Stormy Night by Jade Stratton Page A

She normally slept naked, and in keeping with her nightly ritual, she sloughed off her remaining clothes – just a long T-shirt and thong panties – and dumped them on top of the pile of clothes in the corner of her bedroom. She wrinkled her nose in disgust: she didn’t consider herself a sloppy person, but she just didn’t have the motivation to keep the house clean all the time. It was just too depressing to face. I need to get a maid , she thought. You are a maid .
    Feeling tears well up in her eyes at that bitter thought, she crawled between the cold sheets (they were new; she had thrown away all the sheets Carl had ever touched) and turned off the light, hoping she’d have some wonderful dreams that would take her away forever.
    Instead, just as she was starting to fall asleep, the phone rang.  
    “Fuck,” she cursed. The only number on her phone that she had set to ring after 10PM was work. Groping for her phone, she managed to knock her alarm clock off the nightstand. “Fuck!”  
    At last, she grabbed the phone and hit the answer button. “Hello?” she growled.
    “Anne?” said a male voice on the other end. It took her a second to recognize it: it was Jack, one of the department’s computer dweebs.  
    “What is it, Jack?” She threw back the covers and got out of bed.  
    “Well,” Jack said, a little breathlessly, “Bob was here late and said I had to call you in.”
    Anne fought to rein in her temper as she turned on the light and began digging through the heap of clothes for some jeans. Don’t take it out on Jack , she told herself. It wasn’t his fault; he was just the messenger. Bob was the problem. He was one of the junior partners of the firm, and technically her boss. He wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, and was held in uniformly low esteem by everyone in the company who had a clue about how things were run. But he was unquestionably proactive: if he thought someone up the chain would look adversely upon his department, he started calling people in the middle of the night, usually starting with Anne. One of these days, Bob , she had promised herself more than once, I’m going to have your job and your corner office .
    “Who else is in?” Anne asked as she started to put on her thong.
    “Nobody, just me. I managed to get Bob to lay off calling in anyone else until you got here. It’s a problem with the Lanning account, I think the same issue that cropped up two weeks ago. You know, when you had me write a program to help you analyze the data.” He paused. “Anyway, I reminded him about that and convinced him to go home.”  
    “Thanks, Jack,” she breathed. “I appreciate you doing that.” With Bob gone, she could actually get some work done without him breathing down her neck every five minutes. “Okay,” she said, forcing herself to relax a bit. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
    “Sorry, Anne,” Jack said.  
    “Well, it’s not like I was doing anything, anyway.”

CHAPTER TWO

    When Anne got to the office she was in an even fouler mood than before. On the walk in from the parking lot, her umbrella had decided to give up the ghost, flipping inside out with a gust of wind, and then the keypad entry terminal at the building’s front door had refused to let her in. She’d had to wait a full five minutes in the pouring rain until a guard, who’d casually explained that he’d been on the pot, arrived to open the door for her. She was soaked to the skin, her hair plastered to her head and her T-shirt glued to her ample breasts, which the guard had taken his good old time ogling. She had wanted to stab him with the remains of her umbrella.  
    “Jesus, Anne,” Jack said as she came in. “You’re soaked!”
    Feeling like a wet wolverine, she was opening her mouth to bite his head off when Jack shot up from his desk and headed toward the storage room before she could say a word. Momentarily puzzled, she decided to ignore him, but gave him credit for his