Page 5 of Her Impossible Boss's Baby

Her chest hurt when she looked at him and what was that emotion exactly?

She didn’t want to know.

She could see he was exasperated, he didn’t like having to explain himself. He also didn’t care if she was tired. He didn’t care if she was upset.

He cared about himself.

She’d put herself in the exact position she’d promised she never would.

Luca wasn’t manipulative, not in the slightest. In that way he was nothing like her parents. But the core issue was the same. She cared for someone who didn’t care for her. She bent and twisted her life to suit someone else’s needs when she’d sworn never to do that.

And if she took a step back and tried to be somewhat sympathetic to the gorgeous billionaire who always got his way, she could appreciate that it must be frustrating to him to try and explain the way that his brain functioned to mere mortals who couldn’t even understand what nanotechnology was, much less how it functioned in a medical setting.

She found she had difficulty drumming up sympathy for him, though.

And the truth was, she didn’t need to. Because she had another job offer. What was she doing standing in her boss’s bedroom in the middle of the night while he stood there shirtless, demanding an opinion on which black suit he was going to wear to speak to a room full of people?

She wasn’t afraid of him. She never had been. He had said many times it was one of the things that he appreciated about her.

She met his complete, uncompromising, blunt nature with relentless cheer. Sometimes with sharpness, but always with efficiency. She had learned that half the problem he had with his past assistants was that they simply crumpled beneath the pressure of working for him. He had appreciated her backbone.

She doubted he would appreciate it now.

“Luca, I cannot believe that you called me out here in the middle of the night to help you choose a suit so that you could rehearse the speech.”

“Why? It is entirely consistent with everything you know about me.”

The problem was, she couldn’t even argue with him.

She was going to anyway, though. “But surely you must understand that it’s unreasonable.”

“It is part of your employment contract. You’re on call.”

“Be that as it may, no normal employer would ever subject an employee to this.”

“At what point have I ever pretended as if I was a normal employer? No one else is like me. You know this.”

“No one else is like you,” she said, looking up at the gilded ceiling in his bedroom. “I sure as hell hope so, Luca, because I don’t think the world could withstand having another human being on its surface that behaved the way that you do.”

“Honesty is appreciated, attitude is unnecessary.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I am running on two hours of sleep because you got me up at two in the morning after staying at the office with you until midnight. I was finally about to go to sleep and then you call me to come down to your personal residence, where you are half-naked, asking for help with something that is simply not pressing by the standards of any other human being. You are a robot, Luca. And I have tirelessly put up with you for the last five years. And I’m not doing it anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

It was all abundantly clear now. She was at a crossroads. She’d been tempted to just stay on the beaten path. To just keep on going. To just stay with Luca and stay stagnant. His favorite piece of office equipment, rather than pursuing her own dreams.

Her own life.

She had to put a stop to it.

She had to be her own best advocate because what was the point of anything that had happened in her whole life up to this point if she failed herself now?

“I quit.”

“You must be joking. Nobody quits.”

“No. You fire them. Because you find fault with everything they do, and I’m the one person you couldn’t find fault with. But I find fault with you. I quit. I’m done. I’m going home and I’m going to bed.”

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