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When Erica came into the office, I could tell she was feeling a little fragile too. She looked shaky, and she kept touching her forehead like she had a headache.
“How are you feeling?” I asked when she came into my office.
“Like shit,” Erica confessed with a grin. “It was worth it, though.”
I laughed and agreed.
Erica and I carried on with business as usual. By lunchtime, I realized I hadn’t seen Shane around. I went on the hunt for him and found him in his office, his feet up on the desk, head tipped back, and his eyes closed.
“You look like shit,” I said.
“I’m dying,” Shane admitted. “It’s that moment a thirty-year-old body doesn’t bounce back as well as a twenty-nine-year-old body.”
“Pussy,” I said with a chuckle. “I drank just as much as you did, and I’m older than you. If I can do it, you should too.”
Shane peeked at me through one eye. “I’m happy for you, but I won’t disregard my own feelings.”
I laughed, shaking my head. “We have the investors meeting later. Are you going to be a whiny bitch then too?”
“Whatcha gonna do?” Shane said with a shrug.
I sighed. “Go home, Shane.”
He opened both his eyes and looked at me with a hopeful face. “Really?”
“Yeah, get out of here. I can’t do an investors meeting with you acting like a baby. I need you on top of your game, and right now you’re benched.”
“Football analogy. Cute,” Shane said, packing up his stuff. “You just want to get me out of the office so you can fuck Erica again.”
“Fuck you,” I said with a grin. It wasn’t that he was right, but the idea sounded good. Of course, that wasn’t going to happen. We had already played with fire the first time. We couldn’t tempt fate twice.
Erica could handle the meeting with me. She was better at her job than any EA I’d had before, and it was part of her job description to step in for either of us if it was necessary. After last night, I would have to concentrate on not staring at her in the meeting, but I could manage.
We’d had a great night together. We had spent time as friends, not as employees or colleagues of any kind, and I had seen more of that side of her that I really enjoyed. There was something wild and free about Erica, which I didn’t see in the office, and I loved it.
But when we were in the office, I had to focus on work. I was lucky that Erica was so good at pretending that nothing was going on between us.
I knocked on Erica’s office door and walked in. She sat behind her desk working on her laptop.
“I sent Shane home,” I said. “He wasn’t up for the meeting.”
“Is he hungover?” Erica asked.
“It’s so bad.” I laughed. “I’m going to need you to step in for him at the meeting.”
She nodded. “What do you need me to do?”
“The point of the meeting is to cut costs. We need to figure out a way to appease the investors, because even though they’re happy to put cash into the company, they feel there’s too much going in compared to how much is coming out.”
I produced files of the companies where I felt we could make a change. Erica paged through it, and I watched her as she ran through the numbers. She was beautiful when she concentrated on something. Her face became serious, and her eyes became lighter, the green more intense. She had a habit of chewing on her bottom lip when she thought about something, and it was sexy as hell.
I realized she had a very light splash of freckles over her nose that I hadn’t noticed before.
“What if we digitize everything?” Erica asked.
“Cut out paper completely?”
She nodded. “This is the twenty-first century, after all. If we take away paper, it saves on printing costs and paper orders as well as all the stationery and possibly even rent for storage space you don’t need anymore.”
“In theory, that sounds great,” I said. “But what if systems fail and we lose everything?”
“Then we upload to the cloud. We can find packages that work so it’s password protected or encrypted and no one else can access it.”
“Except hackers.”
