With an opportunity of a lifetime to make her entrepreneurial dreams come true, Thea finds it getting increasingly harder to hide her attraction to her boss, Aiden Steele - not knowing that the man under all the cold layers has a secret worth millio...
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Jason and Jade left us two days later to go back to New York. I had been getting way too many emails to manage everything remotely within the 3 days we had been in Germany, I shuddered to think what would the state be when I would go back. It was one of the reasons I couldn't wait for Thea's plan to get into motion. Working remotely would become a piece of cake if she allowed me to extend the usages beyond schools to offices and other establishments. In my absence, Jason could look after at least some of the work, and well... he'd be away from Thea.
I couldn't help the surge of annoyance rise up in me when he made a whole display of hugging her while leaving, and my words to Thea seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. Or maybe she enjoyed riling me up again. Whatever the case may be, I would be better off not knowing the full nature of their relationship, but at the very least they could keep things professional when around others.
Like you know the boundaries of personal and professional.
I grimaced. From the second I'd stepped into her house I had crossed all my boundaries and thrown my rule book out of the window. No matter how much I wanted to convince myself that I had a good cause and a reason for my actions, I knew that my mind was muddled in ways that Thea couldn't even begin to imagine. A precisely good reason to push away whatever was brewing in my head: Thea didn't feel the same way. I saw it in the way she was always more comfortable around Jason, joking, hugging, fucking sunbathing...
That had been my personal hell. Thea wasn't carrying any swimwear with her, and she had to borrow something from Jade, which wasn't exactly ideal considering Thea had a more filled out chest than Jade, and the small damn triangles of fabric weren't exactly doing a lot of hiding as they were supposed to. She'd sat with Jason and drank and laughed and rubbed lotion on his back, while I had sat at the bar and tried to keep my eyes off her. But now Jason was gone and Thea was pouting the whole flight to Marseilles, and the next morning too as we headed for our first meeting on the schedule.
"It won't kill you to look a little alive," I told her as she continued glaring at me instead of absorbing the view of the beautiful city in front of her.
"Lead by example." She tossed a fake smile my way, and I sighed. Back to square one. It's always one step forward and then ten steps backwards with her, and often I was too lost to understand what page we both were on. At this point, maybe we weren't even reading the same book. We arrived at Schneider Electric's office a few minutes later, greeted by two men I'd never met before in my life. They were kind enough to arrange for a translator for Thea and Monica, saving me the trouble of doing the job for them.
"You speak French?" Thea whispered as we walked with the two men into the building, immediately noticing the hushed whispers falling down. The French weren't loud by any means, and I lowered my voice to match the environment, "Elective in school and then a lot of business here."
And there was that face again. My kryptonite. I'd not found the right word for that expression yet, but Thea's eyes would go wide, a huge smile on her face, the dimple in full prominence. It was somewhere between fascination and adoration, but the only reason why I hadn't figured it out was that she did not adore me, nor was she by any means impressed by anything I did. Whatever on earth that was, it was enough to make my blood rush, and I cleared my throat, looking away to avoid getting fixated on that.
