Page 96 of Devil in a Tux

“You mean with it.”

“That too,” he admitted.

I rubbed my nose against his. “You should have thought of that earlier. I have to get to work and, well, Brooklyn is a lot farther than your office.”

The problem with sleeping next to a super sexy man who didn’t need little blue pills, and boy did he not, was that not all of our bed time ended up being sleeping. Since getting up late wasn’t an option, it meant heading into the bedroom earlier than either of us was used to.

He groaned. “I need to find you a job that’s closer.”

I jerked away and levered up on an elbow. “You will do no such thing.” My voice echoed off the walls, louder than it needed to be. “I like my job, and experience hours aren’t transportable. I have to finish up with Sydney so I can get my certificate. Besides, if there’s any job getting to be done, I’ll handle it myself. Got it?”

He put his hands up in mock surrender. “I was just trying to to help.”

“I don’t need help. If I can’t do it myself, I don’t want it. I don’t need anybody arranging things for me.” Realizing how abrasive I sounded, I toned it down and added a kiss before pulling away. “Thank you for caring. It’s sweet, but no thank you.”

In the shower I replayed the interchange in my head and felt ashamed of my overreaction. Rachel had told me once that Mom had advised her to count to ten in her head before reacting to anything in anger. It sounded like a practice I needed to cultivate.

I was just over a week into the not-fake version of our relationship and I’d already bitten his head off. Not good.

I rinsed off my hair and had an idea, a fucking brilliant one. What I needed to do was to properly enunciate how I wanted to change this aspect of my behavior and make it one of my major life goals by putting it into my goal journal. There was only one problem, well two actually.

First, I didn’t think ‘learn to control my temper and argumentativeness’was specific enough. And, second, I’d left my journal back at my old apartment. That was another reason to go back there sooner rather than later.

As soon as I was out of the shower and drying off, Evan ambled in. He rubbed sleep from his eyes.

“Shower’s all yours,” I said leaning close to the mirror. My face looked good enough that I could now skip the concealer.

He came up behind me, pulled the towel off and wrapped his arms around me, cradling my boobs. “I have an idea.”

I bumped my ass back against him. “Oh no you don’t. If you want me to soap you up, you have wake up earlier.” I’d learned the hard way, that if we wanted to shower together on a weekday, we had to start earlier than this or I’d be late.

“What put you in a bad mood?” he pouted.

“One of us has to be the adult.”

He shook his head, still sporting his pouty face and opened the shower door. “You’re a tease, tempting me with that body and besides the adult thing is overrated.”

I rescued the towel from the floor and covered up again. “If you want to be nice, you can help me retrieve more of my stuff from the apartment.”

He started to soap up. “Hey, I need to fulfill my part of our bargain. When am I allowed to come into the office to meet with your boss? Sydney, right?”

“Maybe next week. I need to check with them.” I’d waffled too long already.

“Good, because I also intend to make that dream of yours come true and ravish you over your desk.”

“With people in the office? Pfft, that’s not happening. And, you’re the one who dreamed it, not me.”

He lifted his arm to rinse. “It doesn’t matter who’s idea it was, it’s still a good one. Maybe we should visit the office sooner, say Sunday. It should be empty then.”

The devil on my shoulder said ‘go for it, you need something exciting.’ “We can’t it’s being fumigated,” I lied.

Our clothes had ended up on the floor last night. Out of habit I picked them up to throw in the separate laundry hampers.

Evan had everything except his socks and underwear dry cleaned. Plus his cleaning lady did that laundry for him.

I was a do your-own-wash girl, another difference in our stations in life. He had money to burn on such things and if something of mine needed better cleaning it got spot treatment before the washing machine in the basement of my building. In Evan’s palace the machines had their own little room in the unit.

I caught a familiar scent as I was putting his shirt and pants in dry cleaning hamper. Pulling his shirt back out, I sniffed until I found the source. His collar had a distinctive trace of Chanel No. 5.

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