Free Romance: The Boss by Lara West

to.
    I sink into the chair behind my desk and try to calm myself down.
    It had taken all my effort not to look back at him through the transparent glass, and as my hand wavers over the first appointment on the itinerary that I have to reschedule, I cannot help but get the feeling that his eyes are still on me.
    No doubt he’s still chuckling to himself, looking at the back of my head with that philandering stare of his, and wondering why he chose to employ a clumsy girl that gets embarrassed at the drop of a hat.
    Well, that makes two of us.
    I spend the rest of the morning cancelling Mr. Townsend’s appointments and taking calls. When it finally gets to midday I have only one call left to make, the dinner engagement.
    7:30 p.m. Dinner with Elsa. The Lion.
    Elsa could be his girlfriend…or a date?
    I don’t know why, but either one disappoints me.
    I feel like a helpless schoolgirl who’s just found out that her crush likes someone else.
    But then again, of course Clint Townsend would have a girlfriend. He’s a confident, handsome, and successful billionaire. Hell, women must flock to him like moths to a flame.
    When I look up Elsa in his list of contacts on the computer database, it comes up with a small profile and her picture. Her full name is Elsa Louisa Huber and she’s a Victoria’s Secret model ( of course she is ) with long, shapely legs and shimmering golden hair that even Brooke would look stark against.
    Just as her name suggests, Elsa is German, and was crowned Miss Germany, becoming the first runner-up last year in the Miss Universe pageant.
    Hmm, I guess that dashes any hopes of Clint and me rekindling things.
    Not that we would’ve, anyway; after all, he is my boss and you kind of need to remember a girl in order to rekindle things with her. It’s kind of offensive actually—that was some of the best sex of my life, if not the best.
    Oh well, I guess I’ll just keep on hoping that his memory stays elusive and that this job doesn’t end up biting me in the ass. Nonetheless, time is ticking and I still have that dinner appointment to cancel.
    But something tells me that I’m going to enjoy calling this one.
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter Four
     
     
     
     
     
     

 
     
     
    The last two weeks at Townsend Investments have been some of the most grueling of my life, from Mr. Townsend’s coffee not being hot enough and demanding I go get another one, to writing up the itineraries wrong, to hours of note-taking for conferences, to picking up dry cleaning, to lunch runs across town, and now to finding a present for his mom’s fiftieth birthday this weekend, which I have to hand-deliver to his apartment by seven o’clock.
    Honestly, I wish I’d never said that whole “above and beyond” spiel in the interview. Clint Townsend is literally milking it, for all it’s worth.
    On the upside, my first paycheck came today.
    Four thousand dollars for two weeks’ work is pretty sweet, and given that I’m working for the devil incarnate, I think my annual salary is an appropriate one as the personal assistant of hell.
    Okay, so maybe I’m being a tad melodramatic again.
    Clint isn’t that bad.
    In fact, since working with him I’ve managed to taper him down into having three distinct shades.
    The first shade is the most obvious and the same one I’d seen at the bar: confident, smug, and witty, a true businessman of Wall Street. The second shade is pensive, a brooding and fractious edge to him that makes you think twice about getting on his wrong side.
    And then there’s the third shade, the one that stops me from hating him on most days and suggests that deep down, he has the potential to be someone else entirely.
    This shade embraces his sensuality, his compassion, his vulnerability, and his love of animals, notably dogs. I know, the whole dog-lover thing stumped me too.
    But he donates thousands of dollars to animal shelters all over the country, particularly in LA, where the numbers of dogs on the