Under The Mistletoe
Cassie Cross
Contents
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Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Preview: Kiss Me At Midnight
About the Author
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Copyright © 2018 by Cassie Cross
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations for reviews or other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Cover design by Mayhem Cover Creations
Chapter One
“I’ve never seen so many people lining up for coffee in my life,” Stella Reyes said to her friend Liz as they took their place in the queue spilling out the door of the Starbucks on Broad.
She shifted to the left a little—crowding Liz’s personal space—in a desperate attempt to catch some of the warmth wafting out of the store. New York City weather had been fairly mild for December, but of course there was a huge dip in the temps on the one morning the coffee line was obscene.
“And look at you, standing in said line,” Liz remarked unhelpfully, practically yelling over a busker on the corner who was playing an absolutely horrid rendition of Jingle Bell Rock on his electric guitar.
Stella leveled her with a look. “That’s because I have a boss who’s committed to making my life a living hell. And not in the normal way, like being a tyrant and wreaking havoc on my entire life. Logan is subtle. An evil genius committed to breaking me one complicated coffee order at a time, by miring me in little inconveniences until I can’t take it anymore.”
Liz laughed the carefree laugh of someone who had never been a rich man’s personal assistant. She was in accounting, a worker bee whose boss was more interested in keeping up with Twitter trends than micromanaging his employees. Stella was a driven woman—normally she welcomed someone constantly lighting a fire under her—but that kind of life seemed really appealing to her at the moment.
“I should come work with you,” Stella said. “Your stress seems to be at manageable levels.”
Stella moved out of the way of a few patrons exiting the building, which left enough room for her and Liz to step inside into the wonderful, amazing heat. Stella took a deep—warm—breath and sighed.
“I’ll tell you what. I think I’d endure any manner of humiliation to go to work for someone like Logan Anderson. Gorgeous,” she said, counting off on one of her fingers. “Rich.” A second. “And single.” A third.
Stella rolled her eyes. “He’s gorgeous, but a pain in the ass. He’s rich, but that doesn’t make up for being a pain in the ass. And I don’t know if he’s single or not; he has that weird on and off thing going with Astrid Allen.”
On the occasions when Stella allowed herself to be completely honest, she could admit that she was a little jealous of that third thing. Astrid Allen was smart, talented, and she clearly had something going on with Logan.
On those honest occasions, she could also admit that she would’ve preferred if she was the one who had something going on with Logan.
“That weird on and off thing with Astrid Allen is something his mother is pushing, and you know that. It’s old money trying to get with old money to make the old money multiply. It’s the money’s way of procreating.”
Stella laughed.
“Besides,” Liz teased as she gave Stella a gentle hip check. “He’s into you, and this whole weird complicated coffee routine and the associated small tortures are like tugging your pigtails on the playground. He’s teasing you; it’s weird foreplay.”
No. No way.
“He’s not into me, he just thinks I have the hots for him because he’s a conceited jerk, and—”
“Because you do have the hots for him.”
Stella ignored her. “And he’s charming, so it seems like he’s flirting, but he just wants to keep me hanging on because he doesn’t want to have to find another assistant.”
“If that’s the way you’d rather look at it, then sure.”
“It’s the realistic way,” Stella argued.
“Or the delusional way. You’re gorgeous. He flirts with you. The logical conclusion is that he’s interested.”
The thought of it was nice, but too much for Stella to wrap her mind around. “Even if by some miracle you were right, he’s my boss. I can’t go there.”
“That’s why you should accept Alejandro’s job offer. It puts you in a position where you can do work you’re interested in, work you earned a degree for, and it frees you up from all those pesky HR rules that would keep you from banging your boss.”
Stella closed her eyes and let out a long breath, trying to gather her patience. Her friend Alejandro had asked her to join his tech startup as a software developer, where she could put her interests and education to work. While that was a good thing, the position also came along with a pretty severe cut in pay, and the very real possibility that the whole thing could fold in a year or two, and she’d be out a job.
Should she go for excitement or stability? On her best days, she thought excitement. On her worst, stability. She was running out of time debating herself. Alejandro needed an answer, and soon.
“I don’t know,” she replied honestly. “I kind of fell into the assistant job, and meant for it to be temporary. Here I am…four years later. It seems stupid to turn it down, but reckless to accept it.”
“And you don’t want to leave the gorgeous billionaire.”
“That’s not an issue.”
It was totally an issue. Maybe Stella was in love with him.
Probably she was in love with him.
