“Tell him the truth, Kristen,” Mom said coldly. “Or you will force me to handle the situation.”
“What?”
But it was too late—she had already hung up. I stared at my empty kitchen table and realized that I had seriously over boiled my macaroni. It was just as well; I couldn’t eat a thing anyway.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jake
I felt like a teenager again. I’d forgotten the strange and juvenile impulses that came with being a young adolescent and discovering that your body had urges and desires you couldn’t always control.
But it was more than just desire. It was the increased pulse every time she walked past. It was the way I looked up excitedly when she walked into the room. It was the way my mind landed on her every time I had a moment to myself.
The first few days after we’d slept together, I had been scrambling around trying to find someone competent to replace Janet. Kristen had picked up a lot of the slack for me when I worked from home. Thankfully, a few days ago, she had sent me over this list with contact numbers of all the best babysitters and nannies in San Diego. It had been an extensive list with details about every person on it. It had taken me eleven meetings and three second interviews, but I’d finally found someone I was happy with.
She was an older woman named Elaine Bennet, she was fifty-two years old, and she was a primary school teacher for fifteen years before she went back to school to study child psychology. After that, she’d decided she wanted to look after children on a smaller basis. The catch was that she wasn’t a live-in and wouldn’t be on call twenty-four seven. She had made that abundantly clear to me. She was willing to come when I needed her to, but insisted on at least a day’s notice beforehand.
It wasn’t ideal, but I decided that desperate times called for desperate measures. The list Kristen had given me also offered choice. I decided that in times of emergency, when Elaine was too busy to come, I would call my second-best option—Emily was in her twenties, young and too bubbly in my opinion, but enthusiastic and willing to come at the last minute if I happened to need her. I didn’t like the idea of alternating between babysitters, but at the moment, I couldn’t afford to be picky.
With that problem taken care of for the time being, I had gotten back to work, hoping to make a dent in all the work that had piled up over the last week, but unfortunately, that was proving to be difficult.
Especially because Kristen kept walking into the office every hour with files, notes, and paperwork needing my attention. It didn’t matter what she wore; I was instantly attracted to her. Every time she bent over, I would catch a glimpse of her cleavage and the boy in me did cartwheels. Every time she turned away from me, I found myself checking out her ass as she walked away.
I realized how hard up I had been before. The difference was that I hadn’t been made aware of exactly how hard up I was. Now that the sexual being in me had been awakened, I didn’t quite know how to put him back in the box.
Still, I knew I had to control myself. Sexual desire was one thing, but emotional readiness was another thing altogether. I still thought about that moment the morning after we had slept together and the fact that I’d referred to Kristen as Daphne. It told me that I needed to figure out a few things first before I let sex cloud my judgment. Which was exactly why I wanted to get to know Kristen before sleeping with her again.
All this time, she’d been my secretary. I didn’t know anything about her or her personal life, but now she was this new and exciting woman I was dating. And, it was important to me that I find out who she was before I let myself get invested.
Just then, there was a knock at my door.
“Come in,” I called.
Kristen walked in with a thick yellow file that made my head spin. “Sorry to disturb you,” she said. “But this just came in from New Zealand—details of the new contract.”
She was looking lovely today. She was wearing a nice black skirt, a blush pink blouse that brought out the hazel in her eyes, and her auburn hair cascaded down one shoulder. She looked out of place in my office actually, almost as though she belonged on a runway somewhere.
“Geez.”
Kristen smiled at me sympathetically, eyeing the massive file. “The meeting’s set for the end of October.”
“A month away?”
“A little under three weeks,” she corrected.
I sighed. “I actually thought I’d have a little more free time after I closed the deal with the Japanese.”
“It’s a good thing,” she said. “You’re doing well. Everyone says so.”
“Who’s everyone?” I asked with one raised eyebrow.
“The people in this division,” she said. “Apparently, this company was badly mismanaged before you came along.”
“Is that why the board of directors are so happy now?”
“Apparently so,” Kristen smiled.
I glanced at my watch. “It’s lunchtime…”