Page 4 of One Night on the Naughty List

Bain

Most of the time, I dreaded the drive from Albany to my mother’s place.

Not this time.

It was a boring route—mostly highway and forest with the occasional lonely rest stop. I usually blasted music or listened to a few podcasts. Sometimes I drove in silence, letting my mind wander as my SUV ate up the miles.

My mind was doing a lot of wandering right now, and it had nothing to do with boredom and everything to do with the fact that Samantha Pratt was sitting next to me, her sweet scent teasing my nose and her luscious body making it hard to keep my eyes on the road.

There were half a dozen reasons she shouldn’t be in my passenger seat, and all of them made me feel like a lecher.

She was my employee. Strike one.

She was twenty-five years old. Strike two.

She never showed the slightest interest in me as more than a boss. Strike three.

Okay, so maybe there weren’t half a dozen reasons, but the three I had were plenty.

Except lately I had reason to question the last one. It wasn’t anything specific. Just subtle signs every now and then that made me wonder if maybe her unflappable professional exterior was in fact flappable. If maybe the occasional spark I saw in her big brown eyes was a signal and not just a trick of the light.

I used to be good at picking up signals. The old Bain probably would have already asked her out. But ten years of marriage had left me rusty. Natasha and I met in college, when dating apps were a novelty instead of the standard. I never learned to use technology to meet a woman. Never thought I’d need to.

Coming home late from work one night and finding my wife bent over the kitchen counter with her yoga instructor nailing her from behind was one hell of a way to realize I needed to brush up on my tech skills.

I eased my grip on the steering wheel. I wasn’t going to think about Natasha today. However, I owed her in a sense. One of her chief complaints about our marriage—although she neglected to tell me until after she downward dogged on our counter—was that I was too straitlaced. A “rule follower,” she said.

So now I was breaking the rules. The “rules” said a CEO shouldn’t date his employee, and that a man pushing forty shouldn’t be interested in a woman in her mid-twenties.

I had to wonder if the person who first wrote down all the rules envisioned a woman like Samantha Pratt. Her height was the first thing I noticed about her. It was rare for me to be able to look a woman in the eye when I shook her hand. She came to my chin, which probably put her a touch over five-eleven.

And she filled out every single inch with curves that left me flushed and distracted.

Then she sat across from my desk during her job interview and told me all the things wrong with Bain Nutrition’s advertising campaigns. Which, in her estimation, was everything.

“You’re fresh out of college,” I’d said. “Forgive me, Ms. Pratt, but I doubt you know how to market a health food company.”

She’d looked me square in the eye and replied, “Well, that makes two of us, Mister Thatcher, because neither do you.”

I hired her on the spot.

It turned out she was right. I did not, in fact, know how to market a health food company. At least not as effectively as she did. In three years, Samantha had taken Bain Nutrition from a modest success to a household name. We worked closely together from the start, and I’d kept my appreciation for her curves to myself. I was a married man, after all, and admiring a beautiful woman was like seeing a painting in an art gallery. You look. You might even study it a bit. But you don’t pull it off the wall and take it home. At least not in my straitlaced, rule-following world.

Then my marriage fell apart a year later, and I didn’t want anything to do with looking or studying. I buried myself in work, keeping my head down as I replaced Natasha with a new chef and focused on growing my business.

But the fog lifted eventually. I pulled my head out of my ass and started noticing the world around me again.

I noticed Samantha. My body sure as hell noticed. She was built for sin, with a perfect hourglass shape that would make a saint bite his knuckles. Our one-on-one meetings and late nights became an exercise in self-control, as I struggled to match her cool, professional demeanor even as my chest grew tight and lust seared my veins like lit gasoline.

She had this shirt—a creamy silk blouse nearly the same shade as her skin—with a neckline lower than most of her clothes. Dainty white buttons marched down the front, just begging to be undone. She often paired it with a pearl necklace that dipped to deep cleavage.

I lived for silk blouse day.

It was a challenge to pay attention to sales figures and marketing reports when all I could think about was seeing her in nothing but that necklace, her curves on display, those impossibly long legs sprawled apart on my bed. Or my desk. God, I’d entertained some thoroughly detailed fantasies about locking my office door and following where that cleavage beckoned. I devoted entire afternoons to wondering if her nipples matched the charming blush that sometimes stained her cheeks.

I told myself that was common among natural blonds. That the slow spread of pink across her cheekbones and down her neck had nothing to do with me. How could it? There were thirteen years between us. There was a divorce between us. There were professional boundaries between us.

But my body didn’t care about those things. Suddenly, I was ready to throw all the rules out the window.

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