Fooling Around (6 page)

Eric’s conversation was evidently getting more and more frustrating. She cringed slightly when he raised his voice, saying, “If you don’t get it in order by the end of next week, I’ll be finding someone else.”

She didn’t care to be yelled at, but it was likely to happen, given Eric’s attitude and the length of time she’d be working for him.

When Eric hung up, he sat and stewed silently for a minute, so Julie just waited for him to look up again.

He was frowning as he finally did. “What happened in here?”

“I straightened up a little.” She wasn’t going to apologize. It felt a lot better in here than it had before.

He took a swig of the water she’d brought him. “Okay. Whatever. Help me get through this stuff. I hate paperwork crap like this. I’m an ideas man. Not a details man.”

She had absolutely no idea what the piles of papers were or what he needed to do with them. Some instructions would have been nice. Kristin needed to come back here and give her some direction.

With no help in sight, Julie picked up one of the piles and glanced through it. “These appear to be contracts.”

“Yeah, my legal folks have already been through them. I just need to give them a final once-over and sign.”

“Okay. Do you want them one at a time?” She handed him the set of papers at the top of the pile.

If he was just going to be reading through contracts, there wouldn’t be anything for her to do but sit here and pass him each one. She was definitely going to need a chair.

She found a side chair that moved easily and brought it over close to his wheelchair, near the desk, where she could reach the next pile of papers.

She watched as Eric stared down at the first page of the contract he was holding. He was still sweating a little, but he probably wouldn’t appreciate it if she found a damp cloth and wiped his brow.

She amused herself for a minute with that image, until she caught him glancing up at her, his eyes narrowed in that way he had.

She hoped it hadn’t looked like she was laughing. He definitely wouldn’t appreciate that.

When his eyes lowered again, she noticed he appeared to have trouble focusing. He rubbed his eyes once, and he kept sighing and glancing through to see how long the contract was.

She’d looked discreetly at the pill bottles and seen that his pain medication was the heavy-duty stuff. Her father had been prescribed the same thing, and it had made him incredibly dopey.

It was probably hard for Eric to focus on details while he was on the medication.

She waited quite a long time, until he’d finally finished the first contract. He was frowning as he signed it and passed it back to her.

She picked up the second one on the pile. It was even longer than the first. “I could read them out loud,” she offered, “if that’s easier.”

“Yeah,” he grunted. “That would be fine.”

She started on the first one and realized she’d gotten herself into the dullest possible task she could imagine. Contracts were more tedious than any other reading, and there were at least eight of them to get through.

But she read them out loud as Eric closed his eyes and listened. At first, she thought he might doze off, but he never did.

There was one line in one of the contracts he didn’t like, but the others he signed. It took almost three hours to get through them all.

She had no idea what he was working on. He’d sold his share in his old company, but he was obviously starting up something else. The contracts seemed to be for technical and animation support, so she assumed he was working on a new video game.

Her throat was getting hoarse and her back was sore by the time they’d gotten through the other paperwork as well. Kristin had come in and out, occasionally interrupting with a question or piece of information, and at one point she’d brought in some sandwiches and fruit for their lunch.

“All right,” Eric said. “The physical therapist will be here soon, and I’m getting a headache. I have a dinner meeting tonight, so we’ll have to go out. Do you have something better to wear?”

Julie glanced down at herself, feeling suddenly self-conscious. He obviously didn’t like how she looked, which shouldn’t have bothered her at all. But it did. A little. She didn’t have a lot of clothes, but she could probably scrounge up something. “Yes,” she murmured, trying to hide how insulted she felt by the rude question and its implications. “Where are we going?”

“Kristin can tell you. Just get me some more water and then get out. I need some space.”

She bit back her response, which would have been that she was happy to give him as many miles of space as he wanted. She could bite her tongue for three months, if it was the way to earn the money he’d offered.

But it was going to be a long three months, and she was obviously going to have to bite her tongue a lot.

