Page 30 of Enemy Boss

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I laugh.

Cullen’s expression turns serious, and he cups my face with his hand and looks deep into my eyes.

“You could never disappoint me,” he says.

I smile at him, feeling warm inside at his words. He leans in and kisses me, but this kiss is different. It’s not the desperate, hungry kiss we usually share, it’s slow and sensual and almost lazy. It’s a kiss of love rather than a kiss of passion and that’s when I decide that it’s ok to let myself fall for Cullen because it seems like he is falling just as fast as I am.

Chapter 22

Cullen

Three Months Later

Ican’t believe how well things are going with Max and me. In one sense, I feel like I have known her my whole life, and in another sense, I feel like every day I learn something new about her, something that makes me feel even more strongly about her. I love that I feel like I know her enough to be completely comfortable around her, but that she can also still surprise me.

While no one at work has directly asked me if we are dating, I’m sure there will be gossip about it, because people have most likely noticed that Max and I have lunch together every day now. To be honest, I don’t mind if everyone does know – it’s not like we’re doing anything wrong, and while the idea of a dirty little secret is quite a turn on, this isn’t a secret, dirty or otherwise. The only reason I haven’t actively told people at work is because it feels kind of like making a lame announcement to people because as CEO, no one asks me about my personal life really and I don’t think Max has gotten close to anyone here, at least not enough for them to blatantly ask her if we’re together.

At this point, Max spends more time at my place than she does at her own apartment. She has enough of her things at my place to get ready there and not have to go home to get a change of clothes or anything like that before work. Honestly, we are pretty much living together in everything except name.

I want to change that. I want us to officially live together, and I’m going to ask Max to move in with me. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, but to be honest, I’ve been scared to ask her about it in case she thinks it’s too soon and I scare her away. I don’t really think that would be the case though. It’s just my own paranoia speaking up, the part of me that thinks things are going almost too well and given the chance, I’m bound to fuck them up for myself somehow.

Max and I have just come back from a weekend away. We went to the coast and spent a weekend in a beautiful little beach house. It sat right on the beach and our back door opened onto our own private stretch of sand. We got up early the first morning and wrapped ourselves in blankets and went and sat on the sand and watched the sun come up. In hindsight, that would have been the perfect moment to ask Max to move in with me, but of course I bottled it and now I’m left needing to find something romantic enough to top that moment so that I can ask her.

Of course I could just ask her any time. I don’t think the setting will affect her answer one way or the other, but Max is special, and she deserves the best and I don’t want to just give her an effortless standard question. I want to wow her and make her see that I am worth moving in with.

As I’m thinking about this, my desk phone rings, and I smile to myself when I see it’s an inside line and I know it’s Max. I pick up the receiver.

“Why hello there oh light of my life,” I say. “What can I do for you on this beautiful day?”

Max laughs and then she turns serious.

“I’ve just had a call from the main reception desk. There’s a man there asking to see you. He doesn’t have an appointment, but he was apparently very insistent that you would want to see him anyway because he has some news or something. He said his name is …” I hear the sound of some paper rustling while Max gets the man’s name from wherever she has jotted it down while on the line to the main reception desk and then she’s back. “Derek Wellman. Should I tell them to make an appointment for him or just have them send him away?”

Derek Wellman was a guy I met when I first started the company. He was the liaison I had with a company I was doing business with and while I wouldn’t say we were friends – we don’t really know each other well enough for that – I would certainly say we were acquaintances, and we have a mutual respect for each other. For him to come to the office like this without an appointment, he must want something important, or he would have just called.

“Get them to send him up. I’ll see him,” I say.

“Ok,” Max says, although she sounds uncertain, and I laugh softly.

How the times have changed. When she first started working here, I would have taken that kind of response to mean that she was questioning my decision and then I would have snapped at her, telling her to just do what I was telling her to do and not make an issue out of everything. Now I realize that when Max sounds like she’s questioning me, she is often questioning her own understanding of what I have said, and I know this is the case here because the instruction sounds off to someone who doesn’t know my background with Derek. Now, instead of biting her head off, I quickly explain it to her.

“Don’t worry I’m not going soft talking to any old crazy that wanders in off the streets. Derek and I go back a long way,” I tell her. “I figure he wants something important to just drop in like this without making an appointment.”

“Oh ok,” she says and this time she sounds more normal. “Do you think I should move your three o’clock meeting just in case this goes on a while then?”

I check the time. It’s only one thirty and I can’t really see us needing longer than what time we have. Of course it really depends on what Derek wants.

“Leave it for now,” I say. “I’ll let you know if anything changes.”

“Got it,” she says. “I’ll get reception to send Mr Wellman up now.”

A few minutes pass and then there is a knock on my office door.

“Come in,” I call.

The door opens and Max steps in and smiles at me.

“Mr Wellman for you,” she says.

---