“I’ll shove Irish Spring dry up the ass of whatever moron in Personnel decided to send me an intern while Alice is on vacation. Christ. I would have come in this weekend if I’d known, but Alice said she had it handled. Fuck.”
“Alice doesn’t usually make mistakes. Whoever the intern is, she’s probably top of her class.”
“Great. She knows her way around a stack of books. Doesn’t mean a fucking thing in the real world.”
“Mr. O’Callahan?”
Turning, Ben saw Janet, their CEO’s imperious admin, standing in the doorway of the office kitchen.
“Since I and everyone else can hear you,” she said coolly, “your finished contract is on your desk. The baby intern scaled the walls of her crib and spent most of the weekend getting up to speed on the negotiations with Senecorp so you’d have it first thing this morning. You’ll find her sucking her thumb at Alice’s desk. I’ve given her a handful of Cheerios to keep her happy. I trust you’ll handle any diaper changing personally.”
Peter shot him a droll I-told-you-so look. Ben narrowed his gaze, but when he turned that irritated expression on Janet, she didn’t blink. She and Alice had worked for Kensington & Associates long enough to know they were utterly indispensable. Alice had been Matt’s admin before she took paralegal training, after which she became Ben’s assistant, but both women routinely handled the diverse personalities of the five men who comprised K&A’s executive management.
That included Ben’s formidable Irish temper, which he knew had been rising to the top more often of late, enough that he’d had to suffer jokes about male menopause at the ripe old age of thirty-two. And send apology bouquets to both admins more than once.
“Thank you, Janet,” he said. “I appreciate your excellent hearing.”
“Hmm.” She gave him a reproving look and then vanished, her heels soundless on the carpeted hallway.
“The contract will probably be fucked up five ways to Sunday,” he muttered. “Only thing worse than an intern who doesn’t know anything is one who thinks she does.”
“Maybe she’ll have a great rack and a nice ass.”
“I can get that from a Playboy centerfold. Doesn’t help me when Matt is tearing me a new one for sloppy prep work.”
“You’re way tougher on yourself than Matt could ever be.” Peter gave him a thoughtful look. “You’re pretty grumpy these days. I know you’re getting plenty, so maybe you’re fucking the wrong type of women.”
“There is no such thing, Dr. Phil. Bite me.”
“Pass. Haven’t had my shots. I know where you’ve been.”
Ben snorted. “Places you can only dream about now, ball-and-chain.”
Taking his coffee, he headed for his corner office. He balanced the cup with his briefcase as his phone buzzed with several incoming messages. He had forty-five minutes to review and fix that contract, and then he had a meeting with Johnson in Matt’s office that would take up the hour before his ten o’clock. If the intern hadn’t totally screwed it up, he could have her run the contract over to Senecorp so they could digest it before he arrived.
The desk where Alice was normally stationed, a few paces from the door of his office, was vacant. The baby intern had escaped from her high chair or the Cheerios hadn’t been sufficiently entertaining. Setting aside his briefcase, he took a seat at his desk, his eye on the contract sitting neatly in the middle of it.
When he had a free weekend, he spent it immersed in sweet female ass and Irish whiskey, his reward for work weeks often eighty-plus hours long. He worked hard, played hard, with exacting demands in both areas of his life. Which was why Alice’s voicemail this morning had set him off.
The revisions for the Senecorp contract will be done by the intern Personnel has hired. Don’t worry. She’s good. And don’t curse when you get this message.
“I’ll fucking curse if I want to,” he muttered. Just not around Alice. Or Janet. Cognizant of her superhero hearing, he’d have toned it down in the kitchen, except he hadn’t realized she’d arrived as early as he had this morning.
As he scanned the contract, his brow eased. Well, hell. The revisions were damn near perfect. Some of the points had even been tweaked for smoother language, keeping his original meaning intact. Not a typo to be found, not even a random crayon mark or a smudge from fingers stained with Juicy Juice. His lips quirked. Putting the document down, he rubbed a hand over his face.
Hell, what was the matter with him these days? He didn’t used to get so worked up about shit like this. Yeah, he was an ogre on details, but in the past he’d had a scathing sense of humor about it. From Peter’s sidelong glances, he knew he and the others had ongoing theories about him, especially Jon, Mr. Touchy-Feely-Let’s-All-Hug. He gave them credit for sticking to the guy code, though, giving him room to steer the boat the way he needed to steer it for right now.
Still, he had to push down resentment at Peter’s teasing. It was easy to be smug about the hollow state of a single guy’s sex life when you were married to the submissive of your wildest dreams, the way Peter was. Though Dana was blind, she had the courage and unbridled sensuality of a woman with all her senses intact. Ben knew it firsthand, because on one memorable night, Peter had enlisted his help to make one of her fantasies come true, to be taken by two men at once.
All five members of Kensington & Associates executive management were hardcore sexual Dominants, and four of them had found their perfect submissive match. Soul mates, if you believed in that bullshit, and it was hard not to, looking at how they got along with one another. Ben remembered the aftermath of that night with Dana. He’d gone into the bathroom to clean up, and when he came out, he’d seen her curled
