Chapter 5

Grant

I sat at my desk, frustrated, as I watched the clock. I’d sent Crissy an email a half an hour ago, telling her to get in here so she could take notes for me. I had ideas running through my head and things had been thrown at me over lunch that I needed to remember. They were things she had to mark down on the calendar, shift around, and there would be a couple nights I needed her to stay later. That meant she would have to adjust her own schedule, and I wanted to make sure that got put down on the calendar, too.

This week had been rough, and it wasn’t even half over. While Crissy did plenty of things well, like answering the phone and staying on top of my schedule, there were other things she didn’t do well. She didn’t take notes, she wasn’t very organized, times to show up to work were more like suggestions than requirements, and she always forgot to clock out on her lunch breaks. That meant I had to go out there and ask her when she took lunch before going into the system and altering it myself.

But all day yesterday, I was nursing a fucking hard-on. Every single time she came into my damn office, an inappropriate question rolled off her lips. Quips about my shoe size and whether I wore boxers or briefs had me clenching my jaw, but the moment she started in on my inseam, I had to dismiss her for the day. What the hell was this girl trying to do to me? I’d seen her fucking tits, I’d had enough of her shit attitude, and now she was perpetually bugging me about things that were beyond inappropriate.

And when I asked her what she was doing, she simply told me she was learning all about me so she could “better assist” me.

I had to admit, my cock had sprung to life when she’d said that. Her voice was light, and she fluttered her eyelashes a bit. She rolled her shoulders back a lot, jutting out those perky and rounded tits that I knew housed barbells I could just drool over. When I didn’t respond to one of her questions, she’d turn and walk away from me, and the first thing I noticed was how beautiful her ass swayed when she was wearing heels.

I’d had to take a cold fucking shower when I got home last night.

But now? I needed her to do her damn job. Now I needed her in my office so I could spout a few things off at her. I needed her actual assistance, and she was nowhere to be found. I stood from my chair and strode out of my office, ready to fire her on the spot. I would never be able to work properly with the inappropriate questions. Nor would I be able to work with a personal assistant who didn’t sit at her desk and—well, personally assist me.

However, when I heard giggling around the corner, a shiver ran down my spine.

Was that Crissy’s giggle? It was a beautiful sound, but it rumbled a bit low. It wasn’t high-pitched like I figured a girl like her would giggle. The moment a voice started in on another joke, I knew exactly who was around the corner.

“Mr. Anderson,” I said as I rounded the corner. “How was your lunch break?”

There Crissy was, pressed up against the wall with her foot crooked up on it. Her knee was bent, and her shoulders were pressed back, pushing her tits out. The smile on her face was innocent, but the glint in her eye was devilish, and I felt my back straighten out. Dylan’s lips were smirking, like I’d just caught him in the middle of one of his tricks, but I knew Crissy well enough to know that she somehow had the upper hand. Even with Dylan leaning against the wall with his hand just by her head, he only had the appearance of having the upper hand.

“It was good,” he said, grinning. “I found this little treat up here as I was coming to see you, and I thought I might have a bite of dessert real quick.”

“Dylan, you are such a bad boy,” Crissy said as that low rumble of a giggle began again. “You’re keeping me from my job, you know.”

“And it’s a job I bet you do fabulously,” Dylan said.

“There are many things I do fabulously, but I’m not sure if my job is one of them. You know, still learning the ropes and all.”

“Boss man here got you…tied up with all those ropes?” Dylan asked.

“You said you needed something, Mr. Anderson?” This workplace flirting was not appropriate, and that would be the first thing I would address with Miss Marks. My company was not the place for this type of interaction, especially since Mr. Anderson was absolutely terrible at it. A young woman like Crissy could do much better than the likes of him, and for a split second, I could’ve sworn I saw her flick her smirk toward me.

“Actually, yes,” he said. “I’ve got some information on that stream of revenue suggestion you told me to research.”

“That meeting will be later,” I said. “Until then, continue to gather as much as you can.”

“But I’m pretty sure I have everything there is on the topic. If we could just sit down—”

“If I sit down with you, I have to sit down with all the junior executives, Mr. Anderson, and I don’t have that kind of time. Miss Marks, your lunch break was over a half an hour ago. I need you in my office.”

“Oh, I’m sure you do,” she said, grinning.

“Do you care for your job, Miss Marks?” I asked.

The look on her face slowly morphed as she turned her head toward me.

“Dylan, I believe my boss needs me,” she said as she hooked her gaze on mine. “Care to talk later?”

