Chapter 4
SCARLETT
A smirk played on my lips as the knot in my shoulders finally began to loosen. Who knew revenge fantasies could be better than therapy? The vodka probably helped, too, but mostly, I had to credit Dakota’s twisted genius.
“Told you this would be fun.” Dakota’s eyes sparkled. “I’m heading to the ladies’ room. Order me another drink, okay?”
I nodded, watching her weave through the Friday night crowd.
For someone who’d drawn the short straw in the family lottery, I’d somehow hit the jackpot in the work bestie department.
Leave it to Dakota to transform my murderous rage into actual laughter in under an hour, with nothing but a pen and questionable suggestions.
Once she disappeared around the corner, I couldn’t help but admire our masterpiece scrawled in black ink:
REVENGE LIST
Slip industrial-strength laxatives into his morning coffee right before a board meeting. (Bonus: schedule said meeting in the furthest conference room from any bathroom.)
Shove an ice pick into his balls.
Glue his office chair wheels in place.
Put his car up for sale on Craigslist: Luxury vehicle, priced to sell, owner must flee country immediately.
Program his phone to autocorrect his name to Asswipe.
Undo the seams of his pants so they split open during his next presentation.
Send him anonymous glitter bomb packages.
Sign him up for embarrassing newsletters including: erectile dysfunction support groups, adult bed-wetting solutions, DIY hemorrhoid treatments, farm animal breeding techniques.
Hide sardines in his office vents.
Set his email signature to Best Wishes, Your Friendly Neighborhood Pervert.
Replace his desktop background with a looping GIF of him picking his nose.
Superglue his desk drawers shut.
Change his phone’s language settings to Medieval Latin.
Replace his hand sanitizer with superglue.
Reschedule all his calendar meetings to 3 a.m.
Change ringtone to Britney Spears song.
I smiled, running a hand through my hair as I scanned the bar, and promptly choked on my drink.
There, perched at the far end like karma’s favorite vulture, sat Jessica from HR.
The new hire who didn’t know me from Eve, hadn’t been involved in any of today’s disaster, and yet still managed to make my stomach drop through the floor.
Because what if he’d already gotten to her?
Spun some story about the operations director who threatened him for no reason?
And now here I was, coauthoring what basically amounted to a criminal manifesto on cocktail napkins.
Nothing said stable professional quite like the words ice pick and balls scrawled in loopy handwriting.
This wasn’t just a bad look; this was career death, wrapped in bar napkins.
One glimpse of this list would validate every lie he could possibly tell about me.
Worse, she might tell other people. Namely, other HR people with influence over my career, both inside and out, via word of mouth.
And it wasn’t like I could explain this away: Oh, this violent revenge fantasy?
Just a little therapeutic exercise after your executive tried to cop a feel.
Yeah, that would go over great. My credibility would be shot, and I certainly couldn’t afford to give him a leg up on the whole he said/she said situation.
Just my luck. Jessica’s attention did a sweep of the place, landing on me. It was only by the grace of the universe that someone was saying hi to her; otherwise, she might already be on her way over here.
I need to get rid of this. Now.
Dakota had taken her bottomless-pit purse to the restroom, and my own purse, with its temperamental clasp that had been giving me grief all week, felt untrustworthy. With my luck, the napkin would fall out at Jessica’s feet the moment she came over to say hello.
Grabbing the napkin, I spun off my barstool and made a mad dash to the trash can, keeping my eyes on Jessica during my frantic (while trying to not appear frantic) speed walk.
Which, as it turned out, wasn’t the safest idea.
With my gaze fixed to the side, I slammed into what had to be an escaped Greek statue and discovered that Newton’s laws of motion were alive and well as I bounced backward onto my ass with a yelp.
Two shoes appeared before me. More specifically, gray athletic shoes of the handsome variety, which led to a pair of black athletic pants that looked soft enough to make cashmere jealous, wrapped around legs that had to be sculpted by Michelangelo himself.
