Dear Boss: A Single Dad Office Romance (Forbidden First Times Book 3)

by Sofia T Summers

  But then he’d done it again, and again. And again. Until he stopped apologizing and started saying that it was my fault, that I did this to him, that I just made him so angry he couldn’t control himself. Putting all the blame on me until I almost—but not quite—believed him.

  Not all of me could believe him, though, and that was why I had squirreled away the money and prepared to get out. I’d known he would probably kill me if he caught me, and that wasn’t an exaggeration, so I had planned carefully for months. Waited until his guard was down, and played the dutiful, loving girlfriend as much as I could. Then, when he was going to be in Vegas for a friend’s bachelor party, I ran.

  I drove into Texas, and then up into Oklahoma, then went west and didn’t stop until I got to Los Angeles and hit the ocean. I’d already found the person there that I wanted to find, someone in Venice Beach who was able to help me. Their work wasn’t exactly… legal, but I hadn’t been able to go through the legal channels. Those kinds of things could be traced. So this person had changed my name for me—for a hefty price, of course—and now on my passports and driver’s license and all that, it said Trudy Potter.

  Of course my real name was Trudie Harris, my first name spelled with an ‘ie’ instead of a ‘y’, but anything to help get Pete off my back if he came to look for me. I’d wanted to change a lot more about myself, but the forger I’d gone to had told me not to.

  “It’s easier if you just change a few little things, and one big thing,” she’d told me, smacking her bubble gum as she’d started to get to work on my fake forms of ID. If I actually wanted to do things like jury duty I’d still be listed under my real name, but that was the whole reason why I couldn’t go to courts and get my name legally changed—Pete could trace that.

  Instead, I would use a fake name to start a new life. A fake birth certificate, a fake passport, fake work records, all with my new name. Ta-da.

  I had gotten everything, and then driven out of Los Angeles as fast as I could. I’d gone up north to Portland, where I’d gotten my hair dyed blonde. I’d always wondered if I would look good blonde, and I’d splurged on getting it professionally done the first time, although I could always touch it up with something from a box later on. I was a natural brunette, but the blonde was a sort of dark honey blonde, and it went well with my hazel eyes. Or at least, I thought so. It looked not like a dye job but like I’d had this hair color my entire life, and I appreciated that.

  Once I had finished in Portland, I had meandered, taking in the sights of Yosemite and other national parks, taking a road trip, until I got to Chicago.

  I’d been here for two weeks, and I was hoping that now, at last, I would be able to relax and build a new life for myself. I was letting myself establish a routine in a way I hadn’t since Pete. Pete had organized my routines back then—not directly, he hadn’t written me up a schedule and put it on the fridge or anything. But my every choice had been dictated by how he would behave, how he would handle it. Now, routine could become something that was mine, something I asserted for myself. It made me feel like I had a bit of power and control back.

  Part of my routine was selecting a place to work. I’d been terrified about that because, well, I couldn’t exactly put where I had last worked on my resume. I couldn’t have a potential employer calling up Pete’s dad. His father would tell Pete where I was for sure. Pete was popular, everyone loved him. Nobody would understand why I had run or what my problem was. He was probably painting me as a crazy person or a bitch right now to everybody in town. And our town hadn’t been all that large.

  When I’d gotten to Chicago, I had money saved up from working jobs like a dishwasher at a mom and pop diner off the highway, or a maid in a rundown motel. The kind of under the table jobs where the person just needed someone to help them for a month and didn’t care where you came from so long as you weren’t wanted by the FBI. I found a kind of co-op place to live, and the woman who ran it had told me to stay away from corporate places and find someplace like a coffee shop to work.

  I wasn’t really into those artisanal coffee shops that sprung up, or the counterculture hipster ones, or the big chain ones like Starbucks. Luckily, there was an unpretentious place right near Logan Square that I could go to called Buzz. I liked it. There wasn’t a ton of décor but there were plenty of places to work and the coffee was amazing—and they had really, really good cinnamon rolls that I had to be careful not to eat too many of or I’d die of a sugar overload. Edith—that was the woman who owned my co-op place—put in a good word for me, spoke to the owner, and I got the job. I still didn’t know what she said to the guy but so long as I was now a barista with a steady income, I didn’t care. She could’ve told him I had lost all of my family in a fire for all I knew.

  The upper floor of the building held various offices, as was typical in Chicago. I had lived in the desert all my life, in a smaller town, and I had never seen so many tall buildings until I had started my little road trip. Even after LA and Portland, though, Chicago was something else. Holy crap. So many skyscrapers everywhere. I couldn’t believe it. It made me feel like I was a part of something, for the first time. Inside of somewhere, a part of a web, connected.

  One of the offices I was pretty sure was a magazine of some kind. Sports? Something like that.

