Page 7 of The Grumpy Billionaire

ChapterFour

Stella

I survivethrough to the afternoon and demonstrate to Viola that I actually do know mail merge, though she still seems unhappy with me.

Jane promises me that it’s just how Viola is.

I meet my cubicle mate on the other side, Hesh. Hesh has round glasses and wicked things to say about Viola’s constant use of the term “proactive.” We take a break together and walk to the snacks area on the first floor, and I’m surprised to find a vending machine that’s actually stocked with gummy worms.

“Yay!” I purchase a pack and rip them open. “Things are looking up!”

Hesh groans. “We were boycotting them in hopes they’d stop stocking them.”

“They could be pretty old,” Jane warns.

“Gummy worms don’t get old.” I grin and pop another in my mouth.

I’m back at my cubicle finishing my second pack of gummy worms while proofreading a PowerPoint presentation when suddenly everything goes dead still, like a forest when a large predator arrives, or a vampire or something.

Somebody whispers something that sounds like Houdini.

I look up. Our eyes meet. Shock arrows through me.

There he is, up at the courier station, larger than life.

Hugo Jones.

Is he looking at me? Staring right at me? He has a half-smile…or is that my imagination? Is this some kind of test where he’s seeing if I screw up the whole directive where I’m not supposed to know him?

Of course it is!

I look back down. He said I’m not supposed to know him and now he’s testing me.

“Who’s he here to terrorize now?” somebody in the next cubicle over whispers.

Hesh wanders to the panel that separates Jane’s space from mine. “Looks like he’s picking up a delivery,” he says.

“Is Brenda out sick?” Jane asks. “Still. He knows we’ll deliver it to Brenda’s desk or directly to him if it’s urgent.”

Up at the desk, a nervous-looking woman hands Hugo a FedEx envelope, and Hugo regards said envelope with the harshness I remember so well. He’s very much the same, but filled out—strong jaw, hard cheekbones, and a solid build in place of awkward angles. He has a nice haircut rather than the choppy home job I remember.

It looks nice.

The courier desk woman is literally wringing her hands as he burns a hole through the envelope with a hawk-like laser focus.

I force myself to take a breath. It’s not that his appearance is surprising after this long, Hugo-less decade. Stock market websites run his picture all the time. They love his severe beauty and his controversial market models.

And it should be no surprise that he’s traded in his nerd T-shirts for a button-down. Even from here, you can see the way it stretches tight across his shoulders, as if to say, here be muscles.

Hugo. In the flesh. So serious and grown up.

I bite my lip, trying my best to hide my smile. Butterflies are whirling in my belly, but I give them a stern glare. I am supposedly over Hugo and all Hugo types.

The past years have included not only an awesome, self-esteem-building career path—if you ignore these past weeks—but also what amounts to aversion therapy to any and all Hugo types. A team of scientists in a top-secret lab orbiting the earth couldn’t design a better course of Hugo aversion therapy protocols than the dating history I have lived since I last set eyes on Hugo.

This very painful therapy involved my jumping into relationships—two casual and one serious—with icy, brilliant high achievers with harsh personal standards—in other words, men like Hugo.

It’s not as if I sought out only Hugo-like men. I had certainly tried dating nice men who liked me the way I am. But sadly, they didn’t do it for me. Why couldn’t my first blush of love have been for a golden retriever type, loving and uncritically appreciative?

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