The Official Guide to Marrying Your Boss

by Doyle, Mae

  My jaw dropped open and I had to actually remind myself that staring at someone open-mouthed was rude, so I shut it again, although I still felt like my eyes were going to pop out of my skull.

  “Linda is…your aunt?” I repeated. “Linda, the woman who wanted me fired is your aunt?”

  It made about as much sense as if he had told me that she was an alien. No, scratch that. I would have been much more inclined to believe that Linda was an alien than somehow related to this man.

  Then again, as my grandmother always said, you can’t choose your family, you just have to suffer through what God gave you. I didn’t know a lot of my family, but from being friends with Tiffany, I knew that sometimes you just didn’t get along with family.

  It was just the way it was, but then why would he work with his aunt?

  “She is. When I decided to go into business, she said that she’d help me before because she’d been an office manager in the past. It was just so nice to know that I could trust the person working with me, you know? But from time to time she and I have different ideas on how everything should be run.”

  “But you’re the doctor,” I said. “So just tell her it’s your way or the highway.”

  He laughed, and the sound filled the car. I froze for a moment, remembering how envious I had been of the leggy blonde for making him laugh like that.

  And now I was getting to make him laugh.

  The sound filled the car and he shook his head. “You don’t have a lot of family, do you, Katie?”

  I shook my head but didn’t elaborate. Not having family wasn’t something that I wanted to talk to anyone about. First, I’d lost my parents. Then, when my grandmother died, it was like a piece of me died with her.

  “Maybe one day you will,” he said, then slipped his phone from his pocket. He swiped the screen on and then sighed before turning it back off.

  “Everything okay?”

  None of your business, Katie.

  “Just waiting on a text from someone but she hasn’t responded yet.” He slipped the phone into his jacket pocket and grabbed the door handle. “You ready?”

  “Yep.” I popped the “p”, suddenly feeling a little bit better about everything. Chances were good that he was waiting on a text from the leggy blonde, but there was also the possibility that he was waiting on Marie. I chuckled to myself, thinking that if I had such a gorgeous and incredible man waiting on a response from me, I wouldn’t leave him hanging.

  I was halfway out the door when I realized that that was exactly what I was doing. Turning around, I watched him get out of the car and shut the door. The disappointment that had been on his face when he checked his phone was gone, and he caught me staring, throwing me a grin.

  “Let’s get that fall decor,” he said. “My treat, so you go crazy. I’m counting on you to bring a little excitement and life back into the office, okay?”

  I smiled at him without meaning to. “You got it, Nick.”

  He wanted me to bring excitement and life to the office, which meant that there wasn’t any in it right now.

  I didn’t know how the leggy blonde figured into everything at Marshall Medical, but I was going to find out. And now that I knew the truth about Linda, I was closer to figuring out how Nick worked.

  I just forgot one little thing.

  Nick may have been spending time with me, but it wasn’t because he liked Katie. It was because he wanted to impress Marie. I tried to remind myself of that as I walked to catch up with him.

  He held out his elbow for me and I looped my hand through it.

  Yeah, I needed to find out the truth about the leggy blonde, and as we walked into the craft store, I figured out exactly how I was going to do it.

  Chapter 17

  The craft store was easily one of my favorite places in the world. I can’t even begin to count all of the times that my grandmother and I came here to poke through glitter and paint, bags that we could decorate and give away as gifts, and holiday decorations so over the top that her house was always the envy of the kids on the street.

  Nevermind that her power bill greatly increased around the holidays. She loved all of the flashing lights that she could buy and definitely wasn’t above buying animatronic pieces to go in the front yard.

  We stopped just inside the front door and I regretfully let go of Nick’s arm to grab a basket. The smell of cinnamon and spice filled my nose and I took a deep breath, forgetting for a moment why I was there.

  “Smells like that stew,” Nick said. He sounded happy, and I looked over at him, surprised to see the smile on his face.

