“Inappropriate?” she yelled. Were we back to the shouting already? “Get the fuck out of my bed.” She tried to push me off the mattress.
Jesus. I couldn’t do anything right with this girl. Except make her come, apparently.
I gripped her wrists and she started to kick me, so I rolled her to her back and pinned her thighs to the bed to stop her thrashing. “Jesus, woman, you go from zero to sixty in a millisecond.” She closed her eyes and turned her head to the side.
“Get off me.”
“Not until you tell me what’s wrong and why you’re freaking out.”
“Unbelievable.”
At least she turned and looked at me.
“What?” I asked.
“You just told me fucking me is inappropriate. Like your body acted without your consent. And you expect me not to have a reaction to that? You’re an—”
“Asshole,” I said, finishing her sentence. “Yes, I heard you the first fifteen thousand times you said it.” I released her and rolled off the bed, pissed she was giving me such a hard time every second of every minute of every day. I was her boss; of course it was inappropriate for me to fuck her. I grabbed my shorts and T-shirt and dressed quickly.
“And now you’re just going to go?” she asked, propped up on her elbows, her perfectly round tits begging me to come back to bed.
“Did you forget that you ordered me out of your apartment?”
“Whatever.” She leapt out of bed and barged into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind her.
Fucking hell. She was a total pain in the ass. Beautiful. Talented. Sexy. Perfectly infuriating.
Had I been an asshole? She was irritating, but maybe I shouldn’t have told her fucking her was inappropriate right after we had sex. I wasn’t used to having to mind what I said with the women I was fucking.
I sat on the edge of her bed, waiting for twenty minutes for her to emerge.
“Hi,” she said when she finally came out wearing a towel. Her eyes kept flickering from me to the floor.
“Hi,” I replied. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” I never meant to upset the women in my life but it happened far too often.
“Mean it or not, you did.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what it is. Maybe you don’t realize how you come off.”
I scrubbed my hands over my face. “I’m not good with . . .” How did I say I wasn’t used to having to interact with the women I was fucking outside the bedroom?
“Women?” She finished my sentence for me, arching her eyebrow.
“I don’t want to piss you off, Harper.” Yes it would be awkward at work, but I actually liked the girl. “I’m the person who signs your paychecks. That’s all I was trying to say.”
“You need to think about what you say before you say it.”
I nodded. “I’ll do better in the future.”
She stepped toward me. “Okay. The future starts now, right?”
I pulled her onto my lap. I cupped her neck and pressed my lips against hers. Immediately I wanted her again. It wasn’t as if we were in the office anyway. Here we were neighbors, not colleagues. I tugged at her towel and it fell away from her body.
“Yeah. The future starts right now.”
The next morning I got into the office extra early. I was trying to finish going through Harper’s Bangladesh report. I didn’t want any other reason for Harper to think I was an asshole.
“I said no calls, Donna,” I barked into my speakerphone, then hung up.
My door burst open and I slammed my hand on my desk as I looked up.
“Max, you’re going to want to take this call,” Donna said. I seriously doubted it. Other than something happening to Amanda—shit. “Press line one.”
Instead of leaving me to take the call, she shut the door and leaned against it, a huge grin on her face. Amanda must be okay if Donna was smiling. In fact, this probably was Amanda telling me she’d been asked to her eighth grade dance.
Just as I picked up the receiver and punched line one, Donna said, “Charles Jayne.”
Fuck.
Charles Jayne was the founder and senior partner of JD Stanley. His investment bank didn’t use outside firms, but I wanted them to make an exception for King & Associates. I’d been hounding them for years. They didn’t use outside firms, but I wanted them to make an exception for King & Associates.
“Max King,” I answered, trying to keep my voice level as my foot tapped against the desk leg.
“I hear you’ve been making quite a nuisance of yourself with my director of global research,” a man with a deep voice said on the other end of the phone.
Shit, had I pushed things too far? My contact had given me the inside track on Harold Barker. Apparently he liked tennis, so I’d suggested he join me in my box at the US Open later in the summer. I’d invited him to the Met once when I’d run into him at a cocktail reception, but he’d politely declined. I was hoping tennis would hit the spot.
“It’s a pleasure to speak to you, sir. I’m not sure I’d describe myself as a nuisance. I just think that we could do a lot for JD Stanley, and I’d like an opportunity to show you what’s possible.”
“Yes, well, that much you’ve made clear,” he replied. “Which is why I’m calling. Come in on the twenty-fourth and tell us a little about what you do at King & Associates.”
Holy crap.
“Yes, sir. What—”
“Ten sharp. You better live up to your hype.”
Before I could ask him how long we had, who would be in the room, what he wanted to know, the line went dead. I guess when you were Charles Jayne, you didn’t want to waste a second.
I hung up and stared at the phone.
Donna bounded across the room. “Well? What did he want?”
“To give me the opportunity of my career.” Had that really just happened? Just like that, Charles Jayne had called and invited me in for a meeting.
“He’s going to hire you?”
I shrugged. “He wants me to go in for a meeting on the twenty-fourth.”
“I can’t believe it,” Donna said. “Looks like Harper was a smart hire.”
What? I stared at her, expecting her to explain.
“I’m sure your networking helped, but hiring Harper was genius.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Well, she’s his daughter, right?”
“Harper?” Harper Jayne. I’d never made the connection.
“You didn’t know?” Donna asked. “That wasn’t the reason you hired her?”
“Jesus, you must think I’m a real prick. I wouldn’t hire someone just because they had a connection to Charles Jayne. And since when do I get involved with hiring junior researchers?”
Is that what Harper thought? But how could she? She didn’t know about my obsession with JD Stanley. “Are you sure that Charles Jayne is Harper’s father?” I asked. “I mean, has she acknowledged it? Have you spoken about it?”
Donna blinked. “No, I just assumed, with her name and all. I’ve never mentioned it.”
“Could be a coincidence,” I said, thinking out loud.