Fire & Brimstone (Neighbor from Hell #8) - R.L. Mathewson Page 0,1
find the little pain in the ass showing everyone the uniform that she’d ordered behind his back.
“I love it!” Abigail, his bar manager, gushed approvingly, further pissing him off because there was nothing wrong with the fucking uniforms that he'd designed tens years ago!
“It's about damn time,” Tim said with a smile that quickly disappeared when he spotted Lucifer walking towards them.
“I think this will go a lot better with the new…” Rebecca started to explain only to let her words trail off with a resigned sigh when he grabbed her and threw her over his shoulder. “Didn't we talk about the manhandling?” she asked as she settled in over his shoulder, getting comfortable as he walked back to his office.
“We need to have a little chat,” he calmly explained, deciding that there really was no need to yell and ruin this momentous occasion.
“Another one?” she asked, not sounding particularly worried as he carried her back to his office, pausing only long enough to kick the door shut behind him before he deposited his unwanted waitress in the rickety old chair he saved for just such an occasion. With a sigh of his own, he returned to his desk, satisfied that everything in the world was as it should be.
He sat down, cleared his throat and opened his mouth to recite the speech that he'd been working on since the moment he’d realized his mistake hiring her, but after a slight pause he took a long, satisfying breath, deciding to savor the moment.
It was a mistake and part of him knew that when he’d decided to do it, but after five long years of hell and bullshit he hadn't been able to help himself. After all the crazy bullshit she’d brought into his life he'd wanted to savor that one precious moment when he finally freed himself of her.
“I was hoping to talk to you this morning,” his own personal reminder that hell did in fact exist, said as she stood up and walked around his desk, but this time he’d been prepared and had stacked a large pile of folders on the corner of his desk earlier so that she couldn't-
“What the hell do you think you're doing” he demanded as she simply walked past the large pile of folders he'd stacked on his desk to keep her off her customary spot and hopped up on his desk.
Right. In. Front. Of. Him.
“Nothing,” she said, shooting him a frown as though he was the one that had lost his goddamn mind.
“Move,” he bit out between clenched teeth as she lazily crossed one leg over the other, leaned back and grabbed-
“Please tell me that you're fucking kidding me,” he said when the crazed woman reached back and grabbed the clipboard that had helped make his life a living hell over the last five years.
He still wasn't sure how she did it, but whenever she felt the urge to see if he was willing to do ten to life behind bars for manslaughter, she pulled out that damn clipboard. She never carried it around, but it always seemed to be within reaching distance, something that had driven him nuts until he realized that he was allowing this small, plump pain in the ass to have that much power over him. Once he’d figured it out, he'd forced himself not to care that she was able to pull that fucking torture device from thin air and ruin his whole fucking day with just a few key, “points.”
“I had to switch Jen to the morning shift, because I have an appointment this morning. But, I should be back in time for the lunch rush,” she began, trying to prolong the inevitable and bringing this whole thing to a new level of fucking pathetic.
“There's no point in you coming back,” he explained before finally adding, “you're fired.”
“Uh huh,” she mumbled absently, clearly ignoring him, which unfortunately for her was one of the things that pissed him off the most about her.
Well, to be honest he hated a lot of things about pretty much everyone. Except for his family. He tolerated them, because he had to or his mother would probably beat the shit out of him.
Then his father would, of course, feel obligated to kick his ass for upsetting his mother.
Then his brothers would try to kick his ass. That is, if he survived the ass whooping from his father, which wasn't likely. So, for self-preservation, he tolerated his family.