Dirty Addiction (Dirty 2)

“Did you forget why you came in here?” I ask, glaring at her for interrupting me and wasting my valuable time. I make far too much money for this company to waste a single second of it not on point.

She smiles, clearly not getting the message I’m sending. “I’m Angela,” she says, walking toward me with her hand extended to me.

I look down at her hand, not bothering to shake it.

“What are you doing in my office, Angela?”

She tucks her hand back down to her side as she looks around for a chair to sit in. She won’t find one. I don’t keep chairs in my office. It invites people to stay and talk. I don’t want to talk to people. If we are talking, that means we aren’t working hard enough. And, if someone has something to say that is actually useful enough to listen to for longer than five to ten minutes, then that is what meeting rooms are for. Not my office.

“Um…Noah sent me in to meet you.”

I rub my neck in annoyance. “And why did Noah want you to meet me?”

She frowns. “Because he said you would like to meet me. I’m his new assistant, and he said that we would be working closely together, so I should introduce myself.”

I look at her. Really look at her. She’s fresh out of college; that much

is obvious. This is probably her first job. She doesn’t have a clue what she signed up for when she started working for my company. I give her a month, tops, before she decides I’m too much of an ass to bother working for. It takes tough people to work for me. You have to be able to take getting yelled at and not back down. You have to be willing to fight for what you believe in. She looks like, if I yelled at her, she’d run out of here, crying. Might as well get it over with. Rip off the Band-Aid, as some would say.

“Angela, you seem like a nice girl, but you must not have listened very carefully at orientation if you think that you are ever allowed to talk to me. You are Noah’s assistant, not mine. If you have something that you need to tell me, you tell my assistant, Casey. You don’t waste my time, trying to talk to me. You don’t call me. You don’t email me. You don’t knock on my door. And you sure as hell don’t come into my office for no other reason than to say hello. Got it?”

She bites her juicy red lip, and my mind immediately flashes back to the last woman I saw bite her lip like that.

Skye.

But, even when Skye wasn’t wearing red lipstick, like this girl, her lip looked a million times more inviting than this woman’s.

“Why haven’t you left yet?” I half-yell, half-ask.

She releases her lip. “Sorry, Noah told me you’d most likely yell at me but to stay anyway, that it was good for you. That you would yell at me, but then you’d be nice. That you just needed to vent because you’d had a couple of bad weeks. He said to just wade through your storm of emotions, and then things would be a lot better. That you just needed someone to yell at who could take it, so then you could be nice.”

I sigh. I’ll deal with Noah later. “Please tell Noah to stop messing with me. It’s not helpful. And you would do a lot better at this company if you stopped listening to everything that Noah told you to do.”

She smiles, tucking her blonde hair behind her ear. “He said you would say that.”

I run my hand through my thick hair, annoyed and frustrated. Noah’s wrong if he thinks this is going to get my frustrations out. This is doing the opposite.

She puts her hand on mine. “The company is running well. Just try to relax. I’ll see you soon, Brody.” She removes her hand, turns, and walks out.

I blink rapidly, trying to figure out what the fuck just happened when another knock rattles against my door, but this time, the person doesn’t wait for me to answer. Noah just strides in.

“Hey, boss,” he says in his usual chipper self.

“What, Noah?” I want to yell at him for Angela, but that would mean more of my time was wasted.

He grins, folding his arms across his chest while he sits on the edge of my desk. “You fucked up the numbers again,” he says.

I frown. “No, I didn’t. That’s not possible. I checked them three separate times.”

He shakes his head and throws some papers on my desk.

I narrow my eyes as I pick up the stack of papers and stare at the numbers. I do the math in my head and can already tell that I’m way off. Damn it.

I throw them down in frustration, watching as they scatter everywhere.

Noah smirks and folds his arms across his chest like he’s the shit and I’m an idiot. Even though he wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for me busting my balls every damn day for this company.

“Now, will you listen to me?” he asks, but it isn’t meant to be a question.