Page 14 of The Bossy One

That was the problem. Sinead was one of the only people I’d never been able to control.

Unbidden, an image flashed in my mind of Olivia with her damn notebook, fighting me on every instruction I gave her.

It felt like more and more of my life was being upended by uncontrollable women.

4

OLIVIA

The next day I woke up in my peaceful yellow room, determined to start fresh. My first day on the job had not been…ideal. My boss clearly knew nothing about modern childcare. It was frustrating because there had been moments when he seemed to care deeply about Catie, and she him. But then he’d all but vanished for that business call. And when he had come back, he’d barely listened to anything Catie or I said. He’d just nodded absently and agreed with anything Catie said.

“But that was yesterday,” I reminded myself. Today would be different.

I found some neatly folded bath towels in the wardrobe and headed to the bathroom. Declan had his own bathroom attached to his room, but Catie and I would be sharing the one in the hall.

I propped my phone on the window ledge and hit my favorite playlist, keeping the volume low so as not to disturb anyone. Then I got naked and tried to turn the shower on.

It was harder than it looked. There were six nobs and two showerheads—and no matter which way I turned any of the nobs, it always seemed to come out cold.

I stood in the bathroom shivering, goose bumps rising on my skin.

You can do this, I told myself.You can take a cold shower.

I lasted approximately four seconds before jumping back out of the shower.

There was a simple solution for this. I could ask Declan.

But I could just picture his smug face. The one he’d used when giving me career advice. No, I couldn’t bring myself to ask Declan for help.

I studied the shower. Maybe the problem wasn’t that it was a fancy rich person shower. Maybe the problem was that it was a fancy European shower.

If that was the case, then maybe therewassomeone I could ask. I didn’t know if he’d be awake at 6:40 a.m., but it was worth a shot.

I snapped a photo of the shower controls and sent it to @DBCoder, zooming in as close as I could so that the shower control took up the whole screen and he could actually read the various buttons.

If you can tell me how to turn on the hot water, you’d be my hero.You’re the only nice Irish person I know, I typed, and hit send.

He surprised me by responding back immediately.

Unfortunately, he just sent a string of laughing emojis.

Don’t mock my pain, I typed.I am wet, naked, and cold in a foreign country.

Two of those are good things, he typed back.

My stomach fluttered. Every now and then one of us would say something that strayed perilously close to flirting, but then the other one of us would chicken out. There was something undeniably fun about flirting with a smart, funny guy. But then I’d imagine what it might be like to meet each other in real life, and my courage would fail me.

This time @DBCoder was the one to shift the conversation back into safer territory.

Sorry, he wrote.You have no idea how badly I needed that laugh. That’s a pretty common shower set up. Sending over instructions now. Let me know if they work.

I followed his instructions when they came through, including waiting five minutes for the water to heat up. When I saw the shower start to give off visible steam, I almost cried in gratitude.

I sent him a thumbs-up, then set my phone aside and hopped into the shower.

When I finished and toweled off, I saw he’d sent me one more message before signing off.Welcome to Ireland,a chara.

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