Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 42

OCEANS.

“I quit…”

I had been hearing those two words on repeat for the past three hours, and they showed absolutely no signs of stopping.

She had a gift for this. A specific, infuriating gift for walking out of a room and leaving more of herself behind in it. She always left something that was sure to stay and linger and torment my every thought.

She fucking left the job. So, tell me why her words still remained in my fucking office?

“Fuck.” I cursed.

Nonsense. Again.

I crumpled the paper on my table, threw it, and watched it join the thirty–five others scattered across the office floor.

Despite my efforts, it was no different. Still the same meaningless scrawl I had been producing for the past three hours every time I tried to work through the Venzela analysis.

It felt like I was in a loop, and I was consistently doing the same thing over and over again since she walked out that door.

Fine. She fucking quit. That’s her loss. Not mine. But why the fuck was I this affected about it?

I leaned back in my chair and loosened my tie.

Having her quit wasn’t part of the whole point. The point had been to make her understand something. To show her what this job actually required and what happened when the person filling it decided that her personal life – especially her boyfriend – took precedence over her professional obligations. That was a reasonable, defensible position, and I stood by it completely.

I had done this a thousand times to people who were even more valuable to the company than she was. But none of them ever left. And I never felt a shred of guilt about it, not even

for a second.

But one thing I was certain about was that she’d be back.

She would take the night to feel whatever she needed to feel about everything, and by morning, the reality of the fact that there is no other job out there for her would have reasserted itself, and she would walk back through that door.

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Something about the office today felt unsettling. I felt like I was breathing borrowed air.

The entire place was too still. It felt like there was too much air in it at some point, but the next moment, it felt like there wasn’t even enough air to keep me sane for the rest of the day.

The whole place grew increasingly stuffy for me that all I needed was to go home and put some distance between me and this space. I needed at least twelve hours of sleep, and by tomorrow the Venzela figures would make sense, the office would feel like my office again, and everything would have returned to its correct proportions.

I had told myself it was the Sydney trip catching up with me. The accumulated exhaustion of four compressed days, a twenty–one–hour return flight, and a week’s worth of work sandwiched into half the time.

My door opened.

For one moment – one completely inexcusable, embarrassing moment – something in my chest lifted.

Then I registered who it was, and the lift collapsed. Fuck me. It wasn’t her.

I directed my attention back to the figures on my desk and gave them the focus I had been failing to give them for the past three hours.

Harold’s footsteps stopped somewhere in the middle of the room.

I didn’t look up.

The silence stretched to the point where I didn’t need anyone to tell me that Harold was taking in the situation and forming an opinion about it that I was not going to enjoy hearing.

I kept my eyes on the page.

“Don’t,” I said, before he opened his mouth.

Harold did not listen.

He moved further into the office anyway, with a confidence that made it clear that whatever I had just said had been noted and dismissed in the same breath.

The chair across from my desk shifted slightly as he pulled it out and took a seat like he had

every intention of staying there long enough to say exactly what he came seat like he had

I kept my eyes on the figures in front of me.

“Where’s your PA?” he asked.

say,

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I let the question sit for a second longer than necessary, loosening my grip on the pen I was holding, before it snapped in my hand.

“She quit.”

I said the words like they felt lighter than they actually sounded.

Harold was quiet for a moment. “Hm…” He said thoughtfully, “Did she?” he said after a moment, almost to himself.

I didn’t look up or give him anything else..

Then he added. “That’s strange.”

Something in my jaw tightened.

He leaned forward slightly, resting his forearms on the edge of my desk. “Because I was in HR not twenty minutes ago.”

That got my attention, but I didn’t look up.

“I was reviewing the staff updates for the quarter,” he continued. “And I didn’t see her name under the list of terminated or resigned employees.” He paused. “For a woman who quit, she’s remarkably still employed here on paper.”

The pen

in

my

hand tapped once against the paper as I turned the page.

Harold watched me for a moment longer before speaking again.

“Is there a reason you haven’t updated her file?” he asked. “Or started the process of selecting a replacement?”

I finally looked up.

“Because she’ll be back,” I said, and there was silence. The kind Harold produced when he was sitting with something he found interesting and was deciding how to approach it, without sending me across the desk at him before he got to the part that mattered.

Then, he laughed like he had found something genuinely surprising in an otherwise unremarkable afternoon.

–

people who had

and you

“That’s fascinating,” he said. “Truly. Because I have sat in this office and watched you turn away people who have come back on their knees after you let them go given years to this company, people with real leverage and real history here looked through every single one of them like they were strangers at the wrong address.” He tilted his head. “So explain to me how a PA who walked out of her own free will gets a different set of rules.”

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“She’s good at her job,” I replied.

“Right.” He leaned back, “but she walked out on you. No one walks out on you, Oceans.”

My fingers curled slightly against the armrest of my chair. “You’re making this into something it’s not,” I said.

“Am I?” he asked.

I pinched the bridge between my nose, “Have you stopped for one second to think? What if I was too hard on her earlier today?”

He narrowed his brows like I was speaking in riddles, “You gave her tasks, and she clearly messed everything up. How is it turning around to become your fault?”

“She made mistakes, yes. But I put her in a position designed to produce mistakes, and then I used those mistakes against her in front of twenty–seven people.” I paused.

Harold was looking at me with an expression I didn’t want to see on his face right now. He was being judgmental, and I hated it.

“Have you thought about all of that?” I went on. “Or has it not occurred to anyone that I might have taken it too far?”

I shrugged, “Then don’t test people if you don’t have the balls for it.”

That… That bruised my ego.

“You know this isn’t new to me,” I said through gritted teeth, “I’ve done this a thousand times,” I emphasized.

“But you’ve never spent three hours rewriting the same document afterward.”

I leaned back slowly in my chair, my jaw tightening as something in my chest began to shift again in a way I didn’t like.

“That’s not the point,” I said.

He nodded slowly, “So the point is… it’s all… Normal. A normal reaction.”

“It’s entirely normal,” I replied.

“Cool…” He said, looking around my office again before looking back at me.

I exhaled slowly through my nose. “Whatever you’re building toward, Harold, I’d encourage you to reconsider. You’re already pushing too far.”

“You know the last time I sat in this office watching you do this to yourself?” His voice had

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changed, ignoring me completely with comfortable ease, “The last time I watched you sit behind that desk and not be able to work, or think, or even live, while you told yourself it was all normal and professional when it was clearly not?”

Something at the back of my neck went tight.

“Harold,” I warned slowly, already knowing where this was leading.

“The last time you lost your shit and your grip on reality…”

“Don’t…” My voice was quiet.

I could already feel the tremor in my hands, but I did my best to steady them.

But he said it anyway.

“Vanessa.”

The world stopped tilting. Something happened in my chest the moment that name entered my space that I had spent eleven years making sure it never entered.

I slowly looked up at him…

My vision blurred. “I’m warning you.”

“Why?” He asked, narrowing his brows thoughtfully. “What happens if I say her name, Oceans?”

“Harold…” My palms balled into hard, trembling fists.

He looked down at my trembling hands and looked back up at me.

“Does it break you all over again?”

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12:01 Fri, May 22

Chapter 13