Beautiful Bitch (11 page)

“Motherfucking cocksucking son of a whore.”

I looked up from my desk, my eyebrows inching to my hairline as Chloe slammed my door and stormed to my desk.

“Did the gimp escape the dungeon again, Miss Mills?”

“Close enough. Papadakis is pushing up launch.”

I stood so abruptly my chair skidded back and banged into the wall. “What?”

“January is the new March, apparently. The first press blast is set to go out January seventh.”

“That’s a horrible time to pitch something like this! Everyone is still drunk or cleaning up the holiday mess. No one is buying fancy apartments.”

“That’s what I told Big George.”

“Did you also tell him he needs to stick to counting his Benjamins and leave the marketing to us?”

She laughed, crossing her arms across her chest. “I may have actually used those words. With a few other gangster terms thrown in.”

I sat back down, rubbing my hands over my face. Our flight was scheduled to leave in the morning, on Thanksgiving Day, and there was no way we could leave work now. “You told him this was okay?”

Across the desk, I could sense that she grew completely still. “What was my option?”

“To tell him we’re not going to be ready!”

“But that’s a lie. We
can
be ready.”

I dropped my hands, gaping at her. “Yes, but only if we work fifteen-hour days through the holidays—and all to accommodate his shitty timing for a launch.”

She threw her hands up, eyes on fire. “He’s paying us a million dollars for basic marketing and we’re inking a deal for another ten-million-dollar media campaign. You think fifteen-hour days are unreasonable to keep our biggest client?”

“Of course not! But he’s also not your
only
client! Rule number one in business is to not ever let the big dog know how small the other dogs are.”

“Damnit, Bennett. I’m not going to tell him we can’t deliver.”

“Sometimes a little pushback is a good thing. You’re being green, Mills. If you weren’t sure, you should have sent the call to me.”

I immediately wanted to pull the words back into my mouth. Her eyes went wide, her mouth dropped, and fuck, her hands curled into fists at her sides. I reached down to cover my balls.

“Are you fucking serious right now? Are you going to cut my fucking steak at dinner, too, you egomaniacal asshat?”

I couldn’t help myself. “Only if I can feed it to you and help you chew.”

Her face smoothed and I could see her calculate how much effort she wanted to put into kicking my ass. “We’re skipping St. Bart’s,” she said, flatly.

“Obviously. Why do you think I’m pissed?”

“Well, even if we did still go at this point, you’d be sleeping alone with your hand and a tube of lube.”

“I could work with that. These two hands provide some variety.”

She blinked away, jaw clenched. “Are you
trying
to make me more angry?”

“Sure, why not.”

Dark eyes turned back on me, narrowed. Her voice shook a little with one word: “Why?”

“So you can feel the pain more. Because you should have told George that these kinds of decisions have to be cleared with the entire team and we’d have an answer for him after the holiday.”

“How do you know I didn’t say that?”

“Because you came in here and delivered news. You didn’t act like it was a suggestion.”

She stared at me, eyes flashing through a hundred responses. I waited to see how many curse words she could
string together but she surprised me instead, and turned to leave my office.

Chloe didn’t stay over that night. It was only the second night we’d spent apart after her presentation at J. T. Miller last June, and I didn’t even try to sleep. Instead, I watched
Mad Men
on Netflix and wondered which of us would apologize first.

The problem was I was right, and I knew it.

Thanksgiving morning arrived with snow flurries and a wind so strong it pushed me forward into the building as I walked, alone, from the parking garage to my office.

It had never occurred to me that she would leave me again after our fight. I suspected Chloe and I were in it for the long haul, whether the long haul officially began tomorrow or ten years in the future. There wasn’t anything she could do to scare me off.

And while I felt the same was true for her, she rarely walked away from a fight. She either battled with me until I was figuratively on my knees or she ended up on her knees in an entirely different way.

Only a few RMG employees were at work on Thanksgiving—the members of the Papadakis team. And every one of them glared at Chloe as she walked down the hall to get some coffee. Knowing her, she had probably worked late last night and slept under her desk.

She didn’t even glance over to where I stood in the doorway to the conference room. Still, I could almost hear her thinking as she passed every disgruntled team member: “You can suck my dick. And you, too, can suck my dick. And you? The slacker with the pathetic pout? You can
really
suck my dick.”

