It had been weeks and nothing. No lingering glances, no sly innuendos. Certainly, none of the clinginess or sentimentality one might associate with a young, mostly sexually innocent woman giving it up to her billionaire boss.
It was almost like she wasoverme.
Which had to be impossible. This was Flowers. We had a connection. We were important to each other. We couldn’t stop what ultimately happened in her bedroom because our attraction, our mutual chemistry, was so strong we couldn’tnotdo it.
Right?
It was the truth, that there had been some dark days where I wondered if I hadn’t been one ofthose guys.An isolated wealthy man, with no one to stand up to him, to say that his young, funny, smart assistant wasn’t really that into him.
Ultimately, it was my faith in Flowers that talked me off that ledge. She knew herself too well. She wasn’t the type to be swayed or pressured into something against her will. She’d been forged in the fire of having to navigate this life on her own too well to be pressured into something she didn’t want to do.
The fact that she wasn’t crying every day over the fact our intimate connection was over, because I’d said it was over, was just another testament to her internal strength of character. Flowers wasn’t someone who was ever going to beg for affection.
If you gave it to her, you did so freely, without condition, because anything less…
Would be almost criminal.
It made sense she was behaving perfectly normally around me because I’d set the terms of oursitutationship.
I’d told her we weren’t having sex again. I had plans to fire her the minute I found a position worthy of her talents. I was going to walk away and never look back.
She was too much, I’d told myself these past few weeks.
If there was going to be a time where I might heal. Where I might get over the loss of Allison, now was not that time. Flowers was not that woman.
She was ill-suited to me in every way.
Too young.
Too inexperienced. Although, she’d probably lived more in her short life than most women twice her age.
Too naïve. Although she could read a person sitting across from her like no one I’d never met before.
Too…
Okay, just too young, I supposed. What kind of age was twenty-three?
When I’d buried Allison, I knew then I would never love another woman. I would never marry another woman.
However, after a time, I started to imagine maybe finding a convenient partner. Someone to attend charity functions with. Show up with me at restaurant openings. Possibly travel together.
A sophisticated woman of the world. Maybe someone European, where a continent would separate us when we weren’t together.
A beautiful, age appropriate French woman.
Madelaine. Brigitte. Aimee.
“Can I go to lunch a few minutes early?”
Flowers’ voice broke through my musings and I looked up from my monitors to where she stood in the doorway of my office.
In a few weeks, when I looked up, she wouldn’t be there.
Wearing a cheap navy pant suit she’d most likely bought off the discount rack.
Flowers was not French.
“Your pants are too long.”
