The Billionaire Boss Next Door

What am I going to do? Can I really do my best work like this?

Everything is on the fucking line—my career, my relationship with my father, the success of Turner Properties, my mother’s happiness—and making sure this hotel is everything it should be and more is the most important thing I will ever do.

And I’m supposed to just, what, rely on this infuriating woman to design it?

My phone pings from in the middle of my desk calendar, and I pick it up to check the message.

The name Caplin Hawkins fills the tiny bubble, beckoning me to open it, but the action it sparks is different altogether.

Fuck the message. I need to see him in person.

I shove back in my desk chair and rise, turning in one fluid motion to grab my suit jacket off the coat rack behind me, dropping the phone into my pocket, scooping my keys out of the top left-hand drawer of my desk, and striding out of my office with a new sense of purpose.

Caplin may have texted me as a friend, but he’s about to get a visit as my lawyer.

“There’s got to be a way!” I shout, pacing the herringbone tile floor so furiously, Caplin might have to regrout his office.

Fifteen minutes ago, I forced my way past his assistant when I arrived and barged in during the middle of what was apparently an “important” call.

I explained quickly that this was an emergency, a four-alarm fire, and he reacted accordingly by asking the president of ABC to reschedule.

The problem came when I explained that the fire was more like a firing—of an employee.

A new employee.

A very annoying employee with a menacing influence on the retention of my sanity.

Greer Hudson, I explained to him, is the devil in angelic clothing.

With her cerulean blue eyes, tanned skin, and dark brown hair, she’s everything a man should be fighting to keep.

Except that she’s quite possibly the most maddening, rudely forthright, boldly sarcastic person I’ve ever met. And I cannot spend nine months fighting with her while I’m trying to complete the New Orleans project.

Since my arrival, I’ve suggested every reason for firing an employee I’ve ever heard of. My supposed friend and hotshot lawyer has turned down every one of them, the bastard. It’s like he wants me to punch him right in the center of his proportionally featured face.

Undisclosed pregnancy?

She’s not pregnant, he says. Plus, if she were, that’s about as low as you can fucking get, Turn. And you might be a dick sometimes, but we both know you’re not an insensitive tool.

What about damaging company property?

What property? Your fucking pride?

Theft?

Stealing your sanity doesn’t count.

He tries telling me to give her a chance, but I’m still on a roll.

I know it’s insane. I know I’ve quite possibly lost my fucking mind, but goddamn, I don’t see Greer Hudson and me working side by side for nearly a year and it ending in anything but absolute disaster.

The Vanderturn New Orleans hotel needs to be a success.

But how can the designer of said hotel be someone who called the appearance of our most popular hotel ugly?

If only my father weren’t such a controlling, prideful son of a bitch when it comes to his business decisions. This would be a much easier scenario if I could just tell him that his choice in designer isn’t going to cut it.

But me taking a bullet to the heart would end better than giving him that kind of constructive criticism.

Fuck, I have to figure out something here.

If there are a billion, trillion stars in the sky, there have to be at least a million and one legal loopholes for every situation. I round the proverbial third base and head for home, trying my last few reasons with an even deeper sense of desperation.

“A slander clause,” I suggest.

He frowns and tosses the tiny basketball he keeps in the bottom drawer of his desk up like he’s shooting. When he doesn’t give me anything else, I move on to the next.

“Or…misappropriation of taste!”

He quirks a brow. “And that’s what, exactly?”

“There’s no way my father knows how she feels about the Vanderturn Manhattan. Isn’t that something she’d have to disclose?”

“When did Turner Properties start using protocols from fucking Gossip Girl?” he tosses back with a far too knowing smirk. “You and I both know her not liking the design of a hotel she had no part in designing is utter bullshit.”

God, he’s right, and I’m seriously losing it.

But fucking hell. I need an out.

“Goddammit, Cap! Work with me here. There’s got to be something.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t—”

“No, no.” I point an accusatory index finger toward him. “Don’t you say it.”

“Look, Turn—”

“No!”

“You already know this, but since you’re obviously having some kind of psychotic break that I’m praying is temporary, I’m going to say it. You can’t fire her without opening a whole shitcan of shitworms. She hasn’t done anything wrong.” He says what, deep down, I already know. “You’re just going to have to ride it out. I’d suggest literally if you weren’t such a prude.”