She headed to her office, settled in, and left her door open.

Come and get me,
she was saying.
Come on in and let’s have it out.

But for as much as everyone probably wanted to give her an earful for making us cancel our holiday plans, no one did. Each of us had been raised in the business world under the same ethos: work trumps all. The last person to leave work is the hero. The first person in has bragging rights. Working over holidays gets you into heaven.

And while a more experienced executive would have told Papadakis that what he’d asked wasn’t possible, as always I admired Chloe’s determination. This wasn’t just about meeting a new milestone for her. This was her launching her career. This was her foundation. Chloe was me a few years ago.

After everyone else had left for the evening, I knocked on her open door, gently alerting her to my presence.

“Mr. Ryan,” she said, pulling off her glasses and looking up at me. The city skyline winked behind her, speckled lights
covering her entire wall of windows. “Here to show me how to grow a penis so I can get the job done?”

“Chloe, I’m pretty sure if you wanted to grow one, you could do it by will alone.”

She let a half smile form, pushing back from her desk and crossing her legs. “I’d grow one just so I could ask you to suck on it.”

I couldn’t contain my laughter, bending over and collapsing into the chair across the desk from her. “I knew you were going to say that.”

Her eyebrows pulled together a little. “Well, before you say anything else, yes, I know this sucks. And . . . I think you were right. We could be in St. Bart’s right now, on the beach.”

I started to speak, but she held up her hand to urge me to wait.

“But the thing is, Bennett, no matter how much I should have, I didn’t
want
to tell Papadakis no. I wanted to deliver, because we
can,
and we
should.
It’s down to the wire anyway and we’ve had a lot of time to work on this. It felt disingenuous to say we couldn’t make it happen.”

“True,” I conceded, “but by letting him push a milestone ahead to the beginning of the quarter, you’ve set a precedent.”

“I know,” she said, rubbing her temples with her fingertips.

“But actually, I wasn’t coming in here to tell you what you’d done was wrong. I was coming in here to tell you I understand why you did it. I can’t really fault you.”

She dropped her hands, eyeing me cautiously.

“At this point in your career, I can’t be surprised you said yes to Papadakis.”

Her mouth opened and I could see a litany of curse words form on her tongue.

“Easy, firecracker,” I said, leaning forward and holding up my hands. “I don’t mean you’re naïve; I’m not pulling the ‘seasoning’ card again—though it’s true no matter how much you hate to hear it. I mean you’re still building. You want to show the world that you’re Atlas—and to a Titan, that fucking celestial sphere weighs nothing. It’s just that it’s impacted the entire team, and over a holiday. I get why you did it, and I also get why you’re conflicted. I’m sorry this is hard for you, because I’ve been there.” I lowered my voice, moved a little closer. “It sucks.”

The room seemed to grow darker, the sun dipping behind the horizon just as I’d finished my sentence. Chloe watched me, face smooth and practically unreadable.

Well, unreadable to anyone else. Anyone who hadn’t seen that face a thousand times, the one that told me she wanted to smack me, kiss me, scratch me, and then fuck me.

“Don’t smirk,” she said, eyes narrowing. “I see what you’re doing.”

“What am I doing?”

“Trying to build me up. Being a hardass, yet also my lover. Damnit, Bennett.”

“You’re going to fuck me in your office!” I crowed, my words colored with surprise and glee. “God, you’re easy.”

She stood quickly, walking around the desk and reaching immediately for my tie. “Damnit.” She unknotted it, wrapping it around my eyes and tying it behind my head. “Stop studying me,” she hissed into my ear. “Stop seeing
everything.”

“Never.” I closed my eyes behind the silk fabric and let my other senses take over, inhaling the delicate citrus scent of her perfume, reaching to feel the soft skin of her forearms. I moved my hands slowly down her body and turned her around, pulling her back to my chest. “This better?”

Her quiet huff wasn’t for my benefit; it was a sound of genuine frustration. “Bennett,” she murmured, leaning back. “You’re making me crazy.”

I gripped her hips, pulling her to me so she could feel the hard line of my cock against her ass. “At least some things never change.”