Sue stopped in the middle of the room, her body tilted toward my glass desk, my executive leather chair, and the floor-to-ceiling painting of an antique world map behind me.
Generic.
Expensive.
Rich.
Everything I sold the world about myself.
This office was a shell, just like my looks.
This office didn’t represent me. Just. Like. My. Looks.
“Okay…” she trailed off before huffing, moving her special fancy pen over her special fancy iPad. No common shit for this chick. “I have reservations for you at The Breakfast Club for noon with Cynthia Hollyfield. Don’t forget your Skype meeting with Mr. Rexroth, Mr. Spencer, and Mr. Followhill at two. Your dry cleaning should be picked up later on today and will be waiting at your place.” She was firing away all these things while I was flipping through the pages of a report for a client I was supposed to meet when her head snapped up.
“Then there’s your email about booking an extra ticket to Todos Santos for Rose LeBlanc? Can you confirm she’ll be flying first-class with you tomorrow morning?” Sue arched a plucked eyebrow. The real question, of course, was are you fucking her? and the honest answer to that question—which I replied to with two, slow blinks, was it’s none of your fucking business.
“Confirmed,” I said, staring at a paragraph of another merger deal in the works without really reading it.
The AC hummed between us. Forty-six floors down, a bunch of taxi drivers honked their horns. Polite keyboards purred from different cubicles on the floor. Her eyes were on mine, and it was a lost battle for our little Sue. She couldn’t read me in them. Only I knew their language. And I chose not to share me with the rest of the world.
“Right,” she shifted in place. Sue tucked her iPad under her armpit, turned around, and headed for the door. I watched her tiny ass moving to the rhythm of her pointy Louboutins, knowing it was not the end. Sue knew that Rosie was Emilia LeBlanc’s baby sister, but never had the pleasure of meeting my pixie-sized neighbor. However, Sue was privy to the fact that I wasn’t the type to babysit anyone’s sibling, unless there was something in it for me. And Miss LeBlanc was definitely capable of dragging her own ass to the airport, which left her with one, correct conclusion: I wanted into Rosie LeBlanc. In more ways than I’d ever wanted into Sue Pearson.
And it wouldn’t be the first time I crashed someone else’s special day for pussy, either.
I’d been known for taking my dates to inappropriate places. Sue knew that I dragged a one-night stand to the hospital when I went to Chicago to congratulate my best friend, Trent, when he welcomed his daughter, Luna. When Jaime Followhill—another good friend—married his wife and my ex-lit teacher, Melody Greene, I came to his wedding with two randoms I picked up on the way from a bar. My dad’s retirement party, before he un-retired himself and remarried his work? – showed up with one of his interns, no less. So it was really no surprise that I was traveling with a woman, but to Sue, it was a surprise because she knew I’d be there for more than a week. And spending nine days with the same woman? That was definitely a first.
She didn’t know Rosie and I weren’t going to stay under the same roof.
Didn’t know that Rosie hated my guts, and for a good reason. Every time Baby LeBlanc saw my face, she saw empty fun; a stoner who got to where he was because his daddy was a famous lawyer, and his last name was Cole, and the Coles donated enough money to Harvard to feed the better half of Africa, so my future was paved for me before I even knew how to spell the word entitled.
Sue didn’t know Rosie LeBlanc was the only woman in my life who wouldn’t give me the time of day, and she certainly didn’t know that ironically, Rosie LeBlanc was the only woman whose time I wanted.
And Sue didn’t need to know any of those things, because like every other part of my personal life, they were mine to keep.
Cue Sue turning around. Staring at me from under what I suspect were fake eyelashes. Sucking her cheeks in.
Then she did the unbelievable and inhaled without finishing the act with another one of her huffs.
“Mr. Cole, will you need anything else from me today? I’m not feeling very well.”
“That would be all,” I said. “Take the rest of the day off. Go rest. You deserve it.”
She nodded.
I nodded.
Yeah, I wasn’t a bad person, letting my PA ditch me so she could teach me some useless lesson.
I fired my MacBook right back up and finished my transaction, sending twenty thousand dollars to her.