Falling for Your Boss by Emma St. Clair

Chapter Three

Gavin

I like everything you do.

Zoey’s words are still playing on repeat in my head at lunch while I wait for Thayden. After two years of keeping myself reined in and bound up tight, today the tiniest bit of my restraint slipped. And now it’s all spinning out of control. I’m spinning out of control.

My intention was to begin preparing her for the new position I want to create before I finally leave Morgan-Beckwith. My parting gift to her. Instead, I said I wanted to groom her, a comment that made me want to punch myself in the face.

Then, I didn’t just step over the professional line I’ve kept so carefully drawn but pole vaulted over it with my flirty remark.

But she flirted back.

For one second. One line. One sentence. And then she closed up and the being perfect professional returned. The Zoey who seems frustratingly immune to my looks, to my money, to me.

It’s hard not to take it a little personally sometimes. Is that what makes her so irresistible—the fact that I can’t have her?

I’m just some old guy with an inappropriate crush on a woman who is much too young for me. Not that forty-three is that old, but compared to Zoey’s fresh face, just a few years out of college, I’m practically in a retirement home eating sliced peaches from a can and looking for my dentures.

I could find another woman if I wanted. Someone more age-appropriate who doesn’t work for me. Two women have approached me since I walked into the bar tonight. They made their intentions clear and gave me a free pass for drinks. Or more.

And I wasn’t tempted in the slightest.

My first wife was beautiful and look where that ended up—with me paying alimony every month and never wanting to settle down again.

So, it’s not Zoey’s blonde hair or those big blue eyes or the way the apples of her cheeks burn red when she’s flustered.

Nope. I hardly even notice any of that.

The thing about Zoey is that she’s so bright. Not just book smart or marketing smart, but wise. Way beyond her years.

Like the way she handled Roxana’s idea today. I was going to shoot the whole thing down. It was a subpar proposal, surprising for Roxana, who was also in rare form. I honestly considered how easy it would be to fire or demote her, both for the way her work has started to slide lately and the brazen flirting.

But Zoey found a way to tweak the idea into something that worked. Brilliant. Her mind is like the blade of a chef’s knife. She knows how to cut away what doesn’t need to be said.

I want to know what’s behind her calm, controlled exterior. I want the woman underneath, because I know there’s more. I see the way she carefully weighs her words, and every so often, I’ve seen her mask of control slip. I want to know the whole Zoey. I want to see the words she holds back, the ones that turn the wheels in her head. I want to see her with her hair down. I want to take her hair down.

Yeah. I’ve got it bad.

And, as Ella Fitzgerald would tell me, that ain’t good.

“Why the long face? Tough morning at the office pining after your hot assistant?”

Thayden claps a hand over my shoulder and slides into the seat next to mine, holding up a hand to a nearby server as he does.

We’ve been round and round this conversation before. Have we even had other conversations over the last two years? I wish I had something else to say than I think I’m in love with my executive assistant.

Not that I’d ever even mention the L-word to Thayden. He’s got an acute allergy to that emotion. And I have an aversion to commitment, so I need to keep telling myself it’s just attraction. A crush. No big deal.

Thayden rolls his eyes. “Ah. There’s a cure for this, you know. Many cures. Blonde cures, dark-haired cures—there’s a cute redheaded cure looking this way right now.”

I glance up, the response due to curiosity and not because I want to see what woman Thayden means. The redhead at the bar is cute. She’s closer to my age than Zoey. She’s not my employee like Zoey. She’s smiling rather than shutting me out the way Zoey does.

And … nothing. I feel exactly nothing. Because she isn’t Zoey.

“What can I get you?” the waitress asks, sidling up to Thayden.

“I’ll have a water,” I say, but she’s not looking at me. I sigh, wishing just once, we could have a meal without him picking up some woman. He may be my best friend, but he can also be a complete idiot.

As evidenced by the fact that he already has the waitress giggling. How does he do that? And why?

I mean, I know why. I get the appeal … sort of. My body gets the appeal. But long ago, I learned the hard way that letting my body make the decisions alone results in marrying a giant mistake. Thayden may make fun of me, calling me a monk, but I’ll take self-imposed singleness over risk any day of the week.

“Do we need to go over this again?” Thayden asks me when the waitress disappears—after handing him her number.

I swear, the man would be a millionaire another few times over if he had a dollar for every phone number he got.

“First of all, Zoey is a millennial,” Thayden says.

“You’re a millennial,” I remind him.

He grins. “And proud of it. But you.” He pokes at my chest, and I slap his hand away. “You’re a Gen X. And you can’t stand the way we don’t use top sheets and how we eat avocado toast.”

“I happen to love avocado toast. I’m thankful that someone came up with the idea, and even more grateful that every restaurant in Austin serves such a delicacy.”

