Miles
"In my defense," Ray says, leaning against my office doorframe, "the client sounded really upset."
I don't look up from my screen. "The client is always upset, Garcia. That's why they hired a law firm and not a therapist."
"Right, but she was crying, and I felt like—"
"You felt." I finally glance at him over the rim of my glasses and immediately regret it, because Ray Garcia at nine in the morning is a specific kind of problem I'm not equipped to deal with before my second coffee. His tie is crooked. His hair looks like he styled it by sticking his head out of a car window. His shirt is wrinkled in a way that suggests ironing is something that happens to other people. He's also somehow the best-looking person I've ever seen in my life, and I hate myself a little bit for noticing. "You felt like circumventing two weeks of negotiation strategy to tell a client that, and I'm quoting your email here, 'everything is going to work out.'"
"Itisgoing to work out. We have a strong case."
"That's not the point."
"What's the point, then?" He crosses his arms, and his sleeves strain against his biceps, and I look back at my screen so fast I nearly give myself whiplash.
The point is that you don't freelance emotional support to clients when there's a carefully constructed communication plan in place. The point is that we bill by the hour and your little pep talk just undermined my leverage for the next round of mediation. The point is that your arms have no business being that distracting and I've been having extremely detailed dreams about your hands for weeks and I want to throw my stapler at your head.
"The point," I say, keeping my voice flat, "is that I need you to follow the plan. My plan. The one I spent forty hours putting together. Can you do that?"
He grins at me, relaxed and unhurried, like I didn't just dress him down. "Following plans. Got it. That's my whole thing."
"Your thing is showing up late with coffee stains on your shirt."
"Hey, this stain is from yesterday's shirt. Today's shirt is clean." He tugs at his collar like he's presenting evidence, and a faint cloud of him drifts across my desk. Cracked pepper and ginger and something clean and bright, and my whole body goes rigid.
I hate his scent. I hate it because it cuts through every defense I've ever built. I spend a fortune on the best suppressants money can buy, I keep my office at sixty-eight degrees, I run an air purifier on high all day, and none of it matters because the second he walks in, some deep, useless part of my brain goes soft and hungry and I want to bury my face in his neck and just breathe. It's disgusting. It's unprofessional. It's the omega bullshit I've spent my entire adult life training out of myself.
"Sit down," I tell him, because if he keeps standing there radiating alpha pheromones and that effortless, tail-wagging charm, I'm going to say something I'll regret. "We need to go over the Whitmore deposition prep."
He drops into the chair across from my desk, all long limbs and loose posture, and props his ankle on his knee like this is a hangout and not a workplace. I pull up the file and start walking him through the witness list, and he actually pays attention for once, nodding in the right places, even jotting something down in that chaotic little notebook he carries everywhere.
The problem with Ray Garcia—well, one of approximately nine hundred problems with Ray Garcia—is that he's not actually stupid. I know this. He catches things. He reads people with this annoying, instinctive accuracy that makes me want to scream, because I've spent years developing that skill and he just has it, like it costs him nothing. He made a junior associate cry last week, and when I stormed over to handle it, I found out he'd made her cry by being so patient with a difficult research task that she got emotional about it. What kind of psychopath makes people cry with kindness?
The other, much worse problem is that I find him attractive in a way that makes me question every professional decision I've ever made. It's not just the scent, or the shoulders, or the way his eyes go all focused and intent when something actually interests him. It's that he looks at me like he's trying to figure something out, like I'm a puzzle he's decided is worth solving, and nobody has looked at me like that in years. Maybe ever.
Last Tuesday he reached across my desk to grab a pen and his forearm brushed mine and I thought about it for hours. Hours. I sat in a meeting about tort reform and thought about Ray Garcia's forearm. I went home that night and got myself off thinking about his hands on my hips and his breath against my ear, and then I lay there in the dark staring at my ceiling andwanting to throw my phone into the ocean, because this is not who I am. I am not the omega who falls apart over some alpha with a crooked smile and a shirt that doesn't fit right. I'm Miles fucking Covington. I made senior associate at twenty-seven. I don't pine.
"—and the deposition's on the fourteenth, right?"
I blink. "The sixteenth."
"Right, the sixteenth, that's what I said." He didn't say that, and we both know it, and the corner of his mouth twitches, and I want to bite it.
I want to bite his mouth. At work. Fantastic. Someone should revoke my law degree.
"You're staring at me," he says, not looking up from his notebook.
"I'm glaring."
"If you say so, boss." He underlines something in his notes, and I catch a glimpse of his handwriting—messy, slanted, surprisingly legible. There's a doodle in the margin that looks like a shark wearing a tie.
"Don't call me boss."
"You are, technically, my boss."
"Then call me Covington. Or sir. Literally anything else."
He looks up and his expression is pure mischief, the kind that spikes my blood pressure. "You want me to call you sir?"