I felt a sharp pain in my finger as it jabbed against the glass phallus. Then I tried to divert the thing’s descent but only managed to slam it against the shelving and nick the edge of it.
I heard a roared, “Get away from it!” and finally had the good sense to listen.
Cool glass kissed my leg as I stumbled and fell back, and then several hundred pounds of cock-shaped perfume fell to the concrete floor and shattered. A glass shard embedded itself below my knee while another slashed across my calf. Blood gushed.
A gasp slipped through my lips as I watched my clothes become soaked with the pink perfume flooding the room. A patch of dark-red blood diffused into the puddle of pink as I stared, not quite understanding. My hand throbbed.
The smell was horrendous. The bottle had actually been filled with perfume, and not some colored water. Why, I had no idea. I didn’t know why anyone thought that was a good idea. It was like a scented bomb went off, and suddenly I was dizzy and bleeding and the pain in my finger was unbearable.
It all must have happened within a couple of seconds. Distantly, I heard the clatter of the metal pry bar on the concrete floor, and then strong arms clad in a crisp white shirt were siding beneath my knees and around my back, and my boss’s boss’s boss was picking me up.
“I’m bleeding on your shirt,” I noted.
“Quiet,” he barked.
“It’s white. It looks expensive.”
“I don’t care about the shirt. You! Call an ambulance. You, Ophelia. Get a towel. Bring that table over, we need to set her down. And open a damn window.”
The edges of my vision were going fuzzy. The fingers of my uninjured hand felt clumsy as I reached up to feel the fabric of his shirt between my fingers. “Good-quality cotton. The fil-a-fil is a nice touch. Subtle blue tinge.” I glanced up, then my head lolled when I couldn’t keep it up. “Like your eyes.”
He had beautiful, startlingly blue eyes. His eyelashes were thick and very black, almost making it look like he wore eyeliner. Some people had all the luck.
Those remarkable eyes met mine. He was angry for some reason. “Will you stop talking?”
“Why?” I asked, surprised to find my voice was slurring.
I was jarred when he kicked something, and a chair went flying. Then, more gently than I would think him possible, he set me down on a hard surface. Glaring, he said, “I told you to be quiet. You’re bleeding.”
“Sorry about your shirt,” I said, pouting at the red stain on his arm. “But I already know you’re going to fire me, so it’s okay.”
“Just-don’t die, all right?”
“Firing me will be your loss,” I told him. I was a star employee, after all. They’d only had me for a week, and they’d put me on dick-polishing duty. “Big mistake for sure.”
The last thing I saw before everything went black were the dark slashes of his eyebrows drawing together, his full lips pursed in displeasure.
Jared’s POV
The image of Iris Little unconscious on the table stayed with me all day. Her mouth had fallen open slightly, her pillowy lips painted a dark, vampy red. Her hair had been arranged in careful waves that had become mussed in the chaos. She wore dramatic eyeliner that had survived without smudging.
She had the face of a difficult, high-maintenance woman, which was no surprise. It had taken me about ten seconds to figure out she was a difficult, high-maintenance woman before I’d ever laid eyes on her.
I hadn’t expected her to look the way she did, though. Taller than I’d expected. Curvier, with dramatic features. More striking. Just…more. She’d been wearing a dress that could only be called modest, with a square neckline that didn’t show much more than her collarbones and hit well below her knee. But there was something about the way it traced her curves that made it look indecent.
And her shoes. Her shoes had been entirely impractical. No one needed to wear those types of heels to work as a runner in a studio. No wonder she’d been injured. What a ridiculous, difficult, irritating woman. I was glad I didn’t need to interact with her any longer. Once had been enough.
Gritting my teeth, I tore off my glasses and tossed them on the desk before rubbing the bridge of my nose. Leaning back in my chair, I cast my gaze over the multitude of lights in the Manhattan skyline. My domain. Today had been chaotic. The past six months had been chaotic, actually. Sales were down and companies were cutting their advertising budgets. People were outsourcing to smaller companies and freelancers. I’d had to halve my copywriting division, and I knew the remaining few were overworked. I was having to work harder to secure new clients, and a lot of our long-term relationships were beginning to feel strained.
“How did the call with Garcia go?” asked my chief operating officer, Cole Christianson, naming the designer behind the perfume bottle that had been destroyed earlier today. He reclined in the seating area across from my desk, one arm thrown across the back of the black leather couch.
I grimaced. “He wasn’t happy. It’ll take two months to get a replacement bottle of that size. We’ll try to use CGI to get the campaign over the line, but he’s old school. I think he’ll want us to reshoot it, which will push back the launch.”
“Old school,” Cole repeated with a snort. “I’m guessing that’s why they filled the thing with actual perfume instead of dyed water?”
A sigh slipped through my lips. “We talked about water when we initially pitched the idea, but he said the light refracts through perfume differently. He insisted on the real thing.”
“So CGI is definitely not going to work, but we’re going to have to spend the money to try.”
“Basically, yeah.”
“I’m guessing the chick who caused this has been fired?”
I’d met Cole about a decade earlier. He’d been working on Wall Street making more money than he knew what to do with, but he was bored. My company, at the time, was going through its first big growth spurt. I considered it a coup to convince him to work for me at the time, and that sentiment hadn’t changed. He was detail-oriented in work and in his personal life, all the way down to the way he matched his socks to his outfit and made sure his beard and hair were trimmed twice a week.
As I watched him lean back, crossing his legs at the ankle, I wondered how long it would take for him to move on from this company. He wasn’t a sentimental man, and I was sure he could see the sharks circling around us.
“She’s been let go,” I confirmed. “Ophelia made it happen this afternoon.”
“At least you were able to tell Garcia that.”
“He doesn’t care,” I answered, shaking my head. “All he cares about is art.”
“Is that what we’re calling the giant glass dick we’ve been advertising?”
I huffed, unable to stop myself from thinking of the dark-haired beauty we’d just fired-the only other person who’d called a spade a spade-and done it to my face.
Well. She’d been behind the protection of a steel door at the time, but she still said what no one else had.
But she was gone now, and I couldn’t afford to give her one more moment of my time, even in my thoughts.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.