AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Those fucking pictures are still up, Pamela,” I grunted as I strode around my secretary’s desk, slamming my bag down inside my office.
“We’ve discussed that,” she reminded me, sounding cheerful and infuriating.
“Get them down. I’m sick of his face.”
“No thank you,” she said, carrying a stack of messages into my office and depositing them into my inbox. She smiled at me as if her answer had been something remotely close to acceptable and then continued, “A fair bit of churn went on in your absence yesterday. Here are your messages, and I’m sure Mr. Eastburn will be in to fill you in.” She stood expectantly next to my desk, smiling.
I stared up at her, a thousand evil remarks floating through my mind. I pushed them away, running a hand through my hair and forcing a polite reply instead. “Thank you.”
“Glad you’re back,” she said softly, and then turned to leave.
“Pamela?” I said, catching her at the door.
She turned, her eyebrows high beneath the brown hair swept to the side.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” she said.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her something about Holland’s assertion that everyone here knew we were sleeping together, to ask what she thought of it, if it seemed untoward. But I didn’t. “Never mind,” I muttered.
She turned and closed the door behind her.
The MLB deal required my full attention for the remainder of the week, and I spent any time I had left in the search for a new lead counsel. We had the board meeting scheduled for the following week, and I wanted to be able to announce not only the deal, but the imminent appointment of a new counsel. In some ways the work was adistraction, but given that Holland’s name was on almost every bit of MLB correspondence, it was impossible to put her out of my mind.
I didn’t see or speak to Holland for three full days after she’d given me her decision, and my feelings hadn’t become clearer or less difficult to handle. I couldn’t discern whether I was angry with her or with myself, or if I was just hurt. Or maybe I was just embarrassed because I let her into my world so completely, and let myself get blindsided by her sudden change of mind.
As I lay in my bed at night, wishing for the absence of pain that sleep represented, I missed her in a completely visceral way. With my dick in my hand, my palm moving me toward angry release, I could think of nothing but her tight soft body beneath me, her perfect pink lips as they’d gone around my cock. I could think of nothing but her, riding her, filling her. And when I was done, and I lay staring in the darkness at the empty expanse of time before me, I thought of nothing but her sweet smile, the way her crystal eyes glinted with humor when we talked, when she laughed.
Most of the time, if I was honest with myself, I thought of nothing but Holland. And increasingly, I thought only of how to get her back. Every plan I made fell flat in the face of her concern, however. I wasn’t going to quit my job . . . though if I’d been anything less than CEO I might have actually considered it. Jobs were a dime a dozen—Holland O’Dell was one of a kind.
CHAPTER 20
Holland
Iwas a girl with a plan. I had always been a girl with a plan. I was cautious and careful, and I did irritating things like make lists of pros and cons. I thought through outcomes before I acted. Sometimes I even rehearsed situations from life when I was alone so I could be sure I’d do well when the real thing came. That was how I’d been as long as I could remember. That was what kept me on track, kept me safe.
And I’d pretty much disregarded all of that when it came to Oliver. I’d shut my eyes and done the equivalent of a trust fall backward into the unknown. And now everything was ruined. This was exactly why I’d had the plan.
One week apart from Oliver had felt like the longest and emptiest of my life. I’d tried to keep the pain at bay with long hours at work. I’d spent evenings at my desk, ignoring everything and everyone. I’d even canceled on Delia the day after we’d broken up, blaming the MLB work for keeping mebusy. At Delia’s for dinner that next Wednesday, I’d planned to act as if everything was normal. But that was the thing about Deel. She knew me well. Maybe better than I knew myself.
“What?” she asked, the second I walked into the kitchen where Olivia was sitting in the middle of the floor with a tiny microscope in her lap, surrounded by rocks.
“What?” I kept my voice light, reaching for the glass of wine she held out.
“What’s wrong? You have that line between your eyebrows.” She reached a finger out and pressed it to my forehead, pressing my worry line flat. “This is gonna age you, Holl. You need to relax. You can’t control everything.”
“Wrong. That’s exactly the issue. I need to control everything.” I swatted her hand away and took a healthy swallow of wine. “When I follow the plan, control the pieces, then everything goes as it should.”
Delia walked me to the living room. Spring was beginning to appear in the air outside and it was warmer in the evenings. “Well, Carl had to work late and isn’t coming for dinner. So I didn’t cook. Pizza’s on the way, we have plenty of wine, and you can tell me exactly what’s going so wrong.”
Olivia trundled into the room behind us and carefully piled her rocks in the center of the floor and then flopped down on her stomach in front of the microscope. “Hi, Ha-wen.”
“Hi, Olivia,” I said, finding an easy smile for my favorite three-year-old.
“Gigi’s watching a movie,” Delia said, answering my nextquestion without me having to ask it. “I couldn’t takeFrozenone more time, so she’s in my room.”
Olivia smiled up at her mom, a mischievous glint in her eye, and started singing “Let It Go” in her tiny soprano.
