Chapter 3
CARMINE
Two boxes of nitrile, large. One of medium. Half a box of small.”
Clarissa is on the floor of the supply closet with the clipboard balanced on her knee, pen between her teeth. Her hair is half up, half coming loose. The shop opens in twenty minutes.
“Barrier film?”
“Three rolls. We’ll need to order by Friday.”
I write it on the sheet and lean against the closet doorway, balancing the supplier sheet and schedule book on top of my coffee.
Clarissa glances up at me, and the top button of her blouse is open.
It’s been open every morning for two weeks, and every morning I tell myself not to look, and every morning I look.
The swell of her heavy tits, a creamy dessert under the thin fabric of her blouse.
If she leaned forward another inch, I’d see her bra.
My cock thickens against my jeans, and I grip the coffee mug harder.
I look at the sheet. “Supplier invoice from the seventeenth.”
“Filed.”
I look up. “Under?”
She reads from the back of the clipboard.
“Vendors / Quigley & Sons / 2024. I made a separate folder for each vendor—the old system had three Quigley invoices stuffed in with artist receipts.”
“You alphabetized the vendors?”
She caps her pen with her teeth and moves to the next shelf.
“It seemed like a good idea.”
“Thanks.” I knew we needed help, but I didn’t realize just how much someone competent with all the admin bullshit would make my life easier.
I should have hired someone a long time ago, like Waylon suggested.
But then I probably wouldn’t have Clarissa looking like the sexiest fucking angel I’ve ever seen, so maybe all the past grief was worth it.
“I also put due dates on the calendar,” she says, not looking up from the shelf she’s working on. “The Oaker account runs net-thirty, so I set a flag at day twenty-five. The ink supplier flagged on the twenty-eighth. I repurposed the reminder column on the booking system—hope that’s okay.”
“Yeah.”
“Carmine?”
“Yeah.”
She taps the clipboard with her own pen twice. “Are you going to write that down, or do I need to?”
She turns the page and reads off the rest—cartridges, ink, grey wash—without looking at the boxes more than once.
When she gets to the bottom shelf, she bends forward to check behind a case of black, and her ass goes round and high under that skirt, and my cock throbs hard enough that I have to shift my weight against the doorframe.
“How was your weekend?”
She looks up, and some of the light has gone out of her eyes.
“Could’ve gone better.” She caps the pen. “My father is mad at me.”
“How come?”
“Didn’t go to church Sunday.” She sets the clipboard on the shelf and pushes herself up off the floor. “He takes it personally.”
Her skirt catches on her knee on the way up, and she smooths it without thinking, one hand flat against her thigh, fingers spread wide over the curve of it, and my brain short-circuits.
I set the mug on the supply shelf and keep the supplier sheet in front of my hips because I am visibly, painfully hard, and she is two feet away from me.
“What’s the big deal about one Sunday?”
She brushes the back of her skirt off. Looks at me.
“My dad’s the pastor. Pastor Hayes? At the white church on Elm.”
Fuck. Holy fucking fuck.
She makes a small gesture, palm up. “So it’s kind of—it’s not just church. He gets mad if the whole family isn’t there, except for when I was away at college, obviously.”
I have been fantasizing about bending the pastor’s daughter over my desk and railing her until she’s whimpering and coming on my cock.
I’ve been thinking about her naked in my bed, about the sounds she’d make, about what her tits look like hanging over my face, about her kneeling in front of me and sucking my cock until I exploded in her mouth.
I am definitely going to hell, but I always knew that.
“Huh.”
“Yeah.” Her hand lands on my forearm as she leans past me into the hall to grab an empty box for recycling.
Her hip presses against mine on the way through—the full, thick curve of it against my thigh, one second of her body against mine—and every thought I have goes white.
I angle my body so she doesn’t brush against my boner.
“Anyway. Liam’s first asked to push fifteen—I told him I’d check. ”
“Fine.”
She goes down the hall with the box. I take the mug and walk back to the office without looking at her because if I watch her walk away I am going to stare at her ass and her thighs and the way that skirt moves and I will not be able to work unless I jack off.
And jacking off is really not what I should be doing at work. Ever.
The cross at her throat. I clocked it the first day and ignored it when I wanted to put my mouth on that spot.
