Page 3 of The Reading

Living in California, the flight to Oklahoma had been long enough, but not too terrible. I worked for Krusade Insurance, and they always flew their agents in business class. They also didn’t skimp on the hotel rooms that they booked. Though they might not always be five-star, I hadn’t ever walked into a hotel room to find a chalk outline of a body, either.

Plus, there were worse people to work for and travel with than Cash Darling. He’d already been in a supervisor position when I had started working for Krusade three years ago, and though he could be a dick at times, he was good at his job and fair most days.

Cash was also hot as sin, and it was a shame that he was gay. At six-foot-one, he made my five-foot-three feel very feminine whenever he stood next to me. He also had dark, thick, chocolate-brown hair, bright hazel eyes, that chiseled jaw thing happening, and the man worked out. Now, while I didn’t make it a habit of ogling him, we did travel a lot, and he liked to use the hotel gyms when they were available.

The man was sexy as hell.

Unfortunately for me, he was also batting for the other team. While there was nothing wrong with that, it didn’t do me any favors. When I had first started at Krusade, Mindy Crepes had been quick with the gossip, and letting me know that Cash was gay had been right up there with the vending machine eating dollar bills if you weren’t careful. The woman had a hoard of coins that she used for the vending machine, and if I’d been on the federal reserve of the United States, I would have been concerned.

So, armed with that very crucial piece of information, I had put all sexy thoughts about Cash Daring out of my mind, and good thing, too. WhenCash was good, he was good. However, whenever he was on one, he was a complete asshole. In my opinion, he lacked the tact that it took in doing our job. He was a numbers guy, and there’d been a few times when I’d wanted to smack him upside the head for his insensitivity.

The knock on the door had me rolling my eyes. Not that I was in any danger of being ravished in the middle of the night-and for the record, I wouldn’t resist-Cash always booked adjoining rooms. It was as if having to walk outside his room to knock on my door offended him somehow. Granted, we worked late a lot when we were out of town, but still.

Unlocking my side of the door, I swung it open, and Cash Daring stood on the other side, and he was looking like it was a travesty that he was gay. Well, it wasn’t a travesty for the gay community, but it was definitely one for the heterosexual female one.

Barging right on past me, he walked into my hotel room like permission was a foreign word to him. “We have three houses to assess this week, so I’m going to need your full attention,” he said in lieu of a greeting.

Leaving the door opened between our rooms, my eyes followed him as he made himself at home, his hands on his hips, scanning my room like he was making sure that I wasn’t getting anything extra that didn’t come with his room.

“Since when do I evernotgive my job my full attention?” I huffed, annoyed that he was so damn hot and so damn gay.

“Well, it is Valentine’s Day weekend, and I know how you women get,” he retorted, and I wanted to be extremely offended on behalf of women everywhere, but he wasn’t necessarily wrong. We did get stupid when Valentine’s Day came around and we were dateless.

“It’s Valentine’s Day, Cash,” I drawled out. “It’s not like it’s Christmas or an actual federally recognized holiday. It’s like…St. Patrick’s Day or Cinco De Mayo.”

“Except those are drinking calendar dates, Valentine’s has a way of making women get all in their feels,” he pointed out.

“Did you knock on my door just to be a dick?” I asked, tired, hungry, frustrated, and, yes, horny as hell.

Those hazel eyes of his regarded me shrewdly, and my hand was itching to slap him, simply because he looked like he needed to be slapped. “Are you hungry?

Okay, maybe he didn’t need to get slapped after all.

“Starving.”

*****

Cash~

Iloved my job, and I was good at it. Though I could do with a little more sensitivity training, numbers were my thing, and I was good at delivering thebottom line that made everybody involved happy.

The only downside to my job was Vivian Morris, the thirty-two-year-old sexy brunette that made me stupid with those curves that she sported with no thought to what it did to the male population whenever she walked down the street.

When she had first started working for Krusade Insurance three years ago, I had cursed the heavens when they had paired her up with me. Not that I made it a habit of dating coworkers-subordinates or otherwise-Vivian Morris would be the exception. Dark brown hair, deep brown eyes, a face that I jacked off to often, and a body that dried out my tongue, I’d change careers if it meant having that woman in my bed every night.

She was also more than her looks. Vivian was smart, compassionate, feisty, confident, all those good adjectives that would make a man proud to have her on his arm. Even though I was her immediate supervisor, Vivian wasn’t afraid to speak her mind and let me know what she was thinking, especially if it was to disagree with me. She seemed toreallyenjoy disagreeing with me.

Though we weren’t what anyone would consider friends, I had managed to find out a few things about her over the years. She was an only child, both of her parents were still alive, she had this group of friends from college that all still hung out, and she couldn’t keep a plant alive to save her life. That was it though. Anything more personal than that was a mystery to me.

My life pretty much mirrored hers, except that I had an older brother that’d been married to his high school sweetheart since forever. Also, I wasn’t a plant murderer. It wasn’t all that hard for me to remember to toss a glass of water on my plant life.

At any rate, in all the years that we’d been working and traveling together, Vivian hadn’t so much as batted an eyelash at me, so I’d always assumed that she was in a serious relationship. Granted, it could simply be professionalism with me being her boss and all, but whatever it was, it stood between us with a huge, red, blinding Stop sign in its hands.

It wasn’t that I thought that I was this irresistible sexual dynamo, either. It wasn’t my ego noticing the slight, so much as the fact that I was passable in looks, and I worked hard to keep my six-pack intact, and that wasn’t an easy thing to do at the age of thirty-three. At least, not like it’d been when I’d been twenty-three. Still, the woman had never looked my way, and she still didn’t.

What the fuck?

Now, I was stuck with her, during the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, and it was all I could do not to picture her dressed in nothing but heart pasties on those luscious tits of hers, and a little ribbon wrapped around her hips, waiting to be untied.

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