2. 2
She glared at him. “You can’t just play with people’s lives, Mr. Harrison. I’m not a toy. I’m a living, breathing person who needs that income right now.”
She stepped up to him and poked a finger in his chest, her face flushed with fury.
“No you don’t,”
Travis answered with a smirk. “And I think I liked it better when you called me Travis.”
She was quite sure he did because she’d actually been moaning his name in ecstasy. Ally exploded. “You bastard! You are a self-centered, egotistical prick.”
Tears filled her eyes, the result of the burning anger spreading through her entire being. She’d just been intimate with this man, the same man who had gotten her fired from a job that she needed right now just because it was more convenient for him. She lifted her hand and let it fly, the satisfying crack of her palm against his cheek not nearly enough to appease the hurt of his betrayal. She’d confided in him about her life in a moment of weakness, and he’d used that information to get rid of anything that might inconvenience him. “Now I don’t have any job anymore, because I quit. You don’t have to fire me this time. I can’t work for you anymore. You’re just another man who can’t be trusted.”
With as much dignity as she could possibly muster with tears streaming down her face, Ally picked up both pairs of her shoes and her dress and stormed out of Travis’s office, shoving the clip for her hair into the pocket of her jeans. She gathered up her purse, leaving everything on her desk behind. She just wanted to get away from here. Asha would help her by retrieving the rest of her things later.
She fled out the main office door and down the hallway, literally running for the elevator.
Please be there. Please be there.
Ally didn’t want to wait for one of the elevators to get to the top floor. She wanted out of this building and away from Travis. Now!
She punched the down button impatiently, over and over, as though it would open the elevator door faster. Her vision was blurred by her tears as she bolted into the elevator and pushed the button for the lobby.
“Ally! Goddammit! Wait!”
There was a desperation in Travis’s hoarse shout that she’d never heard before, but it didn’t melt the ice that had formed around her heart.
Travis was a billionaire, a manipulative man who was used to getting everything his way. And he hadn’t one iota of remorse for taking away a job she needed, so she could be at his beck and call if he needed her, whenever he needed her, and for whatever reason he needed her. Bastard! Did he think she was going to become his fuck buddy who he could call any time he wanted to take her out and play with her? Pathetically, she’d fallen under his thrall, and maybe he thought he could do just that now that she’d split with Rick. For the brief period of time when Travis had her body under his control, she’d thought she felt a connection, a deeper understanding between them. Oh, had she been so damn wrong.
He was sprinting for the elevator just as the doors were closing. For an instant, their eyes locked, and Ally could see despondency in his eyes as he caught a glimpse of her face. Or she thought she did. But it really didn’t matter. She turned her head, unable to look at him, as the elevator doors slammed shut.
“Ally!”
Travis’s voice carried through the closed doors.
She pounded on the button for the lobby, willing the elevator to move. It jerked and went into motion, but it stopped on several floors on the way down, letting people in and out of the elevator on the way to the ground floor. Ally turned her face away, swiping at her cheeks to dry the tears on her face, hoping nobody would notice.
She stepped out of the elevator to the lobby as Travis came pounding out of the stairwell, his hair a mess, tendrils plastered to his forehead from taking so many flights of stairs in record time. “Ally. I need to talk to you.”
She didn’t want to talk to him. The last thing she needed right now was a lecture from Mr. Harrison. She flew out of the automatic doors and into the Florida heat, running as fast as she could in her stocking feet, juggling her clothing and shoes, digging her keys out of her purse as she went. She turned her head just as her feet hit the parking lot, trying to see if she was going to make it to her car before Travis caught up with her. He was almost close enough to touch, so she blindly bolted, seeing a brief moment of horror on Travis’s face as his feet left the ground in an explosive vault toward her. The impact with his powerful body slammed into her, and she sailed through the air locked together with him briefly before landing on the pavement with a slow skid alone for a moment, Travis quickly moving and rolling her on top of him. She shook her head, confused, before she rested her head on his chest, the fall having scrambled her senses.
From beneath her, she vaguely heard Travis calling her name hoarsely, the sound rumbling against her ear.
