Page 119 of His Temporary Assistant

I shut off my phone and made myself smile at Smoky, who was watching me with one slitted green eye. And maybe I could even have a few more orgasms along the way.

Twenty

I wasn’t sure how, but I was fairly certain I’d scared off Ryan.

I puzzled over it as I took containers out of the bags in the refrigerator. I didn’t know if she’d think I was strange for grabbing this stuff for our dinner. Not to mention I did not know how to properly reheat egg sandwiches.

Typically, if I wanted to charm a woman with a meal, I would’ve made reservations at my usual seafood restaurant. Or if it was a nice night, we could’ve gone to Sherman Inn, a place across from the water in Crescent Cove. But neither of those options felt like Ryan, and besides, I wanted her to see my house.

To see me, when it came right down to it.

I finished unbagging then faced down my loaded kitchen table. I didn’t know how to properly prepare our dinner, but she wasn’t coming down in a hurry anyway.

Maybe she was still tired despite her assertions to the contrary. One thing I had was plenty of comfortable beds. All unused, waiting for my supposed baseball team.

As if I was ready for a family.

I mean, someday, sure. I’d never thought of it in depth, but I’d hoped one day that I would have something in my life besides work. Whether that was a wife and kids or not…well, I wasn’t set on that precise outcome, but it wasn’t an unpleasant thought.

More and more, I liked the idea of a house filled with noise and life. Man couldn’t survive on NPR and The Wall Street Journal alone.

Even if admitting that to Ryan would probably be tantamount to saying I was into sacrificing flamingoes or something in my backyard.

A fruitless search on my phone didn’t give me the details on how to reheat this stuff for maximum palatability. Even if I’d been able to stumble through, I didn’t want to have to reheat it twice if she’d fallen asleep or something upstairs.

Or if she was fashioning a rope of bedsheets to escape with minimum fuss.

I moved to the counter and started hacking at the plastic packaging of the next item on my list. If she wasn’t going to come down on her own, then she could just stay up there. Or climb out the window. Or send out for help from her best bish.

I had these attractive paw-shaped lights to put down in the backyard for reasons I’d yet to fathom.

Fifteen minutes later, I’d finished placing the lights in a meandering fashion on a path in the backyard to the rarely used picnic table. Since I’d neglected to consider ahead of time that they were solar and therefore needed to charge, the paws looked like scattered little bubbles due to running off their weak battery backup.

Hey, I’d tried, and Ryan was still nowhere in sight.

So, I took my cold food outside and also brought along a couple of old Coleman lanterns I still had from my camping days. Within a few minutes, I was wishing I’d worn Citronella cologne thanks to the swarm of mosquitoes, but good enough.

Cold Moons Over My Hammy wasn’t really that bad. Who knew?

I’d eaten my sandwich and moved on to hers—you snooze, you lose was an edict applicable to business and life—when a dark figure finally appeared in the doorway, backlit by the kitchen light.

“PMS?”

I didn’t answer. That was not my name.

She tried again. “Yoohoo, PMS?”

I took an exceptionally big bite of her sandwich and chewed it with relish.

She eventually decided to cross the deck and head down the side steps to the backyard. A flash of skin beneath her dress alerted me she’d taken off her shoes. I wondered if she still had on her anklet. I’d forgotten to check when I was fucking her from behind on her painfully small bed.

“Are you even Irish?” she demanded upon seeing me eating at the picnic table.

“Not the question I was expecting.” I patted the bench beside me, but she bypassed my chosen spot for her to sit across from me and frown at all of the s

tyrofoam boxes.

“What is all of this?”

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