AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You know this is crazy, right?” I shoved out from behind my desk and walked right over to the dartboard on the wall. I pulled the darts out and started throwing them. Hard.
“You call it crazy; I call it creative,” she countered as I continued throwing.
“I can find a different woman to bring to every event if I want, Mom. You know I don’t do that.”
My mom knew that I never brought dates to these things. It was one of my personal rules—no public appearances with someone I wasn’t serious about. That person and the public always got the wrong idea.
She tsked me, her head shaking. “Not a different woman, Joseph. Just one. One girl for all the events you attend, or I will find one for you.”
“The press is going to have a field day with this,” I mumbled under my breath.
They’d been hounding me for the last five years, printing questions and starting rumors about why I always showed up alone at Social Month events. They called me the Anti-Playboy, New York’s Loneliest Bachelor, questioned whether or not I even liked women—spoiler alert: I do—Casanova’s Other Brother, Bad Romeo, Clearly Not a Ladies’ Man, the Un-Seducer, Not Don Juan, Second String, and my personal favorite, Not-So Prince Charming.
“Wonder what they’ll call you now?” The sly grin covering her face made me want to punch a hole in the damn wall.
Was this some kind of joke to her? Messing with my personal life wasn’t funny, not in the slightest. I wanted to be left alone… to work and close the deal I’d been working on for the better part of the last year. The last thing I needed was to show up at Social Month with the same woman on my arm and send the press into a frenzy. I absolutely did not have the time to handle that kind of crap while running a multimillion-dollar company I was trying to expand.
“You’ve lost your damn mind. You know that, right?” I cracked my knuckles, wondering how the hell this was an actual conversation I was having.
“Sometimes, the people we love need a little push.” She extended her hand from the couch, and I walked over to her, reached for it, and helped her up. She stood tall and brushed out the invisible wrinkles in her skirt with her hands.
“This is more like a shove. With a long fall that’s not going to end well,” I breathed out, my heart racing in my chest.
“You never know; you might find true love.” She pulled me in and squeezed me tight.
“The woman I’m already dating isn’t going to like this,” I lied through my teeth and wondered just where the hell that had come from.
My mom pulled away quickly and measured me with her eyes. “The what? Don’t toy with my heart, Joseph.”
I cleared my throat and took a step back from her. “I’m not. I’ve been dating someone for a little while now.” I continued the lie for no good reason other than I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
“Who is she?”
“You don’t know her.” I avoided making eye contact, peering past my mother’s inquisitive gaze and straight at the wall.
“Well then, I look forward to meeting her.” She patted my cheek before turning on her heel and walking out of my office.
UNBELIEVABLE
JOSEPH
Instead of finding something to throw against my wall, I shouted for my assistant, knowing she’d help me see reason and keep me calm. “Kaylaaaaaaaa!”
“I’m coming, jeez!” she yelled back as she hustled into my office, notebook in hand, and closed the door behind her. “Stop shouting like a crazy person. You’ll scare people,” she chastised me before asking, “Couch or desk?”
The question had become one of our routines even though I never responded with couch and she knew it.
“Desk,” I bit out, annoyed.
All five foot two inches of her hurried to one of the two chairs opposite of mine and sat, tossing the notebook on top of the aged wood with a loud thud. “What is the matter with you? Why were you yelling?” she asked, and I continued wearing a hole in the floor instead of sitting. “Stop pacing and sit already,” she demanded, and instead of glaring at her like I wanted, I begrudgingly moved to my chair.
Bossy Kayla had been hired as my assistant two years after I started as CEO. She was my eleventh hire. We were nearly the same age and had hit it off immediately even though I’d fought against interviewing her in the first place and almost had the whole thing called off. I had naively thought that hiring a woman close to my age was a bad idea, but every otherexperiencedassistant before her hadn’t worked out, and I found myself growing increasingly desperate.
Being the number one staffing company for high-level executives in New York City, you could imagine how ironic and infuriating it was to not be able to find myself someone worth a damn. I needed someone I felt comfortable with, who understood the way I thought about the business, who I could eventually trust implicitly, and who would make my daily life easier, not more complicated. Basically, I needed an assistant who wasn’t hell-bent on screwing her boss—i.e., me.
The best part about Kayla was that she had zero interest in me romantically—trust me, I sensed those kinds of things. And it wasn’t that she didn’t find me attractive—I knew she did, but that was as far as her feelings for me went. It was the same for me. She was pretty, but I didn’t want to sleep with her. I knew how vital she was to my daily operations, and I vowed to never do anything to screw that up.
Eventually, a genuine friendship had formed, and I’d found out later—much later—that she wasn’t attracted to men at all. She’d started to feel like family after our first year working together, the little sister I never had who actually did what I told her and let me boss her around.
