Falling for the Boss

  FALLING FOR THE BOSS

  by

  J. Sterling

  FALLING FOR THE BOSS

  Copyright © 2022 by J. Sterling

  All Rights Reserved

  Edited by:

  Jovana Shirley

  Unforeseen Editing

  www.unforeseenediting.com

  Cover Design by:

  Michelle Preast

  www.Michelle-Preast.com

  www.facebook.com/IndieBookCovers

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Please do not participate or encourage the piracy of copyrighted materials. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-13:

  978-1-945042-40-9

  Please visit the author’s website

  www.j-sterling.com

  to find out where additional versions may be purchased.

  Thank you for downloading this book.

  I hope you enjoy my Fun for the Holidays collection!

  Sign up for my newsletter to get emails about new releases, upcoming releases, and special price promotions:

  NEWSLETTER

  Come join my private reader group on Facebook for giveaways:

  PRIVATE READER GROUP

  Other Books by J. Sterling

  Bitter Rivals—an enemies-to-lovers romance

  Dear Heart, I Hate You

  In Dreams—a new adult college romance

  Chance Encounters—a coming-of-age story

  The Game Series

  The Perfect Game—Book One

  The Game Changer—Book Two

  The Sweetest Game—Book Three

  The Other Game (Dean Carter)—Book Four

  The Playboy Serial

  Avoiding the Playboy—Episode #1

  Resisting the Playboy—Episode #2

  Wanting the Playboy—Episode #3

  The Celebrity Series

  Seeing Stars—Madison & Walker

  Breaking Stars—Paige & Tatum

  Losing Stars—Quinn & Ryson

  The Fisher Brothers Series

  No Bad Days—a new adult, second-chance romance

  Guy Hater—an emotional love story

  Adios Pantalones—a single-mom romance

  Happy Ending

  The Boys of Baseball

  (the next generation of Fullton State baseball players):

  The Ninth Inning—Cole Anders

  Behind the Plate—Chance Carter

  Safe at First—Mac Davies

  Fun for the Holidays

  (a collection of stand-alone novels with holiday-based themes)

  Kissing My Coworker

  Dumped for Valentine’s

  My Week with the Prince

  Spring’s Second Chance

  Summer Lovin’

  Falling for the Boss

  Christmas with Saint

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by J. Sterling

  ULTIMATUM

  UNBELIEVABLE

  PAYING FOR DATES

  NO EFFIN WAY

  WHAT DID SHE SAY?

  JUST SAY YES ALREADY

  FIRST—NO, SECOND IMPRESSIONS

  HERE GOES NOTHING

  IT’S NOT REAL

  MEETING MOM

  ALREADY FALLING

  CRAP WITH A CAPITAL C

  MUST BE THE VODKA

  END THE CHARADE

  HANDLING MY BUSINESS

  EPILOGUE

  Other Books by J. Sterling

  About the Author

  ULTIMATUM

  JOSEPH

  “I’m tired of the cold,” my mother said as she looked out my office window on the thirty-second floor.

  Without even glancing up from my desk, I knew she was staring at the snow-covered park across the street. New York had been ravaged by storms lately. A cold front unlike any other in past years blanketed our city with thick white snow. It was beautiful to look at, but it sucked to live in.

  My mom sounded almost bored, as if the city disinterested her somehow. To be fair, she probably was. I’d heard this particular sentiment many times over the years from her, but for some reason, it felt a little different today.

  “You always say that.” I finally looked up and waited for her to face me and make her point. I knew that she had one. I could sense it coming. My mother didn’t make unnecessary statements.

  She turned, as if on cue, her weathered blue eyes meeting mine, even with the Botox. “I do, don’t I?” Her lips curled up into a small smile and her face wrinkled with it.

  “It’s almost winter, Mom. We’re always tired of the cold. And then we’re tired of the heat in the summer. We’re New Yorkers; we’re not supposed to be happy.”

  My mother laughed as she nodded in agreement. “Fair point.”

  I waved my hand toward one of the couches in my massive corner office. “Sit down. Tell me what’s really going on.”

  “Am I that obvious?” she asked before following my direction without arguing and taking a seat, her legs crossing at the ankles.

  I stayed in the chair behind my desk and closed my laptop, so I could see her fully, giving her my devoted attention.

  Ever since my father had been killed on 9/11, it’d been me and my mom against the world. Losing him had been awful and ugly, and we were painfully reminded of it each year on its anniversary. Thankfully, it didn’t hurt quite as bad as it once had, but the memory still seared like a red-hot poker at times. I couldn’t watch any documentaries on what had happened that day without breaking down into hysterics. And TV shows or movies where buildings fell to the ground caused me to have mini panic attacks, where I fought to catch my breath.

