One Night with her Boss
Read One Night with her Boss Online
Authors: Noelle Adams
One Night with her Boss
Noelle Adams
This
book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright
© 2014 by Noelle Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce,
distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.
Proofreading:
Vanessa Bridges,
PREMA
Romance
Anne’s
boss got into the office by 7:00 every morning, so she always tried to arrive
by 6:45.
This morning, however, was one of those
days when every outfit she put on looked frumpy. She normally thought she was a
basically attractive person, but occasionally none of her clothes seemed to
look good. So, after trying on half her closet, she settled for a pencil skirt she
would have liked if it hadn’t made her ass look too big.
She had to wear something, and she was
already running late.
It had already been a bad morning, and
she felt even more out of sorts when she parked in her normal spot in the
parking garage and saw Jake’s black SUV already parked two spots over.
It didn’t matter. Not in the slightest.
There was no reason she had to already be settled at her desk when Jake arrived
every morning, with her email and voice mail already cleared out so she could
focus on whatever was on the schedule for the day.
But she preferred it that way.
With a sigh, she climbed out of her ten-year-old
sedan, her ankle wobbling slightly since she’d worn her highest heels, since
they were the only shoes that worked with this skirt. Then she grabbed her
satchel and the cardboard tray of four coffees she’d gotten on her way to work before
she headed for the elevator.
Jake was standing in front of it,
talking on the phone. She was still a distance away when the bong chimed and
the doors slid open.
Since he was on the phone, she didn’t
call out to get him to hold it, even though it meant she’d have to wait for
another five minutes for the damned elevator to return.
Jake’s back had been to her, so she
didn’t think he’d seen her, but he was holding the elevator door open as she
approached.
He was still on the phone, and he
sounded exasperated.
She picked up her speed so he wouldn’t
have to hold the doors so long, but that was a mistake because she stumbled on the
last few steps, barely catching herself before the coffees all fell to the
floor.
So she was feeling rather flustered as
she stepped onto the elevator, smiling a sheepish thanks to Jake.
He nodded his acknowledgment, but was
clearly focused on his call. “Damn it, Stew,” he said into the phone. “It’s
your job to handle people like that.”
Stewart Hall was the manager of the shop
in San Diego. He was new to the role and still rather insecure about his
ability to handle problems, so Jake had to do a lot of hand-holding.
“No,” Jake said. “This is too important.
You can’t let him—”
He broke off, shaking his head and
muttering, “Lost the connection. Damn thing.”
“It’s not the phone’s fault.” She tried
not to smile at the way he was glaring at the phone, as if it had disconnected him
on purpose. “We’re in an elevator.”
He shot her a suspicious look, as if he
guessed she was trying not to laugh at him.
Jacob Woodward had been a professional
surfer with an impressive reputation for ten years until he’d busted his knee.
Handsome and talented, with a laidback charm, he’d gotten a number of a big
commercial endorsements. The knee injury had cut his career abruptly short,
though. She hadn’t known him back then, but everyone said he’d had a bad few
months, drinking himself into a stupor and acting out with dangerous stunts.
But he’d eventually pulled himself together and opened a surf shop in Malibu.
Instead of easing his way through the
rest of his life, resting on his laurels, he’d thrown himself into the new
enterprise, treating the shop like a real business venture instead of just a
beach hangout like some other retired surfers she knew.
He’d done so well that he’d opened two
more shops on the California coast a few years ago, and he was currently
working on national merchandising opportunities.
Anne had been with him for seven years,
and she’d been in love with him for at least two.
Jake was thirty-nine, with dark hair, gray
eyes, and a powerful build which was evident even beneath the business suits he
always wore so people took him seriously.
Not that he’d ever told her that was why
he dressed so professionally, even in a beach culture that didn’t require it.
But Anne knew him very well, and she understood that he didn’t want anyone to
think he was just some washed-up old surfer. So he wore expensive suits, he
drove an expensive car, and he leased an expensive office suite instead of
setting up an office near his first shop at the beach.
“We might need to go to San Diego this
afternoon,” he told her now, glancing over with gray eyes that always saw more
than his characteristically laidback demeanor indicated.
She tried not to make a face. She’d been
experimenting with online dating recently, as one of her efforts to get over
Jake, and she had a first date this evening. “Okay.”
“Is that a problem?”
For the twenty-thousandth time, she
silent cursed his acute powers of observation. He could obviously tell she
didn’t like the idea of the trip. “No. It’s fine.”
“How’s your car?”
“It’s working fine now. Your guy did a
good job.”
She’d had a clatter in her engine that
no one had been able to figure out until Jake recommended an out-of-the-way
mechanic he used.
“How much did he charge you?”
“Not very much. Thanks for recommending
him.”
“Sure.” The elevator doors slid open
just then, so he stepped out into the hall and immediately reconnected the
phone call with Stew.
By the time they’d reached their office
suite, Anne suspected the trip to San Diego was likely to happen.
Her date would have to be rescheduled.
A year or two ago, she’d entertain daydreams
about their work trips turning into romance, but she’d stopped torturing
herself with those kinds of fantasies
When Jake was working, he was all work.
And he was always working.
She was trying to juggle the tray of
coffees and dig her keys out of her satchel when Jake reached over to take the
tray from her hand. He was still talking on the phone, but he held the coffees
as she unlocked the suite.
It was a little gesture. No big deal at
all. Certainly nothing to feel soft about.
Any halfway decent person would have
done the same thing.
