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Tate’s face went pale, and beneath the shiny veneer of self-congratulatory bullshit, I saw a ripple of real emotion. Something had set him off. I’d been teetering on the edge of getting fired for several minutes now, but nothing had upset him the way my last tirade had. It was as if I’d found the sole soft spot in a rock-hard wall.
Even as he turned venomous, my heart skittered up the wall of my chest. When was the last time a man had looked at me so intensely, as if he saw way more than I’d allowed him to see?
More to the point — had I gotten Tate all wrong?
CHAPTER 4
Tate
KIKI’S STORY about her father set me back on my heels.
She couldn’t have known about my dad. Nobody did. It was the town secret — that he’d built himself a palace to get lost in, a place where no one could stop him, where he had a limitless supply of chips to toss on any given night.
Kiki couldn’t have known.
Didn’t make it hurt any less.
I stared harder at her, trying to get a sense of this complex young woman before me.
She was every shade I knew a human could be. Her hair flamed red around her shoulders, a color that looked to be natural, not out of a bottle, while her eyes were an early spring grass green, pale but defined. Her lips were pink, the lipstick slightly feathering around the edges, and her lashes were rimmed in black. The universe had used the whole palette on Kiki, even down to the white — her skin was so pale it was almost incandescent, save for the little brown freckles which covered her arms and the bridge of her nose.
I met gorgeous girls all the time. In fact, I usually just sat back, and let them meet me. They introduced themselves everywhere I went, often with a wink or an air kiss, each with longer legs and firmer tits than the last. Categorizing them had become too easy. There were blondes with blue eyes, brunettes with brown ones, women of every race and background. All fell somewhere into a neat little pile in my head based on feature breakdown. There was no time — or point — in defining them by personality. When somebody’s in your life just long enough for a quick fuck, you don’t exactly get their résumé and family history.
But Kiki seemed to defy grouping across the board. My mind raced, trying to place her to no avail. She was so… natural. And mad! Women were never mad at me. Or if they were, they did an excellent job hiding it. Let’s put it this way — if they were mad, I’d never cared to consider it. I just discarded that one and moved on to the next.
Do I sound like a cad? It’s probably because I am. In fairness, it doesn’t bring me much pleasure, so it’s a rather empty transaction all around.
For some reason, though, Kiki felt like a slug across the face, down the throat, and right into the heart. Could she be…
No, you moron, my brain quickly corrected. You’re mad because, for one, the dad shit, but more importantly, two, because your employee is being insolent. Fix it.
Right, right, that was the answer. Her insolence, that’s what was getting me so riled up. There was only one way to stop feeling the entire breadth of my emotional bandwidth, and that was to put Kiki back in her place.
“You can’t talk like that,” I told her, my voice stern.
She raised a beautiful eyebrow, confused. “Of all the shit I just said, you’re mad because I… told you the truth about my family and my history at Dazzlers? I don’t get it.”
Okay, she made a fair point, but I couldn’t back down. It would make me look weak.
“No, no, I — was just letting you shake that stuff out of your system. Now that you seem to have gotten out the worst of your insults, I’ll assign you a punishment accordingly.”
Jesus, why was I talking like Jack? At least my excuse made a little bit of sense. It did, right? You can tell me if it didn’t.
Kiki wasn’t buying it, but seemed to be done with the sparring. “Fine,” she sighed. “Just fire me.”
“No! Ahem. I mean… no. Firing you won’t be necessary. I’ll…” I trailed off, embarrassed by both my neediness and my lack of resolve.
“Yeah?”
I thought for a moment, then with a smile, finished, “As punishment, you’ll do an extra shift.”
“That’s it?”
“Tonight. You’ll do an extra shift for the in-house show.”
Kiki’s eyes widened and then narrowed like a camera lens adjusting for focus.
“I’ve been working all day,” she countered. “And the show has its own servers. I don’t wanna step on anyone’s toes. At the risk of sealing my own sentence, why don’t you just have me take out the gross garbage tonight or something? It’d make more sense.”