  It’s not pretty, and it would be embarrassing if I gave a fuck. Which I don’t.

  That day had been mass chaos and panic, and if you hadn’t been in the actual city, you had no idea what it’d felt like to be here. Pictures and television screens were one thing, but nothing compared to seeing it with your own two eyes, being worried with your own heart, and smelling the air that I could never accurately describe.

  My dad had had a meeting with some finance guy at nine a.m.

  “On time is late,” he used to say, and I always naively agreed. That was, until getting there twenty minutes early had literally been the death of him. If he’d been on time, he would have survived. But no, he’d had to be early and stepped off the elevator on the one hundred first floor of the North Tower five minutes before it got hit by a fucking airplane.

  I heard the horrific sounds from my classroom that morning, but I had no idea what it was until all hell broke loose. All of our teachers were hysterical, and even Principal Rogers couldn’t stop crying in the assembly room, where we’d all been forced to gather and wait. Principal Rogers never showed any kind of emotion, except anger. That was when I knew it was really bad. None of us could check anything though. Cell phones had stopped working; the networks were overloaded.

  “Both towers were hit with planes this morning,” Principal Rogers informed us, and my twelve-year-old brain played it off like it wasn’t a big deal at first.

  An accident, I thought to myself. Why is everyone freaking out? The Twin Towers are massive. They’ll be fine. It’s not like they can fall. We all know they were built to stand.

  Another round of noise I couldn’t begin to describe engulfed us, and the ground started to shake. We all frantically looked around at each other, but no one said a word. It was eerily quiet. A room filled with teenagers, not one of us making a sound. Principal Rogers excused himself and returned quickly, his face pale, his hands shaking.

  “One of the towers just fell,” he announced.

  The assembly room exploded with cries and shouts. We all talked over one another, our utter shock apparent. Many of my classmates had parents who worked in the buildings.

  When my mom finally showed up to take me home, it was the first time I’d stepped outdoors since it’d happened. By then, both towers had fallen, and the sky was an unnatural shade of gray, thick with debris that hurt to breathe in. My eyes burned.

  “Your father,” Mom started to say, her hand squeezing mine way too tight as we walked across the street and toward the building where we lived.

  I was too old to be holding my mother’s hand, but I allowed it.

  I stopped walking. “What about him? Where is he?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  I pulled out my phone and tried to call him, but the networks were still fucked. When they did work, the calls went straight to voice mail, and we prayed that he was just somewhere and couldn’t reach us. Roads were closed. Mass tr
ansportation had halted. It wasn’t out of the question that he was simply out of reach and would walk through our front door at any moment.

  But when he still hadn’t shown up or reached out by evening, Mom and I made our way to where the towers had once stood, pictures of him in hand to put up just in case anyone had any information or had seen him. We weren’t the only ones. Hundreds had the same idea as we did, taping photos of their loved ones to walls with phone numbers, desperate for information that no one could give them.

  To this day, it was still the most surreal and horrific experience of my life.

  We’d eventually learned that not a single person from the company my dad had been meeting with got out alive. There was no way to exit the building after the plane hit. Every stairwell had either been destroyed or was filled with debris or packed with smoke.

  Dad never came home.

  And instead of falling apart, Mom stepped up. She ran our staffing business, overseeing the daily operations and making sure everything was in the same tip-top shape my dad had left it in. We both grieved in our own ways, but we weren’t alone. The entire country mourned with us, especially in Manhattan. It was helpful at times, but it was also exhausting. We couldn’t go anywhere anymore without someone asking if we were okay or without running into someone who was mourning a loss of their own, barely holding it together. We were forever bound to thousands of strangers by one horrible moment in time.

  After high school, I’d wanted to come straight here, to the company, but my mom had forced me to go to college, like she and my dad had always planned for. She didn’t want to take away my youth when so much of it had been stolen already in grief.

  I begrudgingly agreed with her but ended up dropping out after three years when I realized I was doing nothing but wasting time. My end goal had always been to run my father’s company, and I hated waiting for what felt like no good reason, except to party and get laid. I didn’t need to be in college to do either of those things. So, I left, came straight here, and learned more about my future than I ever could have by staying in school.

  I spent the next four years working in every department in the company, learning the ins and outs from each division’s standpoint. Creating relationships with the department heads as well as the employees was invaluable to me and paved the way for how I wanted to run things—with an open-door policy. My goal was to be the boss you could talk to, not the one you talked about behind their back. I wanted to be a problem solver, not part of the problem. It was the absolute best thing I ever could have done businesswise, and I’d been running Martin Staffing and Management for the last five years with my mother silently by my side. Her being here was more for show than anything else, and we both knew it, although neither one of us dared to say that little fact out loud.

