The Wrong Boss: Chapter 8

I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to ignore the mounting frustration climbing up my chest. “We have an SOP for this,” I finally said, pleased that my voice was relatively neutral. “Why wasn’t it followed?”

The standard operating procedure for travel arrangements had been in place for years. I had a list of preferred airlines, flight paths, and seat choices. Everything was spelled out in detail so that I could fly wherever I needed to in comfort and most importantly, without losing any productivity.

The itinerary in my inbox had me landing at LAX just a few minutes before my meeting was supposed to start, and it had a connection in Atlanta. I’d lose hours of valuable work time with the extra layover, and I wouldn’t even be able to close the deal when I got to my destination. Wooing a bigwig producer in LA to hand over his wealth for us to manage didn’t work so well when you missed the only meeting you’d been able to secure.

“I’ll fix it,” Kaia assured me. She was the senior executive assistant at Hearst, Inc., in charge of the entire assistant pool that served the C-suite executives. “I’ll have the new itinerary sent over by the end of the day, and I’ll make sure your meeting with Mr. Trews is rescheduled.”

“Kaia.”

“Sir.”

“This is the third time Ms. Bronson has messed up in two weeks.”

Kaia straightened. Her dark-brown hair brushed her chin in a sharp line, swinging slightly as she dipped her chin. Her face was expressionless, features hard and sharp as she met my gaze. She’d worked for me since I’d moved over to work for my father’s company five years ago, and she ran the EAs with an iron fist. The company would be in shambles without her, and we both knew it. But that was no excuse to let standards slip. She swallowed and said, “I’m aware. It’s been a rough start, but Alison came highly recommended. I still trust⁠—”

“It doesn’t matter what you trust if she can’t live up to the standards we set here,” I interrupted, the frustration making another desperate bid for freedom as it pressed against the bounds of my control. “Thank you. Now send her in.”

Kaia’s eyes flared with panic, and her lips dropped open. “Sir. We’re short-staffed already, and Alison can still provide value if I task her with⁠—”

“She’s had her chances.”

“Her mother is sick, and she needs this job⁠—”

I held up my hand to forestall whatever came next. “Everyone needs a job. But not everyone can perform at the level required to keep one. You have a new hire starting today, yes?”

Kaia looked like she was about to protest, then rocked back on her heels and dipped her chin.

“Good. She can handle my travel arrangements while you deal with the staff shortage.”

“The new hire—I’ll need to train her, complete her onboarding,” Kaia replied. “I can’t just throw her straight in⁠—”

“To dealing with me?” I finished, knowing there was an edge of challenge in my voice.

Kaia clamped her lips shut. “We can’t just throw her straight in the deep end without training,” she finally amended.

“Sure we can.” I turned to my computer, dismissing her. “Sink or swim, Kaia. That’s how we’ve always operated.”

There was a tense silence, and then the quick clip of her footsteps took her out of my office. I let out a sigh, glancing at the email inbox flooding with new, urgent inquiries. One of them caught my eye—a fussy client who panicked at every dip in the market—and I clicked through to see what new fire I’d have to put out.

And my phone rang.

Glancing at the screen, I sighed, then swiped to pick up. “Darling,” I said. “It’s been at least two hours since you last called. Another emergency is underway, I imagine?”

“You are lucky I agreed to marry you,” my fiancée, Alba, snapped. “And yes, there’s an emergency. The wedding invitations just came in, and the gilding is all wrong. It’s yellow gold, Cole. I specifically asked for a neutral shade of gold to match our wedding colors. And there’s a typo! It says ‘attendence’ with an ‘e’! Can you imagine?”

“Wow,” I said, only half listening. The difficult client was threatening to withdraw his considerable fortune from our management. Not the first time, but this would require some coddling on my part.

What was the difference between yellow and neutral gold, anyway?

Alba huffed. “Between that and the florist messing me around, it’s looking like there won’t be a wedding at all.”

“That would be a shame,” I said, eyes on the email on my screen.

“I need you to call the printers and fix the wedding invites. They need to be sent out by the end of the day. Your father called and asked me about them just this morning.”

I blinked away from my screen and stared at the abstract artwork on the far wall. Even after years of building a relationship with the man who’d given me up, it was strange to hear him referred to as my father. And yet he was the reason I was here, in this office. He was the reason I’d met Alba, who was the daughter of one of his business associates.

Reaching out to my birth father had been a turning point in my life, and I knew I was lucky. He’d accepted me as his own, welcomed me into his family. He’d made me feel like I had a past—and a future. He’d helped wash away the hurt of rejection that had only started to make sense when I’d found out as a young adult that I’d been adopted and could finally understand why I’d been treated so differently than the siblings I’d grown up with.

He gave me a job. It wasn’t this job, but it was a high-level job at his wealth management fund, and I wasn’t too dense to realize that my rise up the ranks in four short years to this seat in the boss’s chair wasn’t solely due to my resumé. I was back on Wall Street after all these years, and I did know what I was doing, but my father had given me a huge leg up.

I owed him for that.