  “You really liked that? I thought it smelled a little strong.” Might as well hand me a bait box and a fishing pole, because I wanted to know what Nick really thought, and there wasn’t anyone around me to stop me from getting the answers I wanted.

  “No, I loved it,” he said, leading the way into the store. “That’s why I wanted Marie back. She obviously has a sense about these things.”

  “These things?” I grabbed some glittery fall leaves and plunked them into the basket as I followed him. He was holding up a reindeer that was on the Christmas rack and I grabbed his elbow, pulling him with me. “Also, it’s not even Thanksgiving yet, so you put that down for a little while longer, okay?”

  “These things,” he said. “Like cooking and coming up with a great menu. And what do you have against decorating early for a holiday? I would have thought that you’d be all prepared for any holiday coming your way.”

  “I am,” I told him. “But you have to give each one its time and fully enjoy it because soon it will be gone and you’ll be wondering where it went.”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized that I wasn’t just talking about holidays, and I prayed that he didn’t notice. The last thing I needed to do was get into a huge conversation in the middle of the craft store about how much I missed my grandmother.

  Nick gave me a strange look but didn’t push it. “Well, we’ll have to come back in a bit and get Christmas stuff, then.”

  My heart flipped when I thought about doing things in the future with him. Might as well sign me up for caroling and decorating Christmas cookies, because I was in.

  “Sounds good, but I’m surprised that your girlfriend is okay with you spending this much time one-on-one with employees.” My heart beat loudly while I talked and I looked down at a cute little turkey candle, debating the safety of having them in the office, then grabbed three. Okay, five.

  “Girlfriend?” He raised his eyebrows at me and shook his head. “No girlfriend. Why do you think that I have one?”

  Because you and the leggy blonde are perfect together? Because there’s no way that a man like you is single? Even though I wanted to believe him, wanted to indulge in the excitement that was starting to course through my body, I realized something terrible.

  There was always one good reason why he didn’t have a girlfriend. Because…oh, God, what if I’m barking up the wrong tree? Could Nick be gay?

  I squinted at him, but everyone knows that it’s impossible to tell without just asking like an adult.

  “A boyfriend?” I squeaked out, so desperate to know the truth that I was about two seconds away from breaking into his house and tearing it apart to look for a journal. Come to think of it, that may have been a better option than asking my boss if he was gay.

  “No boyfriend either, sorry to disappoint,” he said, a grin on his face. “Just me and my dog, but that’s it.”

  “And your aunt,” I pointed out, making him grimace.

  “And Linda,” he agreed. “Who, by the way, thinks that candles are the devil’s work and should all be thrown into a fire and burned. I tried to explain to her what would happen, but she wasn’t really interested in the logistics of that.” He grabbed two more candles, one with a wonky turkey head, and popped them into the basket before taking it from me. “So I think we need more of them.”

  I wanted to point out that the wonky turkey
was going to look out of place and that we should switch it out for one that didn’t look like it had been hit by a car, but I couldn’t bear to do that to him.

  “Sounds good,” I said, then pointed to the back wall where I knew that the store often had silk flowers that were almost impossible to tell apart from the real deal. “Let’s grab some flowers and a I’ll bring in a vase to make an arrangement for the center of the table. It’s one of my hidden abilities, so I think you’ll like it.”

  “Sounds good. I’m just here to hold the basket, so pretend like I’m not here.”

  Yeah, that was impossible to do, even if I tried, so instead I basked in all of the envious looks that other women were giving me.

  Yes, ladies, I was out with the hottest and most eligible bachelor in town.

  Yep, he was carrying my basket.

  Yeah, when he walked ahead of me, I got to look at his butt. What of it?

  A sudden thought hit me as I was grabbing flowers. “If you’re single,” I said slowly, “who was the blonde?”

  Warning bells were going off in my head as I asked the question, but I had to know. She’d been running — no, wiggling — through my head since I saw her and she was so kind as to help me up off the ground.