The whole thing was futile, and she wasn’t proud of finding it difficult to walk away.
Liz looked at her like she wasn’t buying a word she was saying.
“I’m going to think about it while I’m on vacation,” Stella said.
“That’s not what you should be thinking about while you’re on vacation. Work should be a distant memory; you should pretend it doesn’t exist if you can.”
Since their parents died, Stella and her sisters had an annual tradition of doing something fun the last two weeks of the year. They’d spent Christmas in Hawaii, the Caribbean, Japan.
This year? Christmas markets in Europe, and Paris for New Year’s. It was going to be amazing, but she had hours-long train rides in front of her where thoughts of her future and what she wanted to commit to in the new year were bound to creep in.
“It’s not really thinking about work, it’s thinking about life.”
Liz looked skeptical. “While you’re off in Germany drinking mulled wine and buying stuff, I’ll be at home sprawled out on the couch while my mother complains about my bangs and asks me repeatedly when I plan on settling down and getting married.”
“You can tag along with us,” Stella offered.
“Tempt
ing offer, but it’s not worth the grief I’d get from my family for not showing up.”
Liz and Stella were called to the next available register, where Stella handed over a Post-It note with Logan’s order written on it.
The barista shot her a quick look of irritation, but punched it into the register anyway.
“It’s for her boss,” Liz added helpfully.
“It always is,” the barista sighed.
Stella paid, then slid a twenty into the tip jar, on account of her boss always being such a pain in the ass.
“A twenty, huh?” Liz said under her breath as they moved over to wait for the coffee.
“I expense it. Every time his little game inconveniences someone, they deserve to be compensated.”
“Does he know?”
“Oh, he suggested it. I had been leaving tens, and he told me to up it to twenty.”
Liz laughed. “I really like him.”
Stella smiled. “That’s why he’s dangerous. He can be a demanding asshole, but it’s kind of impossible not to like him.”
“Or love him,” Liz replied with a teasing wink.
Yeah.
She was in trouble.
Chapter Two
Logan Armstrong was hunched over his laptop, reading an email from the head of his app development team that was not good news. He should’ve known that scrimping on the launch of this new group in his family’s company wasn’t a good idea. His assistant, Stella—who sat through countless budget and development meetings—had warned him. He’d just thought that being careful with the startup costs would mitigate the losses if the whole enterprise ended up a failure.
So, he figured they could be conservative with their outlay of cash in the beginning, and strengthen their development team once they’d found some success, with little hit to the bottom line.
He’d taken over for his father nearly a year ago now, and was desperate to be enterprising and innovative, to show him that handing over the reins was a good, sound business idea, that he could lead the company into the future.
That wasn’t really working out like he’d hoped it would so far.
A loud, repetitive knock pulled him out of his work.
“Hey,” his brother Drake said. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d learned how to sleep with your eyes open. I’ve been knocking for at least thirty seconds.”
Logan took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Sorry, I’m…preoccupied.” He looked out the door, surprised to see that Stella still wasn’t in. “It’s not like you to come by unannounced,” he teased.
Drake hitched his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Stella’s desk. “Your assistant isn’t here. Do you have her running around New York looking for a rare silk scarf with just the right pattern to give to Mom for Christmas? Or is she off to find the most exotic kind of peppermint the city has to offer?”
Logan grinned. “She’s out getting me coffee.”
Drake stepped in and took a seat on the opposite side of his brother’s desk. “An order a mile long, no doubt. I don’t know how she stands you.”
Logan laughed, the lightness that he felt whenever he talked or thought about Stella rooting itself in his chest. “It’s a game we play,” Logan said with a wide smile. “I occasionally give her ridiculous errands to run, she gives me shit about it. It’s one of the things that makes us work.”
Drake grinned and shook his head. “Mother would die if she knew that you had a thing for your assistant when she’s been working so hard to get you and Astrid married off.”
Logan rolled his eyes. “I’m not the slightest bit interested in Astrid Allen.”
“The tabloids say otherwise.”
Drake’s wife Christa was an insatiable gossip hound, one of her few flaws.
“The CFO of a Fortune 500 company shouldn’t be paying attention to the tabloids,” Logan reminded him.
“I needed something to distract me from the fact that we’re behind schedule on the app development if we’re going to release on time, like we promised our investors we would.”
There was an annoying older brother I-told-you-so in the undercurrent of his words that set Logan on edge. “The guys on the team are having some issues with the code. I was thinking about having Stella take a look at it. She’s like the software whisperer.”