  Oh, and Edith helped me to go to the local Goodwill and find some proper clothes that fit. I’d been wearing the same few clothes for months and had been using them while I’d been doing waitressing and dishwashing and maid service, so they were worn to shreds. Now I had some nice, new clothes, clothes that I looked nice in.

  It had been a week at my new job, and I really enjoyed it. The customers were polite—or at least ninety percent of them were, and even the ones who had been rude weren’t too bad—and I liked my coworkers. Red was my manager on my shift, a fun, easygoing guy who respected it when I told him I wasn’t really comfortable with being touched.

  “Hey, your body, your boundaries,” he told me after he laid a hand on my arm and I jumped a mile—and then had the embarrassing job of telling him I wasn’t really good with touch.

  “Thanks,” I told him, relieved that he wasn’t asking me why I didn’t like it. Women were okay, I only flinched a little, but if it was a man, something in me curled up in fear and I had to swallow down panic. And if I was touched in surprise, I’d jump.

  I didn’t want it to be that way. At least I wasn’t screaming any more, like I had been when I’d first gotten away from Pete. It was a learning process, or so my research online told me. I probably needed a proper therapist to tell me these things but I sure as hell couldn’t afford one. So that just left the internet articles and online forums for abuse survivors. I was learning a lot from all that, though.

  This is a learning process, one person on a forum had said. Your body and your mind are learning how to interact in a world that doesn’t have your abuser in it. You’re kind of like a child all over again.

  It was annoying, but true. I’d read something else about neural pathways, and how you had to literally rewrite them after coming out of a situation like mine, and that sometimes, some of those pathways couldn’t really be rewritten. They were stuck that way. PTSD, and all that.

  Ugh.

  Red didn’t mind, though. He was accommodating, and would use a gentler, quieter voice with me than he would with the others. My coworkers noticed and followed his example. It made me more grateful than I could say. Of course, the downside of working with such friendly, considerate people was that they wanted to know about me, my life, my past, and I couldn’t tell them that. So I just tried to dodge any questions that went past high school. My childhood and all that I could talk about, but the closer we got to my time with Pete, the more careful I had to be.

  “Are you comfortable working the register today?” Red asked when I came into work and set down my bag. It was just an old messenger bag that Edith had gifted me, but I loved it. It was one more thing that was mine that Pete hadn’t tou
ched.

  “Sure.” Sometimes the idea of facing people and dealing with them was too much, so I would make the coffee. But I was feeling good today, feeling energized. Edith had sort of taken me on as her special project and was making sure I got a hearty breakfast every morning. I didn’t mind. My parents had both died when I was young, Dad from an accident at the construction site where he worked when I was twelve, and Mom from cancer when I was nineteen. Edith might be babying me a little but dammit, I wanted to be babied. I wanted a parent again.

  Red smiled at me. “Great. I’m real proud of you, Trudie, you pick this stuff up quickly.”

  “Thanks, boss.” I’d had to think fast, to be good at picking things up quickly, to stay alive.

  I took my place at the register and smiled at the first customer. The day went pretty quickly—we were busy as hell, since it was cold as balls out and everyone wanted a warm drink. I had never experienced winter like this, not like Chicago, and Red had been telling me that it was one of the worst winters in recent years.

  “Polar vortex,” he said. “Thanks to climate change melting all the damn ice caps, it’s pushing all that ice and cold down here to us. Get used to it, it’s not going away anytime soon.”

  Here in the coffee shop, though, it was warm and friendly, and the day passed by in a blur until it was late afternoon and we were almost closed.

  “My feet are killing me,” I laughed to Red, putting away some coffee bags. I turned back to the register and jumped in surprise to see someone staring at me.

  The person was… well, a man, yeah, but also the most handsome man I’d ever seen. He looked like he belonged on the cover of a magazine with striking blue eyes, a chiseled jaw, and ash blond hair that looked windswept from the cold. I felt my face heating up. I hadn’t really had a chance to look at anyone… in a sexual way, after Pete. I’d just wanted to be by myself, get to know who I was as just Trudie, rather than Trudie, Pete’s girlfriend.

  But this guy was making me blush, and all he was doing was looking at me. I swallowed, trying to remain professional. This was just a customer, after all. No reason to get all excited.

  “Can I help you?” I asked, smiling.

  The guy blinked, like he was startled, and then said, “I sure hope you can, lass.”

  I stared at him in surprise, noting his Irish accent. It was… okay, it was charming, and attractive, the way the words rolled off his tongue, rich and varied, with a lot more inflection than Americans had in their accents.

  And then the guy kept speaking. “How’d you like to be my wife for a few weeks?”

  What the fuck!?

  Continue reading Trudie and Laird’s story here.

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