Page 5 of Rude Boss' Secret Baby
Getting fired from a job was always a terrible fucking day. And as much as I wanted to think otherwise, this wasn’t the first time I’d been let go. I took my work seriously, whatever I was doing, and I didn’t take kindly to people not taking things as seriously. I hated it when people joked around on their job. I hated it when their actions put others at risk. I needed a serious workplace for serious adults who wanted to do serious work.
“You can find something. Just take deep breaths,” I whispered to myself.
This wasn’t the first time I’d struggle on behalf of myself and my daughter, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. Still, though, it felt like these struggles always came sooner rather than later. Maybe I needed to be a little less abrasive while doing my job. Perhaps I should try to be nicer to people, even though they pissed me off in droves. Hell, I had struggled most of my life, and I always seemed to find a way to come out on top.
Why change that simply because someone hadn’t seen my worth just yet?
And dammit, this was the nicest place Aurora and I had ever lived in. I had to fight for it. I couldn’t let that go. Aurora was finally blossoming in school and making friends, something I never thought I’d see from my daughter, who didn’t start using words until she was almost three. She had come through shit in leaps and bounds over the past year, and I wasn’t yanking her out of that simply because I was a fuck-up.
No. Even if I had to starve, Aurora would eat. Even if I had to take out loans and destroy my credit, this roof would stay over my daughter’s head. And even if I had to go back to school—only to be stuck in debt for the rest of my life—I’d do it if it meant keeping Aurora in the one place she liked.
So, with a full day of application-submitting ahead of me, I finally closed my eyes and allowed myself to sleep while thinking of the hot man from the bar and how he could’ve rocked my world had I not been a piece of chicken-shit.
1
Tray
Present Day
“Nope. No. Uh-uh. Hell, no. Eh, maybe, I’ll read it later. No. Nope. Definitely not.”
As I flipped through the mound of resumes that had come my way in the past month, I tossed out over half of them. Well, maybe close to three-quarters of them. Now that Joanne’s husband had retired, she wanted to quit so she could travel with him, even though it left me in a bind.
Guess it’s nice when you actually have someone to do shit with.
I chewed on the inside of my cheek as I kept flipping through pointless resumes. No, I didn’t have time to take on someone that had no secretarial experience. No, I didn’t have time to deal with the bobble-headed nature of freshly graduated-wannabe-adults. And no, I certainly didn’t have the sanity to deal with interns looking for internships for their last year of graduation.
I needed someone with experience.
I needed someone with oomph.
And I needed someone who could get shit done.
In some respects, I hated losing Joanne. That petite little gray-haired woman reminded me of my grandmother, and I missed that hard-ass woman. My Nannie would sit outside with a lit cigarette dangling from her lip. At the same time, with a BB gun in her hand, she bitched out kids about crossing over into her lawn and terrorizing the habitat of squirrels and cats she had cultivated over the years.
That woman was as eccentric as they came, but she owned it. She lived her life fast and to the fullest until the day she died. And even though she smoked like a freight train, drank like a fish, and shoved fried foods into her mouth for every single meal, she somehow lived to be the ripe old age of ninety-two with a mouth to match.
“God, I miss that woman,” I murmured to myself.
She understood the value of hard work. She understood the importance of getting stuff done. She and my grandfather—God rest his soul—owned and operated a dairy farm of over two hundred and fifty cows. Just the two of them with their six spoiled-brat children who, according to her, constantly complained about the hard work—all of them, that was, except my mother.
Who drilled into me the fine art of dedication and reaping what one sowed.
Nevertheless, I knew that losing Joanne—this beacon of familiarity that kept me going throughout my days—was something happening sooner rather than later. And I should have been prepared. I should have started taking resumes with no end date in sight so that I had a curated list of people to call up when she was ready to step down.
Insert lecture from Nannie here.
The thought made me chuckle as I came across a particular resume that caught my eye.
“Now, here’s something,” I murmured.
I leaned up in my seat and placed the resume against my desk. I needed someone who could keep up with me and travel with me for work when it was required, and right there at the top of this resume was “can and will travel.” I also needed someone who could juggle my small businesses' needs, and right below “can and will travel” were the words “great multi-tasker.” And with every beautiful skillset this resume boasted of, there was a number with the name of a reference for me to call.
So, I decided to try out one of them.
“Hello?” a gruff man on the other side of the phone asked.
I leaned back. “Yes, hello. This is Trey Cataline from TC Public Relations.”
