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  “I guess I should explain,” I finally offered. Daniel was a reasonable man, so I could still salvage this situation and my job. Or so I hoped.

  “Yes, that would be a good idea,” Daniel said. “Please explain, in detail.”

  “I didn’t mean to kiss you like that.”

  “What, you just bumped into me? Like you did last Friday?”

  I frowned, feeling defensive. “Last Friday was an accident, and it was dark.”

  “You met her last Friday?” Hunter said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Daniel ignored him and continued to stare at me. “What did you mean to do then?”

  “There was this guy, a very pushy guy. He came up to me earlier, and he asked to dance. He really wasn’t my type, so I told him no. Then he came back after getting a drink, and I told him to back off because my boyfriend was here,” I shrugged. “Then he demanded to know who my boyfriend was. I spotted you, and I pointed you out. The guy seemed to think I was lying, so he told me to go kiss my boyfriend to prove it, so I did.”

  Daniel’s expression hardened. “Where is this guy? Is he still here?”

  It took me a few seconds to realize that he was no longer angry with me, but the pushy guy instead. I glanced around for a moment and shook my head. “I don’t see him anymore.”

  He let out a long breath and shook his head. “I get the point, but why did you lie to him like that? Why not tell him the truth?”

  “If I told him the truth, he wouldn’t have taken no for an answer. He was a creeper, and I wanted him gone.”

  “Most guys are more concerned about hitting on married women than women just dating.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re married, aren’t you?”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m not married.”

  Jacy laughed. “Here come the fine and confusing distinctions.”

  My cheeks heated, and I looked down.

  Daniel looked between the both of us. “Will somebody please explain what is going on?”

  “I’m technically married,” I said, looking up to meet Daniel’s eyes. “But I’ve been separated from my husband for two years. I’ve just—we’ve just not gotten around to getting formally divorced.”

  Understanding dawned in Daniel’s eyes, and he slowly nodded. “Why were you wearing your ring?”

  “You noticed that?”

  “Told you,” Jacy muttered. “Should have gotten rid of it a while ago.”

  She wilted under my glare before I returned my attention to Daniel. “It’s just—hard to explain. My marriage has been over for two years, and I suppose I just found it easier to keep wearing the ring. I finally realized it was kind of silly to wear a ring for a marriage that was dead.”

  Everyone at the table fell silent, and I could imagine why. After all, I was bringing up some pretty serious stuff, and it was hard to explain the whole thing. I didn’t want to explain about the death of my child, and how that led to the end of my marriage. Some pain wasn’t recalled lightly.

  Daniel let out a long sigh. “I understand. Everything is making a lot more sense now. Though next time you might not want to ambush someone in the bar with a kiss.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck, laughing nervously. “I can imagine.”

  “Now that all that is settled,” Hunter said, breaking in, “anyone want another drink?”

  Alcohol had already contributed to enough trouble for me for the night, so I shook my head, not about to drink anything more.

  “I’m good.” I stood, shooting a pleading look over at Jacy. “Actually, I think we’re ready to head out.”

  Jacy glared at me, then quickly nodded her head toward Hunter. She obviously wanted to stay, but I couldn’t stay there anymore, not after everything that had happened. She reluctantly rose, but at least had the decency not to say anything.

  “Nice to meet you, Jacy,” Hunter said, offering her a dazzling smile.

  It seemed like I wasn’t the only one who had made an inadvertent connection.

  “I’ll see you Monday,” Daniel said, his expression flat.

  I took Jacy’s hand and headed toward the exit, still wondering if I was going to be fired on Monday.

  Chapter 9

  Daniel

  I swung at a ball. It whizzed by without me even touching it. My pulse pounded in my ears from pure irritation.

  Yeah, not the most relaxing Sunday.

  A few yards over, Hunter smacked the ball launched at him and sent it sailing into the net like he was ready for the World Series.

  Hunter didn’t open his coffee shop on Sundays. He liked to have one day off and wanted his employees to have a day off as well. He didn’t always come to the batting cages with me every week, but he did tend to hit a couple times a month.

  He wasn’t a member of the club, but I could bring guests, so it was a nice way to treat my friend to something that he liked to do.

  Another swing and miss for me was followed by Hunter launching another ball into the sky. The way I was batting, I wouldn’t make junior varsity on a middle-school team. Maybe not even a grade-school.

  I took a deep breath and waited for another ball to launch. I swung, and I think I missed it by even more than my last few swings.

  “Damn it.”

  “Not your day, is it?” my friend said with a smirk. “Remember, this is baseball, not golf. It’s not one of those lowest score wins games. Eye on the ball and all that.”

  “Screw you, Hunter,” I said.

  He offered me a merry grin in response, frustrating me even more. It was hard to ever ruffle Hunter, something I admired about him. I might have been dedicated and focused, but I lacked his devil-may-care attitude.

  I liked to tell myself it was because I had bigger responsibilities given my wealth and the size of my company, but that was bullshit. The truth was I’d always had a stick up my ass, and Hunter never had. I might have become richer over the years, but I’d never changed, nor had he.

