Chapter 2
AURORA
I did not go to college to become a party planner.
Sometimes I still just feel like a party planner, planning in-person meetups and parties and mixers, keeping track of moving pieces and coordinating communication and recruiting sponsors.
Being single throughout this process feels about as good as you’d expect, given the heavy focus on love and companionship that comes inherently with my job. I try to remind myself it doesn’t actually matter.
So when I show up at work every morning, I smile at everyone I see—except Barf, obviously, because smiling at my coworker ex while working at a love-focused company is more than I can handle.
I ask people how their lives are, their families.
It’s not my normal inclination, because I tend to keep to myself when possible, but I try to be a good employee and a good coworker.
This morning is no different.
The shoes I chose are four inches high, sleek and black.
They would hurt my feet if I didn’t already have faint callouses on the backs of my heels.
Beauty is pain, but for me, beauty is armor, too.
It’s confidence. A weapon in my hands if I need it, and sometimes a wall to keep people out.
So I relish the click, click, click that accompanies me as I walk.
I do not relish the remains of the dark circles under my eyes from my late night excursion, but my makeup does a decent job of covering them up.
When I pass Shelly in the hall, she stops me with a grateful look.
“Oh, good,” she says, adjusting her glasses. “You’re here.” She glances back and forth to make sure we’re alone and then scurries closer. “I have a few new photos of Denice’s baby.”
A genuine smile finds my lips. “Do you? Everyone is still healthy?”
Shelly nods, some of her wispy gray hair shifting.
She’s Denice’s secretary, helping our boss run this place smoothly even into the last stages of her pregnancy.
The past two weeks she’s been holding the fort until Denice’s replacement arrives, too, and she’s been doing a great job.
“Everyone is happy and healthy,” she says, holding out her phone to show me a picture of Nessa, Denice’s two-week-old newborn.
“She’s so little,” I say.
Shelly nods and then clears her throat, tucking her phone away and adopting a more professional tone. “Anyhow, the new guy showed up this morning, thank heavens,” she goes on, lowering her voice. “Apparently he’s Denice’s younger brother.”
My smile fades. “I didn’t know Denice had a brother.”
“I didn’t either,” Shelly says. “But he’s here, so she must.”
Denice is the best boss we could ever ask for, and part of that is because she’s the daughter of our company’s founder.
She has her finger on the pulse of the company, small though it is, and she has a clear vision of what we’re doing and where we’re headed.
It doesn’t hurt that she and her husband are still as in love as ever—a powerful motivation to bring that same love to others.
“Anyway,” Shelly continues, “he’ll only be here for a couple weeks, and then someone else will come until Denice comes back from maternity leave. I just came to look for you, because he’s asking for you.”
I blink at her. “What?”
“The new boss,” she whispers, waving me down the hall. “He’s set up in the room down there at the end. The interim. He wants to see you.”
“I—why?” I say, racking my brain even as I head that direction.
“I don’t know. Just go.”
“Wait, wait—before I do that. Did our permit come through?”
“Yes,” she says. “The town square of Lucky, Colorado, is officially ours for the event.”
“Perfect,” I say with relief. “Good. All right. Thank you, Shelly.”
She nods and continues on her way, and I straighten up to counter the desire to slink away and hide, because hiding is not allowed. With my shoulders back and my head high, I stride down the rest of the hall and stop at the very end, knocking softly on the cracked door.
“Come in,” a deep, unfamiliar voice calls.
With one last inhale, I push the door open and step inside.
Except, I’m surprised to see, I’m not alone. Bart is here; Bart and Mindy, the two of them holding hands and standing side by side in front of the desk, behind which sits—
Oh, no.
My heart sinks down, down, down in my chest, until it thuds sickly against the pit of my stomach.
The man from the holding cell.
Denice’s brother, the son of our company’s founder, my temporary boss…is the man from the holding cell.
Right? It’s him? I scan his face, his hair, his suit, and come to the horrible, awful conclusion that it’s definitely him.