I have wanted to since Clarissa first walked in the shop, and the cross was supposed to be the thing that kept me in line but it turns out the cross is attached to a pastor and the pastor is the kind of man who would take one look at me—the ink, the shop, the everything—and know exactly what I’ve been thinking about doing to his daughter.
I’m really going to hell.
The shop is empty of customers by ten past seven. Clarissa left at five-thirty, and I have been thinking about the sound of her voice ever since. I feel like a stupid teenage boy. I know how to deal with women, but I don’t know how to deal with a sweet girl like Clarissa.
Liam clears his throat. “So.”
“No.”
“I haven’t said anything.” Liam laughs. He finishes cleaning his counter and tosses the rag into the laundry bin. “She’s good at the job.”
“Yeah, she is.”
He drags a clean rag across the rim of his ink tray slowly and lifts each cap to wipe under it. “Really good.”
“Yes.”
“And you watch her like—”
“I don’t think you want to finish that sentence, Liam.”
He doesn’t stop. “She didn’t need your help to do inventory, boss. You inventing excuses to spend time with her now?”
“She was doing inventory. I was doing the supplier order. That’s called running a shop.”
Clancy, without turning from his station: “You were in that closet for forty minutes.”
“She’s sexy as hell,” I say, because denying it would be insulting to everyone in this room, including me. “And it’s a terrible idea. There is a long list of reasons I can’t touch her.”
Liam grins at his counter. “You going to ask her out?”
“And she looks at you like she wants you to,” Ford adds, laughing.
I don’t have anything for that, so I write grey wash, two each of three, four, five on the order and keep my mouth shut.
The bell over the door rings. Daisy comes in, a sandwich bag in one hand.
“Hey, boys. Just bringing dinner for my man.”
Knight is a man I have worked next to for two and a half years, but it never ceases to amaze me how different he is with his wife.
He crosses the shop and kisses her, brief and easy, his hand going to her hip.
I am watching this man touch the woman he loves like it’s the simplest thing in the world and my hands are aching because I know exactly where I’d put mine—Clarissa’s waist, the small of her back, the spot where her hip curves into her thigh.
I’d pull her against me and I would not be brief about it.
“Hey,” he says, in the voice he uses for one person on this earth.
She lifts the bag a quarter inch. “Brought you dinner.”
“You didn’t have to.”
She presses the bag into his chest, both hands. “I wanted to. I know you’re going straight to the studio and you’ll forget otherwise.”
He takes the bag and says something low I don’t catch. She laughs, pats his chest, and walks to the door. He watches her cross the sidewalk.
Liam chuckles as he watches Knight. “And there he goes.”
Knight turns from the door. “I heard that, asshole.” He comes back to his station, sits down, and pulls the sketchpad out of the bag he came in for.
Ford starts breaking down his station. “Did I hear her say that she’s the pastor’s daughter?” He says it loud enough that everyone in the shop goes quiet.
I glare at Ford. “Yeah. It’s true.”
Liam lets out a low whistle. “Pastor’s daughter. So you’re not just screwed, you’re—”
“Liam,” I growl, my voice low with warning.
Clancy sets down a cartridge. “That does add a layer.”
“It adds nothing,” I say, “because there’s nothing to add it to. She’s my employee. End of story.”
The shop is quiet for a second, and then Knight’s pencil stops. He doesn’t look up right away—just sits there, tapping the eraser against his pad, and when he does look up, his voice is different. No razzing in it. “Look. If you really like her, find out if she likes you.”
“Knight—”
“Look at me and Daisy.” He sets the pencil down.
“No one would have ever thought we could make it. I was so sure I’d fuck it up that I almost walked away twice, and both times I couldn’t sleep for a week because the thought of not being with her made me physically sick.
” He picks the pencil back up, turning it between his fingers.
“She’s the fucking love of my life. I can’t imagine not waking up with her in my arms. And if I’d let all the reasons it was complicated stop me, I’d still be drawing alone at midnight and being a lonely, grumpy man. ”
“That’s different,” I say.
“Is it?” Knight asks and goes back to his sketch.
Complicated. Complicated is how many years I have on Clarissa, the fact she’s my employee, the shop I run. I can’t let Waylon down by fucking this place up with a bad rep.
But the pastor’s not complicated. The pastor means I am fucked, in every sense except the one I actually want.