Thayden leans closer, a smirk on his lips. “Right now, Zoey is probably at home with her parents, ignoring a mountain of student debt, and retweeting Kylie Jenner.”

“I didn’t think millennials used Twitter.”

His eyes sparkle, and I find myself smiling, even though I also want to kick the legs of his chair out from under him. “Yes, but it’s an ironic retweet.”

“I don’t even know what that means. Also, did you google millennial stereotypes before showing up?”

“No, old man. I’m living them.”

I roll my eyes. Thayden is anything but the stereotypes we mentioned. Unlike me, his family didn’t hand him money by way of a trust fund. His dad made Thayden start in the family law firm as an assistant, forcing him to work his way up, even after he passed the bar. It’s Thayden’s namesake and should be his legacy. There’s no love lost between them because of this, but Thayden has legitimately earned his spot at the table.

I would point out that his work ethic is far more boomer than millennial, but I’d like to forget this whole conversation. And anything that reminds me how much older than Zoey I am.

“So, did anything interesting happen in the office today?”

Other than me making a fool of myself, not much. “I’d rather not talk about it,” I say. “In six months when I sell, I won’t need to worry about it.”

“You said that six months ago.”

And six months before that. I’ve owned Morgan-Beckwith for two years, which is a year longer than I usually stay with a business. My goal is to scoop up a company that could be profitable but isn’t. I flip it to turn a good profit, then move on to the next business. A reporter once referred to it as spinning straw into gold.

Most people in my line of work buy a company, chop it up for parts, fire everyone, and make a fresh start. That’s too easy. I like rehab better than demo. It’s definitely not more profitable, but I’m doing well. And I don’t need the money anyway. Oil and the mineral rights on our family ranch gave me a safety net that would catch me falling from space.

The point is, I should have left Morgan-Beckwith a year ago. There is one reason I haven’t. One very compelling and impossible reason.

“You could always ask her out, you know,” Thayden says.

“I’m her boss.”

“You’re about to not be her boss. Sell. Ask her out. Or, ask her out now and have a secret office romance. You won’t believe the thrill of keeping it quiet.”

I don’t even want to ask how he knows. “I can’t ask her out.” Can I?No. I can’t. I shouldn’t.

But I want to.

“You could also move on to someone else. Or … marry her.” He grins, knowing how I’ll react.

“No chance.”

Eleanor made sure to leave such a bad taste of commitment in my mouth that I don’t think I could go there again. Which leaves me in the no-man’s land of not wanting to be a playboy like Thayden, and not wanting to get married.

Zoey looks like the marrying type. She deserves that—a guy who would completely treasure her and put a ring on her finger. She probably wants kids, the house in the suburbs—the whole thing. My dreams of that died when Eleanor cheated on me with multiple men, then walked out taking loads of my money with her.

Then again, I don’t know the Zoey behind the woman in my office. Maybe she’s out at bars partying every night. I glance around the room, seeing couples mingling, the redhead now flirting with a man who looks fifteen years younger than I am. The thought of Zoey in a place like this, flirting, maybe going home with a guy …

Nope. Time for a change of subject.

“How are things going for you? Any progress with dear old Dad?” I ask.

Thayden makes a face. “Still in a standoff. He insists that I change my lifestyle before he’ll make me an official partner, much less consider passing things down to me one day. And I can’t seem to make myself want to do what my dad wants. It’s less about giving up my life and more that I don’t want my dad to be able to blackmail me into good behavior. I’m not a child.”

He’s not, even if he’s almost ten years younger than I am. And though I don’t think too highly of Thayden’s revolving door of women, I agree that his dad shouldn’t be holding a business over his head to get his son to act the way Daddy thinks he should. I can’t even imagine that.

My parents are good people. Still living on the ranch because it’s what they know and love, not because they need the money. They’ve turned the whole thing into the kind of place that schools can take field trips, where families can come on the weekends and pick pumpkins in the fall or cut down Christmas trees in winter. Not a working farm, but kind of a living museum.

One that either my brothers or I will be taking over some day in the not-so-distant future. We haven’t quite worked out which of us is going to give up our city lives to do so. I make a note in my phone to call Mom when I get back to the office. I haven’t been home since Christmas, and I want to go visit her and Dad this weekend.

The waitress drops off our drinks, giving Thayden a coy smile as she brushes a hand over his shoulder. We order, and I raise my brows at Thayden as she walks away, an extra sway in her hips.

“Just to play devil’s advocate here. You think chasing every waitress you see is more important than taking over the company?”

“My boy, I’m not the one doing the chasing.” He grins, a single dimple popping out in his left cheek.

Rolling my eyes, I clink my glass to his. “To us. Guys who know what they should do and yet don’t.”

Thayden laughs. “Cheers. To the losers by choice.”