Page 76 of Unexpected You

I loved this woman. I loved Eloise Roth. I loved my boss. I’d loved her for longer than this moment, I just hadn’t been able to see it. I loved her in all the big ways, and all the small ways. I loved the way she typed. I loved her eyebrows and her eyes and her nose and god, I loved her fingers. Her expressions and her laugh and the way she held her fork and told me what to do and clung to her schedules but was willing to throw them out for me.

“Cade?” she asked, when I didn’t answer her. I had no idea what the hell my face looked like, but I hoped my thoughts weren’t written all over it.

“Oh, uh, let me look,” I said, walking toward her like my entire world hadn’t fucking changed.

With numb fingers I took the menu and looked down, but I couldn’t make my eyes focus on the words.

“Whatever you’re getting is fine,” I said.

“And cake? Do you like breakfast cake?”

She really did know me.

“Yeah, definitely breakfast cake.”

After we ate in bed and made each other come with thrusting fingers, we realized that we had to check out of the room. A rush of terror swept through me. What if last night was an only once kind of thing? What would happen when we got back to the real world? Would she still want me?

I was quiet as we got dressed and checked out.

“We still need to try that,” Eloise said when I put my seatbelt on in her car.

“What?” I asked.

She pointed to my shirt. “We still need to try that.”

It took me a moment to understand that she meant scissoring.

I choked on my own saliva for a second.

“Uh, yeah. We can definitely do that. If you want.”

She gave me a heated look that raised the temperature of the air a few degrees.

“I want,” she said. “I definitely want.”

Well, shit.

* * *

“You probably want to go home to change and so forth,” Eloise said when we got closer to the city.

“Yeah, of course,” I said, dread churning in my stomach.

“I should go home too. I need to start figuring out how to replace you,” she said with a sigh.

“What?” I asked, my heart actually stopping and my body turning to ice.

“Cadence. We can’t keep working together like this. It’s untenable, and it’s not something I can do. Morally. Things have changed and if we’re going to be together, you can’t be my assistant.”

Too many thoughts. I was having far too many thoughts. Thoughts piling on top of each other and all screaming at once and all I could hear was noise.

“You want… You want to be with me?” I asked, finally latching onto the most important part of what she’d said.

Eloise put on her blinker and turned into the parking lot of a gas station and turned to me.

“Yes, Cadence. I want to be with you. I thought that should be obvious?”

I shook my head a little violently. “Nope, not obvious. I fully thought you were going to tell me that last night was fun, but we should probably forget about it.”