Strangely, the only thought she could form in her mind was that today, for the first time since she’d known him, Travis was actually calling her “Ally.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
Kade Harrison looked dubiously at his twin as he handed him a bag full of Duoderm, bandages, and ibuprofen. He dropped the overnight bag he had brought at Travis’s request to Ally’s house.
“We can stay with Ally,”
Asha suggested quietly, looking at Travis quizzically.
“I’m staying with her,”
Travis growled, not willing to relinquish Ally’s care to anyone after watching her nearly get plowed down by a truck in the parking lot of Harrison. “This is my fault. I made her run in front of that truck. I should have explained everything to her immediately.”
Kade shifted and folded his arms in front of him. “I’m not going to ask exactly how this happened because I doubt you’d tell me, but Ally’s lucky that all she has is a bad case of road rash. I have a feeling you took most of the impact and you kept both of you from getting smashed by that truck. I’m asking if you’re okay.”
Travis wasn’t about to tell his brother that his leg and back hurt like a son of a bitch. After what Kade had been through, Travis’s aches and pains were minor, and the slight road rash on his face would heal. Ally had gotten it worse, her bare arms and back scraped by the unforgiving gravel and pavement. He hadn’t quite been able to save her from the skid across the concrete from the impact of his body plowing into her. Since he’d been heavily covered from the neck down, all he had to bitch about was the soreness from the impact. “She could have died,”
Travis told his brother huskily.
Travis knew he’d never forget the moment he saw the truck come barreling into the parking lot, Ally running right into its path. He shuddered as he thought about what could have happened, what had almost happened. Although he’d managed to throw them both clear of the oncoming truck, Ally had still gotten hurt. Because of him.
“She didn’t, Travis,”
Kade told his brother solemnly. “You were there.”
I caused it. It was my fault.
Travis suddenly wanted to unload his guilty conscience, tell Kade everything, but he didn’t. “I’m sticking around to help her. You two can go on home. It’s not like we haven’t both had road rash a time or two.”
That was putting it mildly. Since they were both addicted to moving at high rates of speed on anything with an engine, they’d both had their fair share of accidents in childhood and as adults.
Kade gave Travis a knowing grin. “I brought everything you’ll need.”
Travis had taken Ally to the hospital, and they’d cleaned the debris from her wounds. But he knew from experience they’d start to hurt like hell very shortly. Road rash usually hurt more later than right when it happened, the small nerve endings starting to protest some hours after the actual injury.
“Call us,”
Asha insisted. “I want to know how you’re both doing.”
She walked up to Travis and kissed him on the cheek, avoiding the area that was scraped up.
Travis shifted uncomfortably, still not used to Asha’s open affection. It wasn’t that he didn’t like it…exactly. He just wasn’t used to it. The only woman who had ever shown him that kind of affection was Mia, and Tate’s sister, Chloe.
Travis caught Kade’s smirk and he scowled at him. Kade knew damn good and well that Asha unsettled him when she treated him like a brother. He was a cold bastard, an asshole, and he didn’t handle open affection very well.
“Thanks,”
Travis grumbled to Asha awkwardly, giving Kade another dirty look.
“I’ll handle the stuff at Harrison for a while. Just take care of Ally,”
Kade suggested, wrapping his arm around his pregnant wife. “And go easy on the hero stuff, would you? You took ten years off my life today when I heard you were at the hospital.”
Travis shot his brother a grim look. “Now you know how I felt,”
he admitted, remembering the day of Kade’s accident.
“I’m supposed to be the wild twin,”
Kade told him with a chuckle as he led Asha to the door. “Seriously, call me if you need anything. Harrison will survive without you for a while.”
“It will have to,”
Travis replied, not even giving business a thought at the moment. His main concern was Ally.
Travis locked the door behind them, grabbing his bag and the medical supplies as he returned to the living room.
“Why are you still here?”
Ally’s hollow voice came from the bottom of the stairs.
“You’re hurt. I’m not leaving. Once those road burns start to hurt, you might need help.”
