Hate to Lose You

I blink. Stare at her like a crazy person. “But why?”

She hesitates. Swallows hard. “I can’t tell you that.”

“Daisy, you asked me to be open and honest with you, and I have. I know I should have done it sooner, but I’ve told you what’s really going on with me now. Can you do the same for me?”

For a long, quiet moment, she holds my gaze. I think I really may have gotten through to her. But then she breaks eye contact to stare at the floor, and I notice her hands tighten on her knees, bunching her pants into tight knots there. “I can’t tell you. I just need you to trust me, okay? I need this, Bronson. Fire me, please.”

I hold her gaze steadily. Long enough for the ticking clock on the wall to make its presence known, the subtle tick, tick, tick suddenly deafening in this tight space. Finally, I sigh and extend a hand toward her. “Can you just give me a chance to make things right first, Daisy? Let me try to improve the office culture before you cut and run, okay?”

She takes a deep breath. Hesitates. Then lets it out, slowly. “If I don’t think it’s getting better, though, do you promise you’ll let me go, so I can collect severance?”

I clamp my lips together for a moment, thinking hard. But at the back of my mind, I can see my father’s face, red with anger. He told me I couldn’t lose a single employee from this branch, or else I lose everything along with them.

But I’m confident that with Daisy, at least, I can make it work. I know what’s important to her. She’s already told me what she hates about working here—the favored treatment of the cushy senior-level managers. We agree there. I’m confident I can make this office a good place to work again. The kind of place Daisy will want to stay in—no, better, the kind she’d feel crazy to ever consider leaving.

So, finally, after a long hesitation, I extend a hand. “Give me a month,” I say.

Daisy wraps her fingers around mine. “One week.”

I tighten my grip on her hand. “Two.”

She tries to maintain a narrowed, sober expression. But one smirk from me, and she can’t help herself. She laughs under her breath, shaking her head a little. “Fine. Two weeks, Bronson. After that, you’re letting me go.”

“If you still think I haven’t improved things around here sufficiently. Which I promise you’re going to.”

She keeps the smirk. It’s distracting enough that I find myself grinning back at her. “We’ll see about that,” she says, and draws her hand from my grasp.

I reach up to place a hand on the door, before she can reach for it. “While you’re here, though, Ms. Rider…”

“Oh no.” Her smirk widens, and she rolls her eyes. “We’re keeping things strictly professional here at the office, Mr. Burke.”

“I see.” I bend closer to her, close enough to catch the familiar scent of her shampoo, lavender and floral and bright enough to brighten my whole day with one whiff. “And what about after we leave the office…?”

Her throat tightens with a swallow, but she doesn’t tear her gaze from mine. She holds her ground. Tilts her chin higher, and keeps that sexy, impossible to resist smirk on her lips. “After work, well… Same deal applies. It depends on your behavior.” With that, she grips the doorknob and turns it. I step aside to let her pass, though not without reaching down to ‘accidentally’ brush my arm against hers, my fingertips trailing from her wrist all the way up to her shoulder.

I’m rewarded when I turn to watch her leave, noticing the way she shivers with pleasure, and her eyes swivel to search for mine over her shoulder, even as she walks away. “I look forward to proving my worth to you, Ms. Rider.”

“I look forward to watching you try, Mr. Burke.” She flashes me a wink, and then she’s gone.

11

Daisy

For the next week, the office is inundated with meetings. Bronson leads case study after case study, meeting with every single employee in the office to talk about their individual goals, career paths, and past performance if they were like me and transferred over here from another branch.

In between those meetings, he’s been hosting big group lunches, buying us all meals at restaurants near the office and having us do team-bonding exercises over said meals. In any other setting, with any other boss, that kind of crap would annoy me. But with Bronson, somehow, it just all feels so genuine. Like you can really tell how much thought and care he puts into each activity, and how hard he’s listening to everyone’s feedback after each event, trying to figure out how to take what he learned about people from these activities and shoehorn it into a useful plan of action for the office.

I have to admit, working under him is like working at a whole new version of Burke Bank. There’s none of the old busywork I used to dread, and nobody sends me to fetch their coffee or dry cleaning for them. Instead, every task I have, I know exactly why it’s needed, who’s asking for it, and how it’s going to benefit the company if I perform it well. It’s motivating me like none other.

It almost makes me feel bad that, come next week, I’ll have to tell Bronson this isn’t good enough. That I still need him to uphold his end of the bargain and fire me.

Because deep down, I always knew that no matter what he did, it would come down to that. I can’t stay. It’s not an option. However hard it’s going to be for Bronson if I go… I need to be home with my mother.

Just last night, she called me from the hospital again. She had to call 9-1-1 because she passed out, her blood sugar was so low. The hospital has asked that she either hire a live-in aid until she stabilizes—which neither of us can afford to pay for, and of course her insurance wouldn’t cover it—or have a family member come and stay with her.

That’s me, as soon as I get my severance pay so I can continue to care for her once I get there. At the moment, she’s got her cousin staying over, but her cousin needs to go back home to Raleigh in a few weeks. By then I’ll need to be back in Georgia. No more delays, no more excuses.

No matter how much I’m starting to enjoy my job here. Or my life now that Bronson is back in it…

I haven’t seen him in private again. Not since our date. Not since I left his apartment, sick of the way he was acting like he could control me, force me to do whatever was convenient for him. But he’s texted me nightly since then, and I haven’t been able to resist responding.

Those texts devolved last night into dirty messages, culminating with me needing a long, freezing cold shower to forget about the scorching hot series of photos he sent me. And, admittedly, then sending a couple of my own, after said freezing cold shower…

This morning, as I cross the office to the water cooler and catch his eye across the room, heat floods my face, and my fingertips itch to reopen my phone. Stare at those pictures again.

Or better yet, stride over there and interrupt his conversation with Cheryl and drag him into his office instead, so I can see the view in person. I swallow hard, trying not to picture how hot that would be. I’ve already seen his private office. The big, fancy desk, poised at just the right height for him to bend me over it, push my pencil skirt up around my waist and…

Well, I’m blushing bright red all over again. Stop it Daisy, you’re at work, I remind myself. And he’s your boss. Your boss who you promised yourself you wouldn’t hook up with again, since you need to leave the city in, oh, just over a week…

But logic doesn’t have much effect on my lizard brain desires, unfortunately. So a half an hour later, when I notice Bronson ending a meeting with Cal from Accounts, and meandering back toward his office alone, my feet seem to move of their own volition. I trail after him, expecting him to turn into his office. When he doesn’t, I speed up to catch up in the hallway, figuring he’ll be feeling just as frustrated as I am after all our texting. It shouldn’t be hard to persuade him to slip into an office somewhere here—

And then I stop dead, skidding to a halt, because Bronson has made a sharp left into the atrium of the building, where an older, grayer version of him is w

aiting.

Shit.

I knew Bronson’s father owned Burke Bank, but I had no idea he’d be the spitting image of his son. Or vice versa, technically, I guess. I’m so busy staring back and forth between them that I don’t even notice I’m lurking in the doorway like a creep until they start to talk. There’s nobody else in the atrium, and it’s clear the men haven’t noticed me at their backs.

“You rang?” Bronson says without preamble.

His father scowls. “I came to tell you to stop wasting company funds, Bronson.”

“What are you talking about—”