Page 42 of Her Impossible Boss's Baby

She always had been.

Not just from him, but from everyone. Perhaps even herself.

He moved to a chair opposite her. And kept close watch on her as she took a slow sip of her tea. “This is the first time you’ve ever brought anything to me,” she said, looking down at her cup.

“You don’t work for me.”

“Technically I do.”

“I’m not your boss, just as you requested. It is a space to the left of me, rather than beneath me.”

She snorted.

“What?”

“I was beneath you. That is how we ended up in this situation.”

She did not know why she had brought that up. Just the mention of it made her stomach get tight. She knew his body. She could never not know it. She knew how it felt to touch him, taste him.

She might not be able to read his mind but she knew how he felt moving inside her.

That gripped her now. Held her in thrall.

“Yes,” he said.

He looked thoughtful for a moment. “It is interesting. I do not often see the women that I sleep with again.”

She winced. “That’s sort of a bracing truth.”

“Does it bother you because I was your only lover?”

She should’ve known that he would bring that up, and that he would be very blunt when he did. “I don’t know about that, but maybe it makes it feel like we are on an equal footing.”

“I would love to offer you the chance to make things equal. Because I know it isn’t considered appropriate for two people who had a sexual relationship to have a power differential.”

“It isn’t considered appropriate,” she said, trying to keep the reluctant amusement out of her voice. “But when it comes to sex people often behave inappropriately.”

“I haven’t. Before you. Technically, though, that night you were not my assistant.”

“Oh, come now, you kissed me before midnight.”

“Well, what time was it in Rome?”

She couldn’t tell if he was being serious or funny. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me. I wanted you before that night. You don’t think that I was suddenly aroused for the very first time when I saw you in that dress?”

His earnestness caught her off guard, and she didn’t know why it did. Because that was normal for him.

And she had to stop being shocked by it. She had to stop judging him through the lens of her parents.

He made her want to be honest in ways she never was. “Well... Tell me then. When did it start?”

“May twenty-fourth. Four years ago. It was three thirty in the afternoon. You were standing in my office. By the window. And at that time of day the light just clears the building across the way, and allows for a shaft of it to pool on the floor right by my desk. It caught your hair as you bent down, placing a cup of coffee on the desk. I saw you, and I could not look away. I realized that what I really wanted was to touch you. To rise up from my seat and kiss you. I also knew that I couldn’t.”

“You couldn’t?”

Her breath was held fast in the center of her chest, everything in her suspended. “I thought you were a billionaire and you could do whatever you wanted.”

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