Page 15 of Faking It With My New Boss

She turned and walked away from me, heading directly over to the sitting area where the woman was waiting for her, watching us intently. They interacted briefly, then walked out of the lobby. I could feel people looking at me, probably wondering what they had just witnessed. But I didn't care. I turned back around and went to the elevator to head back to the office.

I ordered lunch to be delivered to me and went over the ideas she had left on my desk. It was still a bit of a shock seeing things so completely different from the events I'd told her to look over. It hadn't occurred to me she would take such a radically different approach to planning the event. Now I had to decide how I really felt about it.

Chapter Eleven

Courtney

Maybe there would be a time when I would walk out of the office and not feel completely stunned by what just happened. I was going to go ahead and write that down as my top goal for continuing to work there. I would really like to know what it was like to be able to stroll out of the lobby not shocked and trying to process exactly what was happening in my life.

But that was not the day. I was possibly even more shocked walking out of the office to go to lunch with Vanessa than I was the day before when I was hired. At least then I was just thrown off by the sudden detour that brought me from thinking I was going to have a brief placement as a designer for a hotel gift shop to accepting ludicrous money to be an assistant and party planner. The stunned feeling came from trying to figure out how it had all gone down.

Now I was shocked by the way I'd talked to Bryan. And the fact that he hadn't fired my ass so fast he could have sent it out on a plate and called it rare.

Vanessa looked just as surprised, and more than a little confused, as I walked over to the sitting area in the lobby. I was still holding my box of things from the office and she eyed it suspiciously.

“Hey,” she said when I got to her. “I thought I'd come by and check out your new office. I wanted to surprise you for lunch on your first day.” She paused for a second, then waved her hands around beside her. “Surprise.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it. I'm sorry you had to see that.”

“Well, I don't know exactly everything that I saw, but I can tell you one thing I did see and that would be the absolutely gorgeous man you seemed to be arguing with,” she said.

I rolled my eyes and let out a heavy breath. “That would be my boss.”

Her eyes widened further. “That? That was Bryan Callahan?”

“In the flesh,” I said.

She looked behind me across the lobby even though I was pretty sure Bryan was already on his way back up to the office by now.

“And it was certainly some flesh,” Vanessa said wistfully. “Why didn't you tell me how hot he is?”

That was really the last thing that was on my mind at that moment. I shook my head.

“Come on. Let's go to lunch. I'm starving,” I said.

Vanessa eyed the box in my arms. “How long a wait are you expecting? I don't think you need to move into the restaurant.”

I looked down at the box and sighed, rolling my eyes again and shoving the box at her. “I'll tell you about it when we get to lunch.”

Vanessa brought me to one of her favorite restaurants and we settled in with a drink before I started talking.

“Alright, so I already told you about the whole gala thing and him basically hiring an assistant just to plan the stupid party.”

“Right,” she said. “And he's offering a ton of money for you to do it,” Vanessa said.

“Yep. Which is how I ended up taking it in the first place. But I figured even though I wasn't really the one the former assistant hired and despite it not being anything close to the type of work I thought I would be doing, that I should do the best job possible. So, I started making plans last night. I came up with a few ideas, drew some sketches, even came up with little sample menus.”

“Wow. That's a whole lot of overachieving happening there,” she said.

A waiter came by with a basket of bread and a plate of dipping oil. Vanessa immediately ripped a chunk of bread off and swirled it around on the plate before biting into it. I followed her lead, but got lost in the swirling step, watching the bread make a path through the oil.

“I guess,” I said, then snapped out of the trance and looked at her. “You know what? It was. It was a shit-ton of work and I did it because I wanted to be the highest quality employee he could have hired. I wanted to do well and have him be happy with what I produced for him. And you know what he did?”

“I'm guessing it wasn't praise you for a job well done and ask you to stay on as his permanent event planner,” Vanessa said.

“That would be correct. He yelled at me for putting too much thought into it and having interesting and original ideas rather than just ripping off the former planners and doing exactly the same party as before,” I said.

She screwed up her face and looked at me like she wasn't following me. “Seriously?”

---