Bear No Loss Read Free

theme for all events coordinated by Tarley Events. Okay, so maybe she had gotten a little carried away with describing the options for the campaign leading up to it, but was that such a bad thing?
    Apparently it was.
    “This just brings me to my next point. I’m sure you know this is our low season. Past Christmas and New Year’s, nothing happens until the weddings start rolling up in the summer. We’re scraping at the bottom of the barrel here and frankly, I don’t have enough work to go around.”
    Oh no, April thought, her hazel eyes growing wide with worry. If I lose this job I’ll be so screwed!
    “Sally, I’m sorry for the mistake. It won’t happen again! You know me, I’ve been working for you for three years now!” April began, her fingers clutching the pages of her notebook.
    There was no love lost between Tarley Events and April, that much was true, but the thought of getting fired still sent bile creeping up in her throat. Coming from a wealthy family, she’d made it her life’s goal to manage her own finances and get by on her own merits now as an adult, and Tarley Events had been a big part of that.
    After picking up an English Literature degree, back when she had less qualms about living off of her parents’ fortune, it had become abundantly clear that there simply weren’t that many options out there for someone with her passion for writing and a lack of desire to ruin people’s lives. Journalism seemed to be more about screwing everyone else over than it was about getting a good story and writing books… well, that too was an uphill battle against agents and publishers and finding what spoke to her enough to try. So she never really had given it a fair shot, more preoccupied with her own doubts to make an honest go of it.
    “Stop it, I’m not firing you,” Sally said with a roll of her eyes, lifting up her hand.
    “Oh,” April sighed, letting out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding.
    “But I will put you on extended leave until the busy season starts again. You’ve been with me the longest so you have tons of vacation days saved up that you need to put into good use. I’ll pay you seventy percent of your usual wages past those. I think you really need to take some time off and figure out how you’re going to work with me, because this, ” Stella said, holding up her reports again as if they were something dead and fermenting, “is unacceptable.”
    When April finally walked out of Stella’s office, after hashing out the details of her newfound free time, she was in something she could only describe as a haze of confusion. On one hand, she suddenly found herself with far too much free time and nothing to do with it. And on the other hand, her own boss had just told her what April herself already knew—that she wasn’t happy where she was.
    So what was a girl to do?
    “I need a drink,” she said and thought at the same time, her eyes meeting Nicky’s when she was only two paces from Sally’s door.
    “I’m game!” Nicky quipped with a wide, happy grin, scooping up her purse and jacket before April could even make it back to her desk.
     
    ***
     
    It was the fourth shot of something that included far too much vodka and not enough of anything else that did April in. Her phone had been sitting on the table and when Memphis pinged her on SassyDate and the alert showed as a notification on the screen, she hadn’t been fast enough to stop Nicky from snatching it up and reading the text.
    “Memphis Corley is messaging you!?” Nicky asked, half-gasping, half-sputtering as she braced herself with one hand on the table. “And you’re here talking about what you’re going to do with your vacation? Woman, we have far more interesting things to discuss.”
    Nicky shoved the phone in April’s face as if April wasn’t aware of the man hitting her up on the dating site, leaving her a tiny bit more sullen as she took her phone and read the notification quickly. It was a