The Official Guide to Marrying Your Boss

by Doyle, Mae

  “Nu Wave Catering?” Tiffany knew how much I’d liked Alexis, up until the point where she basically threw me to the wolves by making me almost kill my boss with cinnamon stew. “Are they who you’ll hire?”

  I shook my head. “I…I don’t know that I can.” She shot me a funny look and I held the glass of wine up to defend myself. “The last thing I need is for her to come in to the office and ask me how I did in front of everyone. I think that Nick would have a hernia.”

  “If he did, he could just perform surgery on himself,” she said, with a shrug. “And why don’t you just ask her to not bring it up?”

  I shook my head. “Nuh uh. Not a chance. She’s nice, but the more people that are in on my scheme, the more likely it is that someone will find out the real truth about the fact that I’m a liar. I trust you. That’s it.”

  “You trust me because I would have found out anyway. It’s not like you could hide the fact that you were actually cooking for once from me. I’m surprised that the neighbors didn’t call to ask if everything was okay.”

  I made a face at her because she was right and she knew that she was right, then I drank some more wine. For the first time all day, I felt like I was relaxing. The absolute stress of feeding people food that I had made myself was enough to make me sick, and I really hated lying to people, even people like Linda.

  Although, it was infinitely easier to lie to her than it was to lie to Nick.

  The fact that he gave up his vacation time to travel around the world performing facial reconstruction and cleft palate surgery for people made me want to be a better person.

  I could probably start by not lying to him again.

  “I’m turning over a new leaf,” I announced, sitting up and tucking my knees under me so that I could look tall and important. “From here no out, I’m done lying. No more. No more pretending that I’m someone I’m not. This job could be cool, but I have to try harder to make it mine, and I’m going to start by taking something into my office to decorate it.”

  Tiffany grabbed her chest in mock embarrassment. “The horror! You standing up for yourself. Will wonders never cease?”

  “Seriously? I’m doing my best here. I really want to like this job, Tiffany, you have no idea.”

  “You really want your boss to like you,” she corrected with a smile. “But are you sure that decorating the arctic wasteland that is your office is the best way to get positive attention from him? I thought that Linda made it pretty clear that personal effects were not allowed.”

  “She did,” I agreed. “But it’s not like anyone ever comes into my office. I don’t think I really painted the picture for you, Tiffany. I’m on a hall. By myself.”

  “You said there are other doors,” she pointed out, taking a sip of wine. “How do you know that there’s not someone else working there with you?”

  “I would have seen them by now.” I told her about my hallway calisthenics. “I figured that I might as well do them to try to stay awake, and they couldn’t hurt but make my butt look better.”

  She rolled her eyes and then laughed. “I think that you should knock on the other doors, see who works there. Who knows, you may find the skeletons of some poor people Linda stuck back there years ago.”

  I tapped my chin and thought about what she had said. Earlier in the week I’d been dying to get a look in those other rooms to see what was in there, but I’d kinda given up on it with all of the excitement over the luncheon. Now that that was done, though, there wasn’t any reason why I couldn’t poke around a little.

  “I think I will,” I said, giving her a little nod. “Who knows what I’ll find? And besides, now that I planned this luncheon and it’s over, that’s a lot off my plate.”

  “So what do you do now? When you’re not a party planner, what are you going to be doing?”

  “I’m the new creative consultant and planner,” I reminded her. “Which means that any creative decisions that the company is going to make will be run by me.”

  We both paused, thinking about what I had just said. “And how many creative decisions do you think are made there each day? It’s not like he’s going to ask you to come and give your opinion on someone’s surgery.”

  “Make the nose a little smaller,” I said, in my snootiest English accent. “Pip, pip, everyone looks great.” I leaned over and put my wine down on the coffee table so that I could put one hand on my hip and push my nose up a little with the other.

  Ski jump noses were cute. Button noses were cute. My flat nose that I inherited from my grandfather? Not so cute, to be honest. I wondered if one of the perks of the job was that I could get a little work done on mine to give me a boost of confidence.

  “I’m serious, Kate. What in the world are you going to be doing each day so that you don’t go absolutely crazy? You’re not the best at just sitting around, you know.”

  She was right, and she didn’t have to tell me that. After moving in three months ago I’d already crocheted her a new blanket for her bed, completely edited the mystery novel she’d been working on, and had debated taking up guitar.

  The problem with that was that it involved not only buying an instrument, but also having a place to store it, and I didn’t feel like I could do that to Tiffany until I moved out.

  Moving in in the first place wasn’t my choice, but after my grandmother had died, I hadn’t had anywhere to go. I didn’t know that she owed so much on her house, and had just assumed that it would come to me when something happened to her.

  I mean, the woman raised me from the time I was little. Honestly, I’d always thought that she would just keep taking care of me.

  The thought made tears sting the corners of my eyes, and I tried to look away from Tiffany so that she wouldn’t see them, but she knew me too well, and put her wine down on the coffee table before pulling me into a hug.

  “It’s okay to miss her,” she said, giving me a little squeeze. “I miss her and she didn’t raise me.”

