Page 46 of My Forbidden Boss
“You’ve really backed me into a corner here, haven’t you?”
Hollis looked dejected but didn’t lower his steady gaze.
Without a word, I headed toward the glass door into the cottage common area. I let the silence hang, only calling back to him once my hand was a breath away from touching the handle.
“Give me an hour to get ready.”
I was inside but leaned out just before the door was closing, Hollis in the first moment of taking a deep sigh of relief.
“Oh, and by the way, Romeo… You’re finally giving me the chance to put something on that goes along with that sexy car of yours, so you’d better pick a restaurant that fits the occasion. Two plus two does not equal a number four combo with extra hot wings, got it?”
Hollis
Adjusting the cuffs of my shirt for the thousandth time in as many seconds, I smoothed the sleeves of my suit and once more gingerly touched my tie. I dared not feel it longer than a moment to remind myself it was there. I had already tied and retied it a dozen different times, sculpting my appearance more attentively over the past hour and a half than in any of my meticulous workouts over the previous six months, probably longer.
I raised my wrist and, after a long, deep breath, knocked twice at Tisha’s door.
“Just a sec!”
Her call through the door sent shivers down my back. My apprehension was at the level of an adolescent, and nervously I pulled at my collar, unsure which was stiffer: its enclosure tightly buttoned around my thick neck or the muscles constricting around my throat.
The door swung open smoothly, and finally, my lungs found some air, only for it to be stolen away by the sheer sight of her.
“Just one more minute, I swear. I can never get these damn things in. Honestly, I had no idea that I even brought them.”
She turned and kept fiddling with the sparkling silver at her ear.
My mouth opened, but my vocal cords were dry enough to crack – as if my tonsils were sand dunes in some forgotten desert. I swallowed harshly and cleared my throat, still at a loss for words.
“You look… You are…”
Tisha turned, finishing one earring and picking up the other from a small bag by her suitcase on the bed.
“Yeah, yeah, sure. Go ahead, Romeo, take your time.”
I smiled, not for the first time feeling my tense edginess from intimidation fading in the face of her straightforward sense of cutthroat provocation.
The deep, reverberating pulses from my chest ebbed through my body, blanketing me in a bubble of warmth and bemusement. When I finally gulped back the lump in my throat, my words came out slow and smooth, honest, and true – to the point of potentially making me look ridiculous. I didn’t care.
“I might have to, Tisha. How much time do you have?”
She turned as I spoke, then obviously wished that she hadn’t. For my part, I was far too enthralled to realize it might’ve been a little early in the evening to start laying it on so thick.
Instead, my eyes scanning over her body sensed a different detail.
“Did you pack that?”
It was an innocent enough question and seemed reasonable for me to ask, but only hindsight would allow me to see just how stupid it was at the time.
Tisha looked down, a curled wave of her hair falling from her ear to her cheekbone. Her face flushed and, dumb as a mule, I became only more confused.
She was slow to answer, feeling her words before letting them loose.
“Well… kind of. I didn’t, so to speak. My, uh… my friend did. Now that I think about it, that’s definitely how the earrings got in there. He…”
Finally, it dawned on me. At first, I was dubious, sure that there was another explanation, but her look, like a deer in the headlights, confirmed the suspicion.
A weasel’s grin spread deviously across my face. Immediately Tisha flared up, ready to defend herself. “No, no, no… No! It’s not…”