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But he’s Elliot.
The guy who perches on the edge of my desk and gives me a hard time. The guy who ceaselessly tries to wean me off my planner and notebook addictions and turn me digital. The guy who’s created amusing personalized tech gizmos to help my scheduling systems.
He’s a sweetheart.
But he’s Elliot.
And more importantly, he’s my boss’s little brother. The most off-limits man in the building.
The Dashwoods have a strict policy of never mixing business and family—imposed by Max after the disaster that lost him his previous assistant. And nonfraternization policies are his thing. The one we all sign when we join Harvest is three pages long and could only have been designed by someone who’s experienced something go very sideways.
Get a fucking grip, Charlotte.
I press my hands together to keep them out of trouble and take a step back to keep the rest of me out of it too.
“Is it still bleeding?” I’m sure that sounds businesslike and professional and not even remotely like I can still feel where his fingers just touched me.
Elliot peels back the edge of the tissue as if uncovering a bomb and peers underneath. “Think it’s stopped.”
He looks at me over his glasses in that flirtatious way he has—a way I’m not sure he realizes he has. “But your viselike grip did cut off most of the blood flow to it, so it’ll be a while before I get the feeling back.” He holds up the finger and waggles it at me.
“Great.” I clap my hands together. Time to move on. “Let’s get this mess cleared up.” I reach over the arrangement of more movie and TV collectibles next to his array of monitors and grab the desk phone.
Someone answers half a second after I’ve punched in the internal extension for the building management. “Hi. Can I get a janitor to Elliot Dashwood’s office on the fifty-third floor, please?”
As I hang up, Elliot squats down to attend to the wreckage.
“Haven’t you learned your lesson? Leave it to the professionals now.”
“Just want to be sure I save the plant,” he says.
“There’s more than a dozen others in here. You’d barely notice if you lost one.”
He looks up at me with mock horror. “They’re all special in their own little way, Charlotte.”
He scoops the two halves of the broken plastic pot together to trap as much of the soil as possible. “Need to protect the roots or it won’t be happy when I repot it.”
With the care of someone handling a newborn baby, he lays the plant and its container on its side on the table.
“Better save this too.” I reach down and rescue the neatly hand-written wooden label. Every plant in the room has one. They say its common name and Latin name, followed by a list of whether they like sun or shade, cool or hot, and how much water they prefer. It’s hard to know which Elliot loves most, the plants or the facts.
I rest the label next to the prostrate fern. “What do you mean, when you repot it? Won’t the weekly green service take care of it for you when they come to look after all the other plants and flowers in the building?”
“I do my own.”
I look around Elliot’s office with fresh eyes. Almost every surface is home to some sort of living greenery.
“These are all yours? I mean, I know you wrote all the labels. But I thought the plants were from the interior-scaping service?”
“All mine.”
“Huh. How did that start?” Might as well add another item to my growing list of new things I’ve learned about Elliot today.
He shrugs. “Mom. She’s a big gardener. But when I was a kid and we didn’t have a yard, she’d grow things in indoor pots from seeds people would give her. And I helped. It always seemed like a little bit of magic when a green shoot poked through the soil. Guess it kind of stayed with me.”
He’s overturning a lot of my assumptions lately.
He unwraps the bloody tissue from his finger and tosses it into the wastebasket.
