Page 44 of Dancing for the Minotaur

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TERRA

After lunch, they returned to the accounts and Terra forced herself to concentrate on numbers rather than Taurex's smile, which was much easier once she started digging through the unpaid invoices again. She found one that was sixty days overdue, then another that had gone nearly ninety, and by three o'clock she had identified almost four hundred and twelve thousand dollars in outstanding receivables.

“Do you realize how much money is sitting out there just waiting for you to collect it?” she demanded, turning her laptop toward him.

Taurex leaned over her shoulder to look at the spreadsheet and she tried to ignore how good he smelled and the way the heat from his big body radiated against her back.

“I do now,” he said simply.

“You need procedures,” she told him. “An accurate way to get what’s owed to you.”

“I have procedures,” he protested.

“No, you have instincts,” she corrected him.

He frowned.

“Well then, my instincts are excellent.”

“I believe you.” Terra glanced pointedly toward the leaning tower of papers beside his desk. “But your filing system is not.”

Taurex straightened, looking mildly offended.

“My filing system is fine.”

Terra gave him a skeptical look.

“Your ‘filing system’ is a paper avalanche waiting to happen. If it fell on us, we’d both be buried for months.”

“I know where everything is,” he rumbled defensively.

“You asked me twenty minutes ago where the shipping permit from Vessara was,” she pointed out.

“Well…I knew it was in this room.”

“That is not the same thing as being able to put your hand on it right away,” Terra said. “You can’t go digging through a mountain of paperwork every time you need an invoice or a shipping manifest.”

Taurex crossed his enormous arms over his chest, stretching the white fabric of his shirt tightly over his shoulders and upper arms. Terra's eyes flicked downward before she could stop them, lingering for a fraction of a second on the impressive width of his chest and the way the rolled sleeves hugged his muscular forearms.

Stop it, she scolded herself. You do not find your new boss attractive. You do NOT.

She dragged her gaze back to his face and pointed toward the piles of paperwork with deliberate authority.

“Tomorrow we're getting you a filing cabinet.”

His eyebrows drew low, and a soft snort escaped him, like a bull looking at a matador’s cape.

“I dislike filing cabinets.”

“What? Why?” Terra asked, exasperated.

“They are ugly. Big, boxy pieces of furniture that serve no purpose other than to house all this ridiculous paperwork you humans insist on.”

“Well, we can get a lot of this online,” Terra told him. “But some places just won’t go digital. Besides, you know what else is ugly? An IRS audit.”

Taurex frowned. “What is an IRS audit?”