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Julia’s face was almost comical in its shock. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was hanging open. “What?” she whispered. She leaned over the bar. “Ezra Wright kept you this late?”
Placing my glass in the sink, I turned away from Julia. I didn’t want her to see the blush on my cheeks. Absolutely, nothing had happened between me and Ezra. In fact, he’d been the picture of professionalism.
“He’s got a backlog of cases and no help.” It was the truth, but Julia didn’t believe it. I could tell from her face that she thought there was something more to it than that. “That’s it,” I insisted. I didn’t want to make more of this than there needed to be.
“What’s he like?” Julia spoke with a rapt reverence that I hadn’t expected to hear. She wasn’t normally the type to get impressed with men. “I just read this expose on him, and boy, he sounds like he’d be killer in bed.”
I was glad I hadn’t been drinking anything. “My goodness! He’s my boss.”
Julia’s eyes narrowed on me. “Boss or not, the man is the hottest thing I have ever seen.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I might not be interested in any men, but that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t admit that Ezra was incredible to look at.
“I’m going to bed,” I said. I was done talking or thinking about Ezra Wright. He was my boss, and that was the end of it.
“You’re no fun!” Julia shouted as I closed the door to my room.
Her words made me chuckle. It might not be any fun, but that was okay with me. Being the fun girl, the one who was up for whatever was going to please her man, hadn’t gotten me very far in life.
CHAPTEREIGHT
I closed my eyes as I savored the smoothness of my scotch. It had been two weeks since Annie joined my office, and I’d done everything I could think of to try and worm my way into her good graces. It had been much more difficult than I’d thought it would be, which just made me want it all the more.
But my inability to make inroads with Annie was starting to wear on me. Marcel made it clear that I needed to clean up my image, which meant no more women. Not an easy feat when you were used to using sex as a stress reliever.
Which is why I found myself sitting at one of my favorite bars enjoying a $300 bottle of scotch. Alone. I hadn’t been alone on a Friday night since before puberty.
“Well, well,” a voice spoke out, interrupting my solitude. Its thick Irish accent made my inside clench, and I sighed as I put my glass on the bar counter.
“Sawyer,” I bit out, turning to see my arch nemesis standing beside me. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Sawyer chuckled at the question before he took a seat next to me. I wanted to tell him to fuck off, but I wasn’t interested in causing a scene, which was probably what he wanted.
“It’s a bar, and I’m Irish.” He spoke as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, but I knew otherwise. Sawyer O’Connor was one of the more put together members of his family, but he was still a Hell’s Kitchen boy through and through. I’d rarely run into him outside of work functions.
“You are rarely in this part of the city,” I reminded him. Something told me that Sawyer hadn’t just walked into my favorite bar on accident. He’d sought me out and knowing that he was able to find me so easily made me wary.
“We’ve got a couple of cases that are putting us head-to-head.”
“More than a few,” I told him, sipping on my scotch. The feeling of the liquid warming the back of my throat was less enjoyable with my present company. “Interesting how that happened.”
“Indeed,” Sawyer said. He signaled the bartender and ordered a drink, making it obvious that he planned to stay a while.
I drained the rest of the liquid in my glass before turning to my unwanted accomplice. “What the fuck do you want?” I asked. It had been a long week, and I was already on edge. Sawyer and I had been going after one another since law school. “I’m not in the mood for one of your games tonight.”
A smile broke out on his ruddy face, and I knew that he was enjoying getting under my skin. When we’d started at Harvard, Sawyer had made it his mission to knock me down a peg. He’d thought that I had an inflated sense of self, and I thought he was just generally a piece of shit. Most people agreed with me, which made him even more desperate to knock me off my pedestal.
“There’s a rumor going around that you are planning to run for mayor.”
“Odd,” I told him.
“Very,” Sawyer said, “especially considering that my uncle is planning to throw his name in the ring.”
I’d heard as much from Marcel, but I hadn’t given it a second thought. Patty O’Connor was one of Hell’s Kitchen’s most notorious criminals. There was no way that he would win. His rap sheet was almost as long as the number of cases I’d won over the years.
“As you know, my uncle, his brother, went missing earlier this year,” Sawyer said.
“I don’t keep up on your millions of family members,” I said.