He shot her an obstinate look, a warning that he wasn’t going anywhere.
“No offense, but you look worse than I do,”
she answered matter-of-factly, coming the rest of the way into the living room, dressed in a thick, green robe that covered her from neck to ankles.
She’d showered, her damp hair just starting to curl on the ends. “It’s just my face, and it’s superficial,”
he said, dismissing her comment.
Travis watched her as she sat down with a wince, curling her legs under her in a recliner. He dropped his overnight bag and took the sack Kade had brought him out to the kitchen, rifling through it for the ibuprofen. After shaking a few into his palm, he grabbed a can of soda from the refrigerator and brought them back to Ally. “Take these,”
he demanded, handing her the can and dropping the medicine into her open hand.
“I’m just scraped up, Travis. You can go now,”
she told him adamantly after she’d swallowed the pills. “I’m grateful for what you did today. The truck driver said he probably would have hit me if you hadn’t prevented it. So thank you for saving me from that. But I’d prefer it if you left.”
Travis shed the ruined jacket of his suit and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, taking a seat across from Ally on the couch. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Ally. And I’m not letting you quit.”
Ally snorted weakly. “What are you going to do, Mr. Harrison? Handcuff me to my desk?”
Travis’s cock twitched over that remark, but he ignored it. “No.”
“Since you already lost me a position I needed, you’d have to force me to ever set foot in that office again.”
Ally sighed deeply. “I can’t work for you anymore because—”
“I raised your salary effective immediately,”
Travis confessed. “I knew you wouldn’t leave the bar, and I couldn’t watch you work yourself into the ground. I asked Sullivan what your average salary with tips was at Sully’s, and I raised your annual salary by a little more than that amount. You don’t need to work there anymore. I thought that was what you wanted. I thought you wanted to have some time to pursue your other dreams. It was actually supposed to be a birthday surprise. When I got back to the office late, I was afraid I’d missed you. I wanted to take you out for dinner for your birthday and give you something you really wanted. When I saw you in that fuck-me lingerie, I forgot about everything else.”
Not one single other thing in the world had mattered when he’d seen Ally in his office looking like an erotic fantasy. He’d needed to touch her, make her as crazy with need as he had been at that moment. There was only so much a guy could take, and he’d reached his limit when he saw her.
Ally gaped at him for a moment before she replied hesitantly. “So it wasn’t really for your convenience, was it?”
“Yes and no. It’s convenient knowing you’re safer and happier, but that isn’t why I did it. I do suppose there was some selfish motivation involved.”
Hell, he couldn’t let her think that he was that altruistic, because he wasn’t. “But it wasn’t really about me wanting you available to me all the time. Ally, when have I ever demanded you be available after hours? I might be an asshole, but I usually do it during work hours.”
“Then why did you say that?”
Her green eyes flashed a look of confusion.
“Because I’m an asshole?”
he asked, trying to lighten the conversation.
Ally nodded. “Agreed.”
She looked at him, her eyes searching his face. “Are you doing all this because we’re attracted to each other?”
Did she mean was he doing it because he wanted to fuck her more than he wanted to breathe? Maybe…or maybe not…he wasn’t quite sure. All he knew was that she’d been screwed over by her ex, and he wanted to make her life easier. “You deserve the raise. You’ve become more of an assistant than a secretary over the years, taking on more and more responsibility.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “You already pay me at the high end of the scale for my position.”
“For a secretarial position. I promoted you to executive assistant,”
he told her calmly. “Now you’re on the high end of that scale.”
Okay…that was a little bit of a stretch. She was still salaried higher than the top of the scale, but dammit, it was his company and Ally did the work of both an assistant and a secretary. He’d never needed anyone else. She was worth that and more.
She cocked her brow at him. “It’s still a secretarial position, Travis. It’s just a more important sounding title. Why are you really doing this?”
“I thought I already explained that,”
he grumbled irritably. Christ! Couldn’t the woman just take the damn raise and promotion without arguing about it? “You’ve had to put up with me for four years. Before that, I couldn’t keep an assistant or a secretary.”
