Page 9 of My Not So Wicked Boss (My Not So Wicked 3)

That got her attention. She popped up and out of my arms. “Like how much?” Her eyes began to swirl with all the possibilities. “Could I finally get a cell phone?”

“It would definitely be enough for you to get your own cell phone.”

She squealed and kicked her legs. “Yes! Take the job.”

“Before you get too excited, kiddo, I don’t know if I should take the job.”

Her mouth fell open like I was crazy. “Why not?”

“Because, honey, I don’t know this man, and it would mean you and I would have to move back to Carrington Cove.”

Her green eyes, so like my own, widened while she got up on her knees, making my bed bounce. “You mean I could go to school with Brooke?” Her BFF since she was in preschool.

I nodded.

She grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “You have to take this job. Please, Mom.”

I placed my hands on her perfectly smooth cheeks. “I’m thinking about it.”

“Think hard,” she begged.

“I’m having dinner to discuss the job further with him tomorrow night after I drop you off at Grandma and Grandpa’s, and we’ll see how it goes.”

She flung herself on my bed with her hands clasped together. “Oh please, oh please, oh please,” she repeated over and over again.

I couldn’t help but smile at her and want to make her wish come true. After all, she had made almost all of mine come true, even before I knew to wish for something as wonderful as her. She changed my life, making me less selfish and more aware. She kept me from being bitter about her father. Even now, as Leland was threatening to intervene in our lives once again, Chloe reminded me that she was worth any price, even facing her father.

Unfortunately, facing him was a possibility. A couple of months ago, he called out of the blue after having no contact with us for three years, to tell me he was remarried with a baby and he wanted Chloe in his life. According to him, he was a better man now, all because his new wife taught him what love really was. Leland never failed to shove the knife that he’d stabbed me with so many years ago in deeper. Everything was always my fault. His excuse for cheating on me was I was always too tired to have sex with him whenever he wanted because I was busy taking care of our daughter. He didn’t pay child support because it wasn’t his fault I didn’t use birth control. And now he felt the need to remind me that he never loved me.

He was real father-of-the-year material. If only I could legally keep him from seeing Chloe. I didn’t want him to flit in and out of her life, hurting her more than he already had when he disappeared again. And I knew he would. Which got me thinking. If I did take this job, I could finally hire a lawyer to sue him for all the back child support he owed his daughter. But gazing at Chloe, I knew that the choice I had in front of me would be solely based on what was best for her. I only had to decide what that was.Chapter FourI paced outside Cove Café on the cobbled sidewalks of Main Street in Carrington Cove in the fading evening light, telling myself to go in. It was only dinner. I didn’t have to accept Miles’s job offer.

It wasn’t only that though. My pulse was racing again, and not because I was nervous about a huge life change. For over a year now, I had imagined an evening like this. Dinner with Taron Taylor, where we would sip wine and discuss Silent Stones and his plans for the protagonist, Isabella Jones. I bit my lip and wrung my hands, thinking about the other things I had imagined. I wasn’t supposed to meet the man I had fantasized about smiling across the candlelit table at me before he leaned in and ran his thumb across my lips. His smile would turn from playful to smoldering with each brush of his thumb before he would whisper my name as if I were a secret he wanted to keep all to himself.

I would draw close enough to share his breath. Anticipation brewed and then bubbled over as our lips teased but never touched. Then just as we couldn’t stand the sweet torture any longer, I would tell myself he would eventually disappoint me. I would force myself to either wake up or stop daydreaming. Each make-believe meeting ended the same. And there had been many of them. I knew how ridiculous it was to fear even fantasized intimacy, but it was better than being disappointed or disillusioned, especially by the man who wrote such beautiful words.

Words that had made me laugh, cry, even reflect.

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