Page 15
Sable
My inbox is already a crime scene by the time I finish my first coffee. Forty unread, half of them flagged red, the other half CC’d with just enough passive-aggression to raise my blood pressure. I rub at my temple with the heel of my hand, trying to ignore the headache crawling up the back of my skull.
Like I need more chaos than the last twenty-four hours have already spat at me—the clusterfuck of finding out Noah’s my account lead, dodging him all day by burying myself in client calls, then him offering me a ride to work this morning like we’re carpool buddies… My head is so far up my own ass I might as well list it as my new primary residence.
“Pop-Tart?” Sam chirps from the other side of the partition. “Strawberry frosted.”
I stick my hand up without looking away from the screen. “Gimme.”
A silver packet lands in my palm a second later. I rip it open with my teeth and sink into the first bite, sugar hitting my tongue like a tiny mercy.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he says in a sing-song voice, smug as hell as he disappears again. “Gratitude noted.”
I sigh and click open my itinerary for the day, already bracing myself for the inevitable avalanche. Sam’s still chirping beside me—something about the vending machine eating his money again—when a shadow cuts across my desk.
I glance over my shoulder, and there he is, hands in his pockets, looking like he wants the ground to crumble beneath him.
“Sable,” he says carefully. “Could you, uh—come to my office? To start walking me through the coordination process?”
Sam’s brow shoots up over the partition. “Ooooh, the new boss man summons.”
I ignore him, roll my eyes, kill my monitor with a tap, and grab my tablet. “Sure. Lead the way.”
We move through the cubicle maze side by side. The low drone of keyboards and muted phone calls fills the air, the kind of soundtrack I usually tune out—but now it feels like it’s pulsing in time with the tension crawling under my skin.
He pulls his office door open for me and waits for me to step in. It’s sterile, incomplete, except for the half-unpacked box slouched in the corner, a lonely mug and a laptop on the desk, and a plant by the windowsill that still has a tag dangling from one leaf.
Silence settles in as he pulls out a folder from the drawer and flips it open. He really looks like he’s trying to keep his shit together—all composed and efficient—but his knee’s bouncing like it’s running its own marathon under the desk and his finger’s traveling up, hooking under his collar so he can loosen it slightly as his throat works on a hard swallow.
My eyes stick there. The knot of his tie, the stretch of fabric at his throat. Fuck, it’d be so easy to curl my fingers there, drag him across the desk, and put that mouth back where it belongs.
Stop it, Sable.
I blink hard and pull myself back, shoving that thought right into the mental shredder. “Right. Walkthrough. You seen the client lists yet?”
His shoulders hitch straighter. “Yeah, Marla forwarded them. I looked them over last night.”
“Good.” I swipe my tablet and flick through numbers, deliverables, more numbers. “So you’ve got a baseline, at least. Let’s run through the live ones first.”
For the next ten minutes it’s business—account A is spiraling, account B wants miracles yesterday, account C is the cat that refuses to be herded. I keep it as polite as I can, but it’s impossible not to notice the faint sheen of sweat gathering under his jaw, how he’s clearing his throat every thirty seconds, and how I can feel the vibrations from that damn bouncing knee through the floor.
“You’re… uh… really good at this, you know that?” he blurts suddenly.
I glance up at him. “Yes, Noah. It’s almost as if I’ve been doing it for five years.”
The corner of his mouth tugs up in either embarrassment or nerves as color climbs his neck, but he ducks back to the screen. “We didn’t run it like this at Westbrook,” he admits after a second. “Processes were all over the place. A real mess. This—” his eyes flick to mine. “—this works. You make it work.”
I tip my head, fighting back a smile. “Of course I do.” I scroll further down, sliding another figure into view with my fingertip. “But you’ll have it down in no time,” I say, scrolling to the next column. “Then you can be the one telling me what to do.”
His hand stills, eyes flaring wide. “God—uh, no. I mean—I don’t think I could… tell you what to do.” The words stutter out of him, nerves awkwardly spilling all over the polished desk.
He clears his throat, shifting like the chair’s suddenly made of nails. His knee knocks the underside of the desk with a thud, and his hand shoots down to still it, knuckles white against his slacks.
My brow furrows. I know he’s a nervous person, but what the hell is he so—
Oh.
Oh. Shit. He thinks I mean it like that. Telling me what to do. In bed. No wonder he looks like he wants to crawl under the desk and wrap a charging lead around his neck.