The man was arrogant, rude, thoughtless, selfish, and thoroughly obnoxious.

Maybe he would have been a little better if he didn’t have a broken leg, but she was pretty sure he still wouldn’t have been someone she liked.

The day ended up better than any day Eric had had since his skiing accident. He knew it was because of Julie.

He wasn’t sure exactly what she did, but she’d made his surroundings more comfortable and less irritating. She was also quiet and didn’t fuss over him, but she didn’t ignore him either and could somehow anticipate when he might need something.

How she did it was a mystery to him, but when they came home from dinner that evening, he was aware of having less of a desire to strangle people than he’d had every other day for two weeks.

The dinner hadn’t gone very well. Rayford was still digging his heels in about committing to any sort of partnership on the new game Eric wanted to develop, and Eric had exerted as much pressure as he could. He’d have to just wait and see.

Another thing he hated to do.

He’d always hated waiting and relying on other people to make the right decision. His father had been a tough man who’d never accepted anything but the best from him. Back in high school, Eric’s father had been his football coach. If Eric hadn’t done well enough in practice, his father would have him do extra drills after he came home. “You can’t rely on your teammates to get you there,” his father had said. “You have to make sure you’re a winner yourself.”

“Do you need anything else, Mr. Vincent?” Julie asked, interrupting Eric’s train of thought. She’d worn a black skirt with a gray silk blouse to dinner. Like everything else she seemed to own, the outfit was discreet and appropriate but faded into the background. She rather faded into the background herself.

It was one of the things he liked about her.

“Don’t call me Mr. Vincent, for one thing,” he said. “My name is Eric.”

“Okay,” she murmured. “Do you need anything else?”

He wondered if there was anything that would get her to react in a way other than that quiet calm. “I’ve got to get ready for bed, if that won’t make you uncomfortable.”

He didn’t give a damn what made her uncomfortable. He mostly wanted to see how she’d react.

She didn’t react at all. “It won’t. Are you ready now?”

It was after eleven, since the dinner had run long. Eric figured he might as well get the hassle done. “Yeah, I guess.”

They went into the room he was using as a bedroom for the time being, since he couldn’t make it up the stairs. The room was plenty big, but he didn’t like it. It felt small after his normal room, and the city views weren’t as expansive.

He should have put an elevator in when the penthouse was first being designed.

Shaking his head at his lack of foresight, he rolled himself over to the dresser to grab something to sleep in.

He’d put on decent clothes for dinner, so he shrugged off the jacket and then worked on the buttons on his shirt. As he was pulling off the T-shirt he wore beneath it, he said, “Don’t bother helping me or anything.”

“It didn’t look like you needed help yet. Did you need me to undress you?”

With his T-shirt in his hands, he checked her expression. He’d heard a lilt in her tone he hadn’t heard before. Was she actually being sarcastic?

Her passive expression appeared perfectly normal, so he couldn’t decide one way or the other. “Of course not.”

She picked up the clothes he’d tossed onto the floor. “You should just do your pants when you stand up to go to the bathroom,” she said. “No use going through the effort twice.”

He suddenly felt irritable again. “You think I’m capable of leaning over to pull up my pants with this fucking cast?”

She didn’t even flicker an eyelash. “Didn’t they give you a reach stick?” She’d evidently seen it lying on the dresser, since she went to pick it up without waiting for an answer.

He glared at her. “I hate using that stupid thing.”

“That’s probably because you haven’t practiced with it. Just try it out.”

She made it sound like he was too clumsy to make it work. He mostly just hated it because it was ridiculous to have to use a gripper stick at all. He was finding her less and less helpful as the evening passed.

She added, “You’ll feel better about the world if you can pull up your own pants.”

His shoulders stiffened as he processed her words. There was no way she wasn’t being sarcastic. As he watched, he saw her lip quiver just slightly. It was surprisingly attractive, but that wasn’t as important as the fact that she was laughing at him.

“Is there something you want to say?” he demanded.