  We’d actually met in high school. We both played baseball, but he played for my school’s main rival. We’d had sort of a friendly competition for a while, even though neither of us ended up doing much with baseball past high school.

  I ended up hanging out with him the summer after graduation before heading off to college, and we clicked, a nice, balanced friendship. Too bad he wasn’t a woman.

  I snickered at the thought.

  “Laughing at your own crappy hitting now?” he asked.

  “No, something else, as for the hits, sometimes you just don’t have it,” I grunted, finally managing to clip a ball, at least “The Gods of Baseball just turn against you. If there are hot streaks, then there have to be cold streaks.”

  Even as I spewed the explanation, I knew it was a lie. There was a very simple reason for why I couldn’t hit crap, and it had nothing to do with hot streaks and everything to do with how my mind kept returning to the events of Friday night.

  The memory of Morgan’s soft lips on mine kept distracting me, along with the recall of her taste and the feel of her body against mine. By the time I even recognized a ball was coming, I was only half done thinking about my alluring assistant.

  It was the same thing that had been distracting me the rest of Friday night and all of Saturday. I’d even tried going into the office to see if I could get her out of my head, but that only made things worse. It was as if I could smell her in the air, and it was turning me on. Even if I were just imagining things, it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that my mind and body were reacting to the mere thought and memory of the woman.

  It didn’t matter that it had been two days since I’d last seen her. It didn’t even matter that the whole thing had been over in a matter of minutes. I couldn’t get the woman out of my mind. I cursed under my breath as I swung at another ball. Maybe some anger could help me connect.

  A line drive, a decent hit finally. All hail the power of anger.

  Several more minu
tes passed in near silence other than the occasional grunt or curse as Hunter and I worked through the remaining balls. After the pitching machine was empty, I didn’t even both to ask Hunter how he’d done. I knew. He’d hit almost all of his balls with nice solid hits. I’d whiffed a good third to half of mine. Pathetic. Damn pathetic.

  “Let’s hit the shower then go get some lunch,” Hunter suggested. “Smacking all those balls has worked up an appetite.” He shot me a sideways glance.

  I grunted my agreement, trying to push Morgan out of my mind.

  Hunter was dying to talk to me about what was going on. I knew his expressions well enough to know he wouldn’t be able to stand it much longer. The guy knew my moods and my weaknesses. There was no way I could even hope that he wouldn’t pick up on how distracted I was, no matter what long-winded explanations I offered.

  He was polite enough not to begin the interrogation until after I’d had a few sips of wine and half my salad in me. I appreciated that even if I wasn’t going to tell him so. The guy didn’t need his ego stroked.

  “What the hell is going on with you, Daniel?” he asked. “We all have bad days, but that was a disaster out there.”

  I looked up from the salad. “What, a man can’t have a few bad hits?” Apparently, I wasn’t quite ready to be honest with my friend about what was going on.

  “If there’s one thing I can say about you, is that you’ve always been hyper-focused on whatever you were doing—baseball, making money, or whatever. Today you were so flighty you might as well have been me, just without the great looks and even greater personality.” He grinned. “So, spill. What’s on your mind that’s turning you into a loser in the batting cage? It’s a reverse transformation—hero to zero.”

  “Morgan,” I spat out with no further hesitation. There was no reason to dance around it. Hunter had seen the whole thing anyway, and it’d be less embarrassing if I just walked into it and admitted the problem.

  Even if he wasn’t the master of stable relationships, he wasn’t a stranger to women, and he could maybe offer me a different perspective that would help me figure out how to tackle the situation.

  “Morgan? Yeah, I can see why you’d be distracted. She’s smoking hot, and you guys practically sucked out each other tonsils at the bar.”

  I shook my head. “She might have kissed me to get a guy off her back, but when I started kissing her seriously, she was into it. And before, when I ran into her, I felt a definite spark.”

  “A spark?” Hunter’s eyebrows lifted. “What do you mean?”

  “Not just lust, not just attraction, a spark, a connection.” I pushed some lettuce around with my fork. “It’s not the first time a woman has gotten stuck in mind, but it’s the first time in a long time I’ve felt a draw like that, and I don’t really know what to make of it.”

  “What’s to make of it? You’ve done pretty well in life by trusting your instincts, why are you suddenly second-guessing them?”

  “How can I be sure? This might just be concentrated lust. Maybe I just need to get laid.”

  Hunter shook his head. “We both know that’s not true. You just said as much. You said it’s been a long time since you’ve felt this way. This isn’t about just wetting your dick a little.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck, unsure.

  “Damn, Daniel,” Hunter said. “How have you been getting anything done at work if you’re so into her? I could tell you liked her, but I didn’t realize she was haunting you like some sexy ghost.”

  “It wasn’t like that at first. I mean, yeah, she’s attractive, and I noticed it right away, but it was easy because I hadn’t touched her or kissed and at first, even after the whole hallway thing, we both just pretended like it didn’t happen. It was also easier when I thought she was off-limits.”

