Page 27 of Falling for My Boss

“I’ve never had this with whiskey before,” she said. “It’s good?”

“Shockingly so,” I said. “Everyone else uses a dark cola, but I discovered this one night at a restaurant with Ally. We were staging at a place in New York. The head chef there gave all the cooks a drink at the end of the night, and he ran out of Coke. He had this stuff though, and we all had some and ended up liking it so much we put the two-liter out of commission and started in on the fountain.”

“Oh no. How drunk did you get?”

“We ended up sleeping in the booths at the restaurant,” I admitted. “It wasn’t my finest hour. But we got through the shift the next day and went home, and none of us puked. So, I called that a win.”

“I bet,” she said as I poured the drinks. I went a little lighter on the whiskey for hers, only because I didn’t want her to think I was trying to get her drunk. Then again, my alcohol tolerance was rather high, so my going light was probably still among the more spiked drinks she was used to having.

She took a sip, and her eyes opened wide.

“Wow, this is good.” She sat back on the couch and pulled her legs under her. We were sitting nearly shoulder to shoulder, and I had a very sudden feeling of what I imagined my brothers felt with their women. If this was what it was to fall in love, then I understood what the big fuss was. It was something so much more than any of the flings or short relationships I’d had in my life.

Not that I thought I was in love. Just that I liked having her around in my space. More than I had anyone else. By a long, wide margin. Whatever one would call that.

We sat back and watched the show, occasionally laughing or chatting until her eyes began to droop, and she put her nearly empty third glass down on the coffee table.

“If you will forgive me,” she said, “I think I need to get to bed.”

“Yeah, I should probably hit the sack too.” I turned off the TV. “You can leave the glass. I’ll take care of it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure,” I said. “Get on to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She smiled.

“Good night, Derek,” she said, standing.

“Good night, Jodi.” I refrained from saying anything else about the night. About the kitchen. About us.

Instead, I watched her walk down the hall, stumbling a little as the whiskey hit her and delighting in the little giggle that bubbled up as she righted herself and opened the door to the office that I had begun to think of simply as her room.

18

JODI

I’d broken my rules about getting involved with people I worked with. And I had broken them big-time. I hadn’t just gotten too cozy with a coworker at work or started getting used to having dinner together at the same restaurant every week. Those were the kinds of things I told myself I wasn’t allowed to do. It would get me too comfortable with a location and distract me so I wasn’t as aware of my surroundings. It would make me vulnerable. So, I avoided them.

That would have been a bit of a hiccup. But no. I’d gone for the big time. I slept with my boss. At work.

Apparently when I did things, I did them big.

I would have thought something like that would have thrown everything off, and the next morning would have been a cloud of awkwardness and discomfort. It might have even included attempting to sneak out of the house to get the vineyard with as little contact with Derek as possible.

It turned out not to be necessary. In fact, the next day started out perfectly normal. It was like nothing had changed when the alarm on my phone opened my eyes. Except, of course, that I’d gotten a really good night’s sleep for the first time in as long as I could remember.

In those first few moments after waking up, I let my mind drift back to what happened the night before, waiting for the bad feelings to come. They didn’t. Even as I got up and headed for the shower so I could start getting ready for the day, I only had a little bit of guilt about having sex with Derek.

It had been fun and a fantastic stress relief. When it was all done, there was some awkwardness to be sure. We both seemed to have that moment of realization of what just happened, that it wasn’t just fantasies or daydreams, but we actually had just gone at it with no self-control in the kitchen of his restaurant.

Humor managed to break that, and over the rest of the day, we managed to get comfortable with each other again. Spending time together at the house let us get to know each other more, and it felt like there had been a shift between us. By the time the day was over, we’d gotten past the initial weird phase and headed to bed separately without any awkwardness.

That welcome reaction continued when I got out of the shower and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee to get the day really underway. Derek was already sitting at the table with his mug of coffee. It seemed his taste for actual physical reading materials didn’t extend past books because he had the morning news pulled up on a tablet sitting on the table in front of him.

He glanced up at me and smiled when I walked in.

“Am I ever going to beat you into the kitchen in the morning?” I asked.

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