It’d been almost a year since Sue “caught” me not-cheating on her, and things had gotten progressively worse with every passing month of my non-existent infidelity. Any other chick would be long gone from my glitzy Manhattan office, but Sue had a special contract I had written myself (no legal background, thanks for asking), in a very particular situation where she deep-throated my cock, so I couldn’t fire her. She wouldn’t quit either, and I could see why.

I paid her well, and the hours were relatively sane for a financial company in downtown Manhattan—but she wouldn’t give me a break either. Like now, she breezed into my office with her pencil skirt and high heels and impeccable bleached-out, side-bangs and sour face. I was lucky my office was made solely of glass windows (other than the black wood door). There was always the possibility she’d try to cut my balls off and shove them down my throat.

“Morning, Mr. Cole.” Her crimson lips barely moved as she swiped a finger over her iPad, staring at it intently. I closed the website window to my bank account, holding the thought of wiring money to my archenemy. She could wait. She sure makes me wait. For years and years.

“Sue,” I said, leaning back and lacing my fingers together. I refused to play the bullshit game where I called her by her last name—Miss Pearson—because I was approachable and casual with my staff. Also, it was a little too porno-ish, even for my taste, to refer to someone as “Miss Last Name” curtly when I had been knuckles deep inside of her at some point in my life. “How are you today?” I asked.

“Fine. Yourself?”

“If I were any better, I’d be worried I might explode from happiness.” My smile was intact, but my voice paper-dry. Was I happy? Was I sad? Was I just too fucking high to distinguish the two feelings? Who the fuck knew? What I did know was that I needed a drink or three, which was what I usually felt after speaking with Nina.

Sue stopped in the middle of the room, her body tilted toward my glass desk, my executive leather chair, and the floor-to-ceiling painting of an antique world map behind me.

Generic.

Expensive.

Rich.

Everything I sold the world about myself.

This office was a shell, just like my looks.

This office didn’t represent me. Just. Like. My. Looks.

“Okay…” she trailed off before huffing, moving her special fancy pen over her special fancy iPad. No common shit for this chick. “I have reservations for you at The Breakfast Club for noon with Cynthia Hollyfield. Don’t forget your Skype meeting with Mr. Rexroth, Mr. Spencer, and Mr. Followhill at two. Your dry cleaning should be picked up later on today and will be waiting at your place.” She was firing away all these things while I was flipping through the pages of a report for a client I was supposed to meet when her head snapped up.

“Then there’s your email about booking an extra ticket to Todos Santos for Rose LeBlanc? Can you confirm she’ll be flying first-class with you tomorrow morning?” Sue arched a plucked eyebrow. The real question, of course, was are you fucking her? and the honest answer to that question—which I replied to with two, slow blinks, was it’s none of your fucking business.

“Confirmed,” I said, staring at a paragraph of another merger deal in the works without really reading it.

The AC hummed between us. Forty-six floors down, a bunch of taxi drivers honked their horns. Polite keyboards purred from different cubicles on the floor. Her eyes were on mine, and it was a lost battle for our little Sue. She couldn’t read me in them. Only I knew their language. And I chose not to share me with the rest of the world.

“Right,” she shifted in place. Sue tucked her iPad under her armpit, turned around, and headed for the door. I watched her tiny ass moving to the rhythm of her pointy Louboutins, knowing it was not the end. Sue knew that Rosie was Emilia LeBlanc’s baby sister, but never had the pleasure of meeting my pixie-sized neighbor. However, Sue was privy to the fact that I wasn’t the type to babysit anyone’s sibling, unless there was something in it for me. And Miss LeBlanc was definitely capable of dragging her own ass to the airport, which left her with one, correct conclusion: I wanted into Rosie LeBlanc. In more ways than I’d ever wanted into Sue Pearson.

And it wouldn’t be the first time I crashed someone else’s special day for pussy, either.

I’d been known for taking my dates to inappropriate places. Sue knew that I dragged a one-night stand to the hospital when I went to Chicago to congratulate my best friend, Trent, when he welcomed his daughter, Luna. When Jaime Followhill—another good friend—married his wife and my ex-lit teacher, Melody Greene, I came to his wedding with two randoms I picked up on the way from a bar. My dad’s retirement party, before he un-retired himself and remarried his work? – showed up with one of his interns, no less. So it was really no surprise that I was traveling with a woman, but to Sue, it was a surprise because she knew I’d be there for more than a week. And spending nine days with the same woman? That was definitely a first.

She didn’t know Rosie and I weren’t going to stay under the same roof.

