Page 5 of In Charge

“I could’ve helped you.”

“I had my assistant helping me. That is, until you sent her off doing God knows what.” My frustration seeped into every word I said. I was frustrated, but not because of what he did. Not really. It was because of how my body reacted to him. I had to squash the urge to fuck him—right here, right now—before I acted on it. “You know how important this meeting is to me. Now I have to pull the rest of the numbers and finalize the portfolio myself. I’m going to be lucky if I make it to dinner with this client in time.”

“I’m so sorry.” Robbie’s voice trembled, his footsteps following behind me as I approached my desk. I whipped around to tell him to go, but the look in his eyes stopped me. “Tell me how to fix this. I can help.”

“Robbie!” I dropped my head into my hands and let out a long groan. Why did he have to go and say that? I couldn’t stay mad at him when he looked at me like that. I had to stop letting him get to me like this. I wanted to be mad, but instead my insides melted a little bit more for him.

“Dammit, I’ve really pissed you off.”

Yes, but not really

His hand touched mine and I jerked back. I looked up, and his deep brown eyes had turned several shades lighter. God, I thought the sexy eyes were bad. The sad puppy dog eyes were tearing me up inside. It took all my strength not to wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him. I had to put some distance between us before I did something I would regret. I turned away and sat down behind my desk.

“Have you pulled financial trends associated with social media platforms from the database yet?” I pulled up a screen on my computer to show him what I was referring to. Whether I liked it or not, I needed help gathering the last bit of data for the portfolio. I also couldn’t afford to let this mistake put me in a bad mood. There was too much riding on this meeting. If he wanted to help, I’d accept it.

“Yeah, a few times.” He stepped behind me and leaned down close to my shoulder and a hot flame ignited in my chest. Not helping, Robbie.

“Good, I need you to extract all the data on the music industry, organized by genre, and prepare the graphs of the data in these summary tables.” I handed him a copy of the draft report. “Make sure the numbers match. Can you handle that?”

“You’ll have it before lunch.” He squeezed my shoulder and smiled. He was out the door and halfway down the hallway before I could say thank you. Not that I could speak anyway. His touch left me breathless. My shoulder burned where his hand squeezed, and my body begged for that hand to light me up elsewhere.

I didn’t have time for these feelings today. I had to impress Bo Jensen, one of the most successful rock stars in the music industry. At least our numbers were solid, he’d never let me represent him if they weren’t. It wouldn’t matter that we went to high school together.

Aside from leaving me hot and bothered, Robbie left me stunned, too. Robbie Pennington had actually been concerned about my predicament. His offer to help me had been genuine and sincere. Dammit, why is that man here? What is he after? Everything he did up until this moment had been to create enough sexual tension between us to blow up the building. I’d fantasized too many times about dragging his ass over to my couch and fucking. But he never helped me with work. Not once. And his sudden willingness to help me worried me more than his previous lack of interest in the business.

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