it still a one-night stand if he went three times?
—anyway, a horny little hookup was not really how I wanted to kick off my on-campus reputation.
Bram paces the kitchen, rolling a pen between his fingers, as he explains the situation to the staffing agency in broad terms.
He pauses, his eyes roving over me for a moment before he nods to himself. “Yes, we discovered that we have a . . . conflict of interest.”
“Nice one,” I whisper.
The only recognition I receive is one very annoyed arched brow.
“Right,” he says. “Well, I suppose that’s good for business.” He pauses. “Um . . . no. We will discuss first and I’ll call back if necessary.” He nods, his gaze finding mine as he ends the call. “Yes, thank you. You too.”
I lean forward on his kitchen island with my hands steepling over my lips. “That didn’t sound very promising.”
He shakes his head slowly. “Turns out there was an IVF baby boom in eastern Kansas three years ago and the plains are now overrun with twins. The agency says the soonest they can reassign someone would be in a month, which does me no good, because their mother is gone now, and it’s just me.”
“Yeah.” I move to stand up and smooth my skirt. “That’s bad news . . . for you.”
Now he’s the one leaning on his kitchen island, scrubbing his hands over his face. He takes a few deep breaths before standing up straight, and his face is the picture of calm. “I’ll give you a twenty percent raise.”
“I didn’t realize we were negotiating.” My voice comes out more like a purr. Am I sexually aroused right now?
“We’re not,” he says flatly.
My face falls into a pout with my lower lip sticking out and my chin dropping.
First, he and his great dick are costing me my job before it’s even started, and now he’s ruining my fun by not even letting me negotiate.
Not that I’m entertaining his offer, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my brother, Nolan, it’s that you don’t fuck at work.
(The fact he married his work hookup is irrelevant; Nolan’s sexual omnivorism meant that the odds of him marrying someone he hadn’t worked with in some capacity were unfavorable at best. So I still rest my case.)
Bram’s expression softens, and it stops me in my tracks.
“I’m desperate here,” he says. “I promise to make this the safest, most ideal work environment you could ever ask for. Besides, the whole purpose of your job is that you’re here when I’m not.
We’d be ships in the night, Maddie. That’s all.
I wouldn’t be asking you if I wasn’t completely out of options. ”
He is right in that we would likely never see each other outside of passing along information about the kids. Berry and Letty are adorable. And the agency did say that the third child was a seventeen-year-old girl who could drive. God, is he even old enough to have a teenage daughter?
I shouldn’t do this. In fact, I hadn’t even decided on if I would, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I could push him just a tad more. He might have said his offer was nonnegotiable, but I’d be kicking myself all day if I left without testing the waters. Just for fun, of course.
I inhale through my nose and pull the strap of my purse over my shoulder.
He reads my body language loud and clear. “Twenty-five,” he says. “Twenty-five percent.”
I rock back on my heels for a moment, ready to push, but he holds at twenty-five. A rush of adrenaline chases up my spine when he shakes his head. It’s rare that someone can keep pace with me when I’m bargaining, and it’s kind of sexy how quietly and mildly he can do it.
But I’m not quite done. “I have rules,” I say. My mouth is on autopilot at this point. I’m like a cat who has to know that the glass full of water will indeed spill and shatter the moment I knock it over.
“Anything you want,” he says, walking around the island and closing some of the distance between us.
Now it’s my turn to arch an eyebrow.
“Within reason,” he clarifies.
“No more sex.”
His jaw clenches. “Of course.”
“We will, under no circumstances, be alone together in this house.”
“That’s not a problem.”
“The job description says that I cook five days a week. I propose homemade meals three nights a week and takeout for the other two.”
“I have a binder full of local menus.”
He’s too goddamn agreeable. I’ve pushed him this far and he hasn’t blinked. Now I have no choice but to say yes. Why couldn’t I have just left?
I cross my arms over my chest and try one last time to push him over the edge. “I want a credit card in my name for all incidentals and gas for while I’m working.”
He eyes me thoughtfully for a moment. “I’ll have one rush delivered. You can start tomorrow.”
My jaw begins to drop, but I stop myself before I look like an absolute buffoon.
Sometimes the problem with negotiating is winning when you least expect it.
He walks me to the door, and I can feel his hand hovering above my lower back like he’s guiding me. Protecting me.
I’m fucked.
I get in my car and wait for him to close his front door before I turn around and make the cursory inventory I do every time I return to my car.
My pillows are there. My blankets. My sleeping pallet—a twin bed mattress topper.
It’s all there right alongside the toiletries I keep tucked under the passenger’s seat.
Tomorrow I’ll be chauffeuring around two little girls, which means I’ll have to reorganize the trunk, where I keep most of my belongings—including my wardrobe. I don’t want my personal things out in the open where the girls can see.
I’d hate for Daddy Bram to come home after my first day with Letty and Berry to learn that their new nanny is sort of—okay, definitely—living in her car.