Five minutes later, Thatch was walking out of the en suite bathroom in his office and lifting Mila up to carry her piggyback style. He looked outrageous with a Niall is my boyfriend T-shirt stretched tight across his huge chest and a One Direction baseball cap worn backward on his head.
“How do I look, Mila?” he asked.
“So cool!” Mila said, resting her chin on his shoulder.
His eyes met mine and he grinned. “Next time, Aunt Cassie and I are going to switch. I like Liam more than Niall.”
“No way,” I disagreed, running a hand across the words on the front of my shirt. “You’ll have to fight me for this dreamboat.”
“I have no issues with wrestling you, Crazy.” He winked.
“Can we go?” Mila asked impatiently. “I’m hungry.”
Thatch grabbed his new wallet, keys, and phone and slid them into his pockets and managed it all with Mila still hanging from his back. “Let’s hit it,” he said and grabbed my hand, leading us out of his office and toward the elevator.
As we rode the cart down to ground level, I couldn’t stop myself from smiling as I looked at Thatch, decked out in One Direction fan gear, with Mila on his back. No man in his right mind would subject himself to this willingly.
But Thatch wasn’t a normal kind of guy.
He was different.
And I really liked his kind of different.
“Call on line one from Mr. Sanchez,” Madeline buzzed in as I closed the first-quarter financial statement for Hughes International. They were a relatively new client, so I’d been scouring the details of their money management and hiring expenses and comparing it to their investment portfolio in an attempt to map out a new system of checks and balances. They’d had a plan in place, but they obviously hadn’t been making optimal financial decisions for a while. In fact, the best one they’d made was paying me to get them back on track.
“Thanks, Mad,” I responded after saving my spreadsheet. I kept backups for backups, but I wasn’t particularly keen on having even a chance of losing weeks’ worth of work.
“Hey, Carl,” I greeted one of my longtime clients as I clicked on to the line. “What can I do for you?”
“In a hurry to get me off the phone, Thatch?” he greeted, his voice amused.
“No way. Just a man with many tasks and know you’re the same. I also have a feeling you’re calling to invite me on an all-expenses-paid vacation, and the sooner I get off the phone with you, the sooner I can get a tan in the Southern California sun.”
He laughed and I smiled and rubbed at the edge of my desk. He started talking about a new plant in Encino and all of the questions they had about what that kind of long-term investment would do to their long-term financial goals, so I picked up a pen and doodled on the edge of my calendar as he ran through the particulars.
Squiggles turned into a sun, and before I knew it, a stick woman with a fantastic rack appeared with a bouquet of roses next to her. I scribbled it out and dropped the pen before I ended up dropping Carl’s financially motivated ball.
“I know it’s short notice, but I’ve got the projections team creating a mock plan, and this is the only date our contractor can walk the property for the next six months.”
“When did you say you needed me there again?” I asked, knowing I hadn’t been paying enough attention to hear it the first time.
“Tomorrow. I went ahead and put a hold on a ticket for you out of JFK at noon, but I can have Ashley change it if that doesn’t work for you. We walk the plant on Thursday morning.”
I glanced back at my scratched out doodle and the clock on the wall. Just about twenty-four hours away. The trip actually sounded like a nice reprieve from my uncharacteristically empty apartment.
I’d lived there alone for nearly seven years, and now, two days without Cassie while she was on a shoot in Las Vegas, and the place seemed hollow. We’d transitioned into a different place in our relationship sometime during the last week, coexisting in the same apartment so naturally, it was almost scary.
Our mornings always started with a cup of coffee together, after an initial superficial battle over having woken her up, and our nights ended with Cass cuddled inside my arms whether we were watching TV or catching our breath after orgasms—or both. We filled the time in between with frequent texts and phone calls and making plans for dinner or something to do for the evening.
Cass had even taken it upon herself to pick up my dry cleaning on Monday afternoons, and I’d found myself in the checkout line at the grocery store with a cart full of random, girly bullshit that she’d added to our list more than once.
