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have noticed. I know that Kevin fucked up the Rockwell contract, tried to dump it on you so you’d take the blame, and then took the credit after you salvaged it.” Anne whirled around, her mouth open in astonishment. Jack stepped closer. “I know that you had to sleep with Brett to clinch your last promotion, even though your profit margin for the previous two quarters were higher than anyone else’s by at least fifteen percent, and Brett’s the Equal Employment Opportunity rep.” Her mouth opened wider. “And I know that you were passed up three times for your first promotion, even though you brought in more clients in half the time than the people who got those promotions.”
    “How the hell do you know all that?”  
    He laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. It was bitter, laced with irony. “Because I’m invisible, Anne. People talk around me like aristocrats talk around servants, like they’re no more than marble statues. While I crawl around under their desks or fix some stupid mistake they’ve made, they talk. They brag to one another, they’re on the phone with their wives and mistresses, they come on to the women in the office, who also talk, by the way. But they don’t talk when they think anyone who counts is listening, and I’ve never counted.”
    “That’s not true…” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she knew it was a lie. She had been just as guilty of seeing Jack, or not seeing him, as anyone else.  
    “All I’ve wanted, nearly since the first time I laid eyes on you, was to have a chance,” he told her, ignoring her last words. “This, what we had tonight…maybe it could lead to something more, maybe it wouldn’t. But I want to know , Anne. I at least want the chance to find out. Don’t you?”
    Of all the things she’d had to do in her life, the hardest one was for her to say, “I can’t, Jack. We can’t be together. Not here.” She turned away, unable to suffer the silent accusation in his eyes any longer. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got work to do.”
    Without another word, Jack scooped up his clothes and strode out of her office. Pausing at his cubicle near the back just long enough to get dressed, he left, the door slamming shut behind him.
    Biting back the tears, Anne sank into her chair, the sticky wetness between her legs now a cold reminder of what could have been something special before it was destroyed by reality. Letting the blanket fall from her shoulders, not caring that she was naked underneath, she focused her mind on the data displayed by her computer and forced herself to get to work.

CHAPTER SIX

    Anne rode up the elevator on Monday morning, fighting a constant onslaught of vicious butterflies in her stomach that threatened to morph into full-blown nausea. While she had managed to fix the mistakes in the account Friday night after Jack had left, she had been a complete wreck for the rest of the weekend. Alternately wracked with guilt and self-pity, both of which were unaccustomed emotions for her, she had gotten little sleep. She had wanted to call Jack and had picked up her phone half a dozen times to call the firm’s answering service for his number, but had never gotten up the courage to dial. You spineless bitch , she thought. It gave her some small appreciation for what Jack must have endured in his quest to ask her out. But even had she screwed up the courage to call him, what could she have said? As much as she wanted the same thing he did, a chance to see if they could be something together, she simply wasn’t going to risk her career. And I shouldn’t have to, dammit .
    But what she was dreading most this morning was seeing Jack. She was terrified that she’d give in to the urge to just take him in her arms and kiss him, right in the middle of the office where everyone could see. Fuck the partners, fuck everyone else. And she was equally terrified that she would do what the cold part of her mind wanted him to do: