Falling for the Boss Page 2

  “Mom, I know,” I started, ready to argue, but she wasn’t having it this time.

  Her entire demeanor shifted, her back straightened, and her face grew uncomfortably stern.

  “No, you don’t know.” Her tone made me feel like a little kid who had just gotten caught stealing the last cookie from the cookie jar after being warned ten times. “You need to want more from your life, and if you don’t start taking it seriously, I’m going to intervene.”

  “Intervene? What the hell are you talking about, lady?”

  My mother hated when I called her lady, and I snickered to myself as she clenched her hands together, feeling like I’d won somehow.

  “You know that Social Month is almost here, right?”

  “Yes,” I answered in a bored tone because it was the same thing every year.

  Social Month was thirty obnoxious days filled with industry events, auctions, benefits, and parties. Anyone in the staffing business who wanted to host any type of event did it during this thirty-day period; otherwise, you didn’t do it at all. It was absolute madness and sheer hell, and I fucking hated it, but it never seemed to slow down or end. No matter how many people complained about this period of time, it was those same exact people who booked the yearly events and insisted that you attend every one of them.

  When it had been suggested a few years back that we extend Social Month to happen twice a year instead of just once, I’d almost faked a heart attack on the conference room table to emphasize that Martin Management would not be participating at all if that happened.

  It stayed scheduled for one hellish month from then on.

  “If you don’t bring a date to the events, I’m going to bring one for you. And I do not mean any of those ladies you have on rotation who come to your house at night.”

  How the hell does she know about that?

  “I have quite a few women in mind that I think you’d actually like. I’m sure I can narrow it down, if need be.”

  If I had been drinking anything, it would have come flying out of my mouth with her ludicrous suggestion. “You what? You can’t be serious?”

  “Oh, but I am. I want you to find love. I want you to be happy.”

  “I am happy!” I shouted like a petulant child, but this was fucking ridiculous, and she had to know that. I wasn’t some guy who needed to be set up on dates by his mommy. This was absolutely insane.

  “I want you to be happy in more than just one aspect of your life. I want to travel the world and know that you’re here, giving your heart away and making memories of your own outside of these office walls.” She sounded legitimately sad, like I was disappointing her somehow by not settling down. “I don’t think I can leave otherwise. I can’t go away, knowing you’ll keep spending all of your days and nights here.”

  She had to be joking. I glanced around the office to see if there were cameras set up, recording my reaction. When I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, I let out an annoyed breath.

  “Let me get this straight. If I don’t bring a date to the events, you’ll provide one for me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  I looked at her like she’d gone half-mad because what kind of mother did this shit to her only son?

  “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 other experienced assistant 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 n
eeded 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.

  Sometimes.

  I filled Kayla in on what my mom had just informed me, and she started to laugh hysterically. She sat in front of me, her hand over her stomach, laughing her tiny ass off.

  “You think it’s funny?”

  “Little bit,” she said through her laughter.

  “Can you be serious for one second?” I demanded, and she tried to stop laughing, which only made her laugh harder. I folded my hands on top of my desk and waited while I glared at her.

  “Stop looking at me like that, or I’ll never be able to stop.” She pointed at my face, and I started laughing too.

  Kayla was the only person in the office who could get me to unwind and relax. I appreciated that fact more than I let on.

  Once we both calmed down, I exhaled a long breath. “Can you believe she’s doing that?”

  “Actually, I can.”

  I knew my face did little to hide my shock. Of all people, I assumed Kayla would be on my side, see things my way, like she usually tended to, and realize just how insane this request was.

  “You can?”

  “You have no life outside this office, Joseph. She’s your mother. She worries about you,” she explained like everyone in the world knew this fact.

  “There’s something else,” I said.

  “What else could there possibly be?” Kayla shrugged at me, still smiling.

  “I told her I was already dating someone.”

  I waited for Kayla to laugh at me again, but she only looked shocked instead, her mouth dropping open.

  “Why would you do that?” She sounded exasperated and concerned because she knew that my problem was about to become her problem as well.

  “I panicked!” I said, reaching for a pen and tossing it in the air before catching it.

  “Wait.” She pushed back from the chair and walked to my window, staring outside for three beats before turning to face me again. “Are you dating someone? You can’t be, right? There’s no way that I wouldn’t know about it.”

  “No, I’m not,” I clarified, and she sat back down in her chair.

  “Okay, so who did you tell her you were dating?”

  “I didn’t specify. I just said it was someone she didn’t know.”

  Kayla flung her hands together in prayer pose and leaned into them. “We can work with this. Just give me a second to think.”

  “How? It’s not like I can tell my mom that you and I are dating.”

  “Ew, why would you tell her that we were dating?” She threw her hands down and looked up at me, her expression almost disgusted. Any normal male would have been offended, but I was clearly not normal.

  “I didn’t tell her we were dating,” I said again.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean ew, like you’re gross to look at or anything.” She waved a hand toward my face. “It’s just that …” She was flustered, and it was funny, actually watching her squirm for once. Kayla was always fairly composed and let things roll off her back. “I think of you like a brother, and she has to know I’m gay. Right?”

