Page 12 of Violent Little Thing

I wouldn’t call her a best friend.

No one could replace Sonja in my heart. But I would say that Birdee was as close as you could get without crossing over that invisible line I’d placed in the sand.

“Do you think I could draw unemployment if I quit?” I asked Peter.

“Bummer.”

Peter was a baby macaw.

He had a vocabulary of twenty-two words, and a lot of those words were curse words.

He’d learned the word “quit” recently because that was the only thing I talked about when I was at home—quitting.

I hated working as the personal assistant to Chris Gates.

He was a pretentious, overbearing jerk of a man who thought he was better than everyone else when he wasn’t.

I probably could’ve dealt with his attitude if he hadn’t started dating my archenemy, Seraphina.

But then he’d started dating her, and I had to deal with buying Seraphina gifts as well as seeing her name in Chris’s calendar every day. Then she’d started to drop in at Great Dane, hoping to “steal a few kisses.” And I was done.

Now, Chris acted like he was madly in love with her while also acting like he’d drop her if I gave him the time of day.

I wouldn’t.

Not only because he was with Seraphina. But also because I didn’t necessarily like the way that he treated his employees. And not just me. I didn’t like the way he spoke to Herschel Shepherd, the co-owner of Great Dane. I also didn’t like how he treated Nicole, the head of HR.

I certainly didn’t like the way he treated me—there were only so many times you could accidentally touch someone’s ass before it became more than obvious that you were doing it on purpose.

Besides all of that, I’d been up for a raise at my six-month review, and I hadn’t gotten it because I “wasn’t amenable.”

Whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean.

Then, after he’d told me he wasn’t giving me the raise he’d promised when I was hired on, he’d started to pile so much onto my plate that I couldn’t finish in the time that the workday allotted me.

My watch chimed, signaling that it was time for me to leave, and I groaned because I hadn’t even put on panties yet.

I dropped down to the bed.

“I don’t want to go,” I grumbled to my stained ceiling.

My phone chimed, and I reluctantly shut the alarm off and sat up.

I stared at the wall of black, loose clothing that I’d purchased over the last year that I’d been working for Chris, and huffed.

Grabbing the first set of black dress pants and white top that I could find, I slipped into my underwear and then yanked on the shirt and pants.

I went with minimal makeup, threw my hair up in a messy ponytail, then said goodbye to Peter before heading out the door.

Instead of taking my truck today—it hadn’t started yesterday and I hadn’t had time to look into what was wrong—I hopped on my mountain bike and rode into town, then out of it.

By the time that I got to work, I was only a few minutes late.

It worked out well for me because I didn’t want to get here any earlier than I had to now, because if I did, I might run into Seraphina who usually rode to work with him every morning.

She worked in a building about a half mile from where Great Dane was located, working with her father doing nothing.

She used to run the Cowgirls, but something had happened and Beau had taken over from her.