“I didn’t think you wanted to talk to me, Christopher.” Allison reached for her mouth and covered it with her hand. She hadn’t meant to admit that much to him. It was embarrassing, and it made her feel vulnerable. No, she didn’t want him to know how she felt.
“Excuse me?” Christopher cocked his head. “Explain.”
Oh, he was being bossy, and that drove her so terribly crazy. Christopher was a shifter, which meant he’d be able to scent her arousal. She knew this perfectly well, yet despite how damn embarrassing it was that he’d be able to tell she was turned on, she was.
She was super turned on.
She liked it when he used his “work voice” on her. Somehow, when he talked to her like this, with just the slightest bit of force, it made her more wet than she’d ever been before.
Allison was no wilting flower. She wasn’t a virgin. She didn’t do shy or timid, yet something about him talking to her this way made her feel like it was all new, and she didn’t know what to expect next.
Now he was asking her to communicate. No, he was telling her. He was demanding that she be honest with him, and she wasn’t particularly sure that she was ready for that. Talking about her feelings wasn’t exactly something that she was good at.
Could she do it now?
She had to.
If she wanted him to trust her ever again, then she had to be honest. She had to tell him what she was feeling, and she had to explain to him why she was so very nervous around him.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she blurted out the words. They felt awkward and uncomfortable. “You still didn’t call me over the weekend, and I know someone tried to hack again.”
That had hurt.
The hacker had struck again, and once more, Christopher hadn’t called her. She didn’t plan on calling him out. She had just planned to solve the mystery without him. Then the bad guy had come into the file room, and she’d had to find a way to escape, and things had gotten a little...weird.
“How do you know that someone tried to break into our computer system?” Christopher raised an eyebrow. He didn’t deny it had happened. He just asked how she knew.
“Because Rebecca called me. She asked for my advice, and she said to be ready for Monday.”
“It wasn’t anything major this time.”
“Still, you didn’t trust me.”
“That wasn’t it.”
“Then what, Christopher? Why didn’t you tell me to come in?”
“Because you deserve to be happy!”
He spat the words out, frustrated. She didn’t have to be a shifter to know that he was agitated. Allison couldn’t smell his anger or annoyance, but it was clearly visible on his face. He was uncomfortable right now. Once again, he hadn’t wanted to bother her.
“Excuse me?”
“You deserve to have a weekend to yourself, Allison. You work so damn hard and you always put everyone else above yourself. You deserve to enjoy some time where you don’t have to worry about a single thing. You deserve to have the weekend to yourself where you can just be.”
“I don’t want to just be,” she whispered.
It wasn’t a secret that she loved naps, and she loved bubble baths, and she loved so many different things, but Allison was a grownup. She was the one who got to choose what she did or didn’t do.
Christopher had taken that control from her. He’d chosen for her. She understood, logically, why her boss hadn’t called her, but she thought it sucked, and it was a little shitty, and he was being a control freak.
“We’re supposed to be professional,” she said. Had he skipped calling her because of their feelings for each other? She knew that he liked her. She knew it. Maybe he was having a hard time dealing with those feelings, just like she was.
After all, he wasn’t just her boss. He was also the owner of an incredible company, and there was probably a lot of pressure for him to be a certain way. He wasn’t supposed to date employees. He wasn’t supposed to do a lot of things.
“I know.”
“You can’t keep doing this.”