  I ignored the last question because I honestly wasn’t sure what my mother knew about Kayla’s personal life. “I feel the same way, Kayla. Calm down.”

  She narrowed her eyes before doing as I asked and inhaling a long breath.

  “How am I even supposed to meet someone? I’m always working. Most women don’t like coming in second to a career. And the ones who don’t mind it, I’m not interested in.”

  Kayla grinned. “You mean, you don’t want a pretty little thing on your arm to parade around town and make all the other boys jealous?”

  “A trophy wife?” I scoffed. “Definitely not.”

  Kayla stopped smiling and grew serious. “I know. I can’t see you with someone like that.”

  I lifted my head and met her wide brown eyes straight on. “Who can you see me with?” I asked, wondering what kind of impression I gave off in her perspective.

  She shrugged her shoulder. “I’m not sure,” she said, but for some reason, I didn’t quite believe her. Maybe it was the shit-eating grin that suddenly appeared on her face.

  “I think that’s part of the problem,” I started to overexplain. “I’ve never really thought about it either.”

  “I’m aware. They don’t call you the Not-So Prince Charming for nothing.” Her eyes practically rolled right out of her head at the use of one of my trademarked nicknames.

  “You know, I’ll never understand why being single is such a bad thing. If I was bringing a different woman to every event during Social Month, they’d print a bunch of shit about what a womanizer I was. And not in a nice way.”

  “Yeah, but they’d secretly worship you for it too,” she added before I could keep talking.

  “No shit. Why is that?”

  “Because it makes you hard to tie down. Like, you’ve had soooo many women, so who will be the one to actually capture your heart? And what makes her so special?” She mimicked like she was conducting an interview. “We’re a fairly messed up society when it comes to love and what we consider romantic.”

  I wished I could disagree with her, but it was true.

  “For the record, I like that you don’t bring random women to the events. Your penthouse is another story.” She stuck out her tongue like the thought made her sick and she might puke all over my desk.

  “And there’s only two of them,” I defended.

  While I didn’t have the time or desire for a real girlfriend, I still had needs and wanted good sex. The women on my speed dial did as well. They were both incredibly successful females who were looking for love about as much as I was. The relationship was mutually beneficial. No strings. No feelings. No public appearances. Fuck and leave.

  “Would any of them do this for you?” Kayla asked.

  I shook my head so hard that I thought it might fall off. “Not a chance. And somehow, my mother seems to know about them as well, so that’s off the table.”

  Kayla slapped a hand on the desk with a loud pop. “I swear I did not tell your mom about those women. But back to the point.” She started tapping her pen on top of her notebook. “I think your mom is serious about this, so we only have one real option.”

  Leaning forward, I placed my elbows on the desk and gave her my full attention. “I’m all ears.”

  “We have to find you someone and make your mom think you’re happy, so she’ll go on her Eat Pray Love trip.”

  She flipped open her book and started scribbling quickly as I tried to make sense of her words.

  “What the hell is an Eat Pray Love trip?”

  Kayla waved me off. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Do you have any ex-girlfriends from college that we can pull from?”

  “Pull from?” I had no idea what the hell Kayla was talking about. Sometimes, I swore that females had their own language that only they could understand.

  She leveled me with a look that screamed for me to keep up. She snapped her fingers at me. “I’m trying to make a list. Girls from your past? Anyone we can ask to do this for you? Do you a solid? A favor? Do y
ou get what I’m saying?” she asked like I was the dumbest male on the planet.

  I shook my head. “My mom would never buy it being anyone from my past. She wouldn’t believe it for a second. It has to be someone that she doesn’t know.”

  Holy shit. What the hell am I doing? I can’t believe that I am not only actually entertaining this idea, but contributing to it as well.

  “This wouldn’t be so hard if you actually wanted to fall in love,” she chastised.

  “You’re one to talk,” I chastised back.

  For as much shit as Kayla gave me, I didn’t see her prancing around with a serious girlfriend or a ring on her finger either.

  “Hey! At least I try. I go on dates every week,” she answered with a snarl, and I couldn’t hide my shock. “And I think I might really like the girl I met last weekend.”

  “How the hell do you meet so many girls anyway, Sanderson?”

  Sometimes, I called Kayla by her last name. She always pretended to hate it, but I knew she loved it. I’d overheard her on the phone one time, telling someone that it made her feel like she was part of a team.

  Groaning, she said, “It’s called dating apps, genius. You should try one.”

  “Not gonna happen.” I wasn’t opposed to dating apps for other people, but there was something about them that didn’t appeal to me. They were the very last thing I could ever see myself doing.

  “Well, how did you find the women you sleep with now?” she asked.

  I realized that I’d never really talked about this with Kayla before. While she knew far more about my life than anyone else, that always felt like crossing the line. I hesitated before she prodded.

  “Just tell me. I know everything else about you.”

  I huffed out and said it all in rapid-fire before I could second-guess and stop myself. “One lives in my building, and the other one is an old business associate.”

  “How convenient.” She sounded a little annoyed while I sat there, surprised that she could even understand what I’d said in the first place. I chalked it up to another one of her female superpowers. “Well, for the rest of us, we have to use dating apps. Do you know how hard it is to meet someone?”