Ego Maniac - Page 36

She smiled. “My office.”

“This tastes like turpentine.” Emerie’s entire face twisted.

I sipped. “It’s twenty-five-year-old Glenmorangie. That’s six-hundred-dollar-a-bottle paint thinner you’re drinking there.”

“For that price, they could have added some flavor.”

I chuckled. I sat in a guest chair, and Emerie was behind her desk. She must have unpacked the rest of her box because there were some new personal items on display. I lifted the glass coaster-like base that had gone with the award douchebag Dawson broke.

“You’re gonna need a new weapon.”

“Don’t think I need one with you around to threaten my clients.”

“He deserved it. I should have punched him in the face like he likes to do to his wife.”

“You should have. That guy was a real asshole. A fuckin asshole.”

She was cute working her New York accent, although it still sounded like Oklahoma doing New York.

There were two new frames on her desk, and I reached for one of them. It was a photo of an older couple.

“Help yourself,” she said with sarcasm and a smile.

I looked at her face, then the couple, then back at her. “These your parents?”

“Yep.”

“Who do you look like?”

“My mother, I’m told.”

I studied her mother’s face. They looked nothing alike. “I don’t see it.”

She reached over and slipped the photo from my hands. “I’m adopted. I look like my biological mother.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s fine. It’s not something I’m secretive about.”

I leaned back in my chair, watching her look at the photo. There was reverence on her face when she spoke again. “I may not look like my mom, but we’re a lot alike.”

“Oh yeah? So she’s a pain in the ass, too?”

She pretended to be offended. “I’m not a pain the ass.”

“I’ve known you barely a week. Day one you were stealing office space and tried to kick my ass when I caught you. A few days later you started a fight because I made an innocent comment about some bad advice you were feeding a client, and today, I almost got into a fist fight because of you.”

“My advice wasn’t bad.” She sighed. “But I guess the rest is true. I have been a pain in the ass, haven’t I?”

I finished my drink and poured two fingers more into the tumbler, then topped off Emerie’s glass. “You’re in luck. I like pains in the asses.”

We talked for a while longer. Emerie told me about her parents’ hardware store back in Oklahoma and was in the middle of some story about selling supplies to a guy who was arrested for locking his wife in an underground bunker for two weeks when my office phone rang. I went to grab it, but she reached for it first.

“Mr. Jagger’s office. How may I assist you?” She answered in a sexy, flirty voice.

The two drinks had loosened her up, made her playful. I liked it.

“May I ask who’s calling?” She picked up a ballpoint pen and paused to listen, mindlessly rubbing the top along her bottom lip.

Tags: Vi Keeland Romance
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