Needing Her

“You have a boyfriend, Maci?” Dakota asked as he rounded the corner into my office. “Oh, fuck this. Who is he?”

I groaned into my hands and stared down at my desk. “I don’t have a boyfriend. Dylan is being paranoid because I didn’t come in yesterday.”

“Yeah, where were you?” Dakota asked, but before I could answer, he leaned over me and paged the back office from my desk phone. “Maci has a boyfriend,” he stated. Not five seconds later, I heard my oldest brothers, Craig and Sam, ru

“Who is he?” Craig, the oldest, asked.

“No one, I don’t have a—­”

“Where’s her phone?”

I looked over to see Sam rummaging through my purse, so I pulled my phone out of my pocket before handing it to him. I wasn’t worried about them finding anything, because I had a password that would take them forever to figure out.

Sam looked at my phone in his hand before handing it back to me. “She doesn’t have a boyfriend, dumbasses. She wouldn’t give up her phone like that if she did.”

Ha. Win.

“Ask her where she was yesterday,” Dylan prompted, and both Sam and Craig gave me a suspicious glare.

“Where were you?” Craig asked.

“I went shopping.”

“Yeah,” Dylan interjected, “but she wasn’t at the mall, and won’t say where she was.”

Sam snatched the phone back out of my hand, and Craig caged me in the way Dylan had earlier. “Who are you hiding from us?”

“What’s your password?”

“Screw all of you! I’m not giving you my password. I told you what I was doing yesterday, and I don’t have a boyfriend!”

“You know we’re going to find out, Maci, you might as well just tell us now so we can get this over with.”

“Craig, there’s nothing to tell!”

“Either we give your boyfriend the message now, or he lives in fear of when we find him. Your choice.”

“Jesus Christ! There’s no boyfriend, no message needs to be delivered.” God! How long had I been hooking up with Bryce and I’d never had to deal with this, but one day of pranking Co

“Maci—­”

“Daddy!” I yelled, and let a slow, coy smile spread across my face when all four of my brothers froze. “That’s right, bitches. I just used the ‘daddy’ card.”

They all stood and crossed their arms over their chests as they waited for what would come next. Four pairs of gray eyes were plotting another intervention, or my “boyfriend’s” death. A ­couple seconds later, loud thuds could be heard coming down the hall until my dad appeared in my office.

“Boys, what in the hell is going on in here?” his deep voice boomed, and I couldn’t help but smile when all four of them subtly flinched.

“Maci has a boyfriend,” Craig answered for them.

Dad raised a graying eyebrow; but before he could respond, I pointed at Craig and said, “Now that’s a damn dirty lie. They’re harassing me because they think I have a boyfriend.”

“But you don’t?”

“Nope.”

He studied me for a second before turning around to go back to the hall. “If she says she doesn’t have one, then she doesn’t. In my office, boys.”

The boys all stood there glaring at me until Dad’s footsteps could no longer be heard. One by one, they all turned and began leaving. When only Dylan was left, he grabbed a box of paper clips off my desk, opened it up, and threw the contents at me.

“Are you serious?”

“I’m go

I shook out my shirt and listened as more paper clips hit the floor. “Real mature.”

Looking at the mess on the ground and under my desk, I sighed and lazily fell out of my chair to the floor to begin picking them all up. Crawling on my hands and knees under the desk to grab the dozens that had scattered there, I was just leaning back when I heard a soft laugh and froze.

“Do I want to know why you’re down there?”

I jolted up and back, but misjudged the distance and ended up smacking my head on the corner of the desk. My hands flew up to hold my head, causing me to drop all the paper clips I’d just spent minutes on picking up. When I went to sit back on my heels, I rocked back too far and kept going, falling into my chair, which rolled to the side, leaving me to hit my head on the wall as I fell back.

“Son of a bitch, that fucking hurt! Ow, ow, ow! Shit,” I hissed when I was fully, and safely, on the ground. “You don’t scare someone who’s under a desk, you motherfucker.”

“I’ve always loved that mouth of yours.”

My eyes shot open at the admission, and I found intense, blue eyes directly above my face. I’d officially stopped breathing. What’d he say?

Co

And let’s bring back the insecurities from last night. There’s nothing about me that Co

“You okay?”

“Fine,” I bit out. “Why are you here?”

He breathed heavily through his nose and drummed his fingers on the floor. “I came to check on you.”

“Well . . . looks like you did a helluva lot of good with the checkup.”

“It’s not my fault you’re prone to hurt yourself on every surface available and enjoy being on your back . . .” he trailed off.

“Fuck off, Co

“Where were you when I came over this morning?”

“Not in my apartment . . . ?”

A low growl built up in the back of his throat as he leaned back over me. “You knew I was coming over. I thought you were sleeping, so I let you sleep until I was done cleaning that shit up. By then, you should’ve been getting ready to leave for work. I went to wake you up, and surprise, surprise . . . no Maci. Where were you?”

“Oh, so I’m back to being Maci again?” When Co

“Stop acting like a child. You knew I was coming over this morning and you weren’t there. No note, nothing. I called you and you didn’t answer, I was worried about you.”

A short, humorless laugh bubbled out of my chest. “I can see you were really worried. It took you almost five hours to come check where I work from when you last cal—­” I cut off quickly and internally cursed for giving myself away.

His blue eyes narrowed. “I drove over here at eight, I saw your car here so I knew you were okay. Now. Tell me why you weren’t there this morning, and why you weren’t answering my calls, since apparently you knew I was calling.”

“That’s really none of your business, and I don’t know why it’s such a big deal that I wasn’t there. All you needed to do was clean up the polish—­that doesn’t require me being there, right?”

“It does, because I wanted to talk to you.”

Part of me was dying to know what he wanted to talk to me about. The other was remembering him calling me Mini, and balking at the idea of me thinking he liked my mouth. “Well I don’t want to talk to you. So if you could leave now, I’d appreciate it.”

Those intense blue eyes widened and he stared at me for a handful of seconds before shifting back and standing up. I scrambled awkwardly until I was vertical again, and fell into my chair. Trying not to show how much my head was still throbbing, I refused to grab my head again until he left.

“Why were you outside my door last night when Sadie came over?” he asked when he reached the door to leave. His back had been to me as he asked the question, but he turned to face me as he waited for my answer.

“I already told you la—­”

“I’m not buying that.”

“I don’t care if you are or aren’t. I told you why I was there, and you’re just trying to make it out to be something different than it was.”