Page 2 of Boss On Notice
Please, God, no.
“Yes,” he says.
I can’t afford to stand still while staving off my second panic attack of the morning. I’ll probably have more before the day is over. The only way Orion knows how to access his calendar is through my computer.No…I’m stabbing the Down button to the elevator with my elbow while staring longingly in the direction of my apartment. I feel like I’ve forgotten something.
“How?” I close my eyes, chastising myself for asking that question. I didn’t mean to say it that way. Orion may be superficial, but he’s not dense. On very rare occasions he’ll shock me by displaying moments of brilliance. However, he’s never been able to access his calendar remotely. Let’s just say that I have a sneaky feeling he pretends not to know how to access his calendar remotely. Regardless, after I tried to walk him through the process dozens of times, he threw up his hands and insisted that I push his calendar to his devices three times a day throughout the workday and on weekends if something changes. Something is always changing on the weekends.
For instance, Heather, his date for his brother’s wedding this weekend, for which the festivities actually start today, had called and told him to find someone else to go with. She was angry because Orion hadn’t answered any of her thirtysomething messages and eleven emails. I so desperately wanted to let her know that ghosting women he makes dates with is his MO. I have no idea why he does it, but I think it’s psychological or psychotic or something in between. But I’ve come to know Heather well. She was bluffing, which is why I never passed on her message.
However, he has paused again and now my insides are sending SOS signals to my feet. He couldn’t have gone back to the office yesterday evening, could he? No way. He never returns to the office after he leaves. But I had turned my phone off.Oh no.I clutch my chest as the elevator stops on the eleventh floor. I know I should’ve run down the stairs instead of getting myself trapped in the slowest-moving elevator in New York City. I don’t have enough patience to stop. I need to keep going, especially if…
Oh no…
“I figured it out,” Orion finally says.
A guy with curly black hair, the most gorgeous eyes I’ve ever seen, the body of a Greek demigod, and perfectly white teeth smiles coyly at me as he joins me in the elevator. This isn’t our first time smiling at each other this way as we say good morning or good afternoon and on rare occasions good night. Once, he said good night to me while wearing a beautiful woman, who appeared to be a supermodel, draped over his shoulder. He’s always flirting though. But I’m certain I’m not his type. I never have the time to make myself look like his type. Just like this morning, as I left the house wearing no makeup.Shit.I pat the side of my head, remembering I left my apartment so fast that I had forgotten to neaten my ponytail.
So, realizing that I look a mess, I shy away from smiling back at Mr. Eleventh Floor, which is what I call him in my head and when I talk to Xena and my girlfriends about him.
“You figured it out?” I try to whisper to Orion while staring in the opposite direction of Mr. Eleventh Floor. He smells extraordinary today. I love a man who smells like heaven.
“Yes,” Orion replies.
I shake my head. This makes no sense to me. Orion is not the kind of person who figures it out. I jump when the elevator dings. Dang it, I should’ve muted our call before the car stopped.
“Where are you?” Orion asks.
I race into the lobby. “I’m getting coffee.”
He pauses yet again. “Oh yeah. On the fourth floor or at Starbucks?”
“Starbucks.”
“Did you get me one too?”
I’m practically running up Fourteenth Street. “Yep, black, no sugar or cream.”
“That’s great. You’re great, Lilly.” His tone is patronizing.
I frown as I narrowly avoid slamming into a pedestrian who’s following the normal New York City sidewalk-walking speed, which is very brisk and at a steady pace. But did he just call meLilly? He never calls me Lilly. He always calls me Lila—and nobody calls me that but him—even though I’ve told him more times than I can remember that nobody but him calls me that, but he stills does it just to annoy me. But now he’s calling me Lilly?What’s he playing at?
“Right,” I barely say.
“You don’t believe me?”
I want to breathe heavily, but I can’t tip him off that I’m running. However, even though I can’t see his face, I can very well picture his charming smile. Orion can charm cheese from a starving mouse. But there’s no black or white answer to the question he just asked. He’s being manipulatively charming and I have no idea why, although my brain has propelled me into figure-out-why mode.
Has he read the letter?
I picture myself sitting at my desk before the power went out, grumbling to Xena about what had happened that morning. Orion woke me up with a phone call at 7:03 a.m. and asked if I could bring him a bottle of cold water and towel. He was in the neighborhood, jogging on the High Line. I had dragged myself out of bed, grabbed a fresh bottle of cold water out of my refrigerator, and a towel from my hallway cabinet and met him on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Orion showed no signs of ever breaking a sweat. He claimed he went for a run, but I thought it was more like a walk, and not even a power walk. He grinned at me with that annoying twinkle in his eyes as if I should’ve felt blessed to be doing him a favor.He’s such a narcissist.
He didn’t even say thank you either. He just gobbled down the bottle’s contents as though he had spent the morning in hell and finally had been given ice water. But I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was turn my back on him and pretend our strange encounter never happened. Yet before I could spin around on my heels and stomp back to my apartment, he said, “Wait a minute. I’ll give you your towel back.” Then he proceeded to wipe his nonexistent sweat.
I glared at him, asking myself,What do women see in him?On a subconscious level, I’m aware that Orion Lord is an extremely handsome man. But frankly, I cannot allow myself to acknowledge his looks. The way he behaves doesn’t allow me to see them.
“Whoa,” he finally said. “You don’t look so good. Did you get enough sleep last night? Because you can’t take off today. I need you.” To drive the point home, he aimed his half-drained water bottle at me. “I need you.”
My mind experienced some sort of mental traffic jam full of insults, expletives, and explanations. For instance, “Yeah, I look like crap because I was stuck at the office until 2:00 a.m., finishing a report for your brother Hercules’s office that was supposed to be completed by you.”By the way, I do his work too.I also wanted to say, “When was the last time I had a day off?” I can never take off. If I did, the whole office would go to shit.
