dinner time so that he didn’t have time to think about how badly he’d fucked up his life.
Over the past few weeks, he’d found himself even more intrigued with his own personal mystery, trying to figure her out. She was quiet, kept to herself, always greeted him with a smile that looked less forced these days, was severely uncoordinated, hardworking, never complained, bitched, or pissed him off, never left the house unless he needed something, and she was too fucking kind for her own good. He still wasn’t sure why that bothered him, but it did.
When he’d first asked her to help with the files, he’d expected her to do it with another one of those determined smiles that he really fucking hated, but instead, she’d devoured everything he’d shoved at her and seemed to be enjoying every single minute of it. It didn’t matter how much work he gave her, she’d do whatever he asked and get it back to him with a greedy look in her eye, desperate for more. Every morning he found her waiting for him in his gym, sitting on the floor, iPad in hand, and looking so damn eager that he-
“Are you sleeping with her?”
“Not all of us fuck the help,” Hunter drawled, shifting his attention to the thick envelope that Ryan was toying with.
“Really? Because I find that it’s a great way to improve morale,” Ryan said, as Hunter gave up waiting for the asshole to fuck him over and grabbed the envelope.
He tore the envelope open and felt his brows arch to his hairline as he took in the face sheet written up by his men, letting him know that there was so much more to his assistant than he thought.
*-*-*-*
Maybe she should take this as a sign that it was time to buy a new car, Kylie thought even as she gave up hope that her car would start on its own. With a heavy sigh and a prayer that this wasn’t as bad as the last time, she reluctantly popped the hood and reached for her phone only to have it fall between the front seats. Resigning herself to searching for it later, she climbed out and made her way to the front of the car with absolutely no idea what she was doing. But that was fine, more than fine, Kylie decided since she also didn’t seem to have any idea what she was doing with her life either.
“What the hell am I going to do?” Kylie asked, sighing heavily as she reached under the hood and released the latch.
She should buy a new car, she told herself, but she’d been hoping to put it off for as long as humanly possible since that meant that she was either going to have to empty her bank account or get a loan, something that she really didn’t want to do. It had taken her seven years to fix the damage that her parents did to her credit and four years to pay off the credit card debt that her ex left her with, and she wasn’t exactly in a hurry to start the process all over again. But she might not have a choice, she realized, as she stared down at the engine that was most likely on its last leg.
It took her a minute to find the rust-colored stick, another minute to get it to lodge in the slot correctly, and ten minutes before she finally accepted the fact that she had absolutely no idea what she was looking for. Maybe she needed to top off liquids, she hoped, as she checked the windshield wiper fluid, the coolant, and finally the oil only to decide that she probably shouldn’t have skipped her last oil change.
“Maybe it’s the battery?” Kylie said, worrying her bottom lip as she looked from the engine that she had absolutely no idea how to fix to the large house behind her as she debated going back inside and telling Hunter, the large man who had made it perfectly clear how he felt about excuses, that she couldn’t do her job. She needed to get to the post office before it closed, call Mr. O’Mallery’s latest court-appointed therapist and reschedule the appointment that he’d canceled, again, and run to the store, but she might have to put everything off until tomorrow.
Knowing that wasn’t really an option, she shifted her attention back to the battery, trying to remember if the guy that sold her this car had