My (Mostly) Secret Baby - Penelope Bloom Page 0,26

this. I sat at the top of a high rise building fixing problems caused by people who worked for me that I barely knew.

“I ate at this sushi place last night. They served squid that moved around when they poured sauce on it. You ever heard of that? I could swear I felt it moving in my stomach all night.”

I grimaced. “Is there a reason you’re in my office? I have actual work to do.”

The door opened. It had to nearly be midnight, but Chelsea was still here, apparently. She stomped into my office with a stack of papers in her hand and flopped them down on my desk. “There. Everything you asked for.”

“It took you that long?”

She looked like she was barely containing the urge to reach across the desk and throttle me. Her normally messy hair was wild, even by her standards. She’d clearly reached the point of running her hands through her hair in frustration at some point today and never looked back. Her blouse was half untucked from her skirt, and I was immediately met with the memory of how I’d been the one to ruffle her up five years ago.

Not helpful. Definitely not helpful to think about how I like the way she looks when she’s messy. How it makes me think of sex, and how I can remember the way her skin smelled when I kissed her neck while I was buried in her pussy.

“I have never used excel,” Chelsea said, clearly annoyed. “I had to watch a bunch of tutorial videos. And the only printer I had access to was in the lobby. And it was out of ink, so I had to run across town to find the right kind, but apparently your printer in the lobby is ancient, so I had to go to a second-hand used tech shop. And then—”

“Great,” I said. I slid the stack of papers directly from the corner of my desk and into my trash can. “You can go home now.”

Chelsea’s eye twitched. “Is that a trash can?”

I looked down at the papers, which were now smeared with some yogurt and rubbing elbows with a banana peel. “Yes.”

Chris was biting his fist from the couch, eyes darting between us like I was the opponent in one of Chelsea’s old tennis matches. He looked like he didn’t know whether to wince or laugh. Distantly, I wondered if this would be the final straw for Chelsea. Was she going to quit right here? Right now? And why did that idea make me feel a spike of regret?

She turned and walked out of the office without another word.

“Why’d you throw away her papers?” Chris asked.

“Why don’t you focus on what you can control. Like this situation with your coach. Has it improved?”

“What, the whole thing where he said he wouldn’t re-sign me?”

“Yeah,” I said dryly. “That.”

“I did think of an idea, but it’s probably going to sound stupid.”

“Color me shocked.”

12

Chelsea

It was raining, and not the polite kind of rain that makes pretty girls giggle and flip their skirts as they shuffle across the intersection. It was the ugly kind of rain reserved for breakup scenes in romance movies. I’d just watched Damon casually slide hours and hours of my work into his trash can, confirming that he’d only given me the task to screw with me in the first place.

And now it was past midnight. And it was raining.

It meant my grand plans to walk home had been foiled in two ways. The first foil came when my stupidly grumpy and stupidly sexy boss decided to give me a task. Worse, he’d given me a task that clearly wasn’t meant to be completed. He had expected me to get frustrated with the enormity and seeming meaninglessness of it. He’d thought I was going to fail, and he’d have his little victory.

And being the eternal dumbass I am, I decided to prove him wrong. Because that’s what I always did, wasn’t it? Even if it meant having to call my brother and beg him to put Luna to bed for me and promise I’d make it up to him. Even if it meant walking home and taking the subway past midnight in New York City alone because I couldn’t afford to waste money on a cab.

Foil number two was the downpour that was hitting the streets so hard it was coming back up in a frothy white mist. Cars slicked by, blasting little yellow cones of light through the rain