  I sniffed into her shirt, probably leaving a trail of boogers and tears on her clothing, but she didn’t seem to care, so I refused to get embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I really am,” I told her. “I just didn’t know how hard it would be to lose her.”

  “I know.” We were both silent for a moment. I could hear my friend’s heart beating and I struggled to sit up, but she pulled me down harder. “Shh, rest your head on my ample bosom. It’s a place of magic.”

  That made me crack up and I forced myself up, pushing back on her to make her let go. “I’m not one of the guys you bring home, Tiffany,” I reminded her. “Your bosom isn’t magic to me.”

  She looked down at her tits and sighed. “Have I lost my touch?”

  Laughing, I grabbed our wine and handed her hers, cheersing her. “You have not lost your touch,” I promised her. “Your boobs, as fantastic as they are, don’t do it for me. I’d rather rest my head on Nick’s perfectly muscular chest.”

  “There is is,” Tiffany said. “Tell me all about it.”

  I shook my head. “It can’t work. First of all, he’s my boss. Secondly, I liked to him about the stew and caterer, and no good relationship can start out on a bed of lies.” Thinking fast, I tried to come up with a good reason.

  “Just two reasons? Sounds like you need to suck it up and just go for it.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “Besides, I’m sure that he has a wife or a girlfriend, and she probably looks like she walked out of a magazine. I bet they live in a gorgeous mansion with two golden retrievers, 2.5 kids, and a security system that will ensure that nobody breaks in to steal his grandmother’s wedding ring, which he gave to his wife, of course.”

  “Of course he did.”

  I nodded, fully committing to my thoughts. “It’s best for me to see him as what he is — my gorgeous boss who doesn’t yet realize that I’m a liar and a fraud.”

  “You’re being dramatic.”

  “Maybe. Work will just be easier if I keep him at arm’s length away,
you know? And, from now on, no more lies. Whenever I talk to him it’s going to be one hundred percent the truth.”

  Famous last words, right?

  Chapter 10

  Monday morning was full of promise. Not only was it not snowing or raining, which was a huge improvement over the weekend, during which Tiffany and I had spent hours curled up together on the sofa watching old movies, but it was the first day of me turning over a new leaf with Nick.

  I’d already lied to him about the fake catering company, and I didn’t have any intention of continuing the lie. That was in the past, with old Katie. I was new and improved Katie, incapable of lying, especially to my gorgeous, sent from heaven, absolutely perfect boss.

  “Good morning, Linda!” I said brightly, walking quickly past her desk so I couldn’t get sucked into a conversation with her. If I was going to maintain my good mood all day long, there were a few things that I had on my to-do list.

  1. Stay away from Linda so that she couldn’t pull me into her orbit of grumpiness.

  2. Make sure to eat enough during the day to keep my blood sugar up.

  3. Lay eyes on Nick at least twice to help remind me that there are men who look like him out in the world.

  4. Don’t lie.

  The first was going to be pretty easy since I figured that Linda probably had stay away from Katie on the top of her daily to-do list, the second was also simple thanks to the snacks I had squirreled away in my purse, but the third and fourth were going to be a little more difficult.

  I figured that I could try to run into Nick around lunchtime since he always seemed to go out to grab a bite, but leaving my office did put me in a high risk zone of accidentally being around Linda. It was a risk I was willing to take, especially since the payoff was so good.

  And not lying should be easy, as long as nobody asked me anything about Friday. I was New Leaf Katie, and I didn’t want anything to get me down.

  In order to keep my good ‘tude and good mood going, I started whistling as soon as I shut the door behind me and walked onto my hall. Instead of thinking about it as being my private prison, Tiffany and I decided that I should look at it as my private getaway.

  Everyone else had to work with other people. They all had to deal with Linda on a more regular basis. I, on the other hand, was lucky enough to have my own private wing of the office, a place so far away from everyone else that people wanted to leave me alone.

  We’d also decided that I couldn’t really claim this hall as my realm if I didn’t know what was going on behind the other doors.

  To that end, before I lost my nerve, I rapped quickly on the first door then took a huge breath and turned the handle, leaning against it. It swung open easily and I reached in to flick on the light.

  Of course, that light didn’t buzz like the one in my office, but it was probably because it wasn’t used very often. The room was obviously storage, with unused chairs and table stacked on top of each other. A thin layer of dust covered everything, and I wrinkled my nose when I saw it.

  The dust didn’t exactly fit in with the perfectly clean and sanitized rest of the building, and I wondered how long it had been since someone had come in here. I waited a moment, but nothing moved, and besides, from first glance, there wasn’t anything interesting for me to poke around in.

  Satisfied, I turned off the light and shut the door behind me. There were five doors on the hall besides mine, and I was going to open one each morning this week. Tiffany and I had debated opening them all one right after the other, like pulling off a bandaid as quickly as possible, but I decided to drag out the excitement.

  You never knew when you would need something a little exciting to look forward to on a random Thursday.

  I started whistling again as I headed down the hall, my purse whacking into my legs with each step because it was loaded down with snacks. Cookies, chips, a granola bar or two, and even a bag of baby carrots that Tiffany had put in there, which were, sadly, destined for the trash.

