The King - S.R. Jones Page 0,24

the elephant in the room. I half thought he’d ignore it, pretend never to have seen me before.

“I’m sorry.” The words are out before I can stop them.

Shit, the guy is probably about to sack me. I look at him and swallow hard as his stormy blue-gray gaze meets mine. His lashes are long and curled. Softness in a hard face is how I’ve always thought of them. I want to touch his jaw, to see if it feels as sharp as it looks. I want to climb onto his lap and have him hold me and tell me it will all be okay.

He’s so big, and it gives the illusion of him being a safe harbor in a storm. He looks like somewhere I can moor up for the night until the dawn.

It’s a lie—he is the stormy sea. And if I let him, he’ll smash me to pieces on his jagged rocks.

He's not protection; he's danger in a suit and pretty tie.

I lower my gaze and hate myself for submitting, but it's as natural as breathing around him.

Needing to get this out and make my apology, I sigh and pull myself together.

“I truly am sorry. I never should have said what I did about your son … stepson. It wasn’t true anyway. I mean, not that he’s good in bed, or bad in bed. I don’t know. I didn’t sleep with him.” I finally close my mouth and want to cut my tongue out and feed it to the rats. Why am I so stupid?

“I know you didn’t sleep with him, Cassie,” he says, surprising me. He smiles, and it’s the distant one he gave the whole room earlier.

I prefer his arrogant smirk. The smirk is real. This is practiced. His I’m a nice guy, really smile, when deep down he’s anything but.

“Well, it wasn’t professional, and I’m sorry.”

He cocks one dark blade of a brow. “Why would you have been professional? You didn’t know I had bought the firm where you work. I was the guy from the coffee shop and your lift home to avoid the walk of shame, right?” The way he says right holds a challenge, but one I don’t understand.

“So we can pretend it never happened?” I ask. Hopeful on the one hand we can, wishing on the other he’ll say no, we can’t forget it because he’s going to admit to the simmering attraction.

One I’m beginning to believe he feels too. There were moments when I worked in the coffee shop I would think he flirted or I had caught him looking at me, when I convince myself he liked me, but I always talked myself out of it. Now, though, something about the way he looks at me tells me he does, and maybe doesn’t want to. It’s as if he half wants to never see me again, and half wants to devour me. Like he can’t make his mind up.

My mind is already made up. I’m already in too deep with my full-on schoolgirl crush.

“Yeah, I’ll pretend I never saw you dressed up as a jailbait stripper, and you pretend you’ve never seen me before today. We can act completely normal.” He laughs.

I’m side-tracked by his words about my outfit. That again! It was't that bad! What is his issue?

“You know, my clothes the other night were pretty much normal attire for clubbing, right? Nothing overtly trashy about them.”

The smirk is back. “Maybe I need to go clubbing if those places are full of girls who look like you.”

“Oh, they’re full of much hotter girls than me,” I say. I’m one hundred percent not fishing, simply being truthful.

“I doubt that.” He seems to snap out of whatever he’s pondering and clears his throat. “Anyway. We should discuss the company. I have a few questions to ask, and if there’s anything you don’t want to answer, feel free to say; this is completely off the record. I don’t want to hear about individuals or anything of such a nature. Simply the things you feel work well and those you don’t.”

I nod, pushing away all lewd thoughts of clambering into his lap and letting his big hands push my skirt up, instead forcing my professional brain to take over.

We talk for about twenty minutes, and then Konstantin nods and shuffles his papers. He’s made the odd note in a slanted neat hand, and he closes his organizer. I stare at it. It’s got Montblanc on the front in a graffiti font, and