  “I’m tired, Joseph.”

  Worry instantly filled me. My dad had said those exact three words the night before he was killed, and I never realized how much of a trigger they were until this moment. I pushed back from my desk and walked across the room.

  “Are you sick? Are you feeling okay?” I asked before sitting down on the couch next to her and taking her hand in mine.

  “I’m fine.” She pulled her hand away and patted my shoulder. “I only meant that I’m tired of being here and not doing anything else with my life.”

  I knew exactly what she meant. After my dad had died, it was like a part of her world had stopped turning, and all of the dreams they had shared seemed to evaporate, the way his presence did. At first, I knew it was because she was concerned about the company and all of our employees. She felt an obligation to make sure that no one lost their job and that all of our clients continued singing our praises and recommending us while remaining completely satisfied with our services. With ease, my mother oversaw every detail, caught each oversight, and handled the curveballs that clients threw at us. That became her full-time job until it was clear that she no longer needed to hold on with both hands; Martin Staffing and Management was going to be more than just fine with me at the helm. But by that point, I think my mom had forgotten that she once had dreams of her own. She’d lost her way during the detour my dad’s death had caused, and she had yet to get back on her own road.

  It was always part of the plan that I would take over and run the company, but we never intended on it being so soon. Life had taught me that it didn’t follow a script, especially not the ones we tried to write for it. To be honest, I loved what I did, but I would like my mom to have more of a life.

  “What are you saying exactly?” I needed to push her or else she’d never get to the point—at least not directly.

  My mother would hem and haw, hinting at what she wanted to do but never fully giving in to it. She had mastered the ability to talk herself out of anything before it was even a true option.

  “I want to travel. I want to see the world. Your father and I had so many plans for after—” Her voice broke, and she paused. “After he retired.”

  “I know. You guys used to talk about it all the time,” I said almost wistfully even though I wanted to keep my emotions out of it. It was hard whenever he got brought up.

  “We had a lot of plans.”

  “You can still do them, you know? And you should. You had a list once, remember?” I asked, talking about the bucket list of travel places that used to hang on our fridge underneath a Take Risks magnet. It’d disappeared one afternoon, and even though I’d noticed its absence immediately, I never asked about it. Until now.

  “I still have it.”

  I straightened in my chair. “You do?”

  “Of course. I just couldn’t bear to look at it every day. It’s in my dresser drawer in the bedroom.”

  For whatever reason, that little nugget of information filled me with relief. It made me happy to know that my mom hadn’t thrown everything in the trash, the way she had donated all of my dad’s things to charity before the dust settled. I had known it was hard for her to be surrounded by his memory, but it was hard for me to watch them all get handed out to strangers.

  “I came here to tell you that I have plans togo away. I’m going to travel for the next year”—she smiled wistfully—“if not longer.”

  “A year?” I said through my disbelief.

  “Or more,” she added again for clarification.

  My body tensed. I loved my mother, and while I enjoyed having my own space, the idea of not seeing her for a year or longer had me spiraling a bit. I had never, in my entire life, gone more than three days without seeing her.

  “Yes. But I can’t in good conscience leave if—” she started, but I cut her off.

  I knew exactly what she was going to say. “I’ve been running the company for five years, Mom. I’ve got this. Nothing will happen to our legacy or our employees or our clients. I promise you that.”

  “Joseph, you think I’m actually worried about you running the company?” She sounded almost offended.

  My breath caught in my throat. “If it’s not that, then what are you worried about?” I stood up from the couch and made my way back over to my desk. I was more comfortable there, felt more in command.

  “You. You’re an amazing CEO. You’ve far exceeded my hopes for the company.”

  “But?”

  “But …” Her eyes narrowed—she was clearly irritated because I’d interrupted her twice already. “Life isn’t just about work.”

  I stopped myself from growling out loud in frustration and annoyance. We’d had this conversation one too many times in the past, and I’d thought I’d stopped them from happening again. I was too busy for love and all the things that falling for a woman required.

  Women needed the kind of time and attention I wasn’t ready or willing to give. Take into account how hard it was for me to actually meet someone wife-worthy in the first place. Considering I was always here or at corporate functions, and you had the second problem. Plus, to be honest, I had no interest in relationships at this point in my life. That didn’t mean that I didn’t fuck. I did. But it was with women who knew we had no future and who had zero expectations from me. Kind of women versions of myself.

  Dating, marriage, kids were all something I wanted and saw for myself but further down the road.

  My mother knew that, but it still didn’t stop her from lecturing me. “You need a partner. You need a teammate. I don’t want you to be alone forever. This company won’t keep you warm at night. It won’t listen to your fears, or grow old with you, or share meals, take care of you, or love you back.”