I paid her well, and the hours were relatively sane for a financial company in downtown Manhattan-but she wouldn't give me a break either. Like now, she breezed into my office with her pencil skirt and high heels and impeccable bleached-out, side-bangs and sour face. I was lucky my office was made solely of glass windows (other than the black wood door). There was always the possibility she'd try to cut my balls off and shove them down my throat.
"Morning, Mr. Cole." Her crimson lips barely moved as she swiped a finger over her iPad, staring at it intently. I closed the website window to my bank account, holding the thought of wiring money to my archenemy. She could wait. She sure makes me wait. For years and years.
"Sue," I said, leaning back and lacing my fingers together. I refused to play the bullshit game where I called her by her last name-Miss Pearson-because I was approachable and casual with my staff. Also, it was a little too porno-ish, even for my taste, to refer to someone as "Miss Last Name" curtly when I had been knuckles deep inside of her at some point in my life. "How are you today?" I asked.
"Fine. Yourself?"
"If I were any better, I'd be worried I might explode from happiness." My smile was intact, but my voice paper-dry. Was I happy? Was I sad? Was I just too fucking high to distinguish the two feelings? Who the fuck knew? What I did know was that I needed a drink or three, which was what I usually felt after speaking with Nina.
Sue stopped in the middle of the room, her body tilted toward my glass desk, my executive leather chair, and the floor-to-ceiling painting of an antique world map behind me.
Generic.
Expensive.
Rich.
Everything I sold the world about myself.
This office was a shell, just like my looks.
This office didn't represent me. Just. Like. My. Looks.
"Okay … " she trailed off before huffing, moving her special fancy pen over her special fancy iPad. No common shit for this chick. "I have reservations for you at The Breakfast Club for noon with Cynthia Hollyfield. Don't forget your Skype meeting with Mr. Rexroth, Mr. Spencer, and Mr. Followhill at two. Your dry cleaning should be picked up later on today and will be waiting at your place." She was firing away all these things while I was flipping through the pages of a report for a client I was supposed to meet when her head snapped up.
"Then there's your email about booking an extra ticket to Todos Santos for Rose LeBlanc? Can you confirm she'll be flying first-class with you tomorrow morning?" Sue arched a plucked eyebrow. The real question, of course, was are you fucking her? and the honest answer to that question-which I replied to with two, slow blinks, was it's none of your fucking business.
"Confirmed," I said, staring at a paragraph of another merger deal in the works without really reading it.
The AC hummed between us. Forty-six floors down, a bunch of taxi drivers honked their horns. Polite keyboards purred from different cubicles on the floor. Her eyes were on mine, and it was a lost battle for our little Sue. She couldn't read me in them. Only I knew their language. And I chose not to share me with the rest of the world.
"Right," she shifted in place. Sue tucked her iPad under her armpit, turned around, and headed for the door. I watched her tiny ass moving to the rhythm of her pointy Louboutins, knowing it was not the end. Sue knew that Rosie was Emilia LeBlanc's baby sister, but never had the pleasure of meeting my pixie-sized neighbor. However, Sue was privy to the fact that I wasn't the type to babysit anyone's sibling, unless there was something in it for me. And Miss LeBlanc was definitely capable of dragging her own ass to the airport, which left her with one, correct conclusion: I wanted into Rosie LeBlanc. In more ways than I'd ever wanted into Sue Pearson.
And it wouldn't be the first time I crashed someone else's special day for pussy, either.
I'd been known for taking my dates to inappropriate places. Sue knew that I dragged a one-night stand to the hospital when I went to Chicago to congratulate my best friend, Trent, when he welcomed his daughter, Luna. When Jaime Followhill-another good friend-married his wife and my ex-lit teacher, Melody Greene, I came to his wedding with two randoms I picked up on the way from a bar. My dad's retirement party, before he un-retired himself and remarried his work? – showed up with one of his interns, no less. So it was really no surprise that I was traveling with a woman, but to Sue, it was a surprise because she knew I'd be there for more than a week. And spending nine days with the same woman? That was definitely a first.