Lucien (2 page)

She picked up a folder from the top of the stack she had to muddle through before clocking out and arranged the papers on the tray next to the monitor. “I’ll tell you what she was thinking. ‘Government, I don’t need no stinking government.’”

Elise threw down the mutilated pen cap and grabbed a fresh one. “Ha! It’s all that nonsense preached about at The Guiding Light of Gaia which has brought the tax police down on her.”

She moved the mouse and clicked open the file where she kept all of Luc’s notes on the computer. “Well, Moonbeam, let’s see Gaia get you out of this one.”

A bright burst of lightning flashed outside the window and the lights in the building died as a resounding explosion rocked the corporate office. From somewhere in the middle of the cubicle farm, a co-worker’s blunt, explicit curse reverberated between the walls.

Papers slipped from the tray and floated down into her lap as Donna in the cube next over asked, “Elise, do you smell smoke?”

Lights flickered and the air conditioner groaned back to life.

Elise’s jaw dropped as a tuft of smoke unfurled from her computer. “Oh my goodness.” She looked straight up and said fervently, “I didn’t mean it, Gaia. Honest I didn’t. I’ll never say another bad thing again. Just let me keep the hard drive. Please. I was so close to being finished,” she finished in a pathetic whisper.

“Elise,” Lucien Masters, her boss, called from behind her. “Have you finished the notes from this morning?” He was back from lunch and, more than likely, ready to dictate more changes to his plan for the financial reconstruction of Andersen Corporation.

She swiveled in her chair and gazed up into his clean shaven face. The fear she felt must have been written all over her expression, because his blue-green, grayish eyes moved, looking over her shoulder to the sizzling computer. She cringed inwardly as his relaxed appearance transformed into his patented Lucifer look. His attention fastened on her face and his jaw tensed, along with his shoulders, his hands, and in all likelihood the rest of his body.

“Tell me it’s not as bad as it looks,” he ground out.

She hesitantly lifted her shoulders and picked up the papers from her lap, holding them with a white knuckled grip. “It’s not as bad as it looks. We’ve still got the hard copies.”

There was a loud crack from behind her, then a hiss.

“It’s gonna blow,” Donna cried.

Luc lunged forward and yanked Elise bodily out of the chair. “Someone get a fire extinguisher before the sprinklers go off,” he ordered. He snatched up the folders from the desk and thrust them into Elise’s arms. “Not a word,” he warned.

Her knees shook and she clutched the folders to her stomach then sank to the ground. Her mother owed five hundred thousand dollars or more to the government. Her brother was selling his motorcycle. Her computer was on fire. Her boss was mad at her. And Elise had lost six months’ worth of work on a project which Luc had informed her yesterday would be completed within a few days.

Life couldn’t get much worse than this.

“Elise, where are the notes from the meeting with Hayworth?”

On my fried computer
, she nearly answered aloud. “They’re under that stack over there,” she said, pointing to a pile on the corner of his desk.

“I looked there,” he said. Luc ran a frustrated hand through his chestnut brown hair and cursed under his breath. He pushed back his chair and surged to his feet, then leaned over the desk to rifle through stacks of folders.

Elise set aside his laptop computer and went to help him. “I put it with the files from your Tuesday talk with Smithers.”

Luc spared her a glance. “In the same folder?”

“No,” she explained patiently. “It’s in one of its own. I know I brought it in here. It was on my desk before Gaia destroyed by computer.”

“It wasn’t Gaia. It was lightning. And it wasn’t your fault,” he muttered. “So don’t start apologizing again. You heard Jim explain why it happened to your computer and no one else’s.”

“I heard, but that doesn’t mean I believe him,” she retorted sharply. Jim, the computer guru, had assured Elise that the destruction of her computer hadn’t been her fault, but the result of a direct hit to the transformer outside the building. Jim had gone on to say that since her computer was the first one set up on the network, it’d been the first to go. And the only one. Jim had called it luck.
Whatever
.

Elise knew it’d been Gaia’s revenge. She’d been singled out by Mother Nature for doubting
Her
ability to help Moonbeam. Rule number one when dealing with Pagan gods and goddesses: Don’t irk them. Pay back is heck. None of this waiting around mumbo jumbo. They were swift and direct. Elise was paying for her blasphemy and then some. Having to work with a grumpy Luc was a punishment all unto itself. She wished he would just go home and take a nap. His bad mood was rubbing off on her.

The tab of a vanilla folder peeked out from underneath a mound of papers. “There it is. Lift those and—” Elise touched the folder and the precarious stack on his desk shifted. “No!”

Luc uttered a curse and scrambled to catch the pile as it slid for the floor. “Got it. Pull out the folder. Do it slowly, Elise.”

She sucked in a deep breath and eased the Hayworth notes out. “Luc, it would be safer if I just went home. Gaia is punishing me.”

“As much as I’d like to send you home, you can’t leave yet. We’ve got to organize this mess. Tomorrow I need you to sit in on a meeting with Andersen.” He righted the stack and held out his hand for the notes. “Just go over there and sit down. Next time I ask where something is, point.” He must have noticed her annoyance, because he added in a sugar sweet, Southern drawl, “Please.”

