Page 23 of The Wrong Boss

I held up my hand to forestall whatever came next. “Everyone needs a job. But not everyone can perform at thelevel required to keep one. You have a new hire starting today, yes?”

Kaia looked like she was about to protest, then rocked back on her heels and dipped her chin.

“Good. She can handle my travel arrangements while you deal with the staff shortage.”

“The new hire—I’ll need to train her, complete her onboarding,” Kaia replied. “I can’t just throw her straight in?—”

“To dealing with me?” I finished, knowing there was an edge of challenge in my voice.

Kaia clamped her lips shut. “We can’t just throw her straight in the deep end without training,” she finally amended.

“Sure we can.” I turned to my computer, dismissing her. “Sink or swim, Kaia. That’s how we’ve always operated.”

There was a tense silence, and then the quick clip of her footsteps took her out of my office. I let out a sigh, glancing at the email inbox flooding with new, urgent inquiries. One of them caught my eye—a fussy client who panicked at every dip in the market—and I clicked through to see what new fire I’d have to put out.

And my phone rang.

Glancing at the screen, I sighed, then swiped to pick up. “Darling,” I said. “It’s been at least two hours since you last called. Another emergency is underway, I imagine?”

“You are lucky I agreed to marry you,” my fiancée, Alba, snapped. “And yes, there’s an emergency. The wedding invitations just came in, and the gilding is all wrong. It’syellowgold, Cole. I specifically asked for a neutral shade of gold to matchour wedding colors. And there’s a typo! It says ‘attendence’ with an ‘e’! Can you imagine?”

“Wow,” I said, only half listening. The difficult client was threatening to withdraw his considerable fortune from our management. Not the first time, but this would require some coddling on my part.

What was the difference between yellow and neutral gold, anyway?

Alba huffed. “Between that and the florist messing me around, it’s looking like there won’t be a wedding at all.”

“That would be a shame,” I said, eyes on the email on my screen.

“I need you to call the printers and fix the wedding invites. Theyneedto be sent out by the end of the day. Your father called and asked me about them just this morning.”

I blinked away from my screen and stared at the abstract artwork on the far wall. Even after years of building a relationship with the man who’d given me up, it was strange to hear him referred to as my father. And yet he was the reason I was here, in this office. He was the reason I’d met Alba, who was the daughter of one of his business associates.

Reaching out to my birth father had been a turning point in my life, and I knew I was lucky. He’d accepted me as his own, welcomed me into his family. He’d made me feel like I had a past—and a future. He’d helped wash away the hurt of rejection that had only started to make sense when I’d found out as a young adult that I’d been adopted and could finally understand why I’d been treated so differently than the siblings I’d grown up with.

Hegave me a job. It wasn’tthisjob, but it was a high-level job at his wealth management fund, and I wasn’t too dense to realize that my rise up the ranks in four short years to this seat in the boss’s chair wasn’t solely due to my resumé. I was back on Wall Street after all these years, and Ididknow what I was doing, but my father had given me a huge leg up.

I owed him for that.

That evening seven years ago, in my apartment’s kitchen, he’d answered my call and offered to meet with me. Once I’d sent him the adoption paperwork and picture, he even sounded happy about the prospect. The fact that I was sitting in the corner office of his company, marrying his closest friend’s daughter, made me think his reaction had been genuine. He’d been hoping I would contact him.

I’d needed a push to finally reach out to him, which I’d found in the most unlikely of places—and everything had worked out for the best. Memories pressed at the edges of my mind—gray doe eyes, a body to kill for, and a sharp, irresistible tongue—and I repressed them. There was no use in letting myself go down that path again. Carrie had crashed into my life and disappeared again. Which was exactly how it should have been.

If it weren’t for her, I wasn’t sure I would have reached out to my father at all. I owed her for one sizzling evening together and a new direction in my life. That was a high enough pedestal; no use lifting her to higher heights in my mind than necessary.

But sometimes, I wondered if I was clinging to this father-son relationship a little too hard. Alba and I had had a whirlwindromance and were now planning a lavish wedding. My father had been thrilled by our engagement. His best friend and business partner was already calling me “son.” I had a family, a place in the corner office of my father’s business, and a beautiful fiancée.

But with every week that passed, I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted. I wasn’t even sure I loved her.

Which in itself just proved how fucked up I really was, didn’t it? I had everything a man could want, and still, I felt like I was unworthy. I kept waiting for the rug to get pulled out from under me, like it had been when I found out my parents weren’t my parents.

My father would turn his back on me. Alba would decide she was sick of my being so cold and detached. The business would crumble with me at the helm. All the friends and employees that I’d been loyal to would decide it was too much trouble to give that loyalty back.

“Cole?”

I blinked back to myself. “Why does my father care about the wedding invitations?”

“You know his closest friends are on the guest list,” Alba said, impatience nipping at the edge of her tone. “It’s a very bad look to send them out too late. For all of us.”

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