Bound Beneath His Pain: A Dirty Little Secrets Novel by Stacey Kennedy Page A

out of sight. “Oh, yes, because that would be a great idea. Let’s date the very well-known playboy who happens to be my boss. Definitely a CLM, if you ask me.”
    “Oh, yes, career limiting move, for sure. I mean, because dating a gorgeous billionaire is every woman’s worst nightmare.” She gives me a well-deserved
You are an idiot
look.
    It is crazy!
    I should be overjoyed about Micah pursuing me. Most women would be all over this. But Liv doesn’t know the
true
reasons I can’t be with him. She doesn’t know the
real
me and where I came from. She doesn’t know about my mother. She doesn’t know about the money.
    “Might I remind you that he is Micah Holt?” I shoot back at her. “The guy’s splattered all over the tabloids with a new woman on his arm every month. Anything between us would be short-lived anyway—he’s not what I want in a guy.”
    “Oh, I’m not saying to date him seriously.” Liv shudders a little, twirling from side to side in her swivel chair. “He’s a heartbreaker, for sure. But he’s also pretty, so you could”—she grins and waggles her eyebrows—“enjoy that pretty package for one night.”
    “No.” I shake my head, adamantly. “You know I hate one-night stands.” I had one once with an Irish man when I traveled to Ireland. It was the accent, sexily spoken to me while I was intoxicated, and my panties disappeared. That experience was enough—been there, done that.
    “What I know is,” Liv drawls, her foot clad in a black high-heel shoe bouncing in time with the music coming from the radio, “you need to remove your halo and get some horns on that pretty little head of yours.” My lips part, and she waves me off. “I know. I know. A one-night stand is against your angelic morals.”
    Liv loves her bad boys, including her one-night stands. She’ll never understand this about me. “There’s nothing wrong with having morals.”
    “In the nineteen hundreds,” she counters with a level look. “You live in the twenty-first century. It’s okay to want sex and
a lot
of it.” Her eyes dance as she sips her coffee again. “But since you’re clearly in a state of denial, where you somehow think you can refuse the powerful and damn hot Micah Holt, tell me more about what happened with the Lowes yesterday?”
    I sigh, grateful for the subject change. “I got their wish list,” I report, “Last night I stalked the MLS and found four possibilities that I’m planning on showing Jenny in an”—I glance at the time on my monitor—“hour and a half.”
    “Perfect.” Liv smiles, placing her coffee cup down beside the stack of papers on her desk. “That gives me enough time to fill you in on all things Holt.”
    I settle into my seat and reach for my coffee. “Okay, hit me with it.”
    “Our go-to guy about new clients is James,” Liv explains.
    “What department is he in?” I take a sip of my coffee, catching a whiff of the vanilla syrup before the warmth slides down my throat.
    “They call the department
Real Estate.
” Liv riffles through the papers on her desk. “James is one of the team leads who works under the Director of Real Estate, who reports to the Vice President of Real Estate.” She looks up from the papers and gives me a tight smile. “We’ve been placed into James’s division, so he’s our guy.”
    I shake my head, trying to get my bearings. “This company is huge.”
    “Yup, it’s massive.” By the strain between her brows she’s struggling to wrap her head around all of the different departments now. Because she knows I rely on her for that stuff. “Get this, though. James sent me the background info for the Lowes.”
    “Background info?”
    Liv nods, grabbing a folder out from the papers and bringing it to me. “It’s like Mission Impossible around here.” She hands me the file, and as I open it, she returns to her desk, adding, “Everything, and I mean
everything,
about the clients is in that file. Like, what their