Lockdown with My Billionaire Boss - Sloane Peterson Page 0,2

white smile appeared across his lips.

I could feel my face turning beet red, my skin prickling, heating up like a car in the hot sun. My throat burned now, and I ripped my eyes back down, pretending to be entranced by something of vital importance on my computer monitor.

I gave myself a few seconds to try and collect myself, counting down in my head, One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…

I exhaled, and decided to risk peering back up over at him again.

His attention was once again away from me, fixed back upon my colleague’s screen.

I let out a deep sigh, either of intense relief or disappointment, and let out so much air I might have gone shooting wildly around the office like a balloon.

What the hell was that? I wondered.

Malcolm and I had had more than our fair share of interactions over the years. That was pretty much a given, seeing as I was a project manager at his hydra of a social media company, and had worked with him very closely on a number of Goldfinch’s most popular products. We had a very friendly relationship- maybe even a little bit more than friendly…

I mean, obviously I’d never thought that seriously about that sort of thing. He was a freaking billionaire after all, and I was- well, I was, like I said, pretty much just the boring career girl obsessed with keeping her life “on track.” There’d been plenty of times when you might have interpreted our interactions as flirtatious, going both ways. But I’d always just sort of associated that with the way Malcom Finch operated. He made you feel good, at ease in his company. He made you feel wanted, desired even. It was just good business.

I’d always taken it all in stride, never daring to let my imagination run wild with these kinds of fantasies. So why was he having such an effect on me all of the sudden? Was I really letting my newfound singleness, coupled with Dennis referring to our relationship as “settling,” make me think there was anything between Malcom Finch and I other than a healthy bond between employer and employee?

He was, in case I needed reminding, a billionaire, and could literally have any woman that he wanted. He did, actually- some gorgeous young model named Alyssa Muenzel, who was engaged to be his wife within a year’s time. There was absolutely no way I could compete with that, I told myself, and deluding myself into such a fantasy would hardly be the cure for the self-esteem issues I was having.

I tried to shake off the whole interaction, and entered my half-remembered login information into the dating app on my phone. I half-expected and half-hoped that I might be entering it in wrong, but alas, all the old ghosts of my former romantic life came shimmying back out at me from the screen.

The first thing I did off the bat was to open up my old profile picture, as one does. A pretty girl in her twenties with strawberry blonde hair and baby blue eyes stared smiling back at me. I had on a loose-fitting white crop top that showed just a peek of pale-as-moon midriff. I let my eyes follow the flow of my curves, and stared for so long at myself that I started losing track of what I was looking at.

Surely I was pretty enough- not the kind of woman a guy has to “settle” for at all. But then again- and I can’t believe I’m saying this- maybe looks just aren’t everything for some men. What if Dennis had been talking about some deep flaw in my personality, something I was totally oblivious to, and therefore had no way of controlling or improving upon?

My next mistake was to open my old chat logs on this app, and I very quickly regretted doing so. Between the abuse, the one word replies, and the unsolicited dick pics, I could feel myself tensing up as I scrolled, remembering what a dog-eat-dog place the hellish world of online dating had really been.

Maybe I was the one who’d settled, it suddenly occurred to me. Maybe I’d been so disheartened by all of this that Dennis had seemed like my knight in shining armor when he came along. As positively average as he was, I guess after a while even that seems like a pretty high bar to clear compared to the guys you meet on online dating apps…

“Hey there, Annalise. Working hard or hardly