Page 22 of Waste of Worth

“I need you to stop avoiding me like I did something wrong. And if I did do something wrong, the very least you could do is tell me what it fucking is.”

Karen rarely swore. The first time they met, he remembered her using a cuss, and thinking it was probably a regular thing, except it wasn’t. That had been nothing more than a fluke. In all the time Dino had spent with her since she started working for him, he could count on one hand the amount of cusses she let slip past her pretty lips.

He didn’t even think the F-word was in her vocabulary.

How mistaken he was …

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Dino settled on saying.

He couldn’t give her much more.

“But you are avoiding me,” she pressed.

God.

She was not going to let this go.

“I’m avoiding an awkward situation,” Dino replied, adding, “which you’re not helping with at the moment.”

“Because I wanted you to take me on a date?”

Dino blinked. “What?”

Karen looked as though she had taken all she could for the day. Throwing her hands up, she let out an exhausted noise and spun on her heel to leave.

Dino couldn’t let her go like that. In a blink, he was going after her, catching up with her in the hallway. He grabbed her arm, spinning her around to face him.

“Wait a second,” he said.

Karen’s scowl cut him deep and she jerked out of his hold. “Don’t manhandle me, Dino. I’m not a pet for you to play with, you know?”

Dino dropped her arm, taking one giant step back. “Sorry.”

“Listen, if you’re not interested in me, then that’s fine. But the signals you are throwing out are a little mixed, all right? One second you’re watching me like you can’t get enough, the next you’re turning into a block of ice. So I took a risk and asked you, just so I knew. I don’t mind rejection, asshole, but you don’t need to make it more painful than it already is. If you’re not interested, then say so. Don’t be a dick about it, too.”

Well, then.

Dino wasn’t quite sure what to say.

“I’m … very interested,” he managed to utter.

It took a lot for him to say that.

If he wanted a girl to climb in bed with, he could go find one at a club, and he wouldn’t even need to waste his breath learning her name before he was done with her.

Karen wasn’t quite the same.

He actually found himself genuinely curious about her—who she was, where she came from, and why she painted her fingernails black when she wore the brightest colors everywhere else. He wasn’t looking to get his dick wet—though he’d be lying if he said his cock wasn’t interested in Karen—but rather, he wanted to know her.

That couldn’t end well.

He hadn’t done this sort of thing before.

Karen shifted in her heels, watching him out of the corner of her eyes. “Oh?”

Dino nodded. “I’m not very good at this, I guess.”

That was an understatement.