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“William informed me you were working late, so I decided to stop in. I see that working does not mean the same thing to me as it does you. No big surprise, of course.”
He stood to give her a stiff half-bow of greeting. She was about to skin him alive, and he had only himself to blame. He never should have invited Maggie to dinner. “What a pleasant surprise, Mother.”
“Moth—” Maggie straightened at his words, banging her head on the table. “Ow.”
“Oh, Benjamin.” She raised one haughty brown brow, curled her upper lip at his dinner companion, and hugged her Prada jacket closed. “I’ll just bet it is.”
Chapter Two
Maggie crawled out from under the table clutching her stupid fork, her face on fire and her heart racing. Out of all the positions to be found in, kneeling at her boss’s feet was not the most flattering. And the thing was, she was the person least likely to be caught messing around with her boss. She had bad enough luck with men as it was; she wasn’t about to throw the possibility of her ex firing her into the mix.
No, thank you.
She’d keep her disastrous romantic entanglements out of the office.
Once she made it to her feet with Mr. Gale’s help—which his mother did not miss—she smoothed her skirt and swallowed hard, still clinging to the fork for dear life as if it could somehow save her from what was coming. “Mrs. Gale. This isn’t—”
“Quiet,” the older woman snapped, without taking her murderous glare off of her son. “No one was speaking to you.”
Picking up her wine, she swallowed a healthy mouthful, and it washed down the retort attempting to choke her to death in front of her boss and his nasty mother. The woman watched her son like he was a bug she’d stepped on.
Something to be scraped off and forgotten.
And, in return, Mr. Gale watched his mother with all the warmth of a winter’s night. Maggie had never wanted the power to be invisible as much as she did right now.
And she used to pray for it every night.
Guess she knew now where he’d gotten his cold, emotionless exterior. He wasn’t rude to her or anything. He never was. He just didn’t really have the time, or the desire, to chat idly all day long. Something told her that he’d never been taught how.
They must not teach small talk at Harvard.
But they spent a lot of time alone at the office, so she got to see a side of him no one else did. And the more time she spent with him, the more he reminded her of a lost puppy who had all the bones in the world, but no idea what to do with them.
Especially after tonight.
“Please tell me this ‘dinner’ is not being billed to the company,” Mrs. Gale said, each word icier than the last. “Last I checked, there is no clause in your contract that states the company must pay for your many dalliances.”
Many dalliances?
She’d never have pegged Mr. Gale as a playboy.
Sure, he had the looks and the money to pull it off, but he spent almost all his time locked in his office, scowling out at his employees through the glass windows on either side of his closed door. Alone.
Covertly, she stole another glance at him as he shrugged back into his jacket while his mother watched him angrily. Tonight, he wore a black suit with a light green pinstripe dress shirt and a pair of black loafers. Something about the way his custom-made suit hugged all those hard muscles was a lot harder to ignore than it usually was—maybe because moments before she had been kneeling at his feet, staring up into his eyes and thinking how handsome he was from down there.
And he was. Handsome. From every angle.
Not just his feet.
He always had a slight five o’clock shadow going on, but she’d never seen his hair when it wasn’t picture perfect. The man easily could have been a GQ model, but instead he was the CEO of his family’s pharmaceutical company. He was well over six feet tall, weighed a little under two hundred pounds, was thirty-three years old, had attended Harvard for six years, and wore a size thirteen shoe.
I know way too much about him. Stalker.
She sighed.
Oh, and he was freakishly, devilishly, impossibly hot.
And single.
