Tempting the Billionaire by Jessica Lemmon

to her door, the more edgy he felt. Perspiration beaded his lip and he wiped it away, bemused. The last time he had a case of nerves around a woman was junior prom.
    He’d tried to keep a professional distance, but trying not to notice Crickitt only made him notice her more. He’d enjoyed discovering her little tics when she didn’t know he was watching. Like whenever she moved from notebook to keyboard. She didn’t drop her pen, instead resting it between her plush lips while she typed. Or what about the way she wound the writing utensil through her curls when she talked on the phone? Last he checked ink pens weren’t erotic. But as with the clunky mailbag she carried or the square-heeled loafers she wore, Crickitt had a way of making bland look damn sexy.
    And he wasn’t the only one of them struggling with boundaries. This morning she’d been salivating over a part of his anatomy well outside the “friend zone.” Even now, the memory made parts of him stand taller. At her door, he raised a fist to announce his arrival, stopping just short of knocking. Her door was closed? Crickitt never shut her door.
    Since she’d started working for him, he found himself following her lead, propping his door open more often than not. When he asked her why the “open-door policy,” she claimed the barricade would only slow her down. To her point, she did run around this place like her hair was on fire. He blamed the complimentary coffee bar down the hall at first, but seeing how quickly she fled after kissing him, he’d concluded warp was her normal speed.
    He lifted his hand again, but this time, Crickitt’s raised voice stopped him cold.
    “How can you say that?” she spat in a tone accusatory and hurting at the same time. “I buried nine years of marriage because you wanted out. You stopped loving me first. Don’t forget that.”
    Whoa. Shane retreated from the door, even as he felt a surge of protectiveness for her well up within him. But he didn’t dare go in. It was a private conversation and none of his business. He backpedaled to his office, watching her closed door for two more seconds before pulling his door to as quietly as possible.
    Forget you heard any of it, some part of him silently warned.
    At his desk, Shane leafed through his mesh in-box and found a stack of phone calls to return. He reread the same one four times without comprehension before tossing it aside and slumping in his chair. He couldn’t forget her words or the painful undercurrent in her voice when she said them.
    You stopped loving me first.
    The words echoed in his head once, twice, and just for kicks, looped a third time and kneed him in the nuts. Something about the phrase sent a graveyard chill over his skin, made him want to ignore the emotions that came with it. Ugly, banished, and best left in the dark.
    You stopped loving me first.
    It wasn’t as if he’d been close enough to a woman to commit the same crime as Crickitt’s jerk of an ex-husband. Shane made sure not to get to the point where deep feelings came into play. And because he always set expectations, the women he’d been involved with in the past hadn’t left brokenhearted, just pissed off.
    So, why were her accusatory words eating at him?
    Then he thought of his dad, and a shiver of hair stood on the back of his neck.
    Bingo! I think we have a winner.
    Shane shrugged, tried to dismiss the thought. But he couldn’t. The truth was he’d felt exactly the kind of betrayal Crickitt was feeling right now. He knew too well the consequences of love unreciprocated. And if his father was here, and Shane blurted out those same words, they’d ring as true and hit as hard.
    The fact was his dad couldn’t handle losing his mom, and after had turned into one rough, mean sonofabitch. Since his father’s death, he’d struggled to reconcile his father’s accusations. Surely, the man had known what happened when Shane was a kid was an accident. All Shane wanted back then was to