Entry-Level Mistress - By Sabrina Darby Page 0,3

of body that belonged to a man who was active and athletic but had never tried to bulk up. He was about a decade older than me and yet he was without doubt the most attractive man I’d ever been within five feet of.

He knew my name and he was asking me to lunch. If that didn’t add up to having been made, I didn’t know what did. I wanted to run but I had to brazen this out.

I crossed my arms, affected an air of nonchalance that I didn’t feel at all.

“Do you invite all your newest employees out to lunch?”

“Do you look at all your bosses that way?”

The way I had looked at him? What about the way he had looked at me?

“You’re my first boss,” I bit back quickly, hoping the heat I felt didn’t show in my cheeks. How exactly had I looked at him?

“We hired you without a track record?”

I wanted to stamp my feet at how easily he caught me off guard, twisted my words to serve him. Instead, I arched an eyebrow. Tilted my head. “Should I be worried for my job?”

He smirked. I sucked in a breath. The man was wickedly handsome. It wasn’t fair. Especially since I resented him. Hated him. He’d sent my father to jail.

There … attraction almost all gone.

“No. I don’t invite all my employees to lunch. But I’m inviting you.”

Almost.

Chapter 2

He drove a Porsche, which wasn’t all that surprising, and in some ways the smaller car made sense with how difficult it is to find a good-sized parking spot in Boston. I didn’t even have a car, hadn’t in the four years I’d lived there. His was manual, and he drove it like he loved to drive, even with the stop-and-go traffic.

There was no way I was going to be back at the office in an hour. Not with the usual Boston crush and Hartmann driving in the direction of the pier. Even worse, every single person on the third floor, and the security guards in the lobby, knew I was having lunch with Hartmann. If I actually cared about office politics, I would be mourning the loss of my reputation and under-the-radar newbieness. As it was, I was gladly trading in the certainty of office rumors for the chance to excavate beneath Daniel Hartmann’s cruel exterior. Or handsome exterior. Handsomely cruel?

Of course, I had no idea what we would talk about. Perhaps I could dazzle him with the scintillating details of my Excel document skills.

Of course, if this was the shakedown and he wanted to know why Mark Anderson’s daughter had taken a job in his marketing department, I’d have plenty to say. I was already biting back the thousand caustic references to my lineage on the off chance that I could still damage his life in some way, that he hadn’t already made the connection between me and my father. Maybe after so casually ruining my father’s life all those years ago, he’d put my whole family out of his mind. Maybe that model from Brazil had helped him forget.

Which brought up another issue, wasn’t he dating someone? A model again. Tatiana from the Czech Republic.

Daniel kept up a casual patter as he drove, pointing out other restaurants and buildings, or random pieces of information that clearly he considered safe territory. Through it all I managed to respond with words other than monosyllables, but inside, I was a jumbled mess. A week into this job and I was sitting next to Hartmann. In his car. He had even commented on the way I’d admired his body. Heat rushed through my body again. How much more embarrassing could life get?

The conversation paused after we stepped out of the car. In tense, anticipatory silence we walked down the wooden boardwalk of the wharf to an average-looking Italian restaurant. Why this particular place? Was it some sort of underground hot spot I’d just never heard of before? Maybe it was hip among the professional crowd. Or the villainous billionaire crowd.

Yeah. Maybe there was a dungeon beneath, or at least a watery grave.

He held the door open for me, almost negligently. Any of the boys who had held the door open for me in college had done it as a show of manners, nearly comically. As I slipped past him into the restaurant, I could smell the faint spicy scent of cologne. Just enough to be appealing, to make me want to move closer and know the scent of