Office Pet

Chapter One

Reese

I stopped in front of a garish canvas called Apocalyptic Sunrise and tilted my head to the side. Perhaps I wasn’t cultured enough to understand the concept, but the oil painting looked like something a five-year-old on a sugar high would paint.

“You could at least smile, Reese.” Simon lowered his head until his lips were a whisper away from my left cheek. A severe case of halitosis billowed from his mouth. My stomach roiled and the leftover pizza I’d wolfed down before I met him for our date threatened to make an exorcist-style reappearance.

I stepped away from him and feigned interest in the splashes of orange and yellow smeared across the canvas.

So much for my seven years of bad luck coming to an end. I’d had nothing but shitty dates since the day I’d broken my handheld mirror.

Almost seven years ago, on the day I’d graduated from college, I’d discovered my then boyfriend was the campus Lothario. When he came groveling and begging for my forgiveness, I picked up my mirror and hurled it at his head. He ducked. The mirror slammed against my dorm room door and shattered.

To reverse my bad luck, a Wiccan website suggested grinding the broken mirror shards to dust and scattering them in the wind. That bright idea had left me with a scratched cornea and bits of ground up glass in my hair for weeks.

Since then, I’d had nothing but bad luck in relationships, and was superstitious about everything. I avoided walking under ladders, I knocked on wood, I never opened an umbrella inside, and I always threw a pinch of salt behind my shoulder when I cooked. And, if I could have, I would have hidden beneath the covers every Friday the 13th until it became Saturday the 14th, but since I had bills to pay, I couldn’t do that.

I’d tried every old wives’ tale Google had shown me in an attempt to change my luck with men, but nothing had worked.

Cleansing my chakras hadn’t worked, neither had visualizations, love spells, crystals, or burning sage and incense.

Over the past few years, I’d given up on men and had focused on building my career instead of my personal life. Accounting compliance wasn’t glamorous, but being an OCD freak, I enjoyed designing and implementing programs, policies, and procedures.

I also loved, loved, loved internal investigations and uncovering potential breaches. Most people thought I was more than a little weird about work. I didn’t disagree. Numbers didn’t require luck. They required logic and were something I could control.

I’d met Simon Harper through work. A month ago, McKenzie Technologies had gobbled up Hillock Accounting Services, the small investment firm I’d been with since graduating college. I’d worked my way up from lowly accounting clerk to compliance manager.

I was better than good at my job and being part of a massive company like McKenzie Technologies was a challenge I’d grasped with both hands, but McKenzie Technologies already had several compliance managers both senior and junior with more waiting in the wings. Until I proved myself, I was stuck maintaining a database on state and federal statutes and regulations for investors.

“Most women would be thrilled to be on a date with someone who earns as much money as I do,” Simon bragged.

Sidling up to me, he slid an octopus arm around my waist. If he told me one more time how much money he had in the bank, I’d rip Apocalyptic Sunrise off the wall and slam it over his fucking head. He was trying way too hard to impress me. I was less than impressed, but men like Simon were too self-obsessed and arrogant to notice any disinterest.

“I guess I’m not most women.” I stepped away from him and moved onto the next painting—Dark Days. Again, I didn’t understand what the artist was trying to achieve. This canvas was filled with red and black splodges. Maybe I wasn’t cultured or creative enough to understand abstract art.

“You’ve got that right,” he said with a snigger.

The pizza in my stomach churned at the innuendo lacing his words, and I resisted the temptation to roll my eyes and say most women would have run away by now. But instead of blurting out something bitchy, I glared at him and hoped he’d get the message.

Simon was the chief regulatory compliance officer at McKenzie’s and one of my bosses. Over the past few weeks, every time I’d passed by his office, he would call me in to tell me about his car, his lake house, his watches, or some other materialistic thing that was supposed to get me down on my knees and sucking his cock. There was no denying he was a good-looking guy—if aging frat boys were your thing—and if he wasn’t such a jerk, in the right light, I guessed he could be kind of sexy.