He’s young—younger than I realized, definitely younger than me.
He’s fidgeting carelessly with a Rubik’s cube, the same watch from last night glinting as his hands move.
His light-brown hair is neater today, his tie no longer loose, but he has the same long lashes, the same full lips and winged brows.
And when he sees me, I watch his mind come to the same realization. It happens in slow motion. The tiniest widening of his eyes—dark brown—followed by the up-and-down scan of my body, the brief study of my face and hair, and finally the slow curl of his lips that can only mean he recognizes me too.
He recognizes me, and he looks delighted about it.
“Ah,” he says slowly, leaning back in his seat as his smile widens into a boyish grin, his eyes brimming with new laughter as two dimples appear in his cheeks. His hands stop working on the Rubik’s cube. “I see.” He looks back to Bart and Mindy. “Barf—”
“Bart,” Bart corrects, looking confused as I step up next to him.
“Of course,” the man behind the desk says, waving one hand.
“Bart. And Mindy.” He glances at me, possibly watching with fascination as my cheeks turn as-of-yet undiscovered shades of red.
“I understand.” Then he clears his throat.
“All right,” he says to Bart, sounding professional now. “Please explain.”
Bart shuffles closer to Mindy and then glances at me, giving me a little smile.
His normally buoyant demeanor is subdued.
“Apologies,” he says to me before looking at the man behind the desk.
“I meant to come see you before work,” he says, “but someone egged my car”—a rare thread of irritation trickles into his words, and I hold back a savage smile of triumph—“so I ended up being late.”
“Someone egged your car?” the man behind the desk says, and although his expression displays shock, he could not more clearly be laughing as his eyes jump to me. “How horrible.”
I swallow everything I want to say, because none of it will be helpful, and if this man really is the interim boss, he could probably tank my career. Might be planning on it already, in fact.
“It was a mess,” Mindy pipes up in her perfect feminine voice. She leans forward, glances around Bart and at me, and then nudges Bart. “Get to the point,” she whispers.
“Right,” Bart says, adjusting his cheap tie and straightening his shoulders. “Anyway, Mindy and I wanted to talk to you about the assignment that was sent out last night.”
At this, I turn to Bart and frown. “What assignment?”
“Oh, dear,” the man behind the desk says, and I swear, at any moment he’s going to burst into laughter.
I can see it in the dimples that keep appearing; I can see it in his eyes when I glare at him, even though I should be keeping my feelings to myself.
“Were you busy last night, Ms. Marigold?” he goes on. “Unable to get to your computer?”
He knows perfectly well we were locked in a holding cell together—
I gasp out loud as my thoughts come to a halt.
He was in the holding cell with me. Why was he there?
Okay, this is good. It would be good to have something to hold over his head.
It would make me feel less naked, less exposed—less embarrassed that I was caught getting petty revenge on a man I should never have cared about in the first place.
Talk about unprofessional, not to mention a bad first impression.
“I did have a few things to attend to,” I say politely through gritted teeth. “What about you, sir? Busy night?”
This finally does it. The man laughs, raising an eyebrow at me in clear challenge.
He leans back in his seat, kicks his feet up on the desk, and starts working on the Rubik’s cube again, although he never looks at it.
“I’m a busy man,” he says with a tip of his head.
“People to meet, places to go—you know how it is.” A few strands of perfect hair fall over his forehead, but he leaves them, his attention still focused on me.
And even when Bart speaks again, the man behind the desk doesn’t look away from me. His gaze is a slow perusal, his lips twitching, his eyes amused.
“Well, you asked Mindy and I to—”
“Mindy and me.”
Bart blinks at the man’s interruption. “What?”
“Mindy and me,” the man behind the desk repeats, looking bored now as he turns his gaze to Bart. “Not Mindy and I.”
“I—of course. Sorry,” Bart says, clearly floundering. “You asked—Mindy and me—to work with Aurora on the Lucky event, going over there, setting up sponsors and developing a marketing plan—”
“He did?” I say, briefly distracted. I whip my head to look at Bart. “The three of us?”
