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  I didn’t want to like him. But the more I was with him, the more I did. I thought about him all the time when we were apart. And it didn’t help that he always seemed to find a way to make contact with me. Like bumping me when we were walking, brushing my hand when reaching across the table for papers I was holding. Little things that drove me insane. I couldn’t tell if he was doing it on purpose, which infuriated me more.

  “Listen up!” Griffin barked, walking into the Marketing Bullpen. “I know we’re headed into a holiday weekend, but I kept all nine of you on for a reason.”

  I fought not to snort. The reason had been faulty logic, but I didn’t think he’d appreciate it if I called him on his bullshit.

  “The only way we’re going to save this company is by getting new clients. You’d better come up with some advertising that is going to bring back everyone we’ve lost plus another ten percent.”

  “Ten percent?” Mark Donovan scoffed. “Are you crazy?”

  “You’re fired,” Griffin said, turning his cold gaze on Mark. “I want twenty, I was settling for ten.”

  Mark stood up and grabbed his briefcase before angrily storming off toward the elevator. He mumbled something as he walked past me that sounded suspiciously like “always knew you were a bitch.”

  I bit my lip and stared at the ground as tears pricked my eyes. I was actually a really nice person. Griffin was the one that fired him. I knew Mark was upset, but what had I done?

  “Hey!” Griffin yelled after him. “Apologize.”

  “Fuck you,” Mark snapped as he kept walking.

  Griffin put a hand on my shoulder, but I refused to look up at him. I didn’t want him to see me fighting not to cry.

  “Right,” Griffin said, turning back to face the rest of the crew. “Twenty percent. You have until next Wednesday to come up with a pitch. Enjoy your holiday.”

  Griffin put his hand on the small of my back and led me back to his office. I was able to compose myself and when we stepped inside I was clear eyed and calm again.

  “That was uncalled for,” Griffin said. “Are you okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” I met his gaze and was glad my voice was even and strong.

  “That’s my girl,” he said, smiling. “You said you were hungry earlier. Do you want to order a pizza or something? I’d really like to finish the P&L tonight so we can work on overhead cuts tomorrow. Then I can get you out of here early enough to meet your family for dinner.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, pizza sounds great. I don’t have plans tomorrow though. My family lives out west, so I don’t see them very often.”

  “You’re going to be alone tomorrow?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going to be with you, remember?”

  “I meant— “

  “I know what you meant,” I said. “Should we invite Connie to join us?”

  He looked at me funny, as if he’d never considered feeding his assistant. I shook my head at him in disbelief before walking out to talk to her.

  “Connie, we’re going to be here for a while longer so we’re getting pizza. Would you like to join us?”

  “Oh, no thank you sweetie,” she said, reaching over to pat my hand. “You two enjoy yourselves. Would you like me to run out and get it for you?”

  “No, that won’t be necessary,” Griffin said from the door. “Why don’t you go ahead and get out of here. We’ll be okay. Enjoy your weekend.”

  “Thanks,” she said, pulling her purse out from her bottom desk drawer. “You two have a nice Thanksgiving.”

  Griffin pulled my arm and led me back into his office, shutting the door behind us. I sat back down at the table and started reopening all of the binders back to the sections we were working through.

  “You know what?” he said, reaching over to flip one of the binders closed again. “If we’re just coming back tomorrow anyway, why don’t we go out and grab something?”

  “I thought you wanted to get this done tonight?” I asked, staring up at him. He was so fucking confusing. “Don’t you have dinner with your family tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But we eat late and I don’t have to be there at all, really.” He shrugged. “Come on, let’s go get a beer.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Why?”

  “What is up with you?” I asked, standing up and glaring at him. “You come in here, you fire me, rehire me, make me CFO then argue with me about it. Tell me we’re working late then asking me out…you’re giving me whiplash.”

  “Whoa! I didn’t ask you out. I said let’s go get a beer. Not like a date.”

  “I didn’t mean like a date!” I corrected him. “And why do you have to say it like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it’s ridiculous to think you’d ever ask me out?”

  What the fuck was I doing? My mouth was just running and he was staring at me like I’d grown a second head. I didn’t even want him to ask me out on a date.

  Okay, so that was a lie. But it was a terrible fucking idea to date him. He was my boss. And he was not the sort of person I’d ever imagined going out with. All rich and handsome and annoying.

  “Emma.” Griffin put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. “Are you drunk?”

  “You’re such an asshole.” I knocked his hands away. “I’m going home. I’ll be here at seven tomorrow morning.”

  I pushed past him and walked out the door. I had to get away from him. The more he touched me the more I knew I was going to fall for this jackass. And that was just a recipe for disaster. He was way out of my league, and a dick to boot. I didn’t need any of that in my life. It was really time for me to find a new job. The Dunns were just too much for this girl to take.

