The Geek Gets The Girl by Michele Hauf Read Free Book Online Page B

Office attire. “You just…need to let your mind wander. When you think about shoes and sex, what comes up?”
    Amelie winced. “Incompatible?”
    “Really?” Rachel rather enjoyed wearing shoes to bed with a lover. “What comes up are long, sexy legs ending in fuck-me pumps, kicking the air as her lover licks her skin, mapping out her erogenous zones.”
    “Wow,” Amelie said on a gasp.
    Right. Wow. She was still flying high from last night. Did it show? She didn’t care. For the first time in months, confidence had returned to soar through her veins.
    “I need to get back to work.” To focus the high she was feeling on business before it got her in trouble. “Hold my calls. And, I’ll be working late to hash out the campaign. I’d…like to incorporate your ideas, Amelie. Would you mind?”
    “Mind?” Amelie squealed, pressing the sketchbook to her chest. “I’d be honored!”
    “Excellent. And do see if you can get solid information from headquarters about our visiting bigwig.”
    “Will do.”
    “Oh, and Amelie?”
    “Yes, Miss Parker?”
    “Keep sketching.” Rachel winked at her and strode down the hallway, smiling to herself when she heard the quietest ‘yes’ of triumph echo out from her secretary’s cubicle.
    *
    Zac stood before the window that ended the long entry hallway in the eleventh arrondissement apartment his mother had once occupied. Dusty and bare of linens and curtains, he’d opted for the hotel instead of fighting dust bunnies. His mother had lived here nine months out of the year. The other three months had been devoted to travel and visiting him in New York. The top-floor apartment had roof access that led to a neat collection of beehives that were still serviced by a local apiarist. Zac’s mother had loved bees, and one of Haute Heels’ first shoes had been ‘bumblebee yellow.’
    He sighed now, remembering the funeral ten years earlier. His mother had died young but had lived a good life. Ever traveling, learning, and always the first with hugs and the question, ‘What makes you happy?’
    So what made him happy lately? The prospect of having to close the one office his mother had coddled through the decades certainly didn’t; it killed him. She lived in every piece of dated wallpaper, chipped-painted cornices, and even the scooped-shell marble basins in the bathrooms. He didn’t want to close the office.
    But he wasn’t stupid. And if his trusted Operations Director said the office needed to go, it would go. The bottom line always mattered. Though, he wondered now… If Rachel could actually manage to throw together a campaign that would wow the clients on Friday, he’d hold off on pronouncing the office closed.
    He wanted to see her succeed. She deserved success. She’d done a remarkable job holding the office together since the previous manager’s exit. And working with little funds—corporate had to assume some responsibility for that.
    His mother would have never allowed such neglect from corporate. And as Zac pressed his fingers to the window now, and thought to still smell a lingering wisp of Channel No. 5—his mother’s signature scent—he mentally promised her he’d do what he could to see this office resurrected.
    And he wasn’t going to sell this apartment. Not yet. Not until…
    He did travel. And Paris was a stop at least once a year. If he hired a maid to come in every few months, it would be nice to have a landing place. And if he had reason to stay longer, perhaps because there was someone special who lived in the same city…
    Zac shook his head. What the hell was he doing? He’d just met Rachel, and they’d had no-strings sex. That did not a relationship make. Besides, he wasn’t the guy who did relationships. He was the corporate raider who kept a different woman in every city and generally wore arm candy to events. But to get to know those pretty and mindless props?
    Ugh. He’d just considered women as props. Rachel was no man’s prop.