That was totally true. He was an anal perfectionist, and nobody had performed like Ally had as an assistant or a secretary. She anticipated his needs before he even realized what he needed, on a professional level anyway.
“And you couldn’t have discussed all this with me first?”
she questioned quietly.
“No. Then it wouldn’t have been a surprise.”
And he hadn’t planned on letting her refuse.
“You just can’t go around arranging people’s lives, Travis. I appreciate what you were trying to do, but I’m a grown woman, and I make my own decisions.”
“Since when?”
he challenged. “Every decision you’ve made over the last several years has been for your idiot ex, and he certainly never cared whether it was something you wanted or not. It was all for him. What the hell does it matter if I’m giving you something that you actually want?”
Travis wasn’t used to being questioned when he actually did something nice, which he almost never did, and he managed people’s lives all the time, usually because they didn’t do it very well themselves.
She was silent for a moment, giving him a quizzical stare. “And what exactly are my new duties?”
Hell, Travis hadn’t really thought about that. She already did the work of two employees. “We’ll make it up as we go along.”
“I’m not sleeping with you,”
Ally warned him with a frown.
Travis folded his arms in front of him unhappily and stared back at her. “You will. But when it happens, it won’t be because it’s part of your job description. You’ll do it freely because you want to.”
Ally took a swig of her soda before replying, “Don’t count on it.”
“And you’ll bring me my coffee every morning as part of your new duties,”
he informed her.
She shook her head. “Absolutely not.”
He’d already known she’d say that, but he didn’t care. As long as she was safe and he could persuade her to come back to work for him, he could live with that.
When Ally awoke the next day, it was almost noon. How long had it been since she’d slept this late? She stretched, grimacing as her body protested the sudden movement. As usual, Travis was right: the scraped areas on her skin hurt more now than they had the day before.
Was he still here?
She got carefully out of bed, snatching up her robe to put it on over her skimpy nightshirt. Travis had sent her off to bed, telling her he’d be there if she needed anything. Had he really stayed just to make sure she was going to be okay? Really, the infuriating man was confounding her. One moment he was his same asshole self, and then a moment later he was making her shake her head in confusion. It pissed her off that he’d meddled in her life. Yet, what he had done was also one of the nicest things anyone had ever done for her, even if it was highhanded and arrogant. Strangely enough, she believed him when he said he hadn’t done it for himself. But the unselfish actions just weren’t consistent with the Travis she knew. Certainly, she’d see him do some amazing things for his family, things they probably weren’t even aware he’d done for them. However, she was hardly family, simply a valuable employee.
Curious, she wandered downstairs, passing all the bathroom and bedroom doors as she went, every room open and empty. Travis’s bag was sitting on the bed in the master bedroom, the same room that she refused to use because Rick had banged his girlfriend on that bed. The proof of Travis’s presence in that room gave her a sort of deranged sense of satisfaction, the thought of him tussled and sleeping in that bed somehow exorcising a few of the ghostly images of the past.
Ally stopped abruptly as she entered the kitchen, eyeing the piles of papers on her kitchen table, Travis sitting in one of the chairs, moving papers from one pile to the next. He grumbled, and then dumped a sheet of paper on one of the piles, moving to the next with the intense concentration she saw on his face every day at work.
“What are you doing?”
she asked, perplexed, noticing her box where she filed all her papers sitting beside his elbow.
Travis looked up at her, his dark eyes roving over her body and coming to rest on her face. “Contemplating how much I’d like to put your ex in the hospital for an extended stay. He’d be there right now if I didn’t think it would just cause more problems for you.”
Ally opened her mouth and closed it again, taking in the frustrated look on Travis’s face. For once, he didn’t look immaculate. He looked dangerously disheveled, his hair mussed as though he’d been running his hand through it over and over again. “Are those my personal papers?”
Travis shrugged. “How personal are bills?”
“Why are you going through my bills? How dare you?”
Her outrage and curiosity were warring with each other as she asked.
“You said you needed to clean up the mess your ex made of your life so you can move on. So I’m cleaning it up.”
