Page 28 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

She holds up a hand. “Been there.”

I smile. Betsy is the nicest person in the entire place. I head down cubicle row. Sasha pops up and crooks her finger.

Come here.

Danger bells start clanging.

“The wake-up-call service,” she says.

I frown, as though that’s the last thing I’d expect her to bring up. “Is it still…working out?”

“Apparently so. Mr. Drummond wants an extra call.” She hands me a card. “This is his office line, to be used only for the purposes of an extra call to be placed by the current operator he’s working with. The call is to be made at precisely 9:20 a.m.”

“Huh,” I say with a totally straight face. “Really.”

“Yeah, I don’t know, maybe he’s planning a nap up there or something. And you’re to specifically request that the operator working with the Vossameer account be assigned to this job, but it shouldn’t be obvious he’s the client. Have them PayPal invoice me. Understand?”

“I understand,” I say, scrambling to think how I’d ever get away with placing a call from my cubicle. What will I do?

“Unusual, I know. But there’s always a method to Mr. Drummond’s madness,” she assures me breathlessly.

“Of course there is,” I say. “But this request is for a call in two hours.”

“Are you saying you think you can’t handle it?”

“I’ll put in the order,” I say. “I don’t know how they assign things over there, in terms of scheduling the operators. I suspect that they might schedule twenty-four hours in advance.”

“Figure it out. Whatever it costs. This is something Mr. Drummond wants, so this is something Mr. Drummond gets.”

She turns back to her work, my cue to scram. I take a look at the card, vaguely disappointed to find his office line written in Sasha’s loopy and polished hand instead of Mr. Drummond’s expressively angular pencil writing. Crisp, dark lines, like he presses really intensely, so deliciously stern is he.

The handwriting of an asshole,I remind myself.

Also,microwave popcorn ban!

I head down cubicle row, clutching the card. Trying to think how to handle this.

I know what he’s doing, of course. He wants to figure out whether his wake-up-call girl speaks rudely to all her clients. So he’s posing as a different client. Scientist that he is, he’s set up a wee test.

Hah! He has to wake up a lot earlier than 4:30 in the morning to outfox me.

I smile, just at the craziness of it all. I shouldn’t be smiling, but I like that he wants more of the calls. I want to make more of the calls. Because it’s so damn fun.

I take the card back to my desk.

The problem is that there’s no way to be sure I can get alone in two hours. Sasha might need me. Even if I ran to the bathroom stall, somebody could be there. But what kind of service turns down business? What reason will I give?

It comes to me then that I can just say no. He may be perched up there in his CEO lair atop the Vossameer building, but I run the wake-up-call company.

The answer is no. End of story. No reason. Just no.

It feels good and a little bit revolutionary to tell a handsome and controlling guy no, especially after I spent so long accommodating Mason’s requests, always trying to make him feel happy and listened to.

Back at my desk, I press my phone to my cheek and pretend to put in the order for the benefit of my coworkers in the surrounding cubicles.

“You’re sure there’s no way to arrange it…” I say. “We really would like this call to be made…no, I understand…yes, we areextremelydisappointed.”

I return immediately to Sasha’s desk, dutiful employee that I am, and tell her the bad news. “The operator he wants is all booked up. They can’t give her any more clients. Do you want me to try for a different one?”

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