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With a simple nod, she turned and headed for the door. Bobby was coming in, and he held it open for her, and as she walked away, I couldn’t help but watch her. I was only snapped away from doing so when Bobby spoke.
“Seems like you have a live one on your hands, Hunter,” he said.
“What now?” I asked.
“This Julia girl. Very nice. Very pretty. But a hell of a hand around here.”
“Oh,” I said, sitting up and brushing my tie back down so it lay flat against my stomach. “Yes, she is very good. So far.”
“So far,” he said, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, making a sound that out of anyone else I would have told them to stop and never do again. Bobby was the only person I tolerated it from, and that was only because my father had warned me about the sound, and that it was a tick Bobby couldn’t break.
“Yes,” I said. “So far. It’s her first day.”
“Well, she’s knocking it out of the park,” he said. “She’s been by my desk three times and looks like she belongs there. She doesn’t have the wide-eyed deer-in-the-headlights thing some of these people do, nor is she goofing off or acting like she’s hot shit. Just going about the job like a professional.”
“I noticed,” I said.
“I also noticed,” Bobby said with a grin, “that she is pretty nice to watch running around. Especially when you have a catbird seat against a window when she walks away from you to go through those doors and get you coffee.”
“What are you saying?” I asked, curling my eyebrow.
Bobby put his hands up innocently. “Not saying. Just noticing,” he said. “But if I notice, other people will, too. Just remember that.”
“Oh, I will remember,” I said.
“Good,” Bobby said, tossing an envelope on my desk. It had a file in it I had sent Julia to bring him, an old form we hadn’t used in at least a decade. “Now, if another one of these things comes across my desk instead of an email, I promise you, I will shove it in a trash can, set it on fire, and you’ll get your very own wet t-shirt contest out of it.”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time.” I smirked.
ChapterNine
Julia
Hunter, as I should have expected, did not believe in stepping lightly into the job. From the moment he showed up in the office, just minutes after I arrived early, he had me running. Literally, I was running from one errand to the other, flying into my office to print this or scan that, answering phone calls and taking messages while simultaneously writing responses to emails that seemed to never end.
“Julia, I need you,” he said from his office, and a shudder ran down my spine.
I shouldn’t react like that when he said those words, but I couldn’t help it. It was an elemental thing. A carnal thing. The fantasy I had wouldn’t go away, and on more than one occasion, I caught my mind wandering and trying to place myself in the spaces I had occupied in those lurid thoughts.
Then he would bark at me with some other thing I needed to do, and I had to clear the fog fast.
Currently, it looked like what he was going to need was yet another coffee run. The machine he had in the office was missing when I got in that morning, only to learn that it was apparently on the fritz. Rather than just replacing it, Hunter had decided that he wanted me to do physical coffee runs to the shop at the end of the street.
Repeatedly.
There were other coffee machines in the building. Probably dozens of them. I could smell coffee brewing in the main hall just outside his office. But when Hunter said to do something, I was determined to do it.
As I approached the desk, pushing an errant hair that had fallen out of my bun back over my ear, he shook his empty coffee cup at me.
“Another,” he said gruffly, his eyes not moving from his laptop.
“Same as before?” I asked.
Slowly, his head turned toward me, a quizzical look on his face.
“Why would I have something else?” he asked. “Not just why would I change coffee in the middle of the day. What person do you know drinks their coffee black with extra shots of espresso would drinkanythingelse?”
“I—” I began.
