Page 24 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

“You said it felt amazing.”

“But I didn’t know I was actually talking to him.”

“Set your alarm for four and think about what a jerk he is. How controlling he is.”

“He is that.” I squirt in a bunch of soy sauce. “His employees work so hard, and he doesn’t care. He won’t even let us have microwave popcorn.”

She gives me an outraged look. Mia’s amazing at fiercely outraged looks; it’s something that seems to run in her large Italian family along with a passion for Italian cinema and things decorated with sloths. “Microwave popcorn is one of the main sources of office-worker pleasure,” she says.

“I know, right? He wants us to be machines like him. He leads by fear. Dude, have you heard of twentieth-century leadership techniques? Seriously.”

“See? That’s the spirit.” Mia digs into her pad Thai. “You just have to replay this whole conversation at four in the morning.”

“I don’t know,” I say. But then I think about his stern face and rumbly voice, and something stirs in me.

“You get to vent to your asshole boss. Do you know how many people would kill for that opportunity?”

“It’s risky. What if he figures out I’m somebody from the office?”

“Don’t talk about the office. You’re a husky-voiced stranger who’s tired of the patriarchy.”

“It did feel good.” I take a swig of wine.

“And he liked it.”

“He found itunorthodox,” I say. “I can’t imagine that he likes it.”

“Men are weird,” she says.

“He does seem to like unpleasant things. I think his favorite color might be gray.”

“Gray isn’t even a color,” Mia says. “It’s a shade of black.”

“Yeah! It’s a shade of black, motherfucker!”

She snorts. “That’s the spirit!”

I smile. I’m starting to feel better about the whole thing.

“The secret to improv like this is that you just commit,” Mia says. “Whatever comes out of your mouth, go with it.”

“So weird. I can’t even look at him at work, or Sasha might think I’m flirting with him, but I can call him up in the middle of the night and tell him exactly how I feel about him.”

Mia grabs her wine glass. “Best job ever.”

Eight

Lizzie

I’m lessenthusiastic about telling Mr. Drummond exactly how I feel about him when my alarm goes off at four in the morning.

I snuggle under the covers, thinking about how handsome and stern he looked when he came out from around his desk in that white lab jacket that first day. The gorgeous chocolatey tone of his hair. His intense and piercing gray gaze, just a little bit angry. And how the air crackled.

And I think about when I first saw him standing at Sasha’s cubicle that day. How keenly I felt him, like I could close my eyes and feel his stormy energy.

And then the drowsy pleasure clears from my mind and I remind myself I have to call him and be mean.

I sit up in bed. “Because you can’t or won’t learn how to work an alarm clock,” I whisper into the darkness.

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