knowledgeable about every last detail of the build and ready to stand off against a bulldozer to make the contractors follow through.
I sighed as one of my favorite memories of my boss surfaced. Dressed in jeans, a tight red t-shirt and a hard hat, he really had gone toe-to-toe with a bulldozer and the angry foreman driving it while I had frantically called the police. I learned that day and countless others that no one wins a game of chicken with Cole Mason.
Smiling at the ridiculous assertion that he was anything other than an excessively virtuous do-gooder, I double clicked the SB folder. Sub-folders populated the screen and I started a small prayer that I didn’t run into any more passwords.
Finally reading the names on the sub-folders, the prayer died on my lips.
Betty
Charlotte
Gabrielle
Pulse accelerating, my body grew warm again. Clearly, this was not the South Bend redevelopment folder but something else entirely. My finger hovered over the computer mouse as I struggled with which impulse to follow: the one that urged me in strident tones to X out of the entire SB folder and find the South Bend file or the low rumbling whisper urging me to click on the folder named “Betty.”
Betty won, of course. How could I not click on a folder on my boss’s computer with a woman’s name when I had been crushing hard on him for the last two years?
Inside the folder, I found a video file and another folder marked JPEGS. Heart racing ever faster, I click the JPEGS. Thumbnails greeted me. Even at their small size, I could tell most of the pictures were X-rated.
I closed my eyes and asked myself if I really wanted to open one of the image files. For two years, I had entertained a series of fantasies about Cole. What heterosexual woman wouldn’t make him the star of her dirty dreams if she had to work with him day after day? He had a swimmer’s body, powerful across the chest, arms and legs with a narrow waist to form a sexy, but masculine, hourglass.
Even if I had only ever seen him in business attire, I would have daydreamed about licking all over his body. But I also saw him in work clothes at build sites, veins bulging on his thick biceps as he wrangled jackhammers. At least three times a week, I saw him in the office on his way to or from the building’s gym, drool dripping onto my desk from the way the clingy t-shirts and shorts hugged his muscles.
His face was every bit as gorgeous as the rest of him. Steel gray eyes threatened to paralyze me whenever I met his gaze. The large, mobile mouth that was invariably thinned in contemplation or broadly grinning made my pussy ache. I wanted to thread my fingers in his wavy, dark chocolate hair and bring his mouth to my cunt, putting his too clever tongue to better use than verbally sparring with me.
My crush on Cole ran so deep, I only survived working for him because of a single factor -- I didn’t know his preferences. From what I could tell before today, the man was a monk. Certainly, he’d been photographed with women before. Big name models and actresses, most of them no larger than a size six, could be seen on his arm in old press clippings.
But those women never re-materialized in the two years I had worked for him. Even though Cole had doubled, then tripled the charity efforts his company funded he went to outside events alone. When he threw his own fundraiser, he had me serve as hostess.
Without those slim women thrown in my face on a regular basis, I could pretend that my fantasies weren’t the pathetic imaginings of a fat girl that would earn me nothing more than a gentle laugh if my gorgeous boss found out. Now, my hand shaking as I jiggled the mouse with uncertainty, I was faced with the choice of continuing to pretend Cole could be interested in a girl like me or finding out just what kind of woman he preferred.
I clicked blindly then opened my eyes.
“Betty” appeared with long black hair curling around her shoulders. She wore a light pink
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