Chapter 2
Grant me strength in the face of…Crisis.
Viktor
Ice water hits me, fissuring my nerve endings.
Launched awake, I jolt to find Crisis beaming angelically at me with an entire bucket in her hands.
“Good morning, sir!” she chirps, tossing on my nightstand lamp and searing my pupils with the brilliant light.
Quick breaths rock through my shivering chest as I squint against the agony of ice cubes in my t-shirt.
Crisis’s delicate yet strong hands fix one of my shivering ones around a tall weeping glass of whatever concoction she’s decided is my breakfast this morning. Usually, the smoothies are disconcertingly thick, troublingly green, and horrifyingly terrible. It would not surprise me if she delivered them pre-digested.
“Where did you…” I swallow, hard, against the cold. “…get a bucket ?”
“I asked Kaleb.”
“ Kaleb conspired against me?”
Her musical laughter almost warms my frigid skin. “He didn’t know what it was for ,” she says, soothing some angst where my middle brother is concerned. Setting the bucket down by my bed, she opens my curtains, which lends no further light to the room.
Dawn has never looked so bleak before. Violet hues barely kiss the lush flowers weighing down every plant Kaleb’s been tending to these past seven years.
Ever since our parents died in an accident and I was able to bring Kaleb back home, he’s kept to himself, making it his top priority to fill the Bachelor property with lavish gardens. Needless to say, the devastating shock of losing the matriarch and patriarch of our broken home hit each of us five brothers differently.
Kaleb gardens.
I…fall madly in love with the most abusive person I have met since my parents passed.
As my vision adjusts to the light and the devil herself takes shape, I free a shuddering breath. Dark waves spill around her shoulders, which her shirt today bares as though the birthmark upon the left one doesn’t beg kisses every time I see it. Sultry, alluring, brown eyes fix on me—thinly-veiled wickedness hiding in the elusive depths.
Her full pink lips taunt, tease, torture.
But I’m stuck on her eyes. Her beautiful, beautiful coffee brown eyes.
I really miss the mornings when she’d bring me coffee instead of concentrated death. Oh to return to the days when she didn’t care about my health, or did care about losing her job.
It’s such a shame she’s proven her value as my personal assistant far exceeds early mornings and green smoothies by now. More than doubling my net worth in a matter of months’ll do that…
Still, I’d give anything to have the love bombing back. She was just… so good at it.
“Up, up, up.” She returns to my bedside, sinking her fingers into my blankets. “You’ve got quotas to meet. I’ve got bedding to dry.”
With that, she steals my wet comforter, and trots out of my room.
Weak and shivering, I watch her hips sway until her perfect figure’s out of sight. Then I sigh and drag myself to my computer so I can start on the day’s work.
?
Only a monster would wake me at six in the morning via ice bath on a mid-April day in West Virginia, force me to drink a tall glass of kale protein powder, run my bedding through a dry cycle while answering emails and checking tenant complaints, then cozy up on my nice clean blankets for a nap while I’m trapped at my desk in a video interview with a fantasy blog.
But Crisis—beautiful, alluring Crisis—is such a monster.
Once my interview call ends, I twist my chair away from my wide oak desk and stare across the dark wood flooring, toward where my bed sits centered on a platform surrounded by open windows. Afternoon sun kisses the slumbering woman atop the tan comforter in ways wholly tormenting, filling my head with sonnets and scripts that don’t fit my high fantasy genre.
I am known for writing extravagant trilogies with five-hundred-page-long wars, forbidden desires, and star-crossed love.
Not poetry.
As it stands, my editor would kill me if he knew I was spending half my time working on a contemporary romance fanfiction, starring a self-insert male lead and a precious young woman…named Catastrophe .
Desmond’s a real stickler for deadlines. I’m a real stickler for whatever keeps me from climbing into bed and napping with my assistant.
There is only so much a human body can take before it collapses, and no amount of kale is going to give me the strength I need to stop my thoughts from straying—repeatedly—to places they shouldn’t.
Where Crisis is concerned, all I can do is shove the feelings into word documents and hope I don’t do anything drastic.
Like stand.
Walk myself across my room.
And touch her.
I become aware that my hand is an inch from Crisis as a straying ray of sunshine catches on my skin, drawing out the warmer shades of my flesh. Compared to the milk white around her birthmark, I’m almost tan, though next to Kaleb, I might as well be a fresh Google Doc with screen brightness turned all the way up. My fingers close away from that perfect dark star on her porcelain shoulder, and I stuff my fist into my gray sweatpants pocket as I march myself back to my desk, my computer, the two thousand words I still need before the end of the day according to my little slave driver’s schedule.
Crisis, by all trackable means, is the best assistant in the world.
Ever since she started working for me exactly two agonizing years ago today, my productivity has soared. My opportunities have tripled. Income has doubled, which is saying something since I was already a seven-figure author with several major deals before she came sweeping into my world with her Canva Whiteboards and systems. In about a month, she cut my admin time down by a modest…ninety-nine percent. In two, the drafts of the email replies she sent me to go over for my fans were so full of my voice, I stopped feeling like I had to do anything but press send. She’s on top of everything —from work to work adjacent, if the ergonomic gaming chair I’m sitting in is any indication. She spent hours searching for the best option after I, mindlessly, mentioned needing a new one. This was in my house the very next day.
The woman is so good at her job, it’s scary.