Sure, we still pushed at each other with pranks and surprises, but I was really fucking enjoying it. It made things interesting, and I couldn’t seem to get enough.
We’d even started a little joint prank of our own, texting Kline from her number with the same kind of bullshit subscription messages she’d sent me what seemed like a lifetime ago. She was seriously gifted at coming up with different shit to say, and when I found out over dinner one night that Kline didn’t know her new number yet, the opportunity to mess with him was too good to pass up.
“I’ll be there. I’ll expect donuts and coffee on Thursday morning, though. No industrial tour is acceptable without them.”
He laughed openly. “You drive a hard bargain, but it’s done. I’ll make sure there are donuts and coffee waiting.”
“Fantastic.”
If anything could pull me out of my funk, it’d be sweet treats and a run under the California sun to burn them off.
As soon as my desk phone landed in the cradle, I picked up my cell and unlocked the screen.
Me: How’s Las Vegas?
Cassie: Hotter than a ball sac.
Me: Is that your chosen analogy because the actual temperature of a ball sac is fresh in your mind?
Cassie: Huh?
Me: Have you been fondling anyone’s balls?
Cassie: Fuck no. Do you have any idea how quickly I’d have to make contact after showering to avoid ball sweat? It’s pretty much impossible, and I’m not really into that kind of thing like Georgie.
Me: Wait…what about Georgia being into ball sweat?
Cassie: Nevermind. It was a whole thing during the Kleorgie breakup debacle. I think you had to be there.
My thumb hovered over the little phone icon when a banner for another message crossed the top of my screen. I tapped the icon to open my messages again instead.
Cassie: I gotta go. My entourage is calling. Say hi to your boner for me.
Me: He says hi back. And he misses your tits.
I miss you. I sighed and took a deep breath as I stared at my phone for an embarrassingly long amount of time before accepting there wouldn’t be any more messages. She was busy working, the very thing I should have been doing, but my concentration was pretty much shot.
There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I’d be able to get my head back into third-quarter analytics and projections based off my suggested budget cuts and advertisement allocation for Hughes International.
I considered calling Kline, but I knew he’d actually be working.
I dialed Wes instead. He answered on the third ring.
“What’s up?”
I spun in my chair to face the window. “Just seeing what you’re up to, Whitney.”
“On the West Coast again.”
“Ah. Back for another round. Where are you this time? I’m headed toward that end of the country tomorrow.”
“Seahawk territory. I’ve got a couple of meetings with guys coming to the end of their contract.”
“A Tuesday afternoon and everyone is actually working? I don’t understand.”
“It’s that whole being an adult thing. I can see why you wouldn’t be familiar with it.”
“Ha-ha,” I mocked.
“Why aren’t you working?”
“My eyes were starting to cross,” I lied.
“Ah. Well, sorry I can’t spend hours on the phone giving you a cuddle.”
“I’m flipping you off right now, in case you were wondering.”
“We don’t have time for that either. Go get something to eat. Preferably at my restaurant.”
“Discount?” I asked even though I knew his answer.
“Fuck no.”
“You know, it’s okay to admit you’re in love with me. It won’t make you less of a man.”
“Bye, Thatch.”
I laughed as I pulled the phone away from my ear. That had actually made me feel better. Fuck, I have weird comforts.
I looked down at my phone once more before deciding to be done for the day. I had work, but I didn’t have meetings, so I could pretend I had nothing.
Shutting down both of my monitors, I grabbed my suit jacket from the coat hook and filled my pockets with my keys, wallet, and phone.
Madeline looked up as I walked out. “I’m gonna take off for the day. I just got a last-minute meeting with Carl Sanchez, so I’m headed out there tomorrow on a noon flight out of JFK.”
“I’ll book you a car,” she replied, making a note on a convenient stack of Post-it notes.
“Thanks. Feel free to work from home while I’m gone, okay?”
She smiled, and I knew it’d been the right move to offer. She worked really fucking hard for me no matter where I was or what time I called. I had other people who worked for me in a sense, but she was the only other one I kept in the office, and she did a pretty bang-up job of managing my entire life.