Never Tease The Boss

  Age Gap Instalove Romance

  By Haley Travis

  Copyright 2021 Haley Travis. All rights reserved. Edited by Rosemary Stewart. Cover Design by Lexie Renard.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted or duplicated in any form whatsoever without express written permission of the author. This book is intended for sale to adults. All main characters are over 18. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual people or specific locations or details is completely coincidental, or intended fictitiously.

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  ***

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 ~ Amelia

  Chapter 2 ~ Jeremy

  Chapter 3 ~ Amelia

  Chapter 4 ~ Jeremy

  Chapter 5 ~ Amelia

  Chapter 6 ~ Jeremy

  Chapter 7 ~ Amelia

  Chapter 8 ~ Jeremy

  Chapter 9 ~ Amelia

  Chapter 10 ~ Jeremy

  Chapter 11 ~ Amelia

  Chapter 12 ~ Jeremy

  Chapter 13 ~ Amelia

  Chapter 14 ~ Jeremy

  Chapter 15 ~ Amelia

  Chapter 16 ~ Jeremy

  Chapter 17 ~ Amelia

  Chapter 18 ~ Jeremy

  Chapter 19 ~ Amelia

  Chapter 20 ~ Jeremy

  Epilogue One ~ Amelia

  Epilogue Two ~ Jeremy

  Other Books & About the Author

  Chapter 1

  _____

  Amelia

  “Come on, you son of a pig,” I muttered, giving the scrap of paper one more tug. It finally released, allowing me to pull it free of the rollers with a huge sigh of relief.

  Getting up from my hands and knees, I realized that I’d been bent over in an extremely improper position on the floor, with my ass hoisted up in the air and my skirt hitched up to an indecent height.

  Whirling around, I spotted a man in a dark gray suit turning the corner as he walked away from the mailroom. Crap. I hope that whoever it was, he hadn’t seen me.

  It was tricky: I tried to be dignified while working in an office full of polished professionals, yet I was the one to keep the machines running no matter what, and sometimes that involved getting dirty. But I loved every bit of it. The crisp feeling when opening a new package of thick, glossy paper. Calibrating the massive printer so that the dark teal of the Castle and Wentworth logo would look perfect.

  The printer, whom I called “good old Bessie”, was longer than my living room. Yes, I had measured.

  I nearly choked when I found out how much the thing cost. The company leased it, so we’d get a repair tech in whenever something really went wonky. Thank goodness. I’m pretty sure that some of the interior was designed by actual rocket scientists.

  But I’d learned most of the little tricks to keep Bessie happy, even though I had only been here for a week.

  I’d worked as a mailroom assistant before, but this new job was managing the mailroom, which was basically a print shop. However, I’d also worked in one of those for several months, and had learned the ways of finagling machinery. So I was in a good position to look after this space with the massive color printer, a much smaller, slower color printer, and a tiny black and white one that I mainly used for shipping labels. Plus the cutting and binding machines, and keeping track of the endless variety of paper products.

  Tugging my skirt down to a more respectable level, I looked around the enormous room, with the long work table and huge shelves. Running the mailroom of this prestigious corporate real estate company, I felt like a military commander as I took a survey of my assets every morning. Ink levels, paper supplies, binders, clips, plastic cover pages.

  I’d actually managed to weasel my way into the room the day before I officially started working here so that I could completely organize the entire space. So far, everyone seemed dazzled, which led me to believe that the previous mailroom manager didn’t have a clue.

  It was funny to see how shocked and surprised people were when they received their completed jobs within a few hours or less.

  Cleaning my hands with an ink removing wipe, I snapped the printer door panels back into place, then hit a few buttons for the job to continue.

  “Hey, Amelia.”

  I turned to see Megan standing in the doorway, as if she were afraid to enter. “There was a paper jam, but we’re back in business now,” I said. I tried to keep an eye on the master print queue that showed whose job was in progress, so that I could anticipate who would come running down the hallway.

  “Good, thanks. Can I get those bound with the blue card stock covers, with silver wire binding?”

  “Absolutely. When do you need them?”

  I’d never seen Megan look nervous before, but then, this was just the start of my second week. “I’m so sorry, it’s a rush. There’s a meeting in the boardroom in...half an hour?” she said apologetically, brushing her hands nervously on the skirt of her little black dress.

  She was a financial analyst, and seemed relatively new. I wanted to help her in her quest to prove to the men she was just as qualified. Girl power, and all that.

  “Oh, geez,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I thought you were going to say three minutes or something. Half an hour? Should be no problem if old Bessie behaves herself.” I reached out to pat the side of the printer encouragingly.

