Page 8 of Baby Bombshell for the Boss

CHAPTER 4

IVY

Ivy felt herself come awake, but she didn’t open her eyes right away. She felt warm and satisfied after the events of last night. She and Elliot had come back to her apartment after the time they had spent together in his office, and she was enjoying the familiarity of being in her own bed paired with the strangeness of having someone there with her.

Without looking, she could feel Elliot in the bed beside her and knew by his steady breathing that he was still asleep. It felt as if the spell would break the moment she opened her eyes. He would wake up too, and they would smile at one another awkwardly and begin the process of saying their goodbyes. And that was as it should be — the night had been magical, but it was over now.

But she didn’t have to work today, so there was no reason to rush things. She might as well lie here for a few more minutes and enjoy the afterglow before she forced herself to get up.

Then she heard a soft buzz from the nightstand.

She allowed her eyes to open, little though she wanted to. That was the sound of her phone, and there was only one person who called her early in the morning with any regularity. It would be Devin, no doubt with some bizarre request for Monday morning, when she was expected at seven sharp.

She rolled out of bed, doing her best not to disturb Elliot beside her, and picked up the phone. She hurried out of the room, not answering it yet, because she didn’t want to take the call where her voice might wake him.

By the time she made it out into the kitchen, the phone had stopped ringing. But when she looked at it, she got a shock. She’d missed seventeen calls, all of them from Devin. Ivy began to get an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Why would he call her so many times on a Saturday morning? What could he possibly want?

She called him back and he picked up right away. “Ivy!”

The knot in her stomach tightened. He did not sound happy. “Hey, Devin,” she said. “I’m sorry I missed your calls. I was sleeping.”

“It’s ten a.m. What the hell were you doing asleep?”

“It’s Saturday,” Ivy pointed out. “I don’t have work today.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean you can sleep all day. What if I need you? I did need you.”

“You needed me for what?”

“The interns didn’t collate the photocopies for Monday’s presentation! They just left a couple of big piles on my desk, and what am I supposed to do with that?”

Collate them yourself? “I can come in a little early on Monday to help with it,” she said, even though she had already been planning on coming in early. An extra half hour wouldn’t be a big deal. “We should be able to get it done if we work together.”

“What do you mean, if we work together? What do you think this is, kindergarten? We don’t work together. You work for me, and when I give you a task you damn well do it. I needed you to come in this morning and get this done! Now I’ve had to call Will in to do it because you weren’t answering your phone, because you decided your beauty sleep was more important than your job.”

That was a pretty unfair retelling of history, in Ivy’s opinion. “I’m sorry Will had to be bothered with it,” she said. “But I’m glad the problem was solved.”

“Well, now we have a new problem. You should have been available when I called you. I can’t have someone on my staff who isn’t going to pick up the phone when I call them. How would it be if I hadn’t been able to reach Will this morning either? These papers wouldn’t have been collated, and then how would we look when the client came in on Monday? We’d look like a disorganized mess! Do you think I got to where I am today by presenting myself to clients as a disorganized mess?”

“Of course I don’t,” Ivy said. “But I would have returned your calls as soon as I woke up. And it isn’t as if I slept until some insane hour. It’s not yet noon. If you hadn’t had Will come in already, I could come to the office and do it right now.”

She couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing herself say. How had she become someone who could be called in before noon on a Saturday morning? She knew perfectly well that this was how people lost control of their work–life balance. It started out with agreeing to work on a weekend or two, and before they knew it, they had established the expectation that that was something they could be counted upon to do and their bosses began to find it weird when they didn’t want to come in and work on a weekend. It had happened to friends of hers, and she’d sworn, when she came to New York, that it wasn’t going to happen to her.

But on the other hand… was work–life balance really the most important thing right now? She was working her dream job in her dream city, and she was going to make excuses not to give a hundred and ten percent? No. The only thing that mattered was succeeding in this career, and Ivy knew she could do it. If that meant bowing to the whims of her crazy boss, that was fine. She could put up with craziness for a few years while she paid her dues, because she knew that where she was going would make it all worthwhile.

Someday, she would be running her own interior design firm. Someday Devin Sayers would be nothing but a glowing line on her resume. She looked forward to that day with everything she had in her, but until it came, she would continue to work hard and do whatever she had to do to reach her goals.

So she swallowed her ideals and her objections. “I could still come in,” she suggested. “If there’s anything else that needs doing this morning to prepare for the meeting, I’d be more than happy to do it.”

“There isn’t anything,” Devin snapped. “Will’s already taken care of everything. It’s making me start to wonder why I even keep the both of you on my payroll. I think what you’ve demonstrated to me this morning is that it only takes one of you to do the job I’m paying for two people to do.”

Ivy felt as if her blood was freezing over. “I’ll make sure to set an alarm from now on,” she said quickly. “Every weekend, so it won’t happen again.” How quickly she was giving in on the principle of holding on to her own personal time! But personal time couldn’t be kept if you were going to succeed. That was the lesson of the day. Maybe she shouldn’t have allowed the incident with Elliot to happen — maybe it had been too much of a distraction from the things she was supposed to be focusing on. Maybe it was better if she limited social interactions until she had found her footing in the city.

“Setting an alarm from now on isn’t going to change the fact that you weren’t here today,” Devin said. “You weren’t here when I needed you. Ivy, I understand that there’s a period of adjustment when a person starts a new job, but you’ve been with me long enough that you should be anticipating my needs.”

“How could I possibly have anticipated that the papers wouldn’t be collated?” Ivy asked, frustrated. “There’s no way I could have seen that coming.”

“You should have known that with an important client coming in on Monday, there was every chance I would need you over the weekend,” Devin said. “You should never have been thinking of today as a day off. When you work for me, you don’t have days off. You have days you’re not in the office, maybe, but even on those days, you should be available to me. This is a very prestigious firm, you know. There are dozens of people who would kill to work for me, and they would understand that when you work for Devin Sayers, work comes before everything else. You don’t get to put your job down and turn your phone off and forget about things for the weekend. Not here. Not when I’m your boss.”

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