  Hunter nodded, “Because you thought she was married?”

  “She is married. You heard her.”

  My friend scoffed. “She’s been separated for two years. She’s only married on paper, and face it; the guy must have been a huge ass to push a woman away like that.”

  I leaned in, curious. “How do you figure?”

  “It’s obvious. She’s hot and smart, right? Seems like she’s pretty easy to get along with. You’ve worked with her for a while. See any big problems with her?”

  I shrugged. “No, not really. She’s very professional at work, friendly. Easy to get along with, tolerates my bullshit well enough.”

  “Exactly. So don’t you see the problem?”

  “I guess I’m not following you.”

  “What sort of dumbass throws something like that away? And if she can put up with a lot of bullshit, how far must he have pushed her before the separation?”

  “I’m not sure. She wore her ring until recently. She was still wearing when she started work. So even if it was two years ago, it wasn’t like she wasn’t thinking about it.”

  “The past is the past. She’s not wearing it now, is she?”

  “No, I guess she’s not, but I’m still not sure about that whole thing.”

  Hunter leaned back in his chair and stared at me. “Okay, let’s be real. If you’d met her, and didn’t think she was married, would you have gone for her?”

  “I—maybe. I guess. It wasn’t something I was thinking about. Half the reason I hired her was because she was supposed to be married remember. I was looking for an assistant, not a girlfriend.”

  “Then the only real problem was the husband thing.” Hunter threw up a hand. “So who cares? You should go for it. Unless there was something else stopping you. Otherwise, I’m really trying hard to see what the problem is.”

  “She does work for me.”

  “Does your company have a strict no-dating policy?”

  “No, but this is a minefield.”

  Hunter smirked. “I am reminded of more than a few boss-and-secretary pornos I’ve seen. Look, at you living the dream of a high schooler.”

  I groaned. “That’s the thing. This isn’t a movie. The whole thing was—”

  “What?”

  “I wanted someone who was married in the job to begin with.”

  “Because of that whole quitting thing?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t want to have an assistant quit, and now if I go after her and things go badly, she’ll quit for sure, and I’ll be back to square one.”

  “You can always find a new assistant. Assistants are a dime a dozen,” Hunter said. “Are you so sure you can find a woman like that again? One who was practically dropped in your lap?”

  I rubbed my chin. “Not sure if it even would bother her.”

  Our conversation was interrupted when the waiter stopped by with our meals, a ribeye steak for Hunter and pasta for me.

  We took a few minutes to start on our entrees before the conversation resumed.

  “What if I eased into it?” I said.

  Hunter finished swallowing a bite of his steak before responding. “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe I can approach her, and not try and start a relationship. Maybe more of a friends with benefits thing. I’ll make it very clear it’ll have nothing to do with her job.”

  My friend grinned and nodded. “Boss and the secretary. In real life.”

  I snorted. “She’s my assistant, not my secretary.”

  “Same difference.”

  I laughed. “We’ll see.”

  Chapter 10

  Morgan

  Jacy and I sat on the back deck of my apartment, drinking mimosas. I liked the place well enough. It was nice and quiet, even though my landlord was an ass.

  After the separation, Blaine and I had decided to just sell our house and split the proceeds. I could have easily afforded a down payment for a new house, but I didn’t know where I wanted to end up. If anything, the money was useful, as it allowed me to take six months off while I grieved after losing my baby.

  I sipped my drink, looking at the pines and firs beyond the deck, and the small stream running
past the land. It was nice and relaxing, even with the haze of the day, though there was no chill in the air.

  “We’ve not talked about it, you know,” Jacy said.

  “Talked about what?”

  “Friday.” She took another sip of her drink. “We hurried out of there, and then we took an Uber back to your place, and I continued to mine.”

  “What is there to talk about?”

  Jacy cackled. “Seriously? What’s there to talk about? What I saw on Friday was a big deal.”

  “A woman getting drunk and kissing someone she shouldn’t be kissing isn’t exactly some shockingly unusual thing in Seattle.”

  “Yeah, keep telling yourself that what happened was no big deal, and maybe you’ll eventually believe it, but I know what I saw.”

  “You keep forgetting I only kissed him to get that creeper away from me.”

  Jacy rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure. Maybe that’s why you started kissing him, but that’s not why you continued kissing him, or why you were so flustered afterword. If it was no big deal, you would have just laughed it off.”

  “So what? I kissed a guy, and it was kind of hot. What’s the big deal?”

  My friend gulped down the rest of her drink and set the glass down. “You honestly don’t see the big deal?”

  I put my drink down then shrugged. The buzz wasn’t doing much to make me feel more comfortable.

  “No.”

  “You’ve been separated from your husband for two years. You finally took off your ring, and now you’re actually finding yourself attracted to people. It’s a sign.”

  “A sign?”

  “A sign that you’re ready to move and have sex again, maybe even have a relationship. I think you should go ahead and get your divorce handled, but there’s nothing wrong with getting out there on the market while you’re in the process. You’ve had two years, and your marriage is still just as dead as it was before.”