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Bringing my free hand up that isn’t holding my putter, I look at the black waterproof sports watch on my wrist and make a tsking sound.
“Ten minutes late. So you don’t run a tight ship. Got it.”
“Bite me,” she mutters.
“Wow, and sexual harassment on the first day to boot.”
Birdie lets out a closed-mouth scream, clenching her hands into fists at her sides, and I do my best to keep my face neutral and not laugh out loud.
“Tess! We have that meeting about your schedule, remember?” Birdie shouts across the room.
“No, we don’t. Go away.”
This time, I do laugh out loud when Tess doesn’t cover for Birdie, because she’s still shaking Bodhi’s hand and staring into his eyes like a love-sick teenager.
With a stomp of her foot, Birdie turns and slams her palms against the handle of the glass door, shoving it open and storming outside into the hot sun. I only look at the perfect round globes of her ass wrapped in a pair of tiny black cotton shorts for a few seconds before I adjust my cock, do a few math facts in my head, and follow behind her. You know, because she’s my boss and all, and it’s not appropriate to have dirty thoughts about her at work.
And because if I want Birdie’s forgiveness, I need to repair our friendship first. The foundation of everything I feel for her was built on our friendship. I put some cracks in there that need to be filled before I can even think about telling her I want more. That I’ve always wanted more. And, you know, have a little fun being the new Palmer along the way.
“Hey, boss!” I shout after Birdie as I pull my hat down lower over my eyes to shield the sun as I race after her while she hoofs it toward the cart path. “Will we have daily meetings about my performance or will weekly suffice? Hey, boss! Do I get my own parking space? What about an employee locker? You’re not in charge of making me watch the sexual harassment video, right? Because that would be like making me have dinner with the guy who robbed me. Awkward!”CHAPTER 7Birdie
“Strike while the iron is hot.”“You really should have fled the country when Bradley dumped you. This is just not your week, my friend. I can’t believe you have to work with him. Every day.”
“I don’t even know why I let you in my house after the way you threw me under the bus at work this morning,” I grumble at Tess sitting next to me in the Adirondack chairs on my deck that look out over the pitch-black ocean, hours after the sun has gone down.
I stare out into the endless darkness sprinkled with dots of lights from passing military ships and a few tourists and locals out for late-night boat rides, trying to let the sounds of the waves cresting and crashing onto the beach a few hundred yards away calm me like they usually do. Tonight, it’s not working. I don’t know if it ever will again, knowing Palmer is staring out at the same dark water, listening to the same crashing waves, on the same island, in a cottage not that far down from mine.
“You didn’t let me in. I have a key,” Tess reminds me. “What I don’t know is how you managed to run away from Putz again without giving him a chance to talk to you about anything important. You’ve got skills I wasn’t even aware of. It brings a tear to my eye.”
I don’t bump my fist against hers when she holds it out to me, making her sigh and drop it back down into her lap.
“When he wouldn’t stop following me on the cart path asking ridiculous questions and annoying the piss out of me, I told him to go play eighteen holes, familiarize himself with the course again, and then come find me and we’d talk. Then I packed up my work and my laptop, came home, and finished out my day here, where you found me. Wasn’t that hard.”
I’m not proud of myself that I ran away from him again like a big baby instead of a mature, thirty-year-old woman who could have an adult conversation. Every minute I spend with that man makes me weak, especially with this newfound sarcasm that seems to have been unleashed from him. That’s all I ever wanted for Palmer, for him to be able to breathe and not be so uptight and rigid all the time and to let his personality shine. It would sneak out every once in a while over the years, usually only after a few alcoholic beverages or too many hours in my presence. Seeing it fly out of his mouth so easily brought the tingling back in full force, and that absolutely could not happen. Not just because it really did look like I would be his boss for the foreseeable future, but because I’ve been down that road before. It doesn’t end well for me.
