Page 111 of Wait for Him

The smile is still there when I reach Michael's office and push open the door.

"Claudia mentioned you canceled the board—"

I stop dead.

"Holy fuck!"

Michael has Blaire Monroe on his desk, her legs open around him and his hand up her skirt, and that is not an image of my brother I ever needed burned into my brain.

He moves fast, putting the corner of the office between us while he adjusts his clothes. Blaire slides off the desk and spins around, smoothing her skirt down, but not quickly enough that I don't catch a full tit that had made a bid for freedom somewhere along the way.

What the hell is he thinking?

"What the hell did I just walk in on?"

I should close the door. I should walk out, scrub my eyes with bleach and pretend Fridays don't exist. But God help me, I can't leave this man unsupervised without him sticking a fork in a light socket.

Goddamnit.

"I'll uh—" Blaire starts, with all the grace of a woman currently tucking herself back into her own blouse. "Yeah. I, uh, I need to make a phone call."

I level a glare at her.

Yeah. You do that, bitch.

I manage to hold onto my composure and some frayed thread of professionalism as she slides past me and out of his office, close enough that I could trip her. The thought crosses my mind with enough sincerity that I shift my foot back just to remove the temptation.

God, this woman ruined him. She and Colt Monroe stood in that poolhouse and broke him into so many pieces that it took years to put him back together, a project I'm still actively completing if we're being honest. She's the reason we left Texas. The reason he changed his name. The reason I've spent ten years chasing down and cleaning up every mistake he's made while acting out against that boy, making damn sure he never becomes him again. It doesn't take a shrink to connect those dots, and yet Michael has decided the appropriate response to all that history is to put his hand up her skirt on company property.

How could he be so fucking stupid?

I pinch the bridge of my nose and push the door shut behind her.

"Rose—"

Please don't speak.

"Don't." I hold up one hand. "Give me a minute."

"You're back early."

I'm going to drown him.

Right downstairs in the lobby fountain, in front of the entire staff. Claudia will testify that I was under extreme emotional duress, Jackson will help dispose of any inconvenient security footage, and not one jury in California would convict me once I explained what I just saw.

"One. Minute. Michael."

I take several slow breaths, the kind my therapist would be proud of, although I doubt he envisioned me using the technique to avoid murdering my younger brother after accidentally seeing far too much of his sex life.

I love him. I truly do. I have loved this man through every terrible decision he's made since he was fourteen, and there have been enough of them that I should qualify for some form of government pension.

But God, am I exhausted.

I've been back in this building for all of eleven minutes. Eleven. I have a man I'm crazy about acting cagey in a town car somewhere, several days of work waiting for me, and now I've seen my brother's hand up Blaire Monroe's skirt, an image I will eventually be paying a licensed professional an obscene hourly rate to remove from my brain.

Fine.

I straighten my spine, ready the big-sister speech I've been delivering in one form or another for most of my adult life, and take the chair across from his desk like I'm about to chair the world's most humiliating board meeting.