Love Slave to My Devil CEO Boss 18+ novel Chapter 152

“The best way to make people

believe that we did nothing wrong is to act proud as if we did nothing wrong.

In reality, I don’t consider us dating to be wrong to begin with, so it really

doesn’t bother me,” Ace said while sound extremely bored.

“Right…” I murmured while I only

felt half convinced.

What we did and were still doing

was breaking the rules no matter how he looked at it. Despite what I thought,

the employees in the company seemed to have so much faith in Ace and his words.

After the press conference everything settled down quite fast in the company,

and within a few days, everything was back to normal. No one gossiped about the

photos of us kissing anymore. Everyone seemed to have moved on.

The key change for me was that now

everyone in the company recognized me, my name, and my face. Everyone knew Ace

as the CEO of the company beforehand, so nothing changed at all for him;

however, very few people in the company knew me. Only those that I had the

pleasure to work with in some way knew me and that has changed dramatically.

Now everyone ‘knew’ me and even though they no longer believed that I was

inappropriately involved with their CEO, it still made me very self-aware and

uncomfortable.

This must be what it felt like to

rise up in fame overnight. However, I didn’t gain all this unwanted attention

and fame from some good merit that I did and that was probably the worst part.

Pushing all of that aside, the bigger problem was how Ace was going to grow

this company into the size he promised his father.

“Do you have any plans in mind?” I

asked in a small voice when we were alone in his office.

“Well, the first easy but important

step is for us to win the Ashford competition with Project Alpha. Now that

Chase Creastives is no longer in the picture, it shouldn’t be hard for us to

win. That doesn’t mean that we can let our guard down and the reason is

simple…” Ace replied.

“It doesn’t matter if we win if our

work is below the standard and expectation from our potential clients. They’ll

have their eyes on this…” I finished his sentence for him flawlessly.

“Exactly. Not just our existing and

potential clients in the industry. If we want to expand our portfolio, we’ll

have to work hard to attract even more companies to work with us,” Ace

surmised.

“You’re right. It doesn’t matter who

our competitors are, we still need to put out our best work out there without

fail,” I said with determination.

“Correct. Without fail. If we get

this right, the winds will really be blowing in our sails,” Ace said before he

reached out a hand and played with a strand of my hair.

…

I sat down at the table for our

regular Project Alpha meeting with the CEO’s office team members. It was such a

relief to finally focus on my work without any distractions in my way. Things

were looking up. We got our original storyboard back and we managed to clear

the rumors in the news. Everything finally felt peaceful, and I was mentally

prepared to focus on delivering real results for this project.

Everyone was on time to the meeting

except for Ace who told us beforehand that he would be around ten minutes late

because of a previous engagement. That left me alone with my other colleagues

and that was when I found out what they really thought about the gossip that

was circulating in the news.

“I feel so sorry for you that those

photos were leaked. They really are so misleading just like Ace said in the

press conference,” a colleague told me with clear sympathy.

“See? I told you that there is no

way that Karina would be dating the CEO. I mean, he’s Ace. The gossip is

nothing but gossip,” another person said.

“I feel bad for you, but you really

need to be careful. Ace is a public figure, so these things are bound to

happen. It’s not your fault but keeping some distance between you two would be

better in my opinion,” another person advised sternly.

“Don’t be mean to her. I’m sure

everything is fine now, Karina. We can focus on pushing this project forward.

We have to finalize the detailed version of the storyboards enough so that we can

start on the production planning,” Jeremy said with a smile.

It always seemed like Jeremy had my

back all the time. He was a genius at what he does, and he was also very kind.

Just like me, he worked in design, and I was such a big fan of his storyboards

too.

As the people in the room chatted

away about what they thought about the rumor