Lockdown with My Billionaire Boss : Second Chance Office Romance

by Sloane Peterson

  © Copyright 2020 by Sloane Peterson - All rights reserved.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

  Lockdown with My Billionaire Boss

  Second Chance Office Romance

  By: Sloane Peterson

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  Table of Contents

  1-The Before Days

  2-Swelter-In-Place

  3-Social Distancing (With Benefits)

  4-Settling

  5-The New Normal

  1-

  The Before Days

  I’ve started thinking of that age as “The Before Days.”

  It really wasn’t all that long ago, but it kinda feels like a lifetime at this point, doesn’t it? It’s like it was a completely different era.

  Back when you could go out in public. Back when you could shop, go to restaurants, see a movie, go to a football game- not that I was all that sorry to see sports go. I never did personally understand the appeal...

  Back when you could risk a single cough in the middle of a grocery store, and everyone didn’t suddenly turn around and glare at you with the evil eye. Back when you could make a trip to that same store, with the reasonable expectation that they would have an ample supply of personal bathroom tissue in stock for you to purchase, without having to fistfight another ten or fifteen customers for it.

  God, I miss those days...

  It’s strange, isn’t it, that those are the things we miss? How mundane everything was. How our boring, day-to-day lives were allowed to be just that- boring, day-to-day lives. We might have wished for some added excitement every now and again, but we never could have guessed what was on the horizon for us.

  Could we?

  Who knows, maybe if we’d been paying attention we would have seen the signs all along. Maybe we could have been prepared for it. Thinking back now, I’m starting to wonder whether that might be true, but I’m still not sure whether the past me would have believed the present me if I tried to go back in time and warn myself about all of this. I might have been more inclined to go and check myself into a psych ward, if anything.

  The pattern of my life had seemed so steady, so consistent for so long, that it was unthinkable to me that my future would end up diverging in so severe a fashion as it did. And not just in the way that you’re probably thinking, either…

  But maybe I should pause and rewind a little bit before I get into all of that.

  I guess as decent a place to start as any is back during The Before Days, pretty early on in the New Year. My boring, mundane life was about as boring and mundane as it always was, save for one important exception- I’d just been broken up with by the man I’d been dating for the past year and a half.

  Dennis was- well, he was fine. He was about as boring as I was. Boring face. Boring haircut. Even the way he talked was boring. I don’t mean to say he was unattractive or anything like that, just that he was monumentally unexceptional. He represented stability in my eyes, though. He was sort of middle-of-the-road ambitious- he wasn’t going to be the next president of the United States, or fly a mission to the moon. But he was reliable enough, with a steady, on-track career. And if you’d been brought up like I was, always making plans for ten, twenty, thirty years into the future, “on-track” was all you really cared about in a man.

  And that’s really the key word, I think. “On-track.” My parents had pressured me a lot growing up. I did everything by the books. I envisioned my life as it would be far into the future, giving little thought to my present day needs or desires. Hell, for that matter I don’t even know if you could say I had present day needs or desires, seeing as how everything I aspired to was specifically pursued to bring me some future happiness, some far-off contentment in a more mature age of my life, which I simply had to trust would end up coming to me in time.

  It’s not like I totally believed that a person could live their life like clockwork, but I think my breakup with Dennis was the moment that first shattered my faith in the idea that a person is in any way in control over the direction of their own life.

  “This isn’t working out,” he announced without preamble one night as we were eating at a Japanese restaurant, his beady gray eyes fixed down at his plate.

  “Here, you’re just holding them wrong,” I said, misinterpreting, and reaching for the chopsticks in his hand to correct the way he was gripping them.

  I’d no sooner touched him than he pulled his hand away, and I looked up in surprise. He shook his boring, handsome face at me, his clean-shaven lips puckering into a frown, and a strand of blond hair dripping down over his eyes.

  “I’m talking about us, Annalise. You and I. Things aren’t working out between us.”

  I remember furrowing my brow at this, actually feeling confused at the idea.

  “Who said that?” I asked, as though it was someone else dictating the terms of our relationship.

  “Nobody said anything,” he said. “Look, I know this is hard, I just… You need to understand, you’re a beautiful girl. You’re smart, talented, and funny, I just… I’m not ready to settle, okay?”

  The word plunged into my heart like an arrow.

  “Settle?” I asked, my skin suddenly prickling.

  He’d looked back down at his plate for a moment, but quickly returned his attention to me when I spoke.

  “What? Oh… No, I meant I’m not ready to settle down. Sorry, I misspoke.”

  I felt a little bit like I’d just swallowed an entire apple whole, and the thing was lodged painfully at the base of my throat.

  “Oh. Oh, I see,” I said in a spacy voice, my eyes drifting off into the middle distance, pondering his obvious Freudian slip.

