The Boss (The Boss 1)

"You wear that better than I do," he quipped. "Go on then. I want you at least once more before breakfast."

I giggled and hurried out of the room, sucking in my breath when my toes encountered the cold marble in the foyer. He really needed to get those floor-level heating things all around the entire apartment. I scooped up my bag, then stopped. I smelled coffee.

Huh. That's weird. I thought he'd given his housekeeper the weekend off. Maybe he had one of those coffee machines with a timer on it. That would be amazing. I could take a cup back to bed for him. I set my bag down and sprinted on tip-toes through the living room and dining room.

I was grinning like an idiot at the thought of having my morning coffee with a side of Neil when I pushed through the kitchen door. Then it all fell spectacularly apart. There was a woman seated at the kitchen counter. I gave a startled yelp at the sight of her.

She smiled like a Bond villain and tilted her head to one side, warbling a falsely chipper, "Good morning."

It was Emma. Oh god, it was Neil's daughter.

Chapter Fifteen

“Sophie?” Neil called from somewhere far off in the apartment, alarmed. He must have heard my startled shriek.

In hindsight, I should have yelled back, “I’m fine,” or “It’s just your daughter,” but all I could think was that he would come stampeding into the kitchen naked before I had a chance to tell him anything at all. It was bad enough I was standing there in his sweater, and nothing else, in front of Emma. So I shouted a loud, hysterical, “Have pants on!”

“Oh, that’s lovely. Thank you, for that,” Emma said, blinking and turning back to the magazine open on the counter. She had a cup of coffee beside her, too, and the dinner from last night had been cleared away.

So... she had been there for a while. Great.

Neil came into the kitchen behind me, tying the belt of a black bathrobe. His expression changed from concern to confusion to horror in an impressively short span of time. “Emma? What are you doing here?”

“I was supposed to be here. We spoke earlier this week.” Her gaze raked me up and down. “But you must have had other things on your mind.”

“You were coming in on the twenty-ninth,” he asserted, as though just saying it aloud would somehow reverse the entire, horrible, situation we were in.

“The twenty-eighth.” She lifted her mug and sipped from it. “I suppose when Tony wasn’t at the airport, that should have been my first clue that you’d gotten the date wrong. Again.”

“How, uh,” Neil cleared his throat. “When did you get here?”

“I got here right around, ‘I want you to fuck me harder.’” She lifted her eyebrows and blinked innocently at him, challenging her father to some silent battle of wills.

I heard Neil’s sharply indrawn breath behind me. “I suddenly very much regret the way the morning has gone thus far.”

I tugged the bottom of the sweater down. It could have reached the floor, but I would have still felt way naked. Emma had already heard me having sex with her dad, she didn’t need the full peep show. “I’m going to just... go.”

“You don’t have to go,” Neil said, following me into the dining room. He looked briefly at the swinging kitchen door, then back down at me. He lowered his voice so we wouldn’t be overheard. Oh yeah, now he thinks of that.

“Stay. Have breakfast. It’s the least I can do.”

“No, you don’t owe me anything,” I said quietly. “You mixed up some dates, no big. We can get together another weekend.”

“No, I insist. Please, there’s no reason you can’t be here, just because Emma is. We’re all adults. I’m sure I don’t need to explain myself to her.” He put his hand on my upper arm, his thumb kneading my flesh through the sweater. “Look, go get dressed, and I’ll talk to her. It could be a blessing in disguise, the two of you meeting. You might really like each other.”

Too late, I thought, but I didn’t argue with him. This was the absolute worst way he could have introduced his daughter and me. It would have been preferable if we’d never met at all. Since Neil and I weren’t serious, there was no reason to play ‘meet the family’. I wasn’t about to take him home to my mom or anything. Hell, I hadn’t even mentioned I was seeing someone when I’d spoken to her last. It was just easier that way.

But, he really wanted me to stay, for whatever reason, and I wasn’t going to strain things between the two of us. I would get dressed and join them for dysfunctional family breakfast. I had a feeling Emma would make a stronger case for why the whole thing was fucked up than I ever could.