  “The blonde?”

  The leggy one. With the curves. And the wiggle.

  “She was in your office and then helped me when I fell outside the bodega,” I said, leaving out some bits of the truth. “I just…wanted to thank her for being so kind and helping me up off of the ground but she was like a guardian angel and disappeared.”

  So. Many. Lies.

  “Oh, that’s Sara,” he said, a strange look on his face. “Just Sara.”

  Just. Sara.

  I had no way of knowing what he meant when he said that and I tried to think about his inflection.

  Just. Sara.

  Was I Just. Katie.?

  “Well, Sara was very nice,” I told him, with a little nod and pulled out one more flower from the buckets on the wall. I had a mix of black eyed susans, daisies, goldenrod, some seed pod things on the ends of sticks, and some dried leaves that, with my powers of arrangement, would look less like something a kid would bring in and shove in a mason jar on the counter and more like an arrangement from a high-end florist.

  I hoped.

  “Looks nice,” Nick said. “What else do you need? Remember, I’m just here to help you out however I can, so you tell me what you need.”

  There were lots of ways that he could help me out, but I just smiled at him. This trip wasn’t just great for getting what I needed for the lunch on Thursday, but it gave me some prime info into Nick.

  “I’m good,” I told him. “Ready to get back and I’ll get in touch with Marie about the lunch?”

  His face lit up like a little kid getting to hold a puppy for the first time and I felt myself getting insanely jealous of…myself. Well, that wasn’t true. Marie wasn’t me, exactly, she was the better version of me who knew how to cook and didn’t trip out of doors and tear up her tights twice in a week.

  If Nick liked Marie, it wasn’t because she was anything like me.

  “Let’s get coffee first,” he said, walking with me to the checkout. “I think that something warm sounds nice, and this didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would.”

  The checkout lady kept shooting Nick sly grins as she slowly scanned our items. Instead of getting worried that she was going to swoop in and try to take him, however, I just enjoyed it for two reasons.

  1. He wasn’t mine to get worried about someone taking

  2. She was at least thirty years older than him

  Stuffing the receipt in the bag, she ignored me when I reached for them and handed them over to Nick. “It’s just so nice to see a man helping his girlfriend shopping,” she said, finally turning to me and giving me a wink.

  I froze.

  The absolute last thing that I wanted was to hear Nick deny out loud in front of people that I was his girlfriend. Obviously, I wasn’t, but I didn’t see any reason to rub salt in the wounds and make me feel bad about it.

  Nick grabbed the bags from her. “Thanks, it was fun,” he said, then nodded to the exit. “Shall we?”

  I gave him a nod, unable to come up with anything to say. It wasn’t until we were back outside in the parking lot, the cold air swirling around us, that I came to my senses.

  “You’re not my boyfriend,” I told him, like he needed reminding that he wasn’t dating me. “So why didn’t you correct her?”

  We were right in the middle of the parking lot and he stopped, turning to me with a confused expression on his face. A car slowed down and then inched around us when the driver figured out that we weren’t going to go anywhere.

  “Would you rather have me correct her and make her embarrassed? I just didn’t see any reason to make an old lady feel bad, but I can go back in there right now and set the record straight.” He turned like he was going to walk to the craft store.

  “Wait!” I cried, grabbing his sleeve and pulling him back. He spun around and grinned at me, and I smacked him in the arm. “Don’t joke like that! I thought that you were really going to go do it!”

  “Oh, come on, Katie,” he said, pulling away from my grip and leading the way to his car. “I’m not that cold and heartless as to ruin some little old lady’s day. Do you really think that I’m that bad?”

  I eyeballed him as we got in and cranked my seat warmer to high before answering. “I guess that I don’t really know you yet, Nick. I know that you are a doctor, have a nice car, and keep your office impeccably neat. You let your aunt work with you and you like pink sticky notes. Is pink your favorite color?”