  “Like I said, it’s nothing personal,” he continued in a casual tone of voice, and returned to poking at his dinner plate with his chopsticks. “I just think we’re two different people. We want different things. And that’s totally okay. God, this sushi is delicious…”

  And so that was that.

  Now I found myself sitting at work, a couple of weeks later, still trying to wrap my head around what had been said to me that evening.

  Settle? Settle?!

  He was settling for me?

  He was the one breaking up with me?

  I’d tried to force myself not to go on the rebound immediately after the breakup, as badly as I might have wanted to. I was afraid that I might end up making some pretty poor decisions in the aftermath of such rejection, just to convince myself that I wasn’t the kind of girl who someone “settled” for.

  By this point, though, the blow to my self-esteem was proving too hard to live with, and so I found myself reactivating several of my dating profiles with my phone out under my work desk, I was feeling so crushed by it all.

  Goldfinch’s open-office plan made it tough to sneak onto your phone during work hours. We technically weren’t supposed to be using our phones for non-business-related purposes, but people did it all the time anyway, and no one was ever very strict about it. Still, I really didn’t want anyone to notice that I was trying to meet people through a dating app, which was exa
ctly why I’d decided to avoid using Goldfinch’s own state-of-the-art hookup app for this purpose, despite having had a hand in designing it. I don’t know how realistic it was to worry that someone from the office might find out I was on there, but I didn’t want to risk that possibility.

  As casually I could I peered around the office before entering my login info to an old dating app I’d abandoned after meeting Dennis. No one was paying any attention to me, all eyes locked intently on one of any number of screens that filled the room. My gaze flitted gradually over to my boss and CEO of the company, Malcolm Finch, and I found my eyes suddenly locked into place.

  He was the definition of tall, dark, and handsome as he stood hovering over the shoulder of a colleague, paying attention to their screen with intense focus. He wore a gorgeously cut suit and had his dark brown hair in an expensive-looking crewcut. A beard skirting the line between bushy and ruggedly handsome graced the billionaire’s angular jaw, and he ran his fingers through it in a contemplative fashion as he stood there, the fine flakes of salt-and-pepper leaping with every stroke of his fingertips.

  The man was a masterpiece, positively mesmerizing in every way. And it was precisely because of that fact that I wound up staring too hard for too long at him, until it pretty much became inevitable that he would notice me.

  And sure enough, he did just that.

  He didn’t even fully lift his head. His face remained angled toward my colleague’s computer, but his eyes darted suddenly up at me, his irises a dazzling color somewhere between mahogany and obsidian.

  Our eyes met, and I felt a sizzling current flash through the space between us. The air fled my lungs, and I felt myself drowning above the surface. His gorgeous face cracked, and a blinding white smile appeared across his lips.

  I could feel my face turning beet red, my skin prickling, heating up like a car in the hot sun. My throat burned now, and I ripped my eyes back down, pretending to be entranced by something of vital importance on my computer monitor.

  I gave myself a few seconds to try and collect myself, counting down in my head, One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…

  I exhaled, and decided to risk peering back up over at him again.

  His attention was once again away from me, fixed back upon my colleague’s screen.

  I let out a deep sigh, either of intense relief or disappointment, and let out so much air I might have gone shooting wildly around the office like a balloon.

  What the hell was that? I wondered.

  Malcolm and I had had more than our fair share of interactions over the years. That was pretty much a given, seeing as I was a project manager at his hydra of a social media company, and had worked with him very closely on a number of Goldfinch’s most popular products. We had a very friendly relationship- maybe even a little bit more than friendly…

  I mean, obviously I’d never thought that seriously about that sort of thing. He was a freaking billionaire after all, and I was- well, I was, like I said, pretty much just the boring career girl obsessed with keeping her life “on track.” There’d been plenty of times when you might have interpreted our interactions as flirtatious, going both ways. But I’d always just sort of associated that with the way Malcom Finch operated. He made you feel good, at ease in his company. He made you feel wanted, desired even. It was just good business.

  I’d always taken it all in stride, never daring to let my imagination run wild with these kinds of fantasies. So why was he having such an effect on me all of the sudden? Was I really letting my newfound singleness, coupled with Dennis referring to our relationship as “settling,” make me think there was anything between Malcom Finch and I other than a healthy bond between employer and employee?

  He was, in case I needed reminding, a billionaire, and could literally have any woman that he wanted. He did, actually- some gorgeous young model named Alyssa Muenzel, who was engaged to be his wife within a year’s time. There was absolutely no way I could compete with that, I told myself, and deluding myself into such a fantasy would hardly be the cure for the self-esteem issues I was having.

  I tried to shake off the whole interaction, and entered my half-remembered login information into the dating app on my phone. I half-expected and half-hoped that I might be entering it in wrong, but alas, all the old ghosts of my former romantic life came shimmying back out at me from the screen.

