Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 108636 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 543(@200wpm)___ 435(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108636 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 543(@200wpm)___ 435(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
Because I, Juniper Perry, have been keeping a big one.
For over a decade, I’ve been crushing on the guy with the easy smile, warm brown eyes, and charismatic charm. He’s all the perfect things that, when you add them up, spell out Man of my dreams.
I know that doesn’t sound bad at all, but there’s more to this story...
We work together. I’m a lowly intern, and he’s a high-powered executive.
He’s my newest neighbor. No joke—he’s temporarily living next door to me.
And to top it all off, he’s my best friend’s older brother.
I’ve spent what feels like an eternity keeping my crush on him a secret, but recently, I’ve found a way to have him and my anonymity too. A way to chat and flirt and get close to him.
My best friend doesn’t know about these Midnight chats.
And he doesn’t know I’m the girl he’s talking to night after night.
Beau Banks might be completely off-limits, but what happens at Midnight stays between us.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
I’ve dreamed about the day Beau Banks would notice my pussy.
I’ve had years—a decade, even—of fantasizing about my best friend’s older brother perceiving me as more than an extra appendage of his younger sister, Avery. Years of wondering what it’d be like to have him put me and sex in the same stratosphere, and instead, I have no choice but to settle for this.
His dad—my boss, Neil Banks—asking about the cat filter that’s covering his face during a very important virtual meeting. But instead of just saying cat, he keeps saying pussycat over and over and over, while Beau and a dozen other important people from my new place of employment, Banks & McKenzie Marketing, look on.
And no, as much as I wish I were, I’m not dreaming and I’m not high.
This is happening, live and in color—beet fucking red, specifically.
“I’m a pussycat, Juniper. Do you see I’m a pussycat?” Neil asks, confused why his face isn’t his face.
“I see, Mr. Banks,” I answer, fighting like hell to keep myself from falling into the black hole his son sucks me into whenever he’s around. Right now isn’t the time to focus on Beau’s warm brown eyes or sexy dark hair or the way his expensive gray suit hugs his most perfect shoulders and biceps. It isn’t the time to wonder if his hands would feel just as good on my skin as they look sticking out of the cuffs of the sleeves of his expensive white shirt.
I have a cat-filter emergency to worry about, and as the seconds tick by without my doing something about it, it gets more and more out of control.
Every time Mr. Banks speaks, a cat’s mouth moves on the screen while the Hughes International execs watch on via Zoom. A Zoom I am responsible for setting up.
Just moments ago, my focus went to shit when Beau strode into the conference room and found an empty seat at the massive table, and my gaze is still trying to keep track of his every move. But Neil is getting more and more unhinged as he tries to figure out how to remove the whiskers and fur and pointy cat ears from his face.
“Why do I look like a pussycat, Juniper?” Mr. Banks asks from his fancy leather chair at the head of the table where I stand directly beside him.
Inadvertently putting a funny filter on your boss for an important meeting is bad enough, but his calling the kitten a “pussycat” is making it irrefutably worse. I didn’t know anyone still used the word without being facetious, but I guess that’s what you get for assuming.
Ass, meet me, Juniper Perry, brand-new marketing intern extraordinaire and the next resident of whatever the nearest spot to the earth’s crust is.
“I’m trying to fix it,” I assure Mr. Banks, silently cursing myself when my eyes wander from the screen of the laptop in front of us to Beau for a flash of a second. Clearly, when it comes to him, I have no control. It’s a wonder I’m not actively fantasizing about how his mouth would feel on me right now.
Annnd now I am…
Great, Juniper, just great.
“Why am I a pussycat?” Mr. Banks asks yet again, seeing as I’ve yet to master his daughter—and my best friend—Avery’s computer settings enough to get it turned off.
I swear, I’m going to absolutely throttle her for sticking me with this Zoom responsibility with no warning this morning. She all but shoved her laptop into my hands as we were heading out the door and told me she’d meet me at work.
She’s still not here, by the way.
“Your pussycat is cute, Juniper, but it’s not ideal for this meeting,” Mr. Banks comments, and I can actually feel my face heating up beneath my skin.
“What? No. It’s just a funny filter, Mr. Banks. Avery must have been messing around with it,” I explain in a panic as I hit the escape button. Surely ending this Zoom and having to start over is no longer the worst-case scenario when my boss keeps talking about my pussycat in front of a room full of people.
But nothing happens. The screen is frozen up.
“A filter?” he questions. “Of your pussycat?”
Someone save me.
“It’s not my cat,” I say through a tight throat, my face hotter than the surface of the sun. I don’t dare look up at anyone in the room as my fingers gently tap the touch pad of the laptop in an endeavor to move the still-frozen cursor. “It’s just a funny filter of a random cat.”
Mr. Banks edges in, pounding his meaty Boomer clubs on the keyboard like that’s somehow going to fix it. In reality, even with his grayish-white hair, he’s more of a Gen X-er than a Boomer, but his lack of technological savvy is wildly Boomer behavior.