“If your assistant can do better work at the coding than the people you hired to do the job, that doesn’t say a lot about them,” Drake replied dryly.
“Or it says a lot about Stella. She’s brilliant,” Logan said, fully aware that his luck was running out where she was concerned. She was smart, gorgeous, and talented…and incredibly overqualified to be his assistant. He wanted to move her up, to give her a promotion more on par with her abilities. But, he knew there were rumors circulating about the two of them, and he hadn’t quite figured out how to put her in a better position in the company without people thinking she slept her way there.
That couldn’t be further than the truth, although Logan would like it to be closer.
Somewhere over the course of their time working together, Logan had crossed the line and fallen in love with her.
It was dangerous, it was unprofessional, and…Logan didn’t care. He couldn’t let her go. So, he gave her ridiculous errands to tease her, hoping it would annoy her enough that she wouldn’t consider him an option, that she wouldn’t be as crazy attracted to him as he was to her. It was a defense mechanism when it came to Stella, to keep that distance between them so that he didn’t act on his feelings.
He was pretty sure it was working. Most of the time.
“You know we need it done by Tuesday or the whole project goes to shit. It needs to be done before people start leaving for the holidays.”
“She’s quick. I’ll get her started on it tonight.”
Drake raised his brow, skeptical. “That’s at least a week’s worth of work, and it’s nearly the weekend. And you’re supposed to go upstate to that party to work on investors for the Lennox deal.”
Upstate to that party he was definitely bringing Stella to because he couldn’t see two feet in front of his face without her, and couldn’t even remember some of the attendees’ names. The Armstrong Company’s presence was a fixture at that party, and Logan needed to keep some of these business connections. He couldn’t have a disastrous showing.
He also really wanted to see her in a gown, but he wasn’t about to tell his brother that.
“She can bring her laptop with her and, I’ll stay out of her hair while we’re up there, give her time to work.”
Drake shook his head. “I think you’re physically incapable of staying out of her hair. You’re walking a dangerous line, Logan.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I have amazing balance.”
With a frustrated sigh, Drake stood.
“Put her on it and see what she can do. Let me know how it goes.”
“I will.”
Drake walked out just as Stella walked in, and Logan pointedly ignored his brother turning back and giving him a look. Her long brown curls were tossed over her shoulder, her eyes bright and her cheeks rosy from the chilly weather outside.
She was gorgeous.
“Good morning,” she said, her words clipped. “I got your ridiculous, over-complicated coffee.” She handed the cup to him, then slipped off her gloves. “The line went out the door, so it took a little longer than usual and I will not be making that time up later.”
He shrugged. “Fair enough. It must be really cold outside; this is barely warm.”
Stella narrowed her eyes. “It’s hot, and if you’d like we can test out the temperature when I dump it on your lap.”
Logan couldn’t help himself, he threw his head back and laughed. “I’ll deal with it.”
He noticed the slightest smile curve the edge of her lips, even though she was fighting it.
“Why don’t you have a seat?”
She slipped off her coat and h
ung it on the coatrack by Logan’s door, then slipped a notepad and pen out of the pocket and did as he asked.
She was always prepared for anything, and Logan liked her sass. Women never gave him attitude, they never teased, never told him exactly like it was. So many of them fell at his feet because of his name or his face, but Stella would just as soon step on those feet if she pissed him off.
He really liked that about her.
Loved that about her.
“First, did the toys we donated get delivered?”
Stella flipped back a few pages in her notebook. “Yes. All five hundred of them—anonymously, just like you asked—yesterday at…eleven thirty-eight AM.”
He sighed. “Good.”
“Thanks again for letting me pick them out. It’s one of very rare fun parts of my job,” she said, biting her lip to keep from smiling.
“Hopefully you’ll think the next thing I’m going to ask you to do is fun.”
She narrowed her eyes, immediately suspicious. “What is it?”
“There’s something I’d like you to work on for the app development.”
Stella’s whole face lit up, and she shifted forward in her seat, suddenly more interested in what Logan was about to say. “Okay.”
He explained to her what he needed, and the time crunch they were in as she quickly scribbled away on her notepad, thankfully not giving him any I told you so’s. He would’ve deserved them, because she had told him not to cut any corners with the app development team. Many times over.
“But I still need you at the Abernathy party,” he tagged on to the end of his explanation. “I know it’s a lot, but—”
“I can do it.”
Logan saw the spark in her eyes, the way her spine straightened with determination.
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