  The first thing I did off the bat was to open up my old profile picture, as one does. A pretty girl in her twenties with strawberry blonde hair and baby blue eyes stared smiling back at me. I had on a loose-fitting white crop top that showed just a peek of pale-as-moon midriff. I let my eyes follow the flow of my curves, and stared for so long at myself that I started losing track of what I was looking at.

  Surely I was pretty enough- not the kind of woman a guy has to “settle” for at all. But then again- and I can’t believe I’m saying this- maybe looks just aren’t everything for some men. What if Dennis had been talking about some deep flaw in my personality, something I was totally oblivious to, and therefore had no way of controlling or improving upon?

  My next mistake was to open my old chat logs on this app, and I very quickly regretted doing so. Between the abuse, the one word replies, and the unsolicited dick pics, I could feel myself tensing up as I scrolled, remembering what a dog-eat-dog place the hellish world of online dating had really been.

  Maybe I was the one who’d settled, it suddenly occurred to me. Maybe I’d been so disheartened by all of this that Dennis had seemed like my knight in shining armor when he came along. As positively average as he was, I guess after a while even that seems like a pretty high bar to clear compared to the guys you meet on online dating apps…

  “Hey there, Annalise. Working hard or hardly working?”

  I nearly leapt out of my skin with surprise at the sound of my boss’s voice. I fumbled with my iPhone, dropping it beneath my desk. I stooped down awkwardly to pick it up, blushing furiously as I turned and straightened my air, trying to respond with something even resembling a hint of composure.

  “Malcolm! I’m so sorry about that,” I stammered instead.

  He laughed. “No, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to catch you off guard like that, and I definitely wasn’t trying to startle you.”

  A few necks were craned to stare at us now, but they turned away again as I began to compose myself.

  “No, no it’s fine,” I said. “I was on my phone at work, and I shouldn’t have been, I know…”

  My boss’s lips slid into a thin smile, and one of his eyebrows pushed up ever so slightly.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he reassured me. “It’s almost five o’clock anyway. Come on. Why don’t you clock out a little bit early tonight? Come grab a drink with me. Chad and I have just been discussing some exciting ideas for our messaging app. I’d like to pick your brain about it and see what you think, if you aren’t in any hurry to get home.”

  I had absolutely nothing waiting for me but an empty apartment at home, and in any case this felt more obligatory than optional.

  “No of course,” I said, running the palms of my hands across my skirt, and doing my best to compose myself. “I’m excited to hear all about it!”

  “Perfect,” he said, flashing me that immaculate smile of his yet again. “I’ll go grab my coat.”

  _____

  Minutes later the two of us were seated together at a luxurious, dimly lit bar downtown, as drifts of snow fluttered past outside the window. Old crooners rang out through the speakers overhead, and I sat awkwardly sipping at a glass of bourbon, letting the heat of the alcohol burn exquisitely down to the back of my throat, warming my entire body.

  I waited until Malcolm had downed a considerable gulp of his own scotch, then asked brightly across the table, “So, what were some of the ideas you’d been discussing with Chad? I’m really excited to hear about it.”

  Malcolm smiled, and I knew pretty much instantly that this had nothing to do with the Goldfinch
messaging app.

  “I have a confession to make,” he said. “I may have invited you here under false pretenses.”

  I smiled back at him, and some of the ease of our usual dynamic seemed to return to the conversation.

  “Yeah, I was starting to kind of guess at that,” I said.

  He laughed. “My apologies,” he said. “I was actually wanting to pop in for a drink before heading home on my own. But to be honest, well… This might sound corny coming from some rich douchebag CEO, but I’ve always thought of the Goldfinch team as being almost like a family to me. I care about my employees, very much.”

  “That’s not corny at all,” I insisted, shaking my head, and I meant it. For being as wealthy and as powerful as he was, Malcolm had a knack for making himself seem endlessly approachable. No problem was too trivial that you couldn’t come to him to discuss it, no matter how busy he was.

  He gave me a grateful nod, and continued. “I’m very glad to hear that. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I feel like I’ve developed a kind of sense for when things are going good for my family, when things are running smoothly. And conversely, with that, when there’s something amiss…

  “I know there’s a line between concern and just being plain nosy,” he laughed at this, and I smiled, a little bit nervously. “But beyond even the business end of things, it’s important for me to know that my employees are happy. That they have everything they need. That they feel like they’re being treated well, have a comfortable environment to work in, and that they’re being fairly compensated for all their hard work.”

  “Oh, absolutely!” I quickly interjected. “No, for real, working at Goldfinch has been a dream come true for me, career-wise. I love the people there, I love the projects I get to work on, and you’ve always been beyond generous with pay and benefits. It really does feel like we’re all family there, more so than any other place I’ve ever been employed.”