“I’m looking forward to it,” he said.

Crissy snapped her gaze back at him and smiled kindly before her foot slid from the wall. I turned my back, feeling it pull taut as her heels clacked in front of me. She buzzed by me, heading for my office, and again, I found my eyes slipping down to her ass. I bet those tight cheeks of hers would overflow the palms of my massive hands, but the moment she sighed, it pulled me from my silent reverie.

“I’m sorry your job is impeding upon your personal life,” I said as I entered the office. “But no fraternizing of that sort occurs here.”

“I shall keep that in mind,” she said before she sat down.

Yet again, Crissy didn’t have anything to jot down notes with. I sighed before I pulled out a pen and pad. Then I handed them to her across the desk. Our fingers brushed, ricocheting a shot of electricity up my arm, but all I could do was ignore it. My mind was flooded with a thousand different ideas, and I needed them out before I lost them all.

“This meeting is confidential,” I began. “If any of this information gets out to the public, you will be fired on the spot.”

“On the spot. Got it,” she said.

“J&M is in the middle of a possible acquisition,” I said. “We’re still batting around figures and what that might mean for the company as a whole, but overall, it looks good.”

“It looks very good,” she said.

“Just take notes on whatever I say; then shoot me an email with the summary of it all,” I said.

“I can do that, sir.”

“Tike Oils Company has been spreading into the Midwest. We’ve had a hard time spreading into that area of the country, but their CEO has just been charged with several accounts of fraud, among other things. I’m preparing myself to make them an offer on acquiring their company. My accountants are currently evaluating the final offer I’m going to propose to them, but I’m thinking anything between three million and five million dollars for the twenty-million-dollar company.”

I sat back into my chair before I turned it toward the window. This company acquisition could mean a massive boost in yearly revenue in an area of the country we’d had a hard time establishing ourselves in. Tike Oils was a fairly new player in the area, but they were garnering a massive base of connections and trust.

That was, until their CEO fucked up.

But his fuck-up was my potential gain if I could play this right.

“Tomorrow morning at nine, I need to call the CEO,” I said. “I want to have a personal talk with him about what he’s being charged with and how fast it’s happening. I can’t take on a company with too much heat. Otherwise, I can’t fix it. They’ll need some work already, like updating their workplace policies as well as their overall brand. They’ll also need to trim down their employees. I won’t be able to take all of them on full time until I can really get us established in the Midwest.”

“Likes things trimmed down,” Crissy said. “Got it.”

“I do want to offer the CEO’s family shares of stock in the new merger. Just because he’s going to prison for a while doesn’t mean his wife and kids have to suffer. It won’t be anything substantial, but I’m thinking a three to five percent stock share in the newly merged company. I can afford to give that up.”

“Wants to give some things up,” she said, popping the “p.”

I knew what she was doing. She was trying to rile me up, like she had yesterday. Like she knew she had yesterday. She was trying to cause a fuss and wreak havoc and get underneath my skin.

But I wasn’t going to allow her to do that today.

“The board of Tike Oils is going to throw a fit,” I said. “I have to figure out how big it’s going to be, which means doing research on their board members. Miss Marks, I want you to take on that research. Get me what you can on those men, from their birthdates and where they live, all the way down to their last public hissy fit. I want to know these men inside and out before I begin this deal.”

“Knowledge is power. Gotcha there, too.”

“I want that research on my desk by next Tuesday at the latest—”

I turned around in my chair to face her, and I saw her heavy blue eyes staring at me. She seemed focused and intent, without a hint of malice of playfulness in her features, but the moment I looked down at the pad I’d given her, I saw nothing was written. I’d been sitting here, mindlessly chatting for ten or so minutes, and none of it was on paper.

“Why are you not writing any of this down?” I asked.

“The vault, remember?” she asked, grinning.

“Miss Marks, this job is a very serious position,” I said. “Being my personal assistant comes with responsibilities, and one of the simple ones is for you to take notes. Is that not a concept you understand?”

“It is, Mr. Jacobs,” she said. “I just don’t need the crutch of a pen and a piece of paper to recall the boring information you’re giving me.”

“Then why don’t you repeat back to me the information you think you remember,” I said.

“You’re talking about acquiring Tike Oils Company in order to compensate your own falling revenues with this company. They’re expanding into the Midwest. Their CEO just got caught embezzling, however. Not defrauding his company. He’s also being pinged for tax evasion, if you can believe it. You want me to do research on his board members so you can go in there and do some kind of mind-fuck-bag-juju on them in order to intimidate them, and you want all that information by Tuesday. You want a planned phone call on your calendar for tomorrow at nine to discuss things with the CEO while your accountant draws up the terms for an offer he can’t refuse. But if you’re going to make that phone call, at least know what the poor man’s being charged with.”

