“Wanted to talk to you—week performance review, remember?”
“Oh…sure! Give me ten minutes, OK?”
“Sure! I’ll be in my office.”
“Sounds good!”
I took a deep breath as I leaned against the door. Fucking hell. A pressure radiated from my crotch, and I glanced down to see I was nearly fully hard. I pinched my upper leg, hoping to distract my body as if I were some horny kid who’d been called up to the blackboard at school. When my hard-on was gone, I went back to my office.
The moment I was seated at my desk, the image of April, nearly nude, appeared right back in my mind. Of course it did.
She was fucking beautiful. April was possibly the most gorgeous woman I’d ever laid eyes on. But seeing her like that—aside from the problem of the embarrassment—wasn’t what I needed. Now my mind had something real to work with, and it was going to be even harder to get her out of my thoughts.
Just great.
I ran my hand through my hair, shaking my head in frustration and disbelief. And now I was going to have to see her again, right away. I could’ve put off the review, but that would only seem weird.
After trying, and failing, to busy myself with some work, a knock sounded from the office door.
“It’s April.”
“Come in.”
She opened the door and stepped through. April wore the same jeans she’d had on when I’d seen her, but now with a white blouse on top, the fabric thin enough that I could make out the faint outline of the now-familiar blue bra. My cock twitched to life as she entered and sat down, and it took all the restraint I had not to undress her with my eyes.
“Um, sorry again about that,” she said, a tinge of red forming on her cheeks.
I cleared my throat. “No…it was my fault.”
She glanced up, smiling faintly. “How about it was both of our faults? That way we don’t have to worry about it.”
I allowed myself a smile of my own. “That works for me.”
“Still,” she said. “It might’ve been a nice gesture for you to have your shirt off when I came in. You know, to make things even.”
However red her face was before, her realization after she’d spoken the words took it to a new extreme.
“Um, sorry!” she shot out. “Bad joke.”
“Good joke,” I said.
She appeared relieved. Lucky for me, I was good under pressure.
“Anyway,” I said. “Your performance review.”
She straightened up her back and folded her hands on her lap, attentively watching me.
“You don’t have to be so tense,” I said. “If you’d been doing a bad job, you wouldn’t even be sitting there—would’ve let you go long before this meeting.”
“Good,” she said. “Because I’m eager to hear what you have to say.”
“Nothing but good things. You’ve only been here a week, and Willa’s already crazy about you. The two of you hitting it off?”
A big smile spread on her face. I loved it, seeing her like that, knowing it was because of my daughter.
“Hitting it off like crazy,” she said. “That’s such a special little girl you have, Mr. Ryder.”
“Jason, please.”