But her chest was feeling overly full
when she took the tray back from him.
He was distracted with his call, trying
to give Stew some advice about handling a difficult vendor, and he didn’t
immediately release the coffee.
So, for a minute, they were standing
about two inches apart, both holding onto the tray. Anne could feel the heat
from his body, smell the scent of his soap and his clothes, see the faint
stubble on his jaw, even though she knew he’d shaved this morning.
He met her eyes, and she lost her
breath, suddenly wanting to touch him so badly she could hardly hold herself
back.
He trailed off his sentence and lowered
the phone slightly, gazing at her with an expression that looked deep and
almost awed.
Then he asked, “Did you want something?”
She almost slumped in disappointment at
the prosaic question, but managed to murmur, “The coffee.”
“Oh.” He released the tray and returned
to his conversation.
She handed him the coffee she’d bought
for him—Colombian, black—and went over to her desk to get ready for the day.
Damn, she was an idiot, always letting
herself hope for no reason at all.
She’d worked for him for years, and he’d
never showed her the slightest sign of real interest. An intense look now and
then didn’t mean anything. Besides, he was her boss, and he would never make a
move on her—simply because of that.
Maybe a lot of men had no qualms about
having affairs with members of their staff, but Jake was not one of those men.
So she kept trying to put her feelings
for him aside and find another romantic interest, one there might be a future
with. She’d asked her friends to set her up, and she’d be doing the online
dating sites, but so far she hadn’t had much luck in finding someone who even
came close to Jake in her mind.
She knew Jake dated, but he hadn’t had a
serious girlfriend in a few years. She suspected he just didn’t want to invest
in a relationship, since work took up all of his time and energy. One day, that
would change, though, and she dreaded the day he fell in love.
Of course, it might end up being a good
thing. It might finally drill into her head the reality she should have
accepted long ago.
There was nothing in the world wrong
with her. She was smart and nice and competent and pretty enough on most days.
She had dark hair and eyes, a
slightly-too-curvy figure, and a generally healthy appearance with clear skin
and pink cheeks. Someone in college had called her appearance “wholesome.” Anne
would have preferred to be sexy and glamorous, but that just wasn’t going to
happen.
It wasn’t the issue anyway. The issue
wasn’t that she didn’t measure up. The issue was simply this.
Jake Woodward wasn’t the man for her.
***
A
couple of hours later, she was staring down at a printout of a new marketing
proposal and trying to decide whether she should tell Jake that some of these
ideas just sucked.
She’d gotten her degree in marketing
and, out of college, had made an intensive effort to find a job in the field.
That was right around the time when the economy had tanked, though, and
marketing was one of the costs that businesses were cutting. There were no
entry-level jobs to be had in this area. Not for her, anyway, since her résumé
was good but not great. Plus, she couldn’t move away since her mother had just
been diagnosed with cancer
So she’d applied for the job as
administrative assistant with Jake, thinking it would just be a year or so
before she could find the kind of job she wanted. She’d liked Jake in the
interview and thought she could work well with him. Jake’s business had been
starting to grow so fast he couldn’t keep up, and he’d needed her to bring
order to the chaos.
She was good at it, and she even enjoyed
her job most of the time. He was a hard worker and he expected the same from
his staff, but he was intrinsically kind and he treated her well.
But she’d always wanted to go into
marketing. And here she was, a couple of years from thirty, and she was still
hesitating about whether to give her opinion to her boss about the plans from
his marketing people.
This was not at all the career she’d
thought she’d have.
Caring for her mother had been her
priority for four years, until she died. Then Anne had thought she was really
satisfied as Jake’s assistant and hadn’t felt the need to move on. A few months
ago, however, after a pep talk from her friends, she had started sending out
résumés again. She’d had an interview with a marketing firm two weeks ago for a
job that was exactly what she wanted, but she hadn’t heard back about it, so
she assumed she hadn’t gotten it.
She was hardly a dream candidate, after
having spent seven years as an administrative assistant.
The phone rang, distracting her from her
brooding. It was Jake’s lawyer, so she told him Jake would call him right back.
Jake had left his office a half-hour ago,
when she’d been on the phone. She’d thought he was just heading for the
restroom, but he must have gone somewhere else.
She didn’t like not knowing where he
was, so she got up and started to look.
She knew he hadn’t left the suite, since
her desk had a view of the main door. Max, his financial guy, said Jake wasn’t
in the men’s room, so she checked out the conference room and the lounge area,
where he sometimes moved to stretch out his legs if his knee was bothering him.
He wasn’t there either.
He also wasn’t in Janice’s or Melanie’s
office, which left only one place in the suite.
Anne was shaking her head as she opened
the door of the file room.
He wasn’t supposed to be in here.
But there he was, kneeling down to
search through the bottom drawer of the file cabinet on the back wall.
“What are you doing?” she asked, feeling
a familiar wave of annoyance. Had he been in here looking for something in a
file for the whole thirty minutes?
He jerked in obvious surprise and looked
at her over his shoulder. “I need the sales receipts from last February.”
She let out a breath and walked over
toward him. “Well, you’re in the wrong cabinet.”
“I am not.” He looked frustrated,
rumpled, and absolutely gorgeous, kneeling on the floor in front of her in his
suit and red tie. “This drawer is for February 2013.”
“I know that, but the sale receipts
aren’t there.” When he looked like he was about to argue, Anne went on, “Would
you please stand up? You’re going to hurt your knee like that.”