Good at life , however…
She is not.
Falling asleep in a grown man’s room aside, the woman’s self-preservation skills do not exist.
True to her name, she’s a walking disaster.
If only that knowledge made me want her less. Instead all it does is make me lie awake at night, hoping she’s okay.
Trouble follows her, like a shadow, always nipping at her heels.
I can’t even count the number of near-death experiences she’s side-stepped, blinked at, said so, anyway in the face of. I’m positive she’ll give me a heart attack one of these days, that’s for—
A thud.
I turn from my computer screen, toward a tiny lump on the floor by my bed. Crumpled in a ball of disarray, Crisis blinks wearily, rubs her head, and attempts to gather her surroundings while the softest ow flutters from her pouting lips.
Why.
How.
I was just over there.
I was just beside her.
She was sleeping, peacefully, during my entire hour-and-a-half-long interview .
She was in the center of my California King bed.
How in the world did she kamikaze herself off in the last minute?
The woman is a mystery. A beguiling, intoxicating, mind-altering mystery.
With really, really, insanely nice legs.
A cuss slips through my brain as I tear my attention off her thighs the second her lovely deep brown eyes locate me.
My heart trips, picking up the pace, so I pretend she didn’t notice me staring as I check the monitor with my plot outline and feed the next line or so into the document pulled up on my other monitor.
A buzz slithers up my spine as her steps approach. Graceful and commanding, she takes hold of the back of my chair, leans over my desk, and grips my mouse. Yawning, she checks my word count as though her birthmark isn’t inches from my mouth and her shirt isn’t a gaping chasm, baring more than the shoulders it’s designed to.
Self-preservation, who?
She’s never met the guy.
I cut my eyes squarely off the mysteries of femininity and close them as I free a taut breath.
“Hm.” She closes the word count box. “Subpar.”
Clearing my throat, I rub the stubble on my jaw, inhaling only once she’s pulled away and her hand has left my chair. Nevertheless, breath fills me too soon. Lavender—thick, heady lavender—lingers, cloying. Desperation constricts a fist around my heart, and I plunge my fingers into my hair as my eyes follow her retreat to my bed, which is also going to smell like her tonight.
Normally , she sits pretty at her little desk in the corner furthest from mine. She brings me water, vitamins, and my meals at precise times during writing days. She handles anything that might distract me from getting words down—including matters relating to the upkeep of Sunset, West Virginia, the small town that fell into my and my brother’s hands upon the death of our parents.
Normally, she doesn’t throw an entire bucket of ice water on top of me in the morning and need to remake my bed around noon. Previously, she’s thrown a cup of ice water on me or stuffed a handful of ice directly down the back of my t-shirt. Once—in the past few weeks of this early to rise, early to bed productivity experiment —she found Kyran’s cat, Ender, and let him lick me awake.
Luckily, Ender is not often accessible in this sprawling manor.
Or, perhaps, unluckily if the bucket option is going to become her new favorite technique for getting me up. I’d prefer sandpaper tongues.
I don’t know why I’m allowing her to test out this new idea of hers where she wants to see if I’m more productive on an earlier schedule. It’s clearly abuse. And if I persisted in rejecting it, she would have to let it slide. She does manage to possess some interest in job security whenever I say absolutely not .
I’m not aware I’m watching her until she bends to get something out of the laptop bag by her desk in the far corner, and I recall exactly why I’m allowing her to test out this new schedule.
I…
Am weak.
Painfully, painfully weak.
And her eyes? They’re very, very brown.
Yet again, I force my own eyes to close and stop ogling. Pulling my reading glasses off, I rub the bridge of my nose, up to the scar cutting across my right brow, and refuse to look at the full heart of my assistant’s perfect backside. This is torture. Torture worse than the physical abuse all four of my brothers and I faced at our father’s hand.
Thirty-five years I’ve lived celibate. Thirty-three years I focused entirely on my work, no problem. Thirty-three years I had more important things to deal with—like healing from twenty-eight years of trauma.
But two years ago, Crisis hit me like a storm, changing the chemistry in my brain. Even after everything she’s put me through, the violent feelings I’ve harbored for her have only gotten worse.
It takes approximately eighteen months to three years for the chemicals in one’s brain that result in feelings known often as love , but more accurately as infatuation , to calm down. For most, those feelings taper off at around the two-year mark.
I’m at the two-year mark.
But I’m still struggling to think of anything but filling my hands with Crisis’s hair and kissing her senseless.
Worse, I… like her. Her character. Her work ethic. The way she jokes with my brothers. She made Lukas a Shut Up, Your Brother Is IN AN INTERVIEW flier for today.
And Lukas texted me a picture of it… during my interview.
Which is just funny all the way around.
What I feel for Crisis isn’t a bundle of chemicals. If I allow myself five seconds to draw my idiotic brain out of its virgin gutter, I love her . Her determination. Her laugh. The nonchalance that will—ultimately—stop my heart in the face of a disaster one of these days. She’s peace and discord all wrapped up in one.
I can rely on her.
I can trust her .
While her torment is uniquely dissimilar from what I knew growing up, its presence means she doesn’t shock my system like kindness and tenderness would.
I love Crisis.
And, since my two-year rule of not acting on a crush has officially come to an end as of today, it’s finally time to do something about my feelings.
Which, of course, is easier said than done, when it’s so very obvious…that she hates me.