Page 42 of The Wrong Boss

Wasn’t it?

Or maybe I was kidding myself, wrapped up in the memories of a woman who’d slipped through my fingers after a single encounter.

Was I really ready to blow up my engagement—and possibly my relationship with my father—by deciding that this engagement wasn’t right for me?

Padding to my home office, I crossed to my desk and fished my keys out of my pocket. Using the tiniest key on my keyring, I unlocked the top left drawer of the desk and then sat down in my chair. Pulling the drawer open, I reached to the back of the drawer and took out a small box. I flipped it open and stared at its contents for long, silent moments.

A sigh eased through my lips, and I put the box back where I’d found it. The lock on the drawer clicked shut, and I put my keys back in my pocket. There was no use dwelling on things that didn’t matter.

I was getting married. I was doing my father proud by taking up the reins at his company. I was living the life I was meant to live.That’swhat mattered.

Not a ghost from my past.

The only thing I knew for certain was that if I was going to untangle this mess, I had to keep my distance from Carrie. Leaning back in my desk chair, I let my head fall back so I could stare at the ceiling. I probably should have fired Carrie when I had the chance.

FIFTEEN

CARRIE

The restof the week was a reprieve for me; Cole was out of town for most of it, and when he did return, I wasn’t called up to his office.

The evenings were spent debriefing with Hailey and peppering Seth with questions about his lawyer friend who’d agreed to meet with me about potential custody issues.

For the moment, I was in limbo. I didn’t want to quit, and I didn’t want to do anything rash by telling Cole about Evie before I knew my rights—and the risks involved.

By Friday evening, I was wrecked, but I managed to leave work in time to pick Evie up from school. My daughter came running out of the gates, her bee backpack bouncing, a look of pure excitement on her face.

“Mom!” she cried, using my legs as a crash barrier to stop her forward momentum. “Mom, look!” She waved a piece of paper at me, bouncing on her toes. “Look!”

I managed to snag the paper from her hands and uncrumpled it to see a flyer for a school-wide spelling bee.

“Miss Katie said anyone could sign up. The winner from every grade gets to go to the district spelling bee, and the prize for that one is five hundred dollars! And then she said there are competitions all the way to state and national level!”

My brows jumped. My daughter was nothing if not ambitious. “Wow. And you want to put your name down?”

“Duh!” Evie grinned at me and pointed at one of the bees buzzing around the top of the flyer. “I have to! It’s a spellingbee.”

Chuckling, I turned in the direction of home. “You know a spelling bee has nothing to do with actual bees, right?”

“Mom,” she said, rolling her eyes with enough sass to make me quake in fear of the teenage years to come. “Of course I know that. But I’m a good speller!”

Maybe it was like that phenomenon where people were drawn to careers related to their names—nominative determinism. Someone named Jane Judge would be more likely to end up working in law; Jane Cox, on the other hand, might be more likely to become a specialist in reproductive medicine. Or, you know, porn.

A little girl obsessed with bees might find herself a spelling bee champion.

“I’ll help you practice,” I promised.

“Miss Katie said we would have an in-class spelling bee every week. The winner gets to be class helper!”

I smiled. Miss Katie sounded smart. I chatted with my daughter on the walk home, fixed her a snack once we got there,and then dutifully quizzed her on a long list of words until it was time for dinner. And Evie was right: shewasa good speller.

Her excitement lifted some of the weight from my shoulders. Once Evie was tucked in bed, I took the spelling bee flyer and pinned it to our family corkboard, then noted the date of the spelling bee in my calendar. It would happen on the third Friday of October.

Hailey watched me from the sofa, a mug of tea cupped in her hands. “You look deep in thought over there,” she told me.

I sank down beside her. “I was just thinking about having to tell Evie that I found her father,” I admitted. My eyes slid over to the flyer pinned to the board. “It’ll be a shock.”

Hailey hummed. “As much of a shock for her as it will be for him.”

---