Travis stated the fact with utter calm, giving her a questioning look like he didn’t understand why she’d protest. “You made it quite easy to find everything, by the way. You’re very organized. Everything was alphabetized. Although I’m not quite sure ‘asshole ex’ is quite the way you’re supposed to label and file certain bills.”
Ally took a deep breath and let it out, not knowing whether to laugh or strangle Travis. “I said I need to figure everything out. I can’t believe you’re going through my bills.”
“I’m finished, actually,”
Travis stated calmly, picking up the piles and replacing them into her filing box. “And if you were engaged, why is it that the asshole never bought you a ring? Or did you just not wear it?”
“He didn’t. He said we couldn’t afford it.”
“He bought one. He charged it.”
Travis gave her a concerned glance. “After you split up. Why the hell didn’t you take him off your accounts?”
“He bought it for her,”
Ally said flatly, nausea starting to rise from her stomach to her throat, horrified once again because she’d been so stupid. “I only looked at the balances. I couldn’t bring myself to see what he bought. He never bought me a single piece of jewelry the whole time we were together. Yet he used my cards and credit to charge thousands of things for her?”
Ally paused for a second to get her emotions under control. “I was naive. I guess it never occurred to me that a man I spent five years with would ever run up debt in my name after he’d already betrayed me.”
“Stupid fucking bastard,”
Travis growled, closing the top on the box with a gigantic slam.
Ally felt her eyes well up with tears, an overwhelming sense of worthlessness leaving her stunned. “I wasn’t important enough. No matter what I did, it wasn’t enough.”
“Don’t cry,”
Travis told her ominously. “He isn’t worth it. It’s over. Everything is paid and you can move on again, Ally. He was a leech, a bloodsucker who doesn’t care about anyone except himself. It had nothing to do with you. Most men would kill to have a woman like you. It’s him, not you.”
Travis’s voice was so matter-of-fact, so sincere that it made Ally want to cry even more. “I have to pay you back. I’m not your family, Travis. You can’t just move in and take over my life.”
She wanted to tell him off, be angry that he’d butted into her business. But really, what he was doing was one of the sweetest things anyone had ever done for her, so she was having a hard time getting pissed off at him. Travis was bullheaded, and he was used to managing everything. But when had a man actually listened or cared about what she wanted, offering—or actually demanding—that she let him help make her dreams come true?
“I thought you wanted everything in the past.”
Travis sounded confused. “And no, I’m not family, which is really a pretty disgusting thought when you take into consideration how desperately I want to fuck you. That would be awkward.”
Ally sighed. She had no doubt that Travis did want to screw her, but she had no idea why. “Is that why you’re doing this?”
Men just didn’t run around paying their employees’ bills and organizing their lives for them to make things better for no reason.
“No,”
Travis answered huskily. “I guess I just wanted to make you smile at me.”
That answer floored her. She searched Travis’s face, the scrapes he’d gotten from saving her life the day before still evident. With his hair mussed, his face littered with red marks, his clothes consisting of casual black jeans and a dark pullover, he looked almost…vulnerable.
Her lips trembled for a moment as she caught her breath, astounded. And then, she just couldn’t help herself; she smiled like a madwoman. Yes, she was pissed that he’d pawed through her personal files, but his desire to please her was there on his face, and that made her heart sing. Travis Harrison, billionaire extraordinaire, had actually taken the morning to help her, wanting nothing more than to see her happy. “Is this good enough?”
she asked him, still smiling broadly as she made her way over to the coffee pot. “And we are going to have to talk about how I’ll pay you back and about how wrong it is to rifle through personal papers.”
Travis squirmed. “That smile was good enough for an all-day boner.”
Ally giggled as she poured herself a cup of coffee. She couldn’t help it. “But you wanted it,”
she reminded him.
“I still do. But it will be damn uncomfortable. I guess I’ll just have to spend another night in your bed jacking off to fantasies about fucking you,”
he said bluntly. “But I can guarantee just my fantasies about you were better than his sex with his bimbo could ever be.”
