Page 23 of Baby Bombshell for the Boss

“Show-off,” she said, laughing. “All right, then. What kind of situation makes you nervous?”

He looked over at her. The answer to that question was one he didn’t particularly want to give out loud.

And maybe Ivy knew what he wasn’t saying, because she was looking back at him with the same quiet intensity that he was feeling. She looked like there might have been something she wanted to say, but he could see her holding it back.

Just say it, he thought, and then wondered if he really wanted her to. Whether her thoughts were in alignment with his own or not, once the words were out there, there would be no going back. And what if she said something very different from what he hoped to hear? What if the thing she wanted to say was that they shouldn’t see each other anymore?

He wasn’t prepared to grapple with his feelings about that, little though he liked to admit it.

She swallowed. “Anyway,” she said, “if you can think of a situation that would make you feel nervous, you can probably come up with the same feeling a person interviewing for a job here would be having. And then you just have to answer the question of whether sitting here on this couch makes you feel more relaxed about it.”

“Sitting here makes me feel anything but relaxed,” he told her.

He regretted the words as soon as they’d left his mouth — he couldn’t quite believe he had actually said them aloud. She was going to ask him to elaborate. Of course she would. And he would have to convince her that his current state of nerves had nothing to do with the couch they had chosen or its location here. What was he going to say?

She didn’t ask.

Instead, she turned to face him, a slight smile on her face. “We’re going there?”

“I guess it depends where there is.”

“I mean, I’m not going to sit here and pretend I haven’t noticed the way you’ve been looking at me over the past few weeks.”

“You’ve been looking at me too,” he countered. He had seen her stealing glances.

She was unabashed. “Yeah,” she agreed. “I have been.”

“We agreed that nothing else was going to happen between the two of us. We said it wouldn’t be a good idea as long as we were working together.”

“Mm, we did.”

“You don’t feel that way anymore?”

“Do you?”

He laughed. “I don’t know if I ever felt that way,” he said. “I could’ve happily gone on sleeping with you while you worked for me.”

Ivy laughed too. “That’s awfully noble.”

“Well, I’m willing to make sacrifices for the greater good.”

“Sleeping with me is the greater good?”

“Yes. Absolutely it is.”

“I don’t know if I can responsibly stand in the way of that, then.”

Elliot exhaled. If he was to take the things she was saying at face value, there was nothing preventing him from doing what he’d been dreaming of doing since the first day she’d come to work for him.

But from that, too, there would be no going back. He didn’t know if he could get that close to her again and pull away for a second time. This time, if they crossed the line, it would probably shatter the veneer of strict professionalism that the two of them had maintained so far. They wouldn’t be able to get that back.

Right now, though, he was sure it would be worth it. That veneer had been paper thin anyway, and clearly they had both seen through it.

He reached out and took her hand, feeling a thrill of anticipation that he hadn’t experienced since he was very young. He’d forgotten that sex could be this exciting before anything had really happened — that just the promise of it could make him this alive in his own body.

And then Ivy’s face changed abruptly.

Her smile dropped. Her skin went pale. She clapped a hand over her mouth, jumped to her feet, and sprinted for the bathroom.

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