Page 74 of Snowbound in Her Boss's Bed

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THATITWAS now the sixth day of Hanukkah and still the storm continued was beginning to feel like some kind of divine phenomenon.

“Have you ever been through so long a storm before?” Miri asked Benjamin where they once again watched the storm from the breakfast table. “Six days seems awfully long for a whiteout,” she marveled.

But then again, maybe it wasn’t? She didn’t really know much about snow.

“It is longer than usual,” Benjamin said absently, before turning to her, the grin that she found impossible to resist planted on his face. “Are you so eager for it to pass?”

She wasn’t, which made the grin and the question feel even more like darts as they landed.

With each passing day, Miri wanted the storm to end less and less, and she knew that was unrealistic.

Since the moment she had taken charge in the sitting area, something had changed in Benjamin, and that change in itself was making it harder and harder for Miri to keep things in perspective.

Since that night, he’d filled their time with the kind of holiday joy and pleasure that was the stuff of movies, sharing every family tradition he could remember along the way and taking her body to heights and places she’d never thought it possible to go.

They’d baked, watched Hanukkah movies in his personal theater, they’d cooked meals that took multiple phases and hours to complete without having to wash a dish along the way, and they’d gorged on fare prepared at request by his personal chef.

They’d made love in the spa—where he’d discovered all those robes so long ago—and in the library and in the hot tub, and the hallway, twice.

Each passing day with him was slightly better than the last, and with each one the inevitable end of the storm crept closer.

Miri wasn’t sure her heart or head could take the torment of that push and pull for much longer.

Maybe she did want it to end now, just to lessen the hurt inevitable when it did.

A storm like this couldn’t hold out for the duration of Hanukkah, could it?

Eight days of whiteout was unbelievable—despite the fact that they were well on their way through six.

The end had to be near, could come at any moment really, and Miri wasn’t ready.

But what else was there for it?

Her job was the key to her independence and stability. It was the achievement she’d worked years to be ready for and as much as she had come to appreciate Benjamin, she would not give it up for him.

She could not.

It might have been different if there was something else on the table—something real and lasting and tangible, like commitments and family—but there wasn’t. She knew now, better than ever, how he felt about those ideas.

And nothing he had said or done had suggested there might be something different about what was going on between them.

No. In fact, if anything, it was explicitly otherwise.

They had agreed on something temporary and secret—and neither of those was a strong enough reason to leave a job she loved and needed.

When the storm ended, she had to return to the real world, where she was just another woman working hard to survive and he was Benjamin Silver.

Her Benjamin had made her into a goddess, placing the world at her fingertips, but that fairy tale couldn’t last forever. For all that he was open and revealed, her Benjamin wasn’t the real one.

The magic that let them playact would eventually end, at which point she would have to somehow figure out how to pretend like it was okay that everything was back to normal.

Normal would never be okay again, not after Benjamin.

Normal didn’t even exist after Benjamin.

Normal for Miri was virginal and entirely focused on her job.

After six days with Benjamin, she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to fully focus on anything else ever again.

The man had infiltrated her consciousness in a way that meant he could never be far from her mind again, and she was growing more and more certain that the end of the storm would bring with it not relief at the chance to finally go home, but unbearable heartache—of a kind she had never known before.

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