Total pages in book: 150
Estimated words: 151430 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 757(@200wpm)___ 606(@250wpm)___ 505(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 151430 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 757(@200wpm)___ 606(@250wpm)___ 505(@300wpm)
I remember how she gushed over Grandma’s designs at the Art Institute. The woman has sharp taste, an eye for beauty that serves a purpose.
And if she got through an interview with Grandma, she has to be smart.
She just doesn’t have her shit together yet.
And I’m damned lucky I was there when her true colors showed. If we’d met any other way, total strangers, I might’ve asked for her number.
Either way, we don’t need a chatterbox who can’t lay off the sauce working for us, especially as a C-level executive assistant. She’ll be too involved with our business dealings that have zero room for error.
Besides, the last thing my family needs—the very goddamned last—is more scandal. My parents filled the gossip mills for years, and so did my dolt of a brother.
We’re not getting our feet muddy again.
I flick through an email about new hires and find her, pinching my jaw shut. A part of me flinches and doesn’t want to follow through.
Tough shit.
Paige “One Glass” Holly is just going to have to plant her sweet butt at another job elsewhere. Ideally, far, far away from my family.
Ready to end this torture, I march to the fridge and grab another water bottle, and the Tylenol from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. She’ll need them in the morning. There’s a packet of multivitamins beside the Tylenol, so I leave it on her nightstand for good measure before I let myself out.
It’s the least I can do as the jackass who’s firing her.
Cymbals crash together so loud it rips my head off.
What the hell is that? Oh, the most annoying alarm in existence. Snarling, I grab my phone and dismiss the hellish screeching that’s apparently been going off for three minutes.
My head rings and my throat feels like cotton.
Okay, so I may have had a few drinks after I went home last night, but at least I wasn’t traipsing around downtown Chicago like some kind of drunken idiot. I pick my phone up again at that thought.
One new email from Nick.
To: Ward Brandt
Cc: Beatrice Nightingale Brandt
From: Nick Brandt
Subject: RE: Houston, we have a problem.
Ward,
You need to chill.
You’re exaggerating like always and it isn’t even her first day. Lay off the extra espresso shots and get some fresh air.
Leave the poor girl alone.
Nicholas Brandt
Senior Partner, Brandt Ideas Inc.
For good measure—or to annoy the hell out of me—he’s embedded a link to Taylor Swift’s “You Need To Calm Down.”
I’ll never comprehend why the universe gave me a little brother to piss me off.
Nick thinks everything’s a joke by instinct. He’s a few beams short of a sound structure, that’s for sure.
I think it comes from being the spoiled baby, first by our parents before they lost their minds, and then by our grandparents.
Grandma hasn’t responded yet with the final word.
Even though it’s Saturday, I need to make sure she’s at least seen the email. Far better we cut ties before the new EA ever shows up in person to get a nastygram from HR.
I jump out of bed, and it’s like being beat in the head with a sledgehammer.
Fuck. I didn’t chase the bourbon with enough water last night. I also forgot the joys of encroaching middle age that start to creep up in your thirties.
I glug down a bottle of water and a pinch of pain pills, then get ready for work.
There’s hardly anyone in the office today. Thank God when I’m not in the mood for people.
Let’s be real, I never am, but with this bourbon and Miss One Glass induced headache?
Double hell no.
I pass a couple folks from marketing, but they’re so busy working on a showcase of our recent projects that they don’t even look up.
Nick slumps over his desk as usual, his office door half cracked. The right thing to do is remind him it’s hilariously inappropriate for a partner to show up to work in a Hawaiian shirt and sleep at his desk in full view of our staff, but Nick is the last person I want to talk to before my head stops pounding.
Too bad we don’t have an assistant here today. I’d send her for a coffee run.
Before I’ve got my laptop up and running in my office, Grandma appears at my door like a quicksilver whirlwind.
She’s only a few inches shorter than me, and today she’s wearing platinum heels, regal as ever. She has this lonely deep line in her forehead that she always jokes came from dealing with “her boys.” Her black business suit is custom tailored with a silvery shirt underneath.
She looks just like she did when I was a kid, except the helmet of hair around her face is now mostly quicksilver. She’s gotten thinner and more breakable with age. Still, the grit in her eyes and sharp cheekbones warn the world to tread lightly.