Now those brown eyes were filled with angry tears as she glared down at the necklace. I wanted to die. I wanted the floor to swallow me and just suffocate me so I could escape this situation.
Phoebe closed the Tiffany box and looked up at me. Something I didn’t like crept into her hurt gaze as she raked those eyes down my body and back up to my face. She sneered. “Oh, I understand this situation perfectly,” she said, her voice carrying behind me into the open-plan office.
There was a hush in the air as the people nearest us heard the bitter anger in those words.
“Do me a favor.” She thrust the necklace at me. “Tell your boss not to send a whore to do a man’s job.”
There was utter silence behind me. My cheeks burned with indignation at the insult.
It took everything within me to hold off my humiliation and cling to my compassion. Stiffly I took the box from her and marched out of there with my head held high despite the undesirable attention focused on me.
Forty minutes later I stormed through the building and straight into Caine’s office without knocking.
I stumbled to a stop at the sight of him and Ms. Fenton sitting across from each other at the sofas by the window. Caine was not happy at my interruption. He heaved a sigh of exasperation. “Linda, go back to your office. I’ll be there in a second to continue our discussion.”
Ms. Fenton frowned at my lack of etiquette as she passed, but I could give a crap.
I’d had forty minutes to stew in my rage.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Caine snapped, standing up and striding over to me to do his intimidating “I’m bigger and taller and scarier than you” thing.
But I was too mad to be intimidated.
I threw the jewelry box with the necklace in it at him, and he blinked in surprise before somehow managing to catch the damn thing. “Don’t you ever make me do that again.”
He tensed, suddenly alert. “What happened?”
“Well, the entire office of the Harvard University Press now thinks I’m a whore.”
Caine’s jaw clenched and his face clouded over instantly. “What?”
I shook my head at the fact that for a smart man he could be pretty stupid. “What did you think would happen when you sent me, a woman, to dump your girlfriend? Phoebe told me to tell you—and I might add how very junior high this all is—not to send a whore to do a man’s job.”
His dark eyes blazed. “She called you a whore?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
Caine marched to his desk and picked up his phone. A few seconds later he growled into it, “I got the message you gave Alexa … Yeah, well, your method of delivery was shittier than mine.” If it was possible he looked even angrier at whatever she had to say. “For that you can kiss good-bye that dream position of yours on the art institute’s board of directors … Oh, I can and I will.” He hung up and threw his phone on the desk with irritation.
I stood there, unsure what to do or how to react to the fact that he was pissed on my behalf.
Caine lifted his brooding gaze to me, but he started at my feet and slowly worked his way up my body so that by the time he hit my eyes I felt like I was going to come out of my skin. “I didn’t think,” he murmured.
What? Was he just now realizing I was a woman who, if I may say so myself, was attractive? So I wasn’t a knockout like Phoebe Billingham, but I was still a good-looking female employee he sent over to dump her.
Not good.
“It won’t happen again.”
Okay, that was as close to an apology as I was going to get out of him. And it was more than I’d expected.
I nodded and we held each other’s stare until I started to feel like all the air was going out of the room.
I wrenched my eyes from his and immediately felt like I could breathe again. “Would you like coffee?” I asked, my way of saying I accepted his nonapology.
“Yes.” He lowered himself into his office chair, no longer meeting my eyes. “And send Linda back in.”
CHAPTER 7
Caine’s refrigerator depressed me. It really, really depressed me. Mostly because it would be almost bare if it weren’t for a carton of milk, one of OJ, and three eggs.
And I’d just put the OJ and milk in there per his request.
I shut the door and looked around the beautiful kitchen. It was a Saturday and it was the fourth in a row Caine had ruined by asking me to run some errand he could run himself if he weren’t trying to deliberately exasperate me. In the past, if Caine was out of groceries he’d counted on his cleaner, Donna, to run out and get those. She visited twice a week and was paid handsomely for the bonus errands. However, since I’d come along I’d gotten the grocery run. He said it was so he could stop inconveniencing Donna, but I knew it was really just so he could start inconveniencing me.
I’d spent the better part of the afternoon running around dropping off dry cleaning, picking up dry cleaning, getting groceries, and choosing a gift for Mrs. Flanagan’s seventy-seventh birthday.
I got her this gorgeous emerald green and sapphire blue kimono I found in a little boutique on Charles Street, and I’d left it on his bed along with his dry cleaning. I’d also left him wrapping paper, ribbon, and Scotch tape. He was going to damn well wrap Mrs. Flanagan’s birthday present himself.
What got me through the fact that I was running around doing all this personal crap for my boss was that he was a busy guy and usually in the office. But when he’d called me today I could hear Henry in the background asking him when they were going to hit the gym. He wasn’t even busy and he was making me do his crap for him! It was official. Caine Carraway was a sadist.
Leaning against the counter, I took everything in. The penthouse was like something out of an interior design magazine—stunning, yes, but no personality had been injected into it yet. I was tempted to snoop and find photographs that I could buy frames for and then just stick ’em out on display and see what Caine did.
Maybe in a month’s time.
It still felt too soon to enforce nesting on him.
My focus was drawn to a spot of color on the coffee table at the TV area. Curious, I wandered over and raised an eyebrow at the DVD case Caine had left out. When I picked it up I saw it was a foreign movie based on the events that took place during eighties Berlin. Hmm. I glanced over at the cabinet beneath the television. Opening a cabinet wasn’t exactly snooping. Much.