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“Fine, forget I said that. You worry exactly the right amount. Okay? Are we done now?”
“No, we’re not done now, Emmet! We haven't even started!”
She starts pacing back and forth, her slender ankles flexing dangerously from side to side as she strides. I almost smell her anger: that fuming, boiling acid.
My hands go up automatically, palms out. I don't need her like this. I need her calm and in control, like she is supposed to be. She's the goddamn CEO. She is supposed to be walking around with iced tea in her veins, not yelling like a cornered bobcat.
“All right, all right. Just tell me what you want to do,” I tell her reasonably.
“I don't even know if there's anything we can do anymore,” she mutters to me, but not exactly in my direction. Her eyes keep floating up to the ceiling, as though there's some magical answer written up there in the plaster.
“Hey, you're the one who told me to get lost for a month, remember? That was your idea. I could've been here, handling things for you. Team meetings, whatever. I could've been useful.”
“Useful?” she repeats, her voice pitched somewhere close to air raid siren levels. “Useful? Are you kidding me? How inspiring was that hashtag? Tell me that, Emmet!”
I feel a smirk coming on. I don't want to smirk, but I can't help it. #RiordanTwofer, that was the hashtag. We trended on Twitter for a whole week.
“Oh, come on. Settle. There's no such thing as bad publicity,” I quip.
She unfolds her arms and her palms slap against her hips in frustration. Despite myself, find her overwhelmingly hot right now. She’s uptight as fuck, but maybe she has a secret side. I mean, I've never banged the CEO and I’m pretty sure Dillon never did either, but if we are all out of here in just a few weeks…. Why not?
“There is definitely such a thing as bad publicity, Emmet!”
I roll my eyes, noting that she doesn’t even want to look at me. “So some paparazzi got some blurry pictures from a telephoto lens hidden in the bushes or whatever. So what? Kept us in the news, didn't it? I bet those Google guys are just wetting themselves over us.”
“No! No, Emmet that's not how this works!” She shakes her head incredulously. “This isn’t a buyout, this is a merger. You and Dillon, the whole Riordan brand, is what we are selling. It's like a marriage, and you guys went and… I don't even know… I can't even come up with a good metaphor, I'm so angry at you!”
The toes of her heels stamp against the carpet, and her little frail hands ball into fists. She reminds me of a pissed off kitten. One who hasn’t had a lot of practice. Everyone else seems to take her seriously, but I just can’t.
But, okay, I guess this is serious. She really does seem angry, and I guess she means it. It feels like an overreaction to me but she's legitimately upset. It’s not just the usual boys-will-be-boys kind of scolding that we get from her overly proper, school-principal-shaped mouth. Like seriously pissed, as far as I can tell.
“You're seriously upset about the hashtag trending?”
Her mouth opens, then closes. Her cheeks are so pink that each of her freckles stands out like a little cartoon warning sign. Her eyes burn into mine like lasers.
“What I'm seriously upset about is seeing you and Dillon,” she says slowly in a low, dangerous voice, “buried balls-deep in a married woman. A married Congresswoman.”
I shrug. “But she didn't tell us she was married,” I mumble.
“Both of you,” she continues like she didn't hear me. “Both of you. Both dicks. Which I never should have seen. Inside the same Congresswoman.”
I smile. I can't help it. She was hot. Seriously hot. Really a beautiful piece of ass, in or out of Congress.
“The same married Congresswoman!”
Long red hair, real tits, and that whole angry librarian thing. Basically, she was asking for it. Kind of like Hannah right now, come to think of it.
“At the same time!”
“You know what? I don't think my personal life is really anybody's business,” I sniff.
She strides toward me, stabbing toward my solar plexus with her sharpened index finger now. “You know what, neither do I! So I'd really appreciate it if you stopped broadcasting your personal life all over the goddamned internet!”
She’s so close, leaning over, that I see straight down between her tits all the way to her navel. She's got a little bit of a golden treasure trail there. It's adorable.
“Okay, fine.”
Her nostrils are flared, and a swoosh of ginger hair has come stubbornly undone and is dangling in front of her tortoiseshell glasses. I want to take a finger and tuck the strands behind her ear. Then pull her head close, and kiss her until she shuts the fuck up.