No. Nope. I will wiggle out of that one if it’s the last thing I do.
Can I be professional? Sure.
Do I want to? Not really.
Bart frowns at my outburst and then turns back to the man behind the desk.
“Anyway, since you’re new—and we’re so excited to work with you, by the way”—I roll my eyes at the fawning—“you might not be aware of a—a situation—we’re currently experiencing.
” He shifts uncomfortably. “We had hoped to speak with you about this privately, actually.”
The man behind the desk says nothing; he just watches Bart, waiting, so Bart goes on.
“Mindy and I might not be—that is, we aren’t—we’re concerned Aurora may be uncomfortable working with the two of us.”
Wait—is he about to do what I think he’s about to do? Bring the boss into this mess he created?
Surely not.
“You’re right,” the man behind the desk says as his eyes skate over the three of us. “I don’t know about any situation like the one you’re referencing. But I’d love to hear more.”
I turn to Bart before he can open his big dumb mouth again. “Are you really doing this?” I say to him.
“Don’t pretend,” he says, and I can tell by the way his eyes jump between me and the man behind the desk that he’s trying to make himself look good while also getting what he wants, even though he’s in the wrong.
He puts a fake but bright smile on his face.
“Surely you’d be uncomfortable, Aurora. We’re just worried we might upset you. ”
I clench my jaw shut and straighten up as tall as I can, so that in my heels I’ve got about two inches on Bart’s height.
It makes me feel slightly better, because he never liked it when I was taller than him.
Then I step closer to him. He startles as I reach for his crooked tie and straighten it, smiling serenely and giving it a little pat.
I brush some of the lint off the shoulder of his suit, and he stares, dumbfounded, his jaw hanging unflatteringly.
“I assure you,” I say sweetly, looking down at him, “that I’ll be just fine.”
It’s a lie. But I’m all in now, on principle alone.
“I—you—” he begins, gaping like a fish. He stumbles back toward Mindy, putting a bit of space between us.
Then he looks at the man behind the desk.
“I—well, as you may know, Mindy and I have disclosed our relationship to HR,” Bart says quickly, and on his other side, Mindy nods.
She’s shooting cute little daggers over at me now, because everything she does is cute and petite.
“But there was a previous relationship with Aurora as well. Mindy and I are worried the three of us working together may struggle to be as efficient as necessary. That’s all. ”
The man behind the desk hums, looking utterly unconcerned. Then his eyes find me. “Are you so unprofessional as to be distracted by working with them?” he says with a careless gesture at Mindy and Bart.
In the corner of my eye I see Bart’s head turn toward me; I even see the surprised expression at our new boss’s words, but I don’t look at Bart. “No,” I say, my voice flat and cold.
The boss nods and swings his feet down, straightening up and thumping the Rubik’s cube down on the desk, all faces now the same color.
“That’s that, then.” He pins Bart with the most serious look I’ve seen from him so far, one of faint disgust. “Don’t bring me things like this again.
I’m not interested in your personal affairs. ”
Mindy seems to shrink, and Bart’s shoulders slump. “Of course,” he says. “Of course. Sorry about—sorry.” He stutters weakly into silence and turns to Mindy, wrapping one arm around her waist as though to present a united front.
I hope they’ll be very happy together. All other things aside, he really was a great kisser.
“Your assignment will go forward as planned,” the man says, but now he stands up. Bart and Mindy both watch his height unfold until he towers over all of us, a good several inches above me even in my heels.“With one change.”
We look at him, waiting, and he nods.
“I’d like to join this little group as well,” he says, and as he rounds the desk, a whiff of his scent finds me—crisp and sharp.
He stops in front of the three of us, causing Bart and Mindy to step back slightly.
I don’t, mostly because my pride won’t let me.
His dark eyes flicker down to me as his lips curl like he’s a kid on the way to a carnival.
“Some time out of the office is just what I need, I think.” Then he holds out his hand—to me and only me.
“It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Marigold. I’m Roman Drake. ”