That evening seven years ago, in my apartment’s kitchen, he’d answered my call and offered to meet with me. Once I’d sent him the adoption paperwork and picture, he even sounded happy about the prospect. The fact that I was sitting in the corner office of his company, marrying his closest friend’s daughter, made me think his reaction had been genuine. He’d been hoping I would contact him.

I’d needed a push to finally reach out to him, which I’d found in the most unlikely of places—and everything had worked out for the best. Memories pressed at the edges of my mind—gray doe eyes, a body to kill for, and a sharp, irresistible tongue—and I repressed them. There was no use in letting myself go down that path again. Carrie had crashed into my life and disappeared again. Which was exactly how it should have been.

If it weren’t for her, I wasn’t sure I would have reached out to my father at all. I owed her for one sizzling evening together and a new direction in my life. That was a high enough pedestal; no use lifting her to higher heights in my mind than necessary.

But sometimes, I wondered if I was clinging to this father-son relationship a little too hard. Alba and I had had a whirlwind romance and were now planning a lavish wedding. My father had been thrilled by our engagement. His best friend and business partner was already calling me “son.” I had a family, a place in the corner office of my father’s business, and a beautiful fiancée.

But with every week that passed, I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted. I wasn’t even sure I loved her.

Which in itself just proved how fucked up I really was, didn’t it? I had everything a man could want, and still, I felt like I was unworthy. I kept waiting for the rug to get pulled out from under me, like it had been when I found out my parents weren’t my parents.

My father would turn his back on me. Alba would decide she was sick of my being so cold and detached. The business would crumble with me at the helm. All the friends and employees that I’d been loyal to would decide it was too much trouble to give that loyalty back.

“Cole?”

I blinked back to myself. “Why does my father care about the wedding invitations?”

“You know his closest friends are on the guest list,” Alba said, impatience nipping at the edge of her tone. “It’s a very bad look to send them out too late. For all of us.”

I sighed. “I’ll handle it.”

“Thank you,” my fiancée answered, mollified. “And if you get them fixed today, I’ll make it worth your while tonight,” she added suggestively.

I grunted in response. “Fine. See you tonight.” I hung up the phone and tossed the device on my desk, scowling at it.

I hated when she did that.

Alba treated sex like a commodity. It hadn’t always been this way—or at least, I didn’t remember it always being like this. I’d thought our attraction had been mutual. And yes, my father had encouraged me to pursue the relationship, and her father had done what he could to set us up together. But the attraction had been there. The connection had felt real.

But now, two years into our relationship and six months into our engagement, it had become obvious that I earned sexual favors by doing what she wanted. It was transactional. It felt…hollow.

My phone dinged—a photo from Alba. I opened it and stared at the shape of her reclined on the bed, black lace underwear hugging her curves. A little extra encouragement for you, she wrote.

Knowing she expected a response, I heart-reacted to the photo and set my phone aside. My chest burned, heat rising up the back of my throat. There wasn’t an ounce of lust inside me, which made me wonder if there was something wrong with me.

Well. I knew there was something wrong with me. I was a workaholic asshole who cared more about his job than the people in his life, other than a precious few. I was desperate to feel like I belonged, desperate to have a family, but I struggled to actually open up to any of them enough to form genuine relationships.

But Alba was gorgeous. She was nearly six feet tall and built like a swimsuit model. Blond hair down to her waist, curves that made men turn their heads, and a face to match. The sight of her wearing lingerie on a bed should’ve filled me with need. A year ago, it would have.

Now I wondered if she had a stash of sexy photos saved in case she needed to ask me for a favor. I wondered if tonight, to thank me for doing her bidding, she’d push my pants down and use her mouth to make me orgasm, then stand up, brush herself off, and walk away like she’d just finished cleaning a toilet or checked off an annoying chore on her to-do list.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

Was this what I wanted in my life? Really?

There’d been a time when I believed in something more than transactional sex. A night with a woman I barely knew, whose eyes saw right through to the heart of me. A woman who’d disappeared after reaching inside me and shaking me awake.

I had to stop thinking about her.

Seven years on, and I knew I’d never see her again. I didn’t want to see her again, because then it would confirm that I’d been seeing our encounter through rose-tinted glasses. My fickle mind had built that chemistry up into something that was bigger than reality. I was misremembering the fire that burned between us. I’d put her on a pedestal, and no good would come of meeting her again when my life was going exactly the way it should be.

A knock drew me out of my thoughts, and the short, sweet-faced Ms. Bronson stepped through the door. “You wanted to see me, sir?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

Frustrated at myself, at my fiancée, and at the employees who couldn’t seem to manage to do their jobs properly despite the detailed instructions and expectations I set out, I motioned to the chair across from my desk. “Have a seat,” I told her. “Has Kaia told you why I called you in here?”

Her shoulders caved in, and I hardened my heart against the thread of pity that tried to weave its way in. Why should I pity someone who couldn’t do the simplest of tasks? Why should I hold other people to lesser standards than I held myself?

This business relied on me being ruthless, on exploiting the thinnest of margins to make a profit. That meant only hiring the best. Anyone else had to be culled, early and mercilessly.

It wasn’t personal, and it never would be.