Page 104 of That Geeky Feeling

As she leads him back toward the dance floor, he turns to look at me over his shoulder and slowly mouths, “Not without a fight.”

31

A Month Later

CHARLOTTE

“O

kay, Darius,” I say to the voice in my ears as I walk back and forth in front of the small, square office window. “I’m happy you like that idea. We’ll talk more next week.”

Behind me, my shiny new desktop computer pings with an email. It’s Tarquin, the Harvest Enterprises CFO, asking for some income forecasts.

A lot’s changed in a short time. I now have the COO of the sports rehab equipment company we’re buying asking for my input and Tarquin asking for my figures, not Max’s.

And this office is all mine.

It’s by no means the biggest one in the building—eight paces by five. I pace a lot now—but it’s not the smallest either. And it even has a window. It looks at a brick wall, but a bit of natural light squeezes in.

I had building services repaint the room in a dusky salmon pink—I brought in one of my towels from home for them to match the color I love so much. And across the end wall, they installed shelves, three of which are already lined with my favorite planners, schedulers, journals, and notebooks.

Frankly, I’m still shocked and ceaselessly grateful I have it at all.

After the wedding I spent a whole week keeping my head down and getting on with executive assisting for Max without speaking to him unless it was absolutely unavoidable. I will never know how I managed to hold my nerve and play the long game and not hurl myself at his feet, begging him to believe it’s over with Elliot, and pleading with him to still take a chance on me.

But right after I finally cracked and spent a lunch break crying to Vivian while perusing job postings at companies I don’t want to work for, the breakthrough finally came.

Max, who’d avoided eye contact almost as much as he’d avoided talking to me since the whole incident, sidled up to my desk and started a conversation I’ll never forget.

“I wasn’t angry with you,” he said.

Him coming over to me was shocking enough. Him voluntarily speaking to me made me so nervous he was about to fire me, I could have thrown up. I even checked to be sure my recycling bin was handy just in case.

His comment came from so far out of the blue I couldn’t process it. Was he talking about Tarquin, who hadn’t shown up for a meeting, claiming he’d not received the calendar notification? Or because, earlier, Vivian chatted with me for too long about plans for her husband’s fifty-fifth birthday? Or because the soap in the men’s restroom has changed to something too floral scented for his liking?

My stomach jittered at the thought of what could be so important he’d broken our unspoken only-talking-when-absolutely-necessary agreement.

Firing me. That’s all I could come up with.

The only possible reason I could conceive that he would be subjecting himself to an unsolicited conversation was that, after a long, hard think, he’d decided we couldn’t continue like that and I needed to go.

“You weren’t angry with me about what?” Even I could hear the hesitation in my voice.

In a display of discomfort unknown to Max Dashwood, he concentrated exceptionally hard on removing a hair or a piece of fluff or some other invisible bit of detritus from his jacket sleeve.

Like a misbehaving child forced to apologize to a neighbor after a particularly enthusiastic game of ding-dong ditch, I almost expected him to start twisting his toe into the carpet.

He forced a halfhearted cough. “At Owen’s wedding.”

And like a match thrown on a barbecue soaked with lighter fuel, my body ignited with embarrassment—the embarrassment I hadn’t been able to shake off, no matter how hard I tried to purge my brain of the memory.

This man, my boss, the billionaire owner of a corporation that owns a host of household-name companies as well as cutting edge up-and-coming businesses, has seen my left breast.

“I wasn’t angry with either of you,” he went on. “How could I be angry when I watched Elliot try to take care of your foot. I’ve never seen him take care of anything but plants before, so it was obvious how much he liked you.” He tugged at his cuffs. “But he knows better than to mix business and brousins.”

“You can’t blame him entirely.” That was an injustice I couldn’t leave unchallenged. “It was half me too. He didn’t exactly force me up against the tree.” And before my brain kicked in, I’d stood up for the person he was blaming and reminded him about the breast hanging out of my dress. Great fucking move, Charlotte.

The involuntary clenching of my inner walls meant I’d also reminded myself of the last time they gripped Elliot’s finger.

---