  “Thanks so much,” she said. “Is there any chance you could leave them in the main boardroom for me? I have to go through some of the research with Ashley before the meeting.”

  “No problem.”

  As I went over to check my email for any incoming rush jobs, my gaze passed over the calendar. There was a tiny black dot in the corner to remind me that the other big boss was back from vacation today.

  I’d already met Byron Castle, who seemed...fine. He was a bit curt, and he always acted like he was extremely busy, yet he came in late and left early, and took long lunch meetings that sounded like they were more social than business. He was in his mid-sixties, and it didn’t seem like he was really much of a go-getter anymore.

  Byron had established Castle Real Estate Investments decades ago. He had apparently taken on Mr. Wentworth as a partner several years ago, both to rejuvenate the corporation and to smooth his transition to retirement.

  It was amazing what I could discover through the company website, but more importantly, the endless gossip that circulated in the hallway, reception area, and mailroom.

  Clicking through my emails, I was still struggling to keep people’s names straight, but everyone seemed pretty nice so far. Everyone was just chatty enough to be friendly, but mainly focused on their work.

  But nobody said a word about Jeremy Wentworth. When I had asked Megan about him, she simply shook her head, muttering something like, “He’s a great man. But anyway…” Then she had changed the subject immediately.

  I’m not sure what the problem was. The photo of him on the website showed an extremely good looking man, who, if he had a fault, it was that he was too striking.

  But who knows. He could be an asshole. I get it. If he’s the boss and he pays everyone’s salary, we have to be quiet about it.

  That’s why I preferred machines and ink and paper to humans most of the time. They worked, or they didn’t. There were fewer gray areas.

  My head jerked up in alarm as I realized the printer had gone quiet again. There were nowhere near twenty reports finished yet.

  In seconds, I was on my knees again, muttering office appropriate curses as I tried not to singe my fingers on the piping hot fuser roller. If this was a job for the big boss, I couldn’t screw it up, and it couldn’t be late, no matter what Bessie’s fussy attitude was like today.

  In my unladylike position, I thought I heard a muffled chuckle coming from the hallway. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the same gray blur turning the corner down the hall again. Whoever it was, they were going to have to learn to wait their turn, or start leaving a note.

  Praying to the gods of massive printers, if there was such a thing, I finally got Bessie restarted. Quickly collating the documents with cardstock tab pages and covers, I punched them and wire bound the first eighteen as the last two were still printing.

  By the time I had all twenty seventy-page reports bound, I had one minute to spare. They were heavy as I tried to carry them all at once, but hitting deadlines was my life’s mission.

  Marching down the hallway, I slipped the sliding door of the boardroom open with my foot, then set the documents at the head of the long table.

  Stepping back, I noticed I had left a huge fingerprint on the clear plastic cover of the top document. It was fine to have fingerprints on the back, but never on the front.

  Glancing around, nobody seemed to be coming in yet, so I untucked the front of my blouse from my skirt, using it as a rag to quickly buff out the print.

  “Ahem.”

  Spinning toward the sound of someone clearing their throat, the wheeled meeting chair I had been leaning on rolled away. Gripping the edge of the table, I tried to balance, teetering in my heels.

  Strong hands gripped my waist, and I realized with shock that they were grabbing my bare skin since my shirt was hiked up. My rescuer set me down so that I was s

itting on the boardroom table facing him.

  Stunning dark blue eyes met mine. I nearly gasped at how gorgeous this man was. And large. Oddly large, actually, with huge warm hands holding me so still that it almost made me feel captured, in a very seductive way.

  Somehow I managed to pull my gaze from his perfect jawline to the dark gray suit he was wearing. Crap. Was this who had been lurking in the hallway earlier when my butt was in the air?

  “Usually I make a guy buy me a drink before he feels me up,” I giggled. “But thanks for saving me.”

  I had intended the crack to be a tension breaker. I honestly didn’t expect to see a sharp blush beneath the rugged tan as he snapped his hands away. He stammered, “I didn’t—”

  “Kidding, kidding,” I said, straightening up and tucking my shirt in. “Seriously, thanks for catching me.”

  “The Bernard Group is here, sir,” Megan murmured politely from the doorway.

  Catching the man’s eyes again, I realized a few things at once. One, his expression was caught between horror, embarrassment, and a smirk for me being so mouthy.

  Two, he was also dangerously sexy. Like, if he were on a stage, there would be women throwing their panties at him.

  And much more importantly, three, it was Jeremy Wentworth. Of course it was. And he was even better looking than his photo on the website.

  Double dammit. With a pickle.

  I darted out of the boardroom without a word. There went the last shreds of my pride, and the chance to make a good first impression with the boss.