  ****

  After eating two packages of ramen, half a brick of cream cheese and an entire sleeve of Oreos, I was laying in the bathtub with a stomachache, a glass of wine, and my phone. As I scrolled through Instagram, looking at the beautiful people doing beautiful things, eating food that didn’t contain Thiamine Mononitrate, it suddenly occurred to me how we were going to save the company.

  “Hey,” I said, when Griffin answered my call.

  “Emma? It’s almost midnight. Are you okay?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry. Were you sleeping?” I sat up in the tub and water sloshed over the side.

  “No. Are you…what are you doing?”

  “I’m in the bath,” I said, not really thinking as I reached over the side to drop a towel on the water that had splashed on the floor.

  “Why are you calling me from the bathtub?” his tone was amused and I flushed as I realized I was naked on the phone with my boss.

  “Sorry. You know what, this can wait until morning.”

  “No!” he said quickly. “Please, I have to know what could be so important. Do you need me to come over?”

  The question gave me pause. Was he teasing me? Was he interested in me? The guy I was on the phone with sounded nothing like the jerk I worked with every day. He sounded…like a normal guy.

  “Stop it,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I was sitting here, scrolling through Instagram— “

  “In the bathtub,” he cut me off. “Naked.”

  “Stop it,” I repeated. “I know how we’re going to save Sliver.”

  “I should definitely come over,” he said.

  “Okay, are you flirting with me?”

  “You just called me, naked, and you think I’m flirting with you?”

  His voice had turned to warm butter and was making me wetter than the water had managed to. Everything I’d been fighting came crashing over me and I knew that there was no use. I was going to fall for this guy. I was falling for him.

  “Griff?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll see you in the morning.” I hung up the phone and got out of the water, pulling the drain stopper before wrapping a towel around myself. I took my phone and the wine to bed,
curling up under the covers and trying not to freak out about what was happening.

  Obviously he was never going to like me the way I liked him. He probably slept with supermodels. He could never want some twenty-four-year-old, mousy virgin. I blew out a sigh and rolled to my side, hugging my bloated stomach and laughing at how ridiculous I was being.

  This was a crush, just a harmless little thing for a guy that would never be reciprocated. He’d teased me because he knew it would get to me. That was all. Tomorrow we’d both act like nothing happened, I’d pitch him my idea to grow Sliver software, then we’d break for the weekend and come Monday, I’d be back to my senses and completely over him. Perfect plan. How could it possibly fail?

  Chapter Four

  ~ Griffin ~

  My cock had been hard since Emma called me from the bathtub. I’d fallen asleep thinking about her naked, covered in bubbles and woke up four hours later with tented sheets and blue balls. Fuck, I wanted her so bad.

  When she’d called me Griff, I seriously thought about going straight to her house…except I had no idea where she lived. I could have asked Max, but I didn’t want to know if he knew. I had to believe she’d never slept with him. She was mine. Only mine. The thought of any man having touched her made my blood boil.

  I knew I didn’t really have a chance with her. I’d been such a dick since the moment I’d walked into Sliver for the first time, she’d probably never be able to get past it. But I’d been angry at having to clean up my brother’s mess, and I knew that if I’d allowed the people there to become human beings to me, rather than just dollar signs in a spreadsheet, I’d never have been able to do what needed to be done.

  But Emma had walked right through every shield I’d put up. And no matter how hard I tried to keep her at arms-length, she just wormed her way in without even trying. I was crazy about her. She was smart and funny and so fucking tough.

  When that marketing asshole had called her a bitch, it had taken everything in me not to run him down and beat the shit out of him. But she’d just stood there, not allowing anyone to see that he’d affected her at all. Like a fucking champ.

  Realizing I wasn’t going to get back to sleep, I rolled out of bed at four a.m., ran through the shower, dressed and was at work by five-thirty. When I pulled into the parking lot I was shocked to see Emma’s little blue Chevy was already there.

  I keyed myself in and headed upstairs to her office, but the whole floor was dark. So were the conference rooms on the second floor, and she wasn’t in my office or conference room either. Finally, I texted her.

  Are you here already?

  Marketing. She responded immediately.

  I walked down there to find her in the round room with glass walls, which I’d learned was called the “Fishbowl.” She was writing furiously on the glass with different colored markers.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked her, walking into the office and looking around at her notes.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she mumbled around a pen she had bit between her teeth. She walked over to the table and scribbled something down, dropping the pen and sighing. “Why are you here so early?”

  “I couldn’t sleep, either,” I admitted. “What is all this?”

  “Later,” she said. “I need coffee and we should run through the P&L, I had some ideas on that, too.”

  “Do you want to run to Starbucks?” I asked.

  “No, I’ll just use the Keurig in your kitchen.” She brushed past me, her shoulder rubbing against my arm on her way out the door.

  I followed her down to my office, watching in surprise as she opened a door I’d never even noticed and walked into a kitchen I hadn’t known was there.

