Shaking my head, I try to get back to my own work. Not easy.
Soon, I’m throwing open my office door.
She’s at Lucy’s desk where she belongs, her face buried in some emails.
“Nevermore?” I ask once I’m standing over her.
“Not my name.”
“Poe? Dakota?”
“Yes?” She blinks up at me like I should just start using her first name.
It scares me where that could lead.
“I need a new batch of prerelease creative for social media approved by three p.m. Let’s change it up this time. Maybe we’ll put the happy couple in a bedroom and show the wedding dress on the floor. What do you think?” I ask, never taking my eyes off her. It’s a test.
She glares at me. Her eye drops to a fruit basket on Lucy’s desk.
Without a single word, the hellcat picks up an apple and hurls it at me.
I’m smiling as I retreat, shutting the door to keep from being pummeled with an orange next. I hear muted laughter around the office as I make it to safety.
Then a resounding thud!
Something splats against my door.
Frowning, I open the door and find a stream of sticky plum juice running down my door to a couple destroyed fruit corpses on the floor.
“You’re keeping the janitorial staff extra busy,” I say, shaking my head. “Was that necessary?”
“Yes, and legal,” she grinds out. “Last I checked, there’s no HR policy against food fights.”
She picks up her desk phone, still daggering me with green-eyed mischief.
“Now what are you doing?”
“Calling for cleanup like you asked.”
“But was it necessary?”
She narrows her eyes. “Very. Also, I’m not out of fruit.”
Little damned minx.
Damn if I’m not thrilled to see her back in fighting shape, though.
With an exaggerated sigh, I shut my door and head for my desk. She’s fast with good aim and I’m not risking a banana barrage to the head.
Honestly, I don’t care how childish it looks to anyone else.
The way I touched her hand lingers in my mind.
If only I’d walked my fingers higher.
If only I’d caressed her face, traced my thumb over her lips.
My cock throbs as I lean back in my seat, caught in a vision of those pert, strawberry lips sucking my thumb.
Even now, after the crap that went down, I’d still like to stroke that delicate skin where her neckline keeps falling.
I’d like to satisfy this weird fuck-fantasy we both share and run my hands over her tits, up her dress.
Fuck, what I wouldn’t give to grab her panties—black lace or dotted with ravens, no doubt—and tear them off her so I can feel what she really thinks of me.
Shit.
How the hell am I supposed to keep my head on straight now that I know she wants me?
It has to be the first poem anyone’s ever written about me, and that wasn’t some soapy love and loss piece.
That was an ‘I want to fuck you because you excite me’ cry from the heart.
Or maybe that’s my own projection talking.
Still, there’s no denying one thing.
Miss Poe excites me in a way no one else has in ages, even if I’m interchangeable to her like she said in the poem.
They’re all the same.
Either way, it’s going to be damnably hard not to try stealing her away, alone, now that I know she wants me to feel her teeth in a different way than I ever imagined.
And isn’t that the problem?
Even if I didn’t have an unbearably large, complicated machine to manage, I know too well that messing with romance only fucks with your head.
Wyatt will never be the same man after the way his ex-wife abandoned him.
I’m sure Dakota isn’t a similar self-centered witch, but my parents were married for over thirty years. They adored each other. Their love for me sprang from their own.
When they weren’t working, everything they did was for our family, and it was beautiful and perfect until the day my father died.
He left a bottomless abyss—complete with pendulum since I can’t get Miss Poe off my mind—in my mother’s soul.
Then there was her.
Regina Swann.
Once as graceful and bright and kind as her name might suggest. I was in over my fucking head.
I believed in an us that never existed, totally unable to imagine she’d kiss me in the sweetest way when I came home. Right after having another man’s cock in her mouth two hours earlier.
She was a walking demolition.
The woman, the siren, the nightmare who taught me beyond any doubt that I’m not cut out for love. The murderer of hearts who made me a rabid monster.
I’m a razor-sharp businessman above all else. Besides assessing marketing that plays on the right emotions, I’m not in the business of love.
My one true mistress is sweat. Equity. Work.
I don’t dream of anything besides chiseling my mark on this world in everlasting stone.
I don’t get mixed up in relationships anymore. Why bother when they’re glaringly predictable?