Every night, I relived the lap dance, but I still didn’t touch myself. Nothing but Ally was going to cut it. Not after she undulated and ground her way up my dick like it was her personal sex toy.
I was ruined and found a certain relief in accepting it.
But it was the silence, her complete withdrawal from me, that started to put the cracks in my facade. By the third week, I was a fucking wreck. I couldn’t work with this kind of tension. I needed to develop a drinking problem stat.
The only thing that kept me hanging on was the fact that the dark circles beneath those honey-colored eyes were fading. The hollows in those cheeks weren’t as noticeable either. Ally still packed her lunches, but they passed for actual food now. However, there was a new mystery to be solved. She was showing up to work with odd bruises and bandages.
What was she doing in her time off? My brain obsessively turned the problem over and over. Was she a submissive? Was she taking care of a large, clumsy dog? Had she taken up totem carving as a new hobby?
I wasted hours of my day thinking up questions that I was never going to get to ask her. I made up excuses to linger near her desk. Every night, I watched her leave without a word and wished she were going home with me. I didn’t know what was worse, seeing her all day every day and not speaking to her or watching her leave and not knowing what she was doing.
I had no idea how I was going to get through the event tonight.
Christian James, the designer who dared flirt with Ally, was launching his new line and we, as in a very large part of the Label team, were invited to the show and afterparty.
I’d rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon than watch Ally, dressed to the nines, parade around a party. But I also wasn’t going to let her go by herself. Not with a playboy designer toasting himself with champagne and flashing ridiculous dimples at her.
Speak of the devil. The woman who haunted my every waking moment hovered in the doorway.
“Yes?” I snapped.
My temper didn’t seem to have the right effect on her. It only emboldened her.
She strode into the office on new gray suede stilettos that peeked out from under the wide cuffs of her red pants. I was grateful that she was facing me, so I didn’t have to pretend not to admire her ass.
“These are from Dalessandra,” she said, dropping a stack of proofs on my desk.
They looked as though they’d been massacred by a very sharp red pen. There was a note in the margin of the first page.
See me.
I’d been summoned.
Any progress I’d been making before moving Ally up here had vanished because I was too busy trying not to lust after my assistant to focus on the job at hand.
I swore quietly.
“Problem?” Ally asked.
She hadn’t bolted for the door yet. I assumed she was hoping for a front-row seat to my meltdown, and I was happy to oblige.
“Problem as in singular? No, Maleficent. I have several. Including the fact that I can’t stop thinking about my Frosty the Snowass PA or seem to do my job anywhere near the standard my asshole father set.”
She stared at me for a long, heated moment, then rolled her eyes. “Ugh. Stay there.”
Ally left the room and fuck it, I stared at her ass.
She stomped back in, holding a folder and scowling. “I’m pissed off that you’re making me do this, by the way.”
“Do what?” I was so pathetically happy that she was speaking to me in multisyllabic words I would have let her slap me across the face with the folder.
“This is an inside spread on incredibly hideous winter coats from two years ago. Your father signed off on it.”
I glanced at the layout. They looked like sleeping bags in beiges and grays. Models slumping oddly inside them on a dingy gray background.
“Here’s one of yours,” she said, pulling the next layout from the folder. Similar to the first, this was winter boots. The models were in the studio on a set built out of square, wooden platforms. It was one of the first layouts I’d spearheaded after taking my father’s position.
“What’s your point?”
“Don’t play dumb. You’re not pretty enough for that,” she shot back. “You can tell that yours is better.”
“I had Linus and Shayla in my ear,”