  What was I, a rabbit? There were some vegetables that I liked, but baby carrots were at the bottom of the list. I knew that they were cut that way to maximize snackability, but they were dry, lifeless facsimiles of the real thing, which, to be honest, before last Friday I hadn’t ever dealt with.

  But new Katie knew how to scrape big carrots and chop them into submission, and now nothing else would do in their place. I didn’t have real carrots to eat, so why even bother?

  As I walked up to my door, I stopped whistling. Unlike everything else in the hall, which was a blinding white — or would be, if the bulbs didn’t put off such yellow light — there was a patch of hot pink on my door.

  I slowed down, but my curiosity got the better of me and I marched up to the door, grabbing the sticky note off of it before I had a chance to wonder about where it came from.

  Katie, come see me.

  I didn’t recognize the handwriting, but I didn’t have to to know that it was Nick’s. My heart dropped down to my feet and I felt my stomach twist.

  Why in the world would he want me to come see him? He hadn’t once asked me to come to his office last week, and this was a little out of the blue.

  Or was it?

  I had lied to him.

  I had cooked food and served it out a kitchen that I was pretty sure wasn’t approved for such use. Did you have to have permits for making that much food for people? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to go into it with a doctor.

  While part of my mind was running through all of the worst-case scenarios it could think of, like the possibility that he figured out that I lied to him or the possibility that I had somehow killed someone with a cinnamon overdose, the other part of my brain was stuck on one little fact.

  Somewhere, in this giant office of white and beige, there was a stack of pink sticky notes. And, instead of using some white printer paper to write me a note, Nick had sat up in his office, thinking of me, and chosen hot pink to carry his message to me.

  Even the thought that I’d been on his mind this early in the morning wasn’t enough to get rid of the overarching feeling of dread that was coursing through my body.

  Groaning to myself, I opened my office door and dumped everything inside. I heard a distinctive crunch as something landed on my chips and broke them, and I narrowed my eyes. It was probably those blasted baby carrots.

  But that was a problem for later. Right now I was still holding the note, worrying it a little so that it was getting creased.

  “Do I go to see him now?” I asked my office. “Can I wait until later when he may be in a better mood?”

  Then I realized that I didn’t know when he would be in a good or a bad mood. There wasn’t a smiley face on the note to clue me in, but I had a pretty good feeling that the doctor hadn’t ever drawn a smiley face in his life.

  If he had, it had probably been an accident.

  “Oh, God, I need coffee,” I said, bending over and grabbing my stomach. As willing as I was to stay there, just like that, until 5:00 when it was time for me to go, I mentally pulled on my big girl panties, straightened up, squared my shoulders, and left my office.

  Linda’s head whipped around when she heard me open my door and she frowned, pursing her lips a little with disappointment. What could she be disappointed about? She saw me go in there, so she couldn’t have possibly imagined that I’d have died that quickly, right?

  “Where are you going?” Her words were clipped and she frowned at me like I was a little kid sneaking out past my bedtime.

  “Ni — Dr. Marshall wants me to come see him,” I told her, lifting my chin a little. Even though he’d told me to call him Nick, I had a feeling that if Linda heard me calling him that, she’d have a hernia.

  I’d have to hold onto that for later, when I really needed to take her down a notch.

  Her eyebrows flew up to meet her hairline, making her look sick. “He does?”

  I nodded and walked past her desk, focused on the task at hand. Up ahead of me,
to the right, was the kitchen and the meeting room where I’d almost poisoned all of his rich guests.

  His office was down a private little hall, much like mine, to the right. In the back of the building was where he performed some minor procedures and had some rooms to meet with his patients, but this early in the morning, there wasn’t anyone here.

  I could do this.

  I just hoped he didn’t fire me. The look of utter disappointment that would flash on Tiffany’s face before she could stop it was enough to make me willing to grovel and beg for my job. I had to get off her sofa and into my own place.

  Even best friends need a break from each other.

  My heels sounded painfully loud as I walked up to his office, but I announced myself anyway, rapping lightly on the door.

  “Come in.” His voice was a low rumble and I felt my muscles below my navel tighten. Scolding myself didn’t work, and besides, I didn’t have enough time to go over all of the reasons why falling for my boss wasn’t a good move.

  The door swung open silently and I stepped inside, shutting the door behind me before turning around to look at his office. It was…well, not what I expected.

  For starters, there was a rug, which was easily the softest and most comforting thing that I’d seen in the office since I started. It was white, which was no surprise, but it existed, which seemed impossible for me to wrap my mind around.

  Nick sat behind a huge desk that was placed almost in the middle of the room. It was a dark wood, ornately carved, with two matching chairs. He was sitting in one, leaned back and looking incredibly comfortable and at home, and the other was in front of the desk, turned at an inviting angle for someone to come in and sit.

  Was I supposed to sit?

  Framed on the wall he had diplomas and certificates, but I only gave those a cursory glance. There was something else that I was more interesting in finding.

  It wasn’t on the bookshelf, which was absolutely groaning with books, but didn’t have any personal pictures. that was odd, but definitely fit with the rule that you couldn’t bring any personal effects to work. I didn’t see it by his computer, which was a sleek white and emitting a soft glow.