Elise glared at him, then spun on her heel and stalked back to her seat. When Lucien Masters resorted to his country boy charm, she knew she was in trouble. In trouble of melting. When she’d been asked to move from Roger Dill’s boring office to Luc’s temporary one, Elise had been an idiot to agree. Luc was an overachieving, work-a-holic. Oh sure, he was vocal in his appreciation of her help, but the work was grueling. Not only that, but he was tall, lean, and sexier than he had a right to be. And he knew it. Arrogant man. He didn’t flaunt his sex appeal. Luc didn’t need to. It showed in the way he carried himself. The confidence in his walk, the breadth of his shoulders, the angle of his jaw, the arch of his brow, the knowing gleam in his sinfully wicked eyes, the firm, sensuous lines of his mouth, the velvety roughness of his… voice.

Elise swallowed hard and summoned forth an irritation she no longer felt. It did little to erase the heat her errant thoughts had caused. Blasted man. Thinking about him as a man instead of a boss never failed to elicit a response which both excited and mortified her. Having an infatuation for Luc was one thing, but being attracted to a man who was engaged to another woman was completely unacceptable and downright annoying.

She plopped the laptop onto her thighs and settled her fingers over the keyboard. “The next time you ask for something, I’ll draw a danged map.”

Luc sighed and dropped into his seat. “Do that.” He swiveled his chair and returned to pounding numbers on his keyboard.

Her fingers flew over the minuscule laptop and she stifled an exclamation each time her fingernail hit the wrong key then snagged in a groove. The wretched thing was out to rip her nails. She wouldn’t be having this problem if Luc would let her use a computer which was normal sized.
But noooo
, she drawled sarcastically in her mind, Luc was afraid she might summon up another electrical storm and blow up another computer. That and every twenty minutes he made her save the file to a flash drive and hand it to him. Glancing at her watch, it was almost time for another annoying, ‘Save it, Elise.’

She didn’t need Raven to take out Luc. She’d do it herself. Working her like a… lowly minion of hell. Maybe he didn’t have a personal life, but she did. She had a stack of books at home waiting to be read along with countless shows recorded on the DVR that were probably no longer on the air.

He was so smug and arrogant and… demanding. Elise get me this. Give me that. Make a copy of this. Did you call for that? She conveniently left out the fact that he’d remembered her birthday with flowers and he’d taken her out to lunch several times to thank her for helping him.

Her nail snagged in the keyboard and ripped. “Damnation,” she uttered with feeling.

Elise was more upset with herself for ignoring his good deeds—such as, walking her out to her car every night they worked late, listening to her comments on his project, complimenting her on her efficiency and accuracy when typing up his notes, bringing her breakfast on those early mornings before a day full of meetings, and, probably the best of all, noticing when she bought a new dress, or earrings, or trimmed her hair. As much as she would like to make him into the evil boss she wanted him to be, he wasn’t. He was, she sighed to herself, the best darn boss she’d ever had.

Luc snickered. “Damnation?”

“Yes. As in eternal damnation and hellfire.”

“Another Lucifer reference?”

Elise barely managed to refrain from groaning. “No. I am not
going to give you the satisfaction of another Lucifer reference.”

“Too bad. Some of them weren’t half bad. What was it you called me? Hell’s overlord who wields his lucky pen like it’s… what was that last part?”

Her good opinion of him disappeared and her irritation returned full force. “I don’t remember,” she lied.

Elise remembered the incident clearly. The blasted man had overheard every word of a private gripe session after a particular grueling day during the first month of their master-minion work relationship. He’d snuck up behind her in the break room and listened to her hushed mutterings when he was supposed to have been in his car and on his way back to his lair.

Luc repeated the phrase, trailing off at the part she wished he’d forget. He knew exactly what she’d said. He just wanted to hear her say it again. Well, she wasn’t about to repeat the words. Suffering another bout of Gaia’s wrath would be easier than to recall those mortifying words she’d hissed in a fit of real temper.

He tapped his pen—his lucky pen which had put the fear of termination into every employee at Andersen Corporation since its arrival—against the desk. He knew it annoyed her. Just as Elise knew her habit of chewing on pen caps irritated the daylights out of him. Oh, but how she longed to get her teeth on his pen and gnaw it to death.

“Hell’s overlord who wields his lucky pen like it’s…?”

Tap. Tap.
Tap
.

Enough!
Elise’s tolerance disappeared in a sulfurous cloud of smoke. “Hell’s overlord who wields his lucky pen like it’s his staff of masculinity,” she ground out, then lowered her head and furiously pounded on the laptop’s keyboard.

Luc laughed and the hairs at the nape of her neck prickled. “Staff of masculinity. How could I have forgotten that? You could have just said—”

Her cheeks burned red hot. “I made that up before I knew you liked to beat your lucky pen against the desk.”

He turned in his seat and smiled the smile that never failed to raise her body temperature a hundred degrees. “And it was that particular phrase which made your habit of sucking on pen caps all the more bearable.”

She glared at him and his smile widened. “Don’t make me get up and come near your desk, Lucien Masters.”

“Getting up and coming near my desk are the least of my worries,” he replied in a husky, Southern rumble.

Her whole body flushed and she stammered for a retort. He always did this to her. A look, a phrase, a casual brush of their arms and she was a useless female being trampled by a stampede of butterflies in her stomach. “Gaia should punish you for that.”