The admin pool was a place I generally avoided. It was loud, disorganized, and it had been my father’s preferred hunting grounds for employees to harass. He’d most likely seen them as powerless and pretty. The perfect victims.
I saw it as a series of potential landmines. Busy women who did the dirty work for everything that happened inside and outside our offices. One false move and I could piss off the entire backbone of our company. It was safer to avoid them, to let them do their thing, rather than remind them that there was another male Russo in residence.
It was Ally’s lunch break, but I hadn’t seen her in the cafeteria. Not that I was looking. Or that I’d checked her calendar in the system for her schedule. Okay, so maybe I had.
I absolutely refused to think about my motives for personally dropping off a legitimate research request. I always had Greta email them, keeping the lines of communication clearly defined.
But if I dropped off this request in person, I reasoned, I could also see if Ally was ready to quit yet.
I tapped the folder in my hand and surveyed the space. Most of the cubicles were abandoned, but I spotted her and that pink sweater across the room. She had headphones on and was rhythmically shimmying her shoulders, lips moving to unheard lyrics.
I tapped the folder again. Debating. What the hell. I had a few minutes for an argument.
She was still swaying in her chair when I walked up behind her. My dick inexplicably took notice of her proximity, which pissed me off. I was forty-four years old. Not some pimple-faced teenager at a pool party. And unlike my father, I had self-control.
I peered over her shoulder, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. “Crap on a cracker, Charming!” She yanked her headphones off but got them stuck in her hair. “Ow!” She pulled harder.
“Stop it,” I said, making a grab for the headgear and slapping her hand away. “You’ll give yourself a bald spot.”
I unwound her hair from the earpiece.
“I’d say thank you, but it’s your fault I’m now balding.”
“I see you’re doing personal work on company time,” I said, looking at the screen where she seemed to be in the middle of designing several versions of a logo for a butcher shop.
She picked up her phone—one of those knockoff smartphones that looked like it was ten seconds away from disintegrating—and showed me the countdown on the screen. “I’m on lunch, Mr. Sunshine. On my own laptop.”
“You’re on my Wi-Fi. And where did you get that poor excuse for a phone?”
She gave me a look that said why don’t you go kick yourself in the balls before turning back to her dinosaur of a computer and disconnecting the internet. “Happy now?”
I was. I liked fighting with her. At least she didn’t go cry in a corner if I looked at her wrong.
I glanced at her desk. There was a banana sitting next to the phone. “That’s your lunch?”
“Yes. It is. Now, is there anything else you’d like to judge me on—maybe my outfit or perhaps I’m breathing too loudly—or can I get back to my lunch break?”
“A banana isn’t lunch.”
I’d been around the fashion industry long enough to know how rampant eating disorders were. But I’d seen the woman polish off two cranberry muffins during the meeting this morning.
“It is when you’re newly and temporarily poor.”
“Newly and temporarily poor,” I repeated.
“Don’t worry, Dom,” she said, dryly. “It’s not contagious.”
Dom. Not only had she used my first name. She’d given me a nickname… one that wasn’t mean.
“Did you need something, or did you just decide to spread your cloud of doom to another floor?” she asked.
“Most new employees at least pretend to show a modicum of respect to management.”
“Most new employees didn’t already lose one job in the past week to management,” she shot back.
“So you’re blaming me for being newly and temporarily poor?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You just managed to make me a little poorer.”
“Is that banana really all you have to eat?” I asked.
“Do I really need to converse with you when I’m off the clock?” she asked, reaching for the banana and peeling it.
As if the gods were smiling on me, her phone timer dinged, and I smirked. “Looks like you’re back on the clock.”
She sighed, hit save on her laptop, and closed it.
“What can I do for you, boss?”
“Just keep being your belligerent self, and sooner or later, my mother will realize she made a terrible mistake.”
“I don’t know about that. She kept you around.” Ally took a deliberate bite of banana, and I was instantly, stupidly aroused.
I was back to being pissed off. This was ridiculous. I’d never gotten a hard-on from a conversation with a coworker. Clearly my self-imposed celibacy had gone on a little too long if arguing with a woman while she ate fruit turned me on.
I leaned in. “Quit.”
“Make me.”
“I fully intend to.”
“Great. Now that that’s settled, how about you scamper off to whatever ring of hell you came from and let me earn my paycheck?”
I turned to leave and nearly ran into someone.
Malinda? Matilda? The blonde with the Real Housewives lips was standing too close. She’d been one of the few who accepted the settlement and decided to stay. She’d also been one who had enjoyed my father’s advances.
“Hi,” she said, her voice all babydoll breathy.
If she called me “daddy,” I was going to puke.
“Excuse me,” I said briskly, trying to step around her.
“Is there something I can… do for you?” M-something asked, planting herself directly in my way. Her gaze skimmed up my body, lingering on my crotch.
Ally mimed a creditable dry heave behind her desk, and I may have telegraphed a “please help me” in her direction.
“No,” I said to… Melissa? Magenta?
She took a step closer. I was bent so far backward when her finger trailed down my tie that I could have won a limbo championship. “Anything at all. Anything,” she repeated.
I backed into the cubicle divider, gritting my teeth. I was not my father, and the fact that she thought I was made me physically ill.
“Hey, Mal, why don’t you try sexually harassing men on your own time?” Ally piped up, leaning over her wall. “Some of us are trying to eat here, and your praying mantis routine is nauseating.”
Mal… inda shifted from “put a baby in me” to “dragon lady” in the blink of an eye. The look she shot Ally was so full of contempt I willingly put myself between them. Sure, Ally’s mere existence pissed me the fuck off. But that didn’t mean she should have to die by psychotic coworker while protecting me.
“I don’t need anything,” I said again. Colder this time.
She seemed to get the hint. Raising her chin, the woman sauntered away, a crocodile slithering into a swamp.
“That was a close one,” Ally observed, taking another bite of banana. “She almost took your balls with her.”
“Yeah. After ripping your face off to get to them.”
She blinked at me and then snickered.
Fuck me. “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean your face would be anywhere near…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Fuck. Five minutes in this room and I’d gotten a hard-on and suggested that an employee put her face near my balls. This was not who I was.
She laughed again, harder this time. “Relax, Dom. You might be an asshole, but you’re not trying to get into my underwear.”
I dropped the folder to cover what was now a raging erection because of course I was picturing her underwear. I hated myself.
“Now that Malina? She’s going to try to crawl into yours. So you might want to consider a chastity belt or shark repellent,” she suggested.
“Maybe you should get back to work,” I muttered and then left the room as quickly as I could without running.
Back at my own desk, dick under control—mostly—I put in a request to HR.
While I waited for the paperwork, I buzzed Greta.
“Do me a favor and have some kind of snack sent to the admin pool this afternoon.”
“Some kind of snack?” She repeated it like I was speaking a foreign language.
“Yes. Food. Something with protein maybe?”
“Enough for the whole department?” she asked. I could hear the curiosity.
“Enough for everyone. Use my card,” I said. I spotted the research request on my desk. The one I hadn’t bothered delivering. “Oh, and can you put a research request into the system for me?”
Five minutes later, I settled back in my chair to read everything there was in Ally Morales’s file.
