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ME: Please accept my apologies. I’m not quite fully awake yet.
CHLOE: I’ll let it slide this once. Please get to it. We have a forty-five-minute drive to the lake cottages this morning to meet with the construction crew, and I don’t want to be late.
ME: I’m never late.
CHLOE: We will be if we don’t leave in fifteen minutes.
Shit.
ME: We’re meeting them at eight????
CHLOE: Yes, sir. I did tell you that last night.
Fuck.
Clearly, I’d missed that.
Or perhaps I hadn’t wanted to listen, because unless the meeting was with someone in a future time zone, eight a.m. was bloody barbaric.
ME: Who approved that?
CHLOE: You did.
CHLOE: Please stop texting me and get ready to leave, sir.
Shit. She was right, of course. Sitting here texting her wasn’t getting me ready for work no matter how much I protested it.
Being late on the first day wouldn’t bode well, and I abhorred tardiness.
I quickly finished drying myself and opened the wardrobe to take out my suit, including the shirt Chloe had ironed on Saturday during what I had a feeling was merely the first of her domestication lessons.
I was already regretting trying to cook us breakfast and burning those fried eggs.
I should have kept my domestic incompetence hidden for a little longer. I was fairly sure she was determined to make a househusband out of me.
What that had to do with making my next secretary happier, I couldn’t begin to guess.
Next secretary.
I froze, clutching my tie in my hand. I didn’t want to think about that. It wasn’t as though Chloe was the first secretary I’d ever had, and I was relatively sure I could survive without her in the office, but that didn’t mean I wanted her to leave.
There was a reason I’d been an arse and not accepted her resignation all this time.
No—I hadn’t even acknowledged it, no matter how creative she’d gotten with her attempts to get it in front of me. Even when she’d written ‘Please look at my letter’ on a little Post-It note that she’d stuck on my computer screen.
I’d tossed the letter in the bin and tucked the Post-It in my drawer for my own amusement.
I stuffed my tie in my pocket and grabbed my phone on the way out of my room. If I lingered here any longer, she really would yell at me, and I didn’t want to get this Monday off to a bad start.
I already suspected she was going to corral me out of the door the moment she laid eyes on me.
I ran my fingers through my still-damp hair as I headed downstairs. “What are—”
Chloe stared at me from the very bottom of the staircase. “Oh, good. You’ve saved me a trip up there to fetch you, sir.”
“This feels like déjà vu. Haven’t you done this before?”
“Waited at the bottom of a staircase for you? Yes, I did it last December for the Christmas charity gala at the Harmann Hotel because you were running late.” She took a step back and held out a travel mug. “Coffee. There’s no time to drink it here.”