  “So, what is this company saving idea you had in the bathtub last night?” I asked, leaning on the door jamb and watching her brew her coffee.

  “Later,” she said again. “Are you in love with this building?”

  “No,” I answered immediately. “It’s insane. Four floors was too much for forty people. For twenty-some it’s just outrageous.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “I always thought so, too. The lease is up in two months, so we really need to look for something smaller. Even when we get back to full staff, we just don’t need all this dead space.”

  She picked up her mug and walked around me, turning her back to my front, her ass rubbing against my crotch as she went back into my office. It was all I could do not to snag her by the hips and hold her there against me. Fuck, she was driving me crazy.

  “This must be a hell of an idea,” I said, forcing myself to act normal. All I really wanted to do was go caveman on her, drag her to the floor and just claim her.

  “It is,” she agreed, settling into a chair at the conference table. “Can you pull up the numbers from last year and screen split it with the ones from this year?”

  I nodded, opening the laptop and pulling up the reports she wanted. When they were on screen, she started pointing to the graphs and explaining what happened at each spike and dip on the reports.

  The first launch had been a massive success, then they’d implemented upgrades that hadn’t been fully tested and caused people to lose their photos.

  “Except they weren’t actually gone,” she said. “We lost market share, but once those photos were restored, confidence ticked back up and within six months, people had forgotten the glitch had ever happened.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, pointing to the four-month plateau that happened in the beginning of the year, just before the crash that had brought me in. “So, what happened here?”

  “Nothing,” she said with a sigh, leaning back in her seat and taking a sip from her mug.

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “Exactly what I said. Nothing happened. Max was so scared by the bugs in the last upgrade, that he stopped trying to improve the software. Meanwhile, every other photo editing software on the market were adding tools and filters and all kinds of cool shit. But we didn’t. So, people started leaving. There was nothing for them to look forward to, so why should they keep paying a monthly subscription for an app that was basically dead in the water.”

  “So, your big idea is to roll out upgrades?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “We don’t have the IT staff to do an upgrade right now. We need to stop the bleeding before we start skin grafting…so to speak. Bad metaphor, sorry, it’s really early.”

  “Okay, how do we stop the bleeding?”

  “Well, you already started,” she admitted. “We have to cut overhead. Not staff,” she said firmly. “But actual overhead. The building, the electricity, the monthly-bill bullshit that keeps the lights on.”

  “That’s not going to save as much as you think,” I argued. “This is what I do, you know. If it was that simple, I’d have started there.”

  “No, you think too big. You’re under the impression that cutting salaries saves money. But it just burns out the people you keep, making them less effective. They don’t trust you, so they won’t work as hard. Do you think that firing Mark yesterday is going to motivate those other guys to come in here Monday with ideas?”

  “Yes,” I said. “If they want to keep their jobs.”

  “They’re marketing people,” she said, exasperation plain in her tone. “They’re more likely to come back with job offers for more money and better perks on Monday than an idea to boost your revenue. You may be good at starting companies, but you’re kind of garbage at running them.”

  “Where the fuck do you get off talking to me like that?” I asked, my temper flaring up. “I’m still your boss.”

  “I know,” she said, setting her coffee down. “But you don’t respond to logic. I thought maybe if I could get you riled up, you’d understand that I’m not fucking around here.”

  “Why are you so interested in saving this company? In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve already fired you once.”

  “Oh, believe me,” she shot back. “I remember. Vivi
dly. Thank you. And had I not come in here and gotten in your face, you’d have nothing left because you just look at numbers on a page and think you’ve solved a problem. If you don’t have customers, dumbass, you don’t have a business. And the only way to keep customers is to serve them.”

  “I’m still waiting for this grand idea you have,” I said, rubbing my temples with my fingertips.

  “We’re going to get Instagram influencers to use the editing software,” she said.

  “Don’t they already?”

  “Not anymore,” she said. “And we never paid the ones that did to talk about it.”

  “People are going to see through that,” I argued. “They always do.”

  “True,” she said. “If we were paying the people to talk about using it. But we’re not.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “We’re going to pay them to get “caught” using our software.” She leaned back in her chair, looking smug.

  “You’re a crazy person,” I said. “Were you drinking last night, by any chance? Maybe you should just stick to…whatever the hell it is you do here.”

  “You mean saving your ass?” she asked. “That’s what I’m doing.”

  God she was cute. Her cheeks were flushed and her gaze was on fire and I wanted her. Her idea made no fucking sense, but she was the only other person in this building that was trying to save their job. To save this company. She was a little hellcat and I loved it. I loved her.

  The thought sent me reeling. I stood up and walked out of the office, needing a minute or two away from her as I tried to figure out where the hell the thought had come from. I couldn’t love her. I didn’t know her.

  Except I did. She was like me, she understood me, probably better than she realized. She knew how to speak my language and she had my number better than anyone.