Didn’t know that Rosie hated my guts, and for a good reason. Every time Baby LeBlanc saw my face, she saw empty fun; a stoner who got to where he was because his daddy was a famous lawyer, and his last name was Cole, and the Coles donated enough money to Harvard to feed the better half of Africa, so my future was paved for me before I even knew how to spell the word entitled.

Sue didn’t know Rosie LeBlanc was the only woman in my life who wouldn’t give me the time of day, and she certainly didn’t know that ironically, Rosie LeBlanc was the only woman whose time I wanted.

And Sue didn’t need to know any of those things, because like every other part of my personal life, they were mine to keep.

Cue Sue turning around. Staring at me from under what I suspect were fake eyelashes. Sucking her cheeks in.

Then she did the unbelievable and inhaled without finishing the act with another one of her huffs.

“Mr. Cole, will you need anything else from me today? I’m not feeling very well.”

“That would be all,” I said. “Take the rest of the day off. Go rest. You deserve it.”

She nodded.

I nodded.

Yeah, I wasn’t a bad person, letting my PA ditch me so she could teach me some useless lesson.

I fired my MacBook right back up and finished my transaction, sending twenty thousand dollars to her.

It was supposed to make me feel better.

It didn’t.

The next morning was a rehash of the one I had when Baby LeBlanc came to my apartment dressed to impress (by her standards.) Meaning, I woke up next to a stranger, braved a hangover from hell, which I decided to tame by smoking a big, fat blunt on my terrace while sipping a Bloody Mary. Not the virgin kind. These days I never took a virgin anything. After all, the last one I had fucked me over, ran away, and was now marrying one of my best friends.

But I digress.

Maybe it wasn’t the best idea I had in mind to stop at a convenience store in the armpit of New York on my way to JFK at six a.m. and grab a bottle of who-the-fuck-knows-what and finish it before the poor taxi driver even dropped me off.

I knew it was a shitty move on my end, but couldn’t stop myself from smoking and drinking before I boarded the plane.

Fuck you, Nina, I muttered the entire drive to JFK, like it was some kind of bullshit yoga mantra. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Zigzagging my way to the terminal, I hoped to hell Baby LeBlanc was already inside the plane and made good use of the ticket and taxi I sent for her. The odds were in my favor. I threatened her, and she had no clue I couldn’t, in good conscience, raise her rent, even by a penny. I always had a soft spot for this girl, and it seemed like the more she hated me, the more I wanted to prove to her that it was always us. That if I believed in that bullshit of two people who were meant to be with each other—it was because we actually were.

I was late, and the flight was delayed as a result. Little Miss CrankyPants didn’t take any of my calls, and I felt an invisible rope tightening around my neck. I wanted to get to Todos Santos, dump Rosie at her sister’s, and collapse into my childhood bed. Somewhere in the back of my head, I wanted more out of life. To stop drinking and smoking like a fucking chimney. To let go of the bad shit that kept ricocheting into my life. To ask her on a date instead of asking her to reverse-cowgirl me, because all the sexual crap I was dishing at her was a defense mechanism in case she said no.

Because no one ever said no.

No one other than her, and if she was going to turn me down, might as well offer her my dick and not my heart.

My last recollection was of the flight attendant showing me the way and the soft thud of my head hitting the headrest, followed by a sharp pain that suggested my brain had just detonated. I winced, scrubbing my forehead before I heard her strained, out-of-breath voice. At first, I thought she was going to yell at me for being late, for delaying the flight, and for fucking breathing. So, it didn’t register when my half-dead mind actually decoded her words into their meaning.

“Here. Two Advils and water.” She dropped something in my palm. “I’ll ask the flight attendant for some milk after we take off. You pull this shit on our way back home, and I will make sure every woman you bring into the building knows your dick is more contaminated than the public restroom in the subway.”

I opened my eyes, turning my head on the cushioned seat to face her, my gaze gliding over her face.

“You seem to take a lot of interest in my dick, Baby LeBlanc. First, you wanted to pour wax on it; now, you want to cockblock it. Maybe you should meet him and see if you two could be friends. I think you will get along great.”

“No, thank you, I’d literally rather eat someone else’s puke.”

“Literally? Somehow I doubt it. Unless you have a very peculiar taste for puke.”

Rosie had always been a bitch to me. I didn’t blame her, but didn’t trust her either. But now, her face looked blank and genuine and, fine, fucking gorgeous. Her cheeks the color of ripe peaches, freckles decorating her little nose, and those huge bluest-blues staring back at me. Two hundred different shades of brown and blonde on her head, all courtesy of Mother Nature. She was the very definition of a nymph. Everything about her was so incredibly smooth and velvet, there was no way you could tell she was sick.