One Night with her Boss Read Free Page B

it real, to get it over
with. “It’s about me. And a great job. And finding a guy who actually wants me.”
    “Or who’s willing to actually take what
he wants.” Raney grinned. “Because we all know that Jake is secretly crazy
about you.”
    Anne smothered a groan and just shook
her head instead.
    Sometimes she wondered if Raney
exaggerated the optimism to show Anne exactly how silly it was to be holding
out hope for Jake to ever return her feelings.
    Because it was simply stupid. Jake had
had seven years to make a move on her, and he hadn’t ever, not once, made a
single move.
    Only an idiot would keep holding onto
hope.
    ***
    As
soon as she returned to the office after lunch, she went to stand in Jake’s
doorway, determined to tell him before she lost the nerve.
    He was scrawling something out on a
yellow pad.
    He liked to brainstorm with pen and
paper, so he was probably just working out some ideas that she would later have
to translate into legible form.
    His thick hair was rumpled, and his tie
was askew. He must be feeling stressed, since those were the first signs she
looked for.
    He glanced up and saw her, immediately
straightening up. “Hey. Can you print out all the emails between me and
Marshall Long since June?”
    “Yeah. I’ll do it now. Then do you have
a minute to talk?”
    His eyes widened in obvious surprise.
“Sure.”
    “I’ll be right back.”
    She went to her desk, found the emails
he wanted, and set them to print. More trees had to die because Jake liked to
hold paper in his hand rather than read from a screen.
    She was about to walk over to the
printer when she noticed for the first time a wrapped present on the corner of
her desk.
    It was wrapped in solid blue paper with
a pink bow stuck on the top. She knew who it was from.
    Jake must have bought a huge bag of
those pink bows at some point, because he always stuck them on his presents.
    She also knew what the present was. Some
sort of book on surfing.
    He gave them to her on birthdays, at
Christmas, on Secretary’s Day—or whatever they called it now—and sometimes he
gave them to her just because. When she first started working for him, she’d
admitted that she’d never surfed before and had never even wanted to. He’d
teased her about how she needed to learn, and he’d bought her a book on surfing
as some sort of light-hearted encouragement.
    Since then, he kept giving her books on
surfing. It was their thing. Some were expensive coffee table books with
beautiful, glossy photos. Some were cheaper paperbacks. A few were novels. One
was a children’s book. The single unifying characteristic was that surfing was
somehow featured in the book.
    Today, she felt a familiar ache of
affection in her chest as she slid her fingers down the fold to disconnect the
tape. The book she unwrapped was old—very old with thick, aging pages and a
faded cover.
    She opened the cover and saw it had been
published in 1942. It was the real-life story of a group of surfers on the
California coast.
    She flipped the pages, amazed and
delighted by the formal language and the antique feel of the book. Where the
hell had he even found this old thing?
    After looking at it for a few minutes,
she laid it on the low bookcase behind her desk that held the rest of the books
he’d given her.
    Then she made herself put aside her soft
feelings and stand up. It was time. She needed to tell him about the job offer.
She needed to give him two-weeks’ notice.
    And a sweet gift wasn’t going to change
it.
    She was going to have to leave him. She
could barely imagine life without him, which should be a clear sign that she
was in too deep here and it just wasn’t good for her.
    She grabbed the stack of pages from the
printer on her way back to his office. He was back at his scribbles and didn’t
look up as she came in.
    She set the printouts on his desk and
then sat down in a side chair and waited.
    After a moment, he looked up, evidently
realizing that she was