  Chapter 2

  _____

  Jeremy

  I had been hoping to meet with Gregory Bernard and the rest of his investment team for years, but the meeting went by in a blur. The young lady who had delivered the reports, who had also been scrambling around on the floor of the mailroom with her perfect perky behind in the air, had truly thrown me for a loop.

  People in this company treated me with respect. Nobody feared me, but there was a bit of formal deference to most interactions. The boss was always treated a bit differently than the other employees, and since I was one of only two bosses, I definitely stuck out, even if I wasn’t the founder.

  But that woman hadn’t seemed to care in the slightest. When I’d grabbed her so that she didn’t skid sideways and smack her beautiful face on the mahogany boardroom table, she had actually…teased me about it.

  Who on earth was she?

  After the meeting I went back to my desk to finish my coffee and tried to read the paper before diving into work. Yet I couldn’t stop picturing that lovely face, and that luscious curvy figure.

  I had to admire that she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty and had been digging into that monstrous printer to fix it herself. Many women would be afraid to break a nail.

  Tapping my fingers on the desk, I stared unseeing at my laptop. Perhaps that was a bit hypocritical of me. I hadn’t gotten my hands dirty in ages. All I did was coordinate research, reports, and development deals for endless clients.

  In other words, I helped ridiculously wealthy investors understand all the details of buildings and properties before they purchased them, then helped broker a fair deal. Not the most exciting career in the world, but I had a knack for it, and Byron had been glad to take me under his wing.

  I could feel my shoulders up around my ears. Dammit. How could I be stressed out already when I’d just taken a two-week vacation for the first time in ages?

  I distracted myself by picturing those perfect rosebud lips as she had held back a giggle. She was the sexiest woman I’d ever laid eyes on. But also pretty. Her brown hair had little copper bits woven through, and was cut in a lovely shoulder length shag that framed her delicate features.

  But it was those eyes that caused tension in areas of my body I hadn’t thought about in years. She was just so…saucy. How could she have the nerve to tease her boss like that?

  I absolutely loved it. A woman who wasn’t after me in any way. She wasn’t going for a promotion, or trying to impress her friends. She had just been trying to get me to laugh.

  The strangest thing was, it almost worked.

  Snapping my laptop shut, I was still shaking my head as I took a few moments to skim the financial section of the morning paper while I finished my coffee. I didn’t want to sink into the swamp of email just yet, even though I was two weeks behind.

  Every man in my family was a success in business: my father, my brother Eric, my cousins. I had shown some promise, but having Byron take me under his wing and prepare me to take over the company when he retired was a huge step up. Instead of being a real success in my late fifties, it was going to happen in my early forties. Not that I had the urge to compete with my family, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t falling behind.

  I never thought that being thirty-eight would be a liability. But I couldn’t be known as “the kid” when I was convincing a room full of fifty and sixty year old men to drop several million dollars on an investment. To some of them, I simply hadn’t been around the block enough.

  Perhaps it was overcompensation, but as a result I had been crafting my persona for the past few years, trying to cultivate a certain gravitas. I didn’t select a watch because it was trendy, or what I personally liked, but because it was something classic that was also on the wrists of most of our clients.

  My suits were gray, never black. That was too modern. My ties were always elegant but not remarkable in any way. I tried to be plain. Inoffensive.

  So far, it was working. The clients didn’t ask my age anymore. But it was exhausting always trying to look and sound like them, mimicking their expressions and speech patterns. I loved hard work, but the amount of information that had to cruise through my brain every day was a bit excessive. Not just the details of each investment property, but of every client relationship.

  Saturdays were usually taken up by client golf dates, and Sundays were for catching up on reading endless research. It felt like I’d been working seven days a week for so long that my soul had gone numb.

  Flipping open my laptop again, I was faced with a breathtaking photo of the sunset over the beach from a week and a half ago. God, it already felt so far away.

  My two-week vacation had been separated into two distinct components: a week on the beach where I could sleep in till noon and then go for a swim before dinner, then a week at home where my routine was simply my basement gym, movies and video games on the couch, and take out. Somehow, channeling my seventeen-year-old couch potato was actually more therapeutic than the fresh air and sunshine.

  I skimmed my emails looking for anything urgent, then dug around to find the announcement from personnel about our new mailroom manager. Amelia Boyle. Not a lot of experience in corporate offices, but incredible references.

  Even though Amelia was clearly extremely efficient, she was definitely going to be a distraction, at least to me. I’d never seen a woman so utterly perfect.

  I tried to distract myself by opening a proposal, but soon realized I was re-reading the same sentence over and over.

  Perhaps if I went and introduced myself properly instead of sitting here daydreaming about her, I could clear my head.

 

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