He shifted in his chair, slouching to hide the fact that he now had a steel boner.
A boner. In the middle of the goddamn day, in the middle of his boss's office.
Trouble. Plain and simple.
Trouble spoke. "Harold, I don't think Jared's ready to feel the love."
He sat up straight. What was that supposed to mean? He could feel the love if he wanted to. If he could ever figure out what the hell Harold was talking about.
Candy tossed him one of those sultry, open-mouth smiles that made him want to tug her full bottom lip into his mouth and suck hard. He dug his fingernails into his thigh.
Harold frowned. "Is that true, Jared? You're not ready to feel the love?"
He was ready to feel up Candy's curves. Did that count? Jared cleared his throat. "Uhh, what exactly are we talking about here?"
"I'm talking about the fact that we have exactly three weeks to get together the ad campaign for Chunk o' Chocolate, and you and Candy have barely spent an hour on it."
That's because he just about ran away every time Candy came near him. She scared the hell out of him. He had been forced to leave five years of hard work and a 401k plan behind him when he'd left his previous marketing firm, due to an unplanned encounter in the copier room with the big boss's secretary. Unknown to him at the time, that secretary was also the boss's girlfriend.
Work and sex didn't mix. Jared and women didn't mix. Every embarrassing and detrimental incident in his life could be traced back to a woman and his inability to control himself around them.
The buck stopped here. Or his dick, however you wanted to look at it.
He was not going to screw this up. Or screw Candy, no matter how much he wanted to taste those lethal lips.
"We can work on it whenever Candy likes." He avoided looking at her and focused on the bright yellow spot Harold had dyed on the front of his rapidly diminishing hair. It looked like a flashing caution light.
Caution: Middle-aged man approaching baldness.
Candy said, "Maybe you should assign someone else to work with Jared. I don't think he really likes me all that much." Her words were slow, and rolled, like a water drop across his skin.
That's where she was wrong. He liked Candy. Candy was sweet and lickable and belonged in his mouth, where he could swirl it around, sucking and tasting every delectable inch.
Harold clapped his hands together, startling Jared out of his erotic fantasy.
"See, that's what I'm talking about! Jared doesn't like you, and you don't like Jared. I can't have that."
Candy didn't like him? Jared turned to her in amazement. Well, hell, that hurt. It was okay if he was avoiding her, but she wasn't supposed to avoid him.
He was likable. He returned phone calls and held open doors for women. Of course, whenever Candy was around, he usually just grunted and bolted for the nearest exit. He supposed she might take that personally.
But what was he supposed to do? Tell her it wasn't her, it was her hot knockers that had him running like a cat from water? That was sure to go over big.
"I like Candy," he managed to say, not at all sure he wanted to know where Harold was going with this.
Candy laughed again, and he was suddenly aware of his poor word choice.
"Liar," she murmured. "But that shouldn't have anything to do with this client."
"It doesn't."
Harold studied them both and said, "I've noticed the tension between you two, and it's got to stop. It's affecting the rest of the staff. It's altering the feng shui state of the office. There are negative auras camped in my company, and that has got to go."
If Harold pulled out crystals and started chanting, Jared was out of there.
Not that he could afford to quit. As luck would have it, he'd bought himself a pricey condo right before he'd gotten canned from his previous job. The three months pounding the pavement had put a real dent in his assets. Another stint of unemployment and he'd be eating macaroni and cheese out of his car after the bank foreclosed on his mortgage.
"We don't want negative auras." Candy dropped her foot to the ground and smiled at Harold.
It made Jared suspicious. She never looked as if she was being sarcastic, yet he suspected she was. She was intelligent, and her ad work was brilliant, yet that brain was housed in a stripper's body.
He had the feeling that, if left alone, Candy could outmaneuver them all, leaving a string of drooling men in her wake as she deftly climbed her way up the corporate ladder.
Maybe he'd catch a glimpse under her skirt on her way up.
Jesus, he was hopeless.
"So Candy is willing to work on improvement. What about you, Jared? Do I have your word that you'll open your mind to a more natural unity?"
Sure. Why not. He had to say yes. This was his boss, no matter how off-the-wall Harold was acting, and he was still in charge. Jared didn't like macaroni and cheese, so he forced his mouth to open and say, "You have my word, Harold."
Harold beamed. He said, "Yesterday I had the best idea.
You're going to love this. There is obviously something holding you and Candy back, something that needs to be resolved." Harold put his finger to his lip. "We could be talking about a betrayal in a past life, I'm not sure."
Jared pressed his hand to his temple. If he'd had a past life, he'd obviously done something really shitty to have earned this torture in his present life.
"What did you have in mind?" Candy leaned forward as she redirected Harold.
"I've signed the two of you up for online couple counseling!"
Jared's head pulsed so violently he could swear he went momentarily blind.
"Oh!" Candy cleared her throat. "Well, that sounds like a great idea."
It wasn't a great idea. It was a stupid, asinine, garbage-can-full-of-crap idea cooked up by his boss who had temporarily lost his mind due to the onset of male pattern baldness.
"We're not a couple, Harold. We don't need counseling." He tugged on the pant leg of his black suit trousers and tried not to panic.
He didn't want some unlicensed Internet shrink telling him he had the hots for his mother or some other such sick shit.
"Yes, you do. There are unresolved issues between you, maybe some domination control problems from your past life, and I want this resolved before we lose Chunk o' Chocolate." Harold pointed to his computer, sitting on his large masculine cherry desk.
"You're all enrolled, ready to go. This is a three-hour session. You are not to leave my office until you've finished the session and given me the printable certificate of completion."
Jared couldn't breathe. Oh my God, Harold was locking him in the plush corner office with Candy for three hours? Alone? With a touchy-feely counseling session to muddle through?
Maybe he could suddenly develop a fever. Or trip and take his eye out on the corner of Harold's desk.
Trouble. Had he pegged her or what?
Candy watched the horror flash across Jared Kincaid's face with interest. He really didn't like her.
She had joked about it, but it was starting to bother her. Everyone liked her, especially men. She had been born a flirt, had always known how to work a smile and a hair flip. It was in her genes, passed down through the women in her family, and instead of fighting it, she had learned to embrace it.
Candy was proud of her femininity, but even more so of her brain. But just because she had that brain didn't mean she wanted to deny she was a woman. She liked wearing heels, and soft flirty dresses when the occasion warranted, and she liked the casual push-pull between men and women.
She liked to flirt, and she was good at it. Candy knew she in no way qualified as a slut, having slept with only two men by the age of twenty-seven. Nor was she a dick-tease as her ex-husband had once accused her. To her mind, you were a tease only if you let a man touch, then taunted him with no. You were a tease only if you promised him sex, then laughed in his face.