Page 2 of Reunion With Benefits

Rylan’s smile grew wider. “But I’ve been working very closely with Abby.”

Yeah, Spence kind of hated this guy. “I’m sure.”

Abby exhaled loud enough to bring the conversation to a halt. She turned back to the table and started piling the paperwork in a neat stack. “Did you need something, Spence?”

She clearly wanted to be in control of the conversation and them seeing each other again. Unfortunately for her, so did he. And that started now. “We have a meeting.”

She slowly turned around again. “We do?”

“Just the two of us.” The idea was risky and maybe a little stupid, but he needed to stay in town until his soon-to-be sister-in-law gave birth. Derrick’s fiancée’s pregnancy was high-risk and Spence promised to help, to take some of the pressure off Derrick.

“Oh, I see.”

That tone... Abby may as well have threatened to hit him with her car. She definitely was not happy to see him. Spence got that. “No, you don’t.”

She sighed. “Oh, really?”

If words had the force of a knife, he’d be sliced to pieces. She’d treated him to a prickly, unwelcome greeting and, if anything, the coolness had turned even icier since then.

The reaction struck him as interesting, infuriating even, since he was the injured party here. She cheated on him. Well, not technically, since they weren’t officially going out back then, but she’d done the one thing he could not stand—she used him to climb the ladder to get to a stronger, more powerful Jameson: his father.

Spence glanced at Rylan. He stood there in his perfectly pressed gray suit and purple tie. He had the right watch. The right haircut. He’d shined his shoes and combed his hair. Nothing—not one damn thing—was out of place on this guy.

Clearly Rylan hoped this was a date or the prelude to a date and not an informal afternoon business meeting.

Well, that was enough of that.

“Are you done here?” Spence asked Rylan, making sure his tone suggested the answer should be yes.

“Absolutely.” Rylan’s sunny disposition didn’t dim one bit. He put a hand on Abby’s arm and gave it a squeeze. “I’ll call you tomorrow so we can go over the list of concerns.” His hand dropped as he faced Spence again and nodded. “Mr. Jameson.”

Yeah, whatever.“Rylan.”

Spence watched the engineer leave. He’d never had such a sudden negative reaction to a person in his life. Rylan could have said anything and Spence would have disliked him.

Abby leaned back with her hands resting on the table on either side of her hips. “Heavy-handed as always, I see.”

Facing her head-on, without a buffer, tested the defenses he’d thrown up against her. He shouldn’t care. It shouldn’t mean anything. If only his brain and his body would listen to that order.

Despite standing ten feet apart, Spence felt a familiar sensation spark inside him. Desire mixed with lust and a bit of confusion. The intensity hit him full force.

“Did I interrupt your date?”

She rolled her eyes. “Right. Because I’m incapable of meeting with a man without crawling all over him.”

“You said it, not me.”

She exhaled loud enough to let him know she had better things to do. “What do you want?”

She didn’t back down. He’d always loved that about her. The boss-employee boundaries didn’t mean much to her. If she had a thought, she said it. If she disagreed, she let him know. She’d been tactful in not making angry announcements in the office lunchroom, but she wasn’t the type to coddle a man’s ego, either.

He’d found that sexy. So sexy even as his life crumbled around him and his relationship with his father, which had never been good, disintegrated.

“Is that how you talk to your boss?” He figured he may as well try to reestablish the lines between them. Like it or not, they had to figure out a way to tolerate each other.

For him, it meant ignoring the way she walked and the sound of her voice. Forgetting that he once was willing to go against his father to be with her. But he had to smash all of those feelings, all that vulnerability, now.

“Is that what you are? Last I checked, you ran out of the office and never looked back. If this were a cartoon, you would have left a man-size hole in the wall.” She smiled for the first time.

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