She arched her eyebrows again in that way that looked perfectly innocent. “I’ve said what I have to say. I assume you don’t want me dressing you, do you?”

“That’s for fucking sure,” he muttered. He grabbed the crutch she positioned for him and wrenched himself out of the chair. He had no idea why he was so angry, but he wasn’t going to sit there while she gloated over him.

It wasn’t easy going in the bathroom. His cast really was a problem. It would have been for anyone. He was basically strong and agile, but it took forever to get his trousers off, go to the bathroom, and then use the damned reach stick to pull up the loose pajama pants he’d been wearing to sleep in.

His leg hurt, his lungs, his heart, and his whole body hurt when he finally managed to hobble out of the bathroom on the crutches. He hated the damned things even more than the wheelchair.

He collapsed back into his chair, noticing that Julie had been busy. His clothes were put away and his bed was turned down. His medication was on his nightstand with a bottle of water.

“Do you need help getting into bed?”

He hadn’t been planning to go to bed right now, but he was tired of her hanging around, making him feel stupid. He wanted to be by himself. “I’m fine. Just get out of here.”

Without another word, she left the room.

“I’ll call you if I need you,” he said as she disappeared.

She didn’t respond to that either, but he knew she’d heard him.

He sat for several minutes, wishing he were anywhere else in the world, wishing he hadn’t been so stupid as to go skiing that morning, wishing his world would get back to what it had been before.

He wanted to call Maddy, but it was too late to talk to her now. She would have been in bed two hours ago.

He was tired but not sleepy. He turned on ESPN and sat watching the scores update for a half hour, trying to focus on something he cared about instead of how helpless and useless he felt. Then he decided he needed a drink stronger than water, so he wheeled himself out of the room and into the living area, where his bar was.

The whiskey he wanted was in the upper cabinet, which he couldn’t reach sitting down. It seemed easy enough to prop himself up on the bar and reach for the bottle.

He didn’t have the crutches with him, of course, and he wasn’t going to wheel all the way back to grab one. He supported himself on the bar top and heaved himself up. He opened the cabinet and reached for the bottle, but his good leg buckled slightly as he was coming down, wrenching his bad leg in a way that hurt so much he let out a bellow.

He also dropped the bottle of whiskey.

It went crashing down onto the bar. Only the top broke off, but that was enough to send liquid all over the place, including all over his chest and abdomen. The bottle tumbled the rest of the way to the floor. The thick glass still didn’t break.

He was cursing and panting and trying to get his ass into the chair again when Julie came running out of her room.

She didn’t ask what had happened. She could see with her own eyes. She ran to the kitchen to get a dishcloth, and then she came over to start picking up the glass and mopping up the spill.

As he tried to catch his breath, he waited for the lecture about how he should have been more careful, how he should have called her to help, how he needed to take care of himself.

“It’s too bad the top broke off,” she murmured, picking up the bottle. “This is really good stuff.”

He couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d just up and slapped him.

“There’s another bottle up there,” he muttered, his leg still throbbing. He needed the drink more than ever.

She pulled a glass forward and reached up for the unopened bottle of whiskey, poured out a finger, and handed it to him.

He took a swallow, sighing as the liquid burned down his throat.

She was still wiping up the mess, and he watched her as she moved, suddenly realizing she was just wearing a little silk robe. It was a vivid red, with a pattern of birds and flowers on it. She’d barely gotten it closed before she’d come running out.

She seemed to be in decent shape, but her body wasn’t small and slender. She had full breasts and full hips, and the silk clung to them in a way that left little to the imagination. Her skin was fair, and the bright color made it look surprisingly lush. Her hair was loose, falling over her shoulders.

He was suddenly hit with a wave of attraction so intense his body reacted. Damn, she was gorgeous. Why hadn’t he seen it before?

“Do you sleep in that?” he asked, genuinely curious about why she was wearing something so sexy.

She glanced down. “No. I was about to get into the shower when I heard the crash. Did you cut yourself?”