The Billionaire's Proposal

“Sorry. Who is this guy? Are you dating someone?”

“Goodness, no. He’s on my team,” I hissed to Nick. “You’ve met him a dozen times—he’s the one who did your initial interview with Ella.”

Nick remained expressionless as the door pushed open and Jake Harmon spilled inside. In hindsight, I didn’t know why I was surprised to see him. After Nick’s coffee maker walked the plank out the penthouse window, neither one of us had been seen or heard of since.

...until our kiss on live television last night.

He knocked. “Hey, is everything okay? Are you dressed? Just meet me in the living room. We have a lot to talk about.”

“It’s okay. Just come in.”

“Hey—there you are!”

Jake was the kind of guy who would play the cousin, or bumbling big brother if my life was cast as a TV show. A bit too tall. A bit too gangly. And a bit too old to have not mastered the combination by now.

That being said, he was a total sweetheart and damn good at his job. Together, the two of us had single-handedly got my little PR operation off the ground. I handled the clients, and he handled things back on the home front. A perfect combination.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to just burst in on you—it’s just that none of us had any idea where you went, and for the first time since we’ve met, you’re not picking up your phones.”

I glanced guilty at my briefcase, as he shoved his rain-drenched hair out of his eyes and pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. From the way he was panting, he had literally run all the way from the office. He had yet to notice Nick (which had to be a first for the both of them), and was staring at me like I’d just beamed down from Mars.

“And then I saw the...” He hesitated, as if there was somehow a chance that I hadn’t seen it yet myself. “Abigail...you know that you kissed our only client, right?”

The entire speech had been said in one breathless burst, and by now, poor Jake was so disheveled and out of sorts, that even Nick was beginning to smile. The difference between the two men couldn’t have been more striking, but Nick was nice about it—tilting his head to the side with an infinitely patient expression, waiting for the man to glance over and notice him.

“Yeah, Jake,” I pulled the blankets up higher around me, “about that—”

“And I know you said never to come to your apartment, but at this point, I thought that emergency protocols were in order.” He held up both of this hands in that calming/bracing way that we did sometimes with clients who had ceased to see reason. “So let me start by first asking you this: did you realize that you were doing it?”

Nick pursed his lips with a bemused frown, while my skin blushed scarlet.

“Jake, I really need you to shut up now—”

But Jake was beyond hearing me. Waves of adrenaline were still coursing in his eyes, and he seemed absolutely determined to save his beloved boss from career suicide.

“I mean, you didn’t think he was someone else, did you?” he asked desperately. “Closed your eyes too soon? Or maybe you were just so drunk, you had no idea what you were doing?”

“Jake, please—”

“Allison guessed that you had elevation sickness from the plane, but I thought that was a bit of a stretch. It was probably something much simpler, right? Something that made sense.”

By now, Nick was shaking with silent laughter in the corner. Jake had dripped an entire puddle onto my hardwood floor. And I was beginning to think I was going to have to move to the west coast just to escape the embarrassment of this one, impossible morning.

“Did you just not see him?”

At this point, even I had to take a step back. My head snapped up, and for a moment, I stopped trying to silence him. I simply wanted to understand.

“...I’m sorry?” I shook my head incredulously, trying to follow his convoluted line of thought. “Did I just not see him? Like...did I trip or something and land on his mouth? How, in your deluded little mind, does that possibly make sense?”

Jake threw up his hands.

“Don’t ask me to unravel the impossible reasoning of you women! Maybe in the dark, he looked like someone else. Maybe, you thought you were being kidnapped and were trying to make the best of a bad situation. Maybe you were struck with temporary amnesia and had no earthly clue that you were making the bigg

est mistake of your life!”

His voice had risen in volume with each accusation. So that by the time he got to the last one, he was basically shouting.

Let me be clear: my employees do not get to speak to me this way. There’s a clear pecking order at the office, and I happen to reside at the undisputed top of it.