I couldn’t help but be stunned. Crissy sat back in her chair and crossed her legs, smirking. In this moment, she knew she had the upper hand. Boys like Dylan Anderson didn’t know how to handle a woman like her, and it seemed every time we turned a corner, she had a new little facet of her personality I hadn’t noticed before.

“And no,” she said. “I didn’t forget about the three to five percent stock you want to give over to his family when the companies merge—after they trim down their staff, of course. Which doesn’t surprise me. Most men enjoy things a little slimmer when they first take them on. What they don’t realize, however, is that a meaty and robust company can really keep an acquiring company warm during the wintertime.”

Was she even talking about the company acquisition now?

“A word of advice?” she asked. “If you want to acquire a company, but then you ask them to trim down their staff, make sure you can take on at least half of them. If you don’t have the revenue to fully take on half, you’re not in a position to buy the company.”

“And how do you figure that, Miss Marks?”

“If you wanted to take on a woman, would you approach someone you could only take less than half of?” she asked.

“I’m not sure I understand the comparison,” I said.

“Because you’re too focused on the metaphor, and that’s the point. Any company rising to the top like J&M needs to tread lightly. Becoming greedy and taking on more water than the company can handle means bailing water out when the boat springs a leak. And you know what happens when men spring immature leaks.”

“You mean boats?” I asked.

“Whatever,” she said, shrugging. “Take it for what it’s worth.”

While it was worded immaturely, she wasn’t wrong. A company that was growing the way J&M was underneath my tutelage couldn’t afford to take on a company that had to trim itself down more than half. That wasn’t so much a rule of thumb for my situation as it was a rule of thumb for any situation like this, but I was shocked Crissy knew that nonetheless. She was obviously much more intelligent than people gave her credit for, but something told me that was because she hid her intelligence and led with her tits.

I felt my cock growing beneath my pants at the display of knowledge she’d just shown.

“Is there anything else my vault needs to take in, sir?” she asked.

“Miss Marks, I understand very well what you are doing. Inappropriate comments like that in this company will not be tolerated.”

“I’m not sure how any of the remarks I’ve made to you are inappropriate,” she said. “Care to…expand upon the subject?”

“Miss Marks, you’re treading a thin line. You’re obviously intelligent, but you’re not without faults.”

“Mr. Jacobs, whatever do you mean?” she asked innocently.

“Just stop with the inappropriate comments,” I said. “You know full well what you’re doing.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jacobs. It’s just…hard sometimes, I suppose.”

If she was going to continue acting like a child, then I was going to treat her like the child she was behaving like. I cleared my throat and slowly rose from my chair, but all that happened was her smirk grew. She thought she had me. She thought she had the upper hand in this situation. But she was about to quickly be reminded of who ran this company and who exactly she answered to.

“Do you see that bookshelf over there?” I asked.

“The one with all the books. I do, sir.”

“Look at it.” She panned her gaze over and quickly took in the shelf before her eyes found their way back to mine.

“You’re going to alphabetize those books by the author’s last name, and you won’t go home until you’re finished,” I said.

“Seriously?” she asked. “You want me to restack your books? What about the summary email you wanted?”

“Seal up that vault tight and get to work,” I said.

She sighed before she got up and started over to the shelf. I sat back down in my chair, turning it back toward the window as I continued to think on the merger. Numbers and dates were flying around in my head. I wanted everything to be right and in order before I called the CEO in the morning. I wanted to be one of the first to touch base with him, because even though he was tanking his company, it was still a hell of an opportunity.

But my attention was soon on Crissy.

She was bent over at the waist, stacking the books backward. Instead of starting at the top with “A,” she’d begun at the bottom with “Z.” It gave me the perfect view of her rounded ass, and for a second, all I could do was stare. Her legs were thick and luscious, her silky, smooth skin flexing underneath the effort it took her to stay upright in her heels. She slowly wiggled her hips side to side, trying to get the pressure off her feet, but all it did was bring my cock to life. Her hair was falling in her face and her tits hung from her body, and all I wanted to do was rip out my throbbing dick, smooth up the fabric of her pencil skirt, and shove my cock into that little pussy of hers.

Holy fuck, I was in a great deal of trouble.