  He laughed and pulled out of the parking lot, angling the car to my favorite coffee shop across the road. “I was going to say that we should take our hot drinks to go, but let’s go in and you can pick my brain so you don’t feel like you’re working with such a stranger, okay?”

  Ten minutes later we were sitting across from each other in Beans ‘n Such, the city’s last local coffee shop that refused to bow to corporations like Starbucks. I had my favorite drink, hot chocolate with a splash of mint and extra whipped cream, but Nick had chosen something more reserved.

  “First of all, thanks for the drink,” I said. “Secondly, you do know that you can make plain drip coffee at the office, right?”

  “It’s not the same,” he told me. “They use special beans or something here. Maybe it’s the water. Whatever, I like it, and I don’t need to add enough sugar to kill a unicorn to my drink to be able to enjoy it.”

  That was…oddly specific. I took a sip of my hot chocolate, feeling the power of sugar course through my veins. “So, what do you want to talk about?”

  “We never really had an interview,” he told me. “You just came highly recommended from the hiring company, so I went with it. Tell me about you, Katie.”

  I got nervous and grabbed my hot chocolate tighter, squeezing the cup a little. “What do you want to know?”

  He shrugged. “How about this. We’ll go fact for fact. You already know that I’m single, not gay, and Linda’s my aunt, so it’s your turn.”

  “Okay.” I could do this. “I’m single, I’m living with my best friend until I have enough saved up to get my own place, and I have a terrible time keeping tights on without tearing them.”

  “I’ve noticed,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee. “Okay, any questions you want to ask me?”

  My mind raced. There were so many things that I wanted to know about Nick, but not all of them were appropriate to ask in the middle of the coffee shop. “Why surgery? Why did you want to be a doctor in the first place?”

  “Because I like to help people, and my dad was a surgeon, so I saw that it could be done.”

  “Is he still alive?” I leaned forward, my hands still on my hot chocolate, but more interested in what he was going to say. “I bet he’s proud of you.”

  “You’re asking mor
e than your fair share of questions,” he pointed out. “But yes, he’s still alive. Lives across the country and still practices surgery, and he’s proud of me. What about you? Parents?”

  I hesitated, but this is what I wanted, right? To get to know Nick without having to lie and pretend to be Marie? “No parents,” I told him. “They died when I was little and my grandmother raised me, but she just died this year, so I’m on my own.”

  Tears sprung to my eyes and I realized just how much I missed my gran. To hide the fact that I was about to fall apart crying at the table in the middle of the coffee shop, I lifted my hot chocolate to take a sip.

  But I’d been squeezing it too hard, and apparently the cup wasn’t designed to handle someone as stressed out as I was. The seam ripped as I lifted the cup to my mouth, the plastic lid popping off and landing with a rattle on the table.

  I was too busy staring at the lid to notice that the cup had basically dissolved in my hand, the seam coming unglued from top to bottom as a waterfall of minty hot chocolate streamed from the cup, pouring all over the table and immediately flooding down over the edges.

  “Hot!” I cried, throwing the cup to get it out of my hand. I heard the soft and squishy sound of it hitting something, but I was too busy standing up and wiping my hands across my lap as the steamy drink soaked into my clothes. “So hot! Why is it so hot?”

  “Are you okay?” Nick stood up and grabbed me, pulling some napkins from the container on the table and pressing them on my body. He dabbed at me, soaking up hot chocolate while I squirmed and fought the desire to rip my clothes off just to get the heat away from my skin.

  It wasn’t until I’d calmed down a little that I realized he was dabbing me all over my front. I was soaked from my stomach to my knees, and although he may have been used to touching patients all over, my face flamed and I swatted his hands away.

  “I’m fine! I’m fine, okay, I’m good. Just a little hot chocolate, but nothing that won’t come out in the wash, I’m sure.” I had my eyes locked on the dripping mass of paper napkins that he held in his hand, but once I’d gotten control of my body and pushed away the thought that he was touching me to deal with later, I looked up at him.