Ally nearly choked on her coffee. Her body heated at thoughts of Travis’s ripped, naked body, and him stroking himself in her bed while he thought about doing wicked things to her. “You didn’t,”
she denied.
“Oh, I did,”
Travis replied evilly. “And it was immensely satisfying to know that I was probably getting more pleasure in that bed with my fantasies about you than he ever did with his girlfriend.”
Okay…maybe he actually did. And that made Ally even hotter. If the ghosts of her ex screwing another woman in that room hadn’t already been exorcised, they certainly were now. Changing the subject, she sat down next to him at the table. “Can we talk about my new job title and repayment terms?”
She certainly couldn’t spend one more moment thinking about Travis touching himself.
“No,”
he answered simply, picking up his own coffee and taking a slug. “Consider it a bonus. Although I wouldn’t argue if you let me be the first person to read the second book in your fantasy series. You left me hanging.”
“You actually read the first one?”
she asked, amazed. He had to have read the manuscript almost immediately to have already finished it.
“I said I wanted to read it. It’s good, Ally. Really good. You need to finish it. Does the young hero eventually get his princess?”
He’d said he wanted to read her book, but people said those things all the time. They didn’t necessarily mean it. Obviously, he had read the story if he knew about the hero and the princess. “My hero is a little young for that right now.”
She took a small sip of her coffee. “You don’t strike me as the type of guy to read young adult fantasy.”
“I grew up reading fantasy,”
Travis answered thoughtfully. “The Chronicles of Narnia series was one of my favorites. I remember looking in every closet we had, trying to find a secret door so I could take Kade and Mia away somewhere else after reading the first book.”
Ally’s heart began to bleed for him, thinking about a young Travis trying to escape his horrible childhood. “I loved that series.”
It had been one of her favorites too, liking it for much the same reasons as Travis: to escape her miserable childhood.
“You need to write, Ally. Finish the books. You’re talented. I have no idea why the book was rejected, but books like yours brighten the lives of a lot of young people. They can escape into a dream when everything else in their life isn’t so great.”
Travis eyed her with a pensive expression before digging into his pocket and pulling out a velvet box. “I missed your birthday, but this made me think of you. I meant to give it to you yesterday.”
Ally stared at the fancy box Travis was holding for a moment before reaching out a trembling hand to take it. She wasn’t used to getting gifts, and especially not from men. “Why?”
she asked nervously.
“It’s a reminder to follow your dreams. And a belated birthday present. It’s nothing really,”
Travis told her tensely, as though he felt a little awkward.
Ally popped the lid, gasping as she saw the contents. There, nestled in a bed of red velvet, was the most exquisite necklace she’d ever seen. But it wasn’t the diamonds or the sapphires that immediately caught her eye, but the design. It was a small unicorn, the entire body sparkling with white diamonds, the horn and eyes made of small blue sapphires. “My unicorn,”
she said breathlessly, taking in what was almost an exact tiny replica of the unicorn from her books.
“It doesn’t talk like yours does, but I’m hoping that you’ll remember to write every time you wear it,”
Travis told her huskily.
Tears rolled down Ally’s cheeks as she fingered the delicate, beautiful beast on the gold chain. “I don’t know what to say.”
And she didn’t. No one had ever given her such a thoughtful gift. “The first piece of jewelry I’ve ever gotten as a gift,”
she mumbled tearfully. “It’s beautiful.”
She also knew it was expensive. “Travis, it’s too expensive of a gift for me to accept.”
“Bullshit. I said it was nothing,”
he rumbled. “I’m not taking it back unless you don’t like it. Then I’ll get you something else.”
“I love it,”
she cried anxiously. “But I don’t get gifts like this. It’s too much. But it’s incredible.”
“It’s nothing compared to what I want to give you, Ally. And I still want to be the first to read the next book,”
he demanded.
Ally looked up from the sparkling unicorn to look into his eyes, eyes that were turbulent and uncomfortable, as though he wasn’t quite sure how to express himself. “You believe in my writing that much?”
“Not just your writing. I believe in you,”
he admitted, his tone sincere.