And because my brain was clearly still scrambled from the fall, I had the completely inappropriate urge to reach out and press a finger to those shins.
Just to make sure they were real. For research purposes.
But those legs? They were just the opening act.
His black athletic shirt might as well have been painted on, displaying a set of abs that looked like they moonlighted as a washboard.
My gaze wandered higher (hello, research mode) to find his chest and shoulders waging an epic battle for Most Likely to Make a Girl Forget Her Own Name.
Spoiler alert: they were both losing to his face.
Eyes brighter than any sparkling emerald I’d ever seen stared back at me.
Even from all the way down here—and the guy was tall, let me tell you—I could see various shades of forest green blending into sea foam, with flecks of gold that seemed to dance in the bar’s light.
His hypnotic eyes were set in a chiseled face that would make artists weep as they sculpted his refined jaw, broad cheekbones, and supple lips that could command an entire army of women to obey his every command.
He was, to put it mildly, striking.
I’d never had an instant flutter in my chest by merely locking eyes with another human being, and the involuntary response both thrilled and unnerved me.
Evidently, I wasn’t prepared for the impact of encountering such a magnificently beautiful guy because I just sat there.
On the ground. Making no effort to be a human and get myself up.
The man’s eyes remained fixed on me as he extended his hand. “Are you okay?”
Holy smokes. His voice was like ear sex, penetrating my brain with a low rumble of pleasure.
“I fell down.” Interesting. Evidently, the ear sex killed my IQ. And for the record, I didn’t fall down, exactly. I’d bounced off his granite body.
Those godlike lips of his curled up slightly on one side, a faint line appearing between his perfectly shaped dark eyebrows that matched his hair.
He finds me amusing. And he’s looking at me like the rest of the bar vanished from existence.
My cheeks incinerated, and my brain ordered me to climb out of the hormone-induced coma and rejoin the land of the mentally functioning.
Why, exactly, was I still lying on this nasty-ass ground, with his hand still stretched out, waiting to help me up like I was frozen?
While I’d never had a guy have this effect on me, I was a grown woman with an MBA, for Criminy’s sake, not some middle-school girl meeting her boy-band crush for the first time.
Get a grip. Get up.
When I accepted his hand, a flash of heat shot up my arm, down my chest, and right to my stomach.
I froze again—because I hadn’t done that a sufficiently awkward amount of times yet—and held his stare, wondering …
Did he feel that too? I didn’t know if I was seeing what I wanted to see, but his lips did fall open slightly, and his eyes snapped to our enclosed palms.
How could one small moment feel like everything, shattering my existence into white noise, until the only thing that existed was his hand in mine, his eyes sweeping back to my face?
An impressively seductive silence stretched between us until he cleared his throat, and with one graceful pull, he tugged me to my feet.
Stop staring at him. Say something. Walk away. What is wrong with you?
“I’m sorry,” I managed. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
Now that I was standing, I could appreciate how much more gorgeous he was up close and how heat radiated off his body.
As a new couple entered the bar, a gust of warm air swept through the door and past us, accomplishing two things: First, it made his hair move so delicately, I wanted to run my fingers through it.
Second, and more importantly, it drew our attention to the napkin, which had previously been lying unsuspiciously on the ground.
Floating through the air for a second, it, horrifyingly, drew the attention of Ear Sex’s eyes. I swear, the particles of time slowed around me as he reached his unfairly gorgeous hand down and picked it up before I could stop him.
Based on the way his arm was originally swooping in my direction, only to freeze, he hadn’t intended on reading it, but I guess when the words REVENGE LIST caught someone’s eye, their natural curiosity took over. Even Greek gods, apparently.
He froze for a moment, drew the napkin a little closer, and while my body and brain decided to become useless bystanders, his eyes roamed over our list of ideas. Those perfect lips of his twitched once, twice, and then …
Oh God.
His emerald eyes lifted to meet mine, dancing with something that looked dangerously like amusement.
Plot twist: My Friday night was about to go from bad to catastrophically entertaining. And this was just the beginning …