Page 9 of The Thing About My Rival

And I’m not.

But she is most definitely mine.

She tosses her keys in her hand, a smile slowly spreading across her face, plumping up the pink apples of her cheeks. “Anyway, where’s my office?”

“Right there.” Miller points at the door whose handle I am still holding.

“Everything else is taken,” Chase adds.

“And you’ll need to work together constantly anyway, so it makes sense,” Leo says.

So I’m not only sharing the job with her, I’m sharing an office too?

Fucking brilliant.

CHAPTER FOUR

HUGO

“Are you going to keep up that huffing and puffing for the whole time we have to share this office?” Wilcox asks, taking a set of blue and orange pens from a baggie and dropping them into a football-shaped cup.

“I was neither huffing nor puffing.” Maybe I was. I don’t know.

This has to be one of the most frustrating moments of my life—right up there with when Butcher passed to Hemmings instead of me when I obviously had a clear run on goal in the eighty-sixth minute of the title deciding match eight years ago.

But, hey, clearly I don’t bear grudges, so I’ll obviously be over this thing quicker than you can say “open goal.”

“I know it’s small, but we’ll just have to make the best of it.” Wilcox lifts the sex toy diffuser thing out of her cart and places it on the corner of her desk.

This office was not built for two people. The seconddesk and bookshelf were obviously wedged in here this morning.

My desk and bookshelves—or rather, the ones Wilcox didn’t immediately claim—are pushed against the wall next to the door to the hallway. Hers are against the opposite wall. At least that means we’ll sit back to back.

“Actually, hold on,” Wilcox says. She grabs one end of her desk and hauls it toward the center of the room, its feet making a screeching sound on the tile that could summon dogs from the other side of the Charles River.

She repeats the ear-splitting move on the other end, then wheels her chair around between the desk and the wall.

Oh, good.

“That’s better.” She surveys her work with the look of achievement akin to a surgeon who’s just wrapped up a life-saving operation. “You should do the same. Then we can confer face to face.”

I don’t want to confer at all, face to face, face to back, or face to fucking anything. “Maybe later.”

One of the two deskless walls at either end of the room has a dirty window that looks out onto the parking lot. The other has a door leading into the adjoining locker room with a full-width window next to it.

“We’re going to have to put a curtain or something over that.” I point at the clear view to where about twenty guys will be getting changed and showered every day.

“Aw, see, you’re settling in,” she says with a sickly sweet smile. “You’re already picking out curtains.”

She pulls open a desk drawer and screws up her face at whatever she’s found in there.

I tap the window and discover it’s plexiglass. “You can nail plywood over it for all I care, but I can’t have the guysworried about wandering around naked in front of a woman.”

She ambles around in front of the desk. “Is that what you do in locker rooms?” She rummages in her cart and produces a spray bottle of cleaner and a roll of paper towels. “Just wander around schlonging it out?”

She throws her shoulders back, thrusts her hips forward and swings them from side to side while holding her disinfecting products in the air.

If I wasn’t so frustrated and tragically disappointed by this whole situation, I might laugh. But I am. So I don’t. “Schlonging it out?”

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