Page 44 of Executive Benefits

Which was what I really wanted to be free from.

My phone rang as I was looking over a document for the bakery. I hit the accept button and said, “Hello, Julia Day here. How can I help you?”

“Julia…”

Dammit.

“Leave me alone, Jared.”

“No, I need you to come here next Tuesday. Things have taken a turn for the worse and I need you to fix it. I’ll pay whatever you want, but I can’t wait until March.”

I closed my eyes and chewed on my lip. He was always pushing against my boundaries to see how much I would bend.

I wasn’t happy that the idea of a huge lump sum of money from him wasn’t enticing, but I was sure he would promise anything to get what he wanted and would back out of it the second he actually needed to pay it. It wasn’t just because he’d be giving money to me, though. I had it on good authority—from one of my own clients—that he’d backed out of paying money to someone else too.

It was going to bite him in the ass in the long run. I just wanted someone to record it when it did so I could watch it on YouTube or something. That would be fun.

“Plus, you need to apologize to that woman you insulted.”

Yup. There it was.

Any thought of how much a chunk of cash would help my business flittered out of my head when he tried to blame the whole thing on me. But… “Why is that woman even around you?” I asked. I did, in fact, react badly the first time Jared told me he was getting slapped with a lawsuit for sexual harassment. It was definitely not one of my better moments, but I did owe her an apology.

“We’re finalizing the settlement on Tuesday. I figured you could come here and you can apologize to that woman, then we could go out for dinner and talk more about us,” he said.

My moral compass told me I needed to apologize to the woman, even if she wouldn’t accept my apology. I knew that she at the very least deserved it from me because I was an ass.

“Fine,” I said. “But I’m not going to dinner with you and I’m not talking about ‘us’. There is no ‘us’, Jared, and if you continue to bring it up, you’ve already heard what I told you what will happen. I wasn’t making idle threats,” I said.

When he said, “I know,” with a patronizing tone, I almost hung the phone up on the spot, but I listened for him to finish. “You always stick true to your word. I remember.” He said it with almost a defeatist attitude that made me think maybe something I said actually stuck around in his overinflated ego. I wasn’t going to comment on it one way or another because it wasn’t going to help get him out of anything, nor would I even consider doing business with him again, so there was nothing I would gain from it.

A weight lifted from my chest when I realized I didn’t have to give in to Jared to make me respect myself. That was a nice feeling.

“I’ll meet you at the courthouse on Tuesday, Jared. Text me the time, please. I’ll see you then.” I hung up the phone, not waiting for him to respond or give me any other kind of hard time. He’d used up his chances with me. I was tired of listening to anything he had to say.

When I saw his text to meet him at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, I got back to work on the ideas I would have for the bakery and then jumped into the next phase of marketing for Gray’s.

It was going to be good.

21

NICK

“Ithink it’s a piss-poor thing to do to yourself,” Phoebe said, patting me on the back.

I didn’t bother to look over to her. “What?” I asked. My gaze stuck to the bar across the street. They reopened their doors on New Year's Eve and the people hadn’t stopped flocking to it for the last two weeks.

My jaws tightened, trying to remind myself that our rebranding and reopening were going to come in almost one month. We’d close down soon, and the big changes were going to be made.

I tried.

It didn’t work very well.

My fingers bunched into a fist as I watched Kendra and another guy walk into the bar as well. If I didn’t know her so damn well, I’d have said she was living her best life and had completely forgotten about tormenting me, the people she used to employ, and the restaurant. But the special way she tossed her hair to the side and snuck a peek over her shoulder at the restaurant told me she was fucking with me and that she hoped I was watching.

I hated that I knew her so well.

“Hey—” Phoebe clapped her hands in front of my face. I rolled my eyes and looked at her. “Try to focus. They’re going to be new and shiny until we are new and shiny, and then we’ll make everyone look like a fool who tried to screw around with us, alright?” she said.

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