ONE NIGHT STAND WITH MY BOSS

Chapter 2

This was supposed to be an initial attempt at finding out where our companies stood in terms of a potential partnership. The fact that Mayfield Properties would send someone who couldn’t even dress to suit the occasion was laughable. Why would Mayfield want to be represented by someone who clearly lacked any knowledge of what is acceptable when dealing with a potential business partner? Or maybe Mayfield didn’t value our cooperation, and this was his way of telling me to f**k off. Either way I wasn’t pleased, and I had no intention of making a secret out of my displeasure. Mayfield was known to be a real son-of-a-b***h. He was also known to take no crap from anyone. If I wanted to make it in this cutthroat business world dominated by men, I had to mirror his tactics, or give up on a career which was already going nowhere.

“Look, I appreciate your coming, Mr. Townsend, but I’d rather speak with at least a regional vice president. Please tell Mr. Mayfield to call me once he’s ready to reschedule. Good evening to you.” Grabbing my purse and coat from the polished counter, I jumped down from the barstool and headed for the exit when strong fingers curled around my upper arm. I froze in my tracks.

“Don’t forget your umbrella. We wouldn’t want that pretty face to get soaked,” Townsend whispered in my ear, sending another delicious tingle through my body. What was it with this man and whispering? Couldn’t he just talk like normal people? I reached blindly around me and yanked my umbrella out of his hand. Without a look back I marched out of the bar, keeping my head high. Only when I reached the parking lot twenty feet from the bar’s main entrance did I stop and finally let out a long breath.

The night air had cooled down. I shrugged into my coat and hurried to unlock the door to my Chevrolet. It was an old thing, but it had been a graduation gift from my stepdad, so I loved it.

I jammed the car into first gear and pulled out of the parking lot. My gaze brushed over the stranger towering in the bar’s doorway, watching me a moment before I drove past.

Did he follow me out? My heartbeat sped up but I didn’t halt. If anything, I floored the accelerator and the car spluttered forward. The engine lets out a drawn-out protest, but I didn’t care. Whatever Townsend’s business was, I decided he was a creep,and I had no intention of ever seeing him again. I was definitely not the kind of woman who’d ever succumb to a hard body and dimples to die for.

I reached my tiny apartment in Brooklyn Heights in less than an hour and parked the car opposite from the five-story building that had been my home ever since graduating from college two years ago. The street was damp and deserted. The street lamp in front of the building cast a golden glow on the steel door, which led into a narrow hall with a lobby area. Minding the large rain puddles, I fished my keys out of my bag and let myself in, then rode the elevator up to the fifth floor.

My roommate and best friend, Sylvie, wasn’t home. Ever since she landed the investment job of her dreams, she barely ever made it home before midnight. I had been taught to put one hundred and ten percent into everything I did, but Sylvie took working hard to a whole new level. She went so far as to sacrifice her hobbies, friendships, and health by doing unpaid overtime in an attempt to gain recognition for all the extra effort. Any attempts I ever initiated to make her realize just how unhealthy her stress level had become were futile so far, but I wasn’t going to give up.

Dropping the umbrella into a brass holder and my handbag and coat on the old coffee table in the hall, I kicked my shoes off and headed for the kitchen to pour myself a much-earned glass of wine. I was halfway through my second glass when the key turned in the lock and Sylvie’s blonde head popped into my line of vision.

“What a surprise!” I sat up and pointed at my glass. “Want one?”

“You better have a bottle.” She slumped onto the couch next to me and put her long legs up. I scanned from her striped skirt that rode just above her knee up to her face and damp, blonde hair. Something was different. Her mascara was smudged. The skin beneath her blue eyes was swollen and red as though she had been crying, which was impossible. Sylvie wasn’t the crying kind. In all the six years we had been best friends, I never once saw her shed a tear. She never looked anything less than perfect and happy.

I sat up, instantly feeling something was wrong. “What happened?”

“I got the boot.”

“What?”

She took the glass out of my hands and drained it in one big gulp. “They kicked me out. Said something about not needing another intern. Blah blah.” She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

“Oh, crap.” I shook my head in disbelief. “But you worked so hard.”

“I know, right? But you know what? I am okay. C’est la vie. Time to move on.” She jumped up, and a smile spread across her lips. “Let’s get plastered.”

I narrowed my gaze. There was something in the way she avoided looking at me that raised my suspicion. “Wait!” I grabbed her arm and pulled her back down on the sofa. “You’re not telling me everything.”

She rolled her eyes again.

“Spill it,” I said.

She pressed her mouth into a tight line.

“Sylvie,” I prompted.

“Fine. I slept with the boss.”

My jaw dropped. “No.”

She nodded. “I did. His personal assistant, who’s best buddies with his wife, started to suspect. So the bastard got the jitters and decided to get rid of me.”

“Is that even legal?”

Was it?

Sylvie shrugged. “Probably not, but it’s a small world, and I need this reference if I ever want to land another banking job.”

“The bastard,” I mirrored her words. Sylvie was the brightest person I knew. She had graduated in the top of her class, and any firm would have been happy to have her. “You’ll find something else in no time.” I had no doubt about that.

She smirked. “Yeah, only next time remind me not to screw the boss, no matter how hot he is. You’re so lucky you have Sean. At least he’s not married and lying to you about not having slept in the same bed with the wife for the last two years. Talk about cliché.”

My arms wrapped around Sylvie, and she leaned her head against my shoulder the way she always did when a relationship turned sour. They always did, whether we wanted it or not.

“Sean’s not perfect, you know. And I don’t want commitment,” I said.

“At least he’s honest. That’s more than you can say about the majority of guys out there.”

Call me a romantic, but I didn’t agree with Sylvie on that one. Surely not all men were liars or commitment-phobes. I rolled my eyes as I thought of the guy everyone seemed to think was a catch. Sean—the boyfriend who wasn’t ready to commit, and neither was I, for my own reasons. He was good-looking, successful, and the guy I had been hanging onto for almost a year even though I knew it was a dead end relationship that might be over any minute. If you’d call his ‘let’s hook up every now and then’ a relationship, then that was about all we had: a sort of friends-with-benefits thing.

Less of a friend, more of a s*x buddy.

We met when Sylvie left her handbag in a bar on a drunken night out. Sean found it,and when he turned up at our doorstep she should have been the one to thank him for not stealing her money and tossing her ID card in the nearest dumpster. However, Sylvie had been puking in the bathroom for nearly an hour...so Sean met me instead. We hit it off instantly, and I really thought he might be long-term material. As it turned out, even planning a weekend break was too much commitment for him. I couldn’t remember the last time we went on a romantic date. In fact, I couldn’t remember ever planning any sort of event that didn’t involve a drunken night out with our friends.