Page 25 of Doctor Daddy Dilemma

CHARLIE

Islogged into the office on a very soggy Monday morning a few minutes late. I was shocked I hadn’t gotten a surprise visit from Lex, who had left more than a dozen voicemails for me asking what was wrong and where I went. He sounded desperate at first. Then the messages took on a more calm tone, and finally he started to sound like his very irritable, grumpy self. Every time I listened to one, I wanted to reach out to him, comfort him, reassure him that everything was okay, but it wasn’t.

I wasn’t.

No man on earth, especially one who slept with random women while calling me his girlfriend, was worth trashing my heart for. Any man who had zero self-control and thought they needed a side chick to be happy was nothing more than a lying sack. That wasn’t how my mother raised me, and if he wanted a woman who was cool with sharing, he’d have to look for someone else.

My hair was flat, so was my mood. I had done enough work over the weekend to warrant a month-long vacation, story after story finished and submitted. It was the only way I could get through the emotions I was feeling, to bury myself in work so deep I couldn’t see the top of the stacks of research. And between being so tired I needed two naps a day and the constant nausea as if I were on a ship at sea, I was dehydrated with a chronic headache.

“Hey…” Amy hissed, rushing up to me as soon as I walked through the doors. My messenger bag hung crossbody over my chest, bobbing on my hip, and she glanced down at it before giving me a confused expression. “What are you doing here?” Her voice was hushed, as if asking me why I was at work late was a secret. The whole office could see me.

“I work here?” I said raising the last note like a question. “What’s gotten into you?” I turned, heading toward my cubicle and she kept step with me the entire way. Our heels clicked on the tile, drawing attention from every cubicle we passed. A few people nodded at me, and one of them scowled, like I had wronged him somehow.

“You haven’t talked to Mr. James yet?” She grabbed my elbow and slowed our pace as we approached my cubicle. Hers was next door to mine, and it was as far as we got before she tugged me to a stop and I faced her.

“No, am I supposed to? I sent in all my stories over the weekend. He should really like what I sent him.” My mind went to the final installment of the exposé featuring Dr. Alexander Hartman, a name I couldn’t even bring to mind without growing teary-eyed. So I thought of him as the beast who preyed on my heart and savagely destroyed it. Anger was an easier emotion to mask behind a fake smile.

“Oh, babe… You should go…” She looked across the newsroom floor to James’s office where he sat at his desk screaming his head off at a poor female reporter. His cheeks were bright red, eyes bugging out, nostrils flared. I had no interest in visiting that man’s office.

“Maybe later,” I told her, turning on my heel and rounding the corner into my cubicle before she could stop me. I froze in my tracks staring at the desk where a cardboard box sat beside a stack of my things that clearly did not fit into the box. It was already full of items that I knew had been in my drawers, and currently a man I’d never seen before in my life sat at my desk typing away at my computer. “Excuse me?”

At my voice, he finished typing and slowly turned the chair around until he was facing me, his eyebrows raised in annoyance. “Can I help you?” The man was clean-cut and handsome, devilish eyes, and a charming fake smile, but it was sardonic. I could see beneath the surface the way he would eat me alive if I let him.

“This is my cubicle, my desk…” I was ready to tear the man’s head off when Amy stepped in and grabbed my hand.

“Sorry, Howie, be right back.” She pulled me out of my cubicle and around the corner into hers. “Babe, you have to go talk to James.”

Nothing irritated me more than dealing with my boss’s misogynistic viewpoint and harassment. He’d given my desk to someone else, which meant I had a new workstation somewhere else, likely in the annex in back beyond the break room where every time someone walked out of the men’s bathroom you got a whiff of nastiness. I scowled at her and shook my head.

“What the heck is going on?”

“Just go…” Her gentle nudge wasn’t comforting at all. She knew something she wasn’t telling me, whether because she was trying to avoid being the bearer of bad news, or because she was sworn to secrecy. After the weekend I’d had, nothing could make me more depressed anyway, so I shoved my computer bag into her hands and glowered.

“Fine, but I’ll be back. This is ridiculous…” Turning on my heel again, I marched out, this time back across the newsroom to Mr. James’s office. The younger brunette who had just been in there getting her head torn off was walking out across the floor, wiping her eyes. It didn’t bode well for his mood or temperament for our discussion.

Even the atmosphere in Mr. James’s office was tense the instant I walked in. He didn’t have to look at me or say a word; I could cut the air with a knife. It felt ten degrees warmer here than the newsroom.

“Sir, Amy said you wanted to see me.” That wasn’t true. She never said he wanted me in here, just that I should talk to him about whatever it was that had happened. How else would I find out why my things had been packed up and my desk given to someone else? I walked toward the chairs opposite his desk, but he glared up at me.

“Don’t bother sitting. You won’t be here long.”

“Uh, okay…” He really was in a foul mood, one I didn’t think I could tolerate long. I chewed on the inside of my cheek and fought the intrusive thoughts. For what it was worth, for a brief second, I sympathized with him.

After the way he had treated me for months, the way my ex-boyfriend crapped on my life, and now the way Lex led me on only to break my heart, I was really feeling a lot of animosity toward men in general. I imagined someone—his mother, a girlfriend, maybe an authority figure—had hurt him pretty badly to make him so biased against women and mistreat them. That sympathy, however, was short-lived when he opened his mouth.

“Your work is crap, Martinez.” His beady little eyes bored into mine as he removed his glasses and set them on his desk.

“Sir, I wrote the article you wanted, even put the photos in that you sent me.” The last ones, the most damning ones of all, had cut me so deeply there was no redemption for Lex after seeing them. The night he left me sleeping in his bed while he went out to see a “patient” he had met up with her at the pharmacy. The paparazzi even had pictures of what they purchased at said pharmacy—condoms and lube. There was no explaining that away.

“Yeah, and it’s the only decent thing you’ve written since you got here. It’s not enough. You’re fired.”

“But, sir…” I protested, feeling tears welling up. I needed this job. I had a baby on the way and no rich sugar daddy to cough up the cash to cover the hospital bills. This was insane. I worked really hard for this place, and I didn’t deserve this.

“Don’t try to argue it, Charlotte. I told you repeatedly what I needed. We can’t write fluff and expect subscriptions to go up. I’m cutting 30 percent of our reporters due to budget cuts, and since your work is crap, you’re out.” He put his glasses back on his face and turned to his computer and started typing.

Thirty percent of the reporters? And I was out?

My heart fell to my feet and I shook my head. “Can I take my articles somewhere else then?” Maybe if I sold them to some other paper as freelance pieces, I could recoup some of the money I’d be losing from this job as I searched for a new one. My mind reeled with the fear of what would happen now.

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