Her Impossible Boss's Baby
Author
Millie Adams
Reads
17.1K
Chapters
17
Chapter 1
HER BOSS REALLY was the worst boss in the entire world. Polly knew she couldn’t prove that scientifically. But she felt like her two a.m. summons to the lair of His Beastliness was empirical evidence that Luca Salvatore was indeed the worst.
Worst, worst, worst.
She let the word serve as the lyrics for her ragey walk through the lobby of Luca’s building. The night doorman didn’t even ask.
“Buongiorno, Miss Prescott.”
“Hello, Antonio,” she said as she carried on through the glossy building, because there was no call to be rude to Antonio just because she hated Luca.
She was granted instant access, probably because Luca would be a bear if he was kept waiting for over two seconds. It made her want to walk slower. But then he would just make up the minutes later in the most annoying way possible. She knew it. Because she knew him.
Four years, eight months, three weeks, five days and three hours. That was how long she’d had this job. That was how long she’d been dealing with Luca Salvatore. Dr. Luca Salvatore. Who was in fact a doctor in more than one way, because he was so obsessive and meticulous that in order to work in the innovative field of medical technology he’d gotten an MD as well as a PhD.
He was brilliant. No one could contest that.
He was also a first-class pain in the ass.
But this job had come to her in a stroke of luck so random and fortuitous the idea of walking away from it had—until this week—been completely out of the question.
For her part, she had run away from home as soon as she was able. She had gotten accepted to a university in Italy that allowed American students to study for free, and she had left Indiana faster than you could say Hoosier. She had never intended to go back home.
Not to her father’s uncontrolled cruelty, or her mother’s manipulations. Between the two of them, her entire life had been a guessing game. Not knowing who they would be at any given time.
They had been a nice enough suburban family by all accounts. Except for the accounts that were coming from inside the house.
She knew just how much a person could hide about who they really were.
She’d never wanted to be vulnerable, because vulnerabilities could be manipulated. She’d built an impenetrable fortress around herself using the knowledge she’d gotten watching her parents play games with each other and with her.
She’d vowed never to hurt anyone with her behavior, but she’d also made sure to take the lessons of her childhood on board and make them work for her instead of against her.
She had made sure when she arrived in Italy that she didn’t look lost or confused. She had done her very best to look as if she had been to all the beautiful places thousands of times before. She knew it didn’t benefit her to look open and vulnerable.
But that was how she had met people at school. Made friends. It was how she had maneuvered her way into an internship at Salvatore Medical Technologies. She wasn’t specifically interested in technology, but in the inner workings of a company that size. She was studying marketing because she was so interested in how façades work. And what was marketing if not a carefully crafted and directed façade?
She was an expert with those.
She was also an expert at sizing people up instantly. In her household growing up it had been a matter of emotional survival. She could read a change in a person’s mood in a moment. She didn’t want to give her parents credit for her success, but she definitely felt like her ability to read a person and a moment had gotten her far.
She’d taken the lump of coal she’d been born into and made it a diamond.
She could still remember the first day at Salvatore. But only vaguely. The day she could remember with absolute clarity, was the first time she had seen Luca Salvatore.
When he had walked into the stunning, modern building, he’d had the look of a shark cutting ruthlessly through the water. His black suit was tailored exquisitely. Showing off broad shoulders and his lean waist. He was tall, well over six feet. But it was not only his physique and height that differentiated him from every other human being in his vicinity. His face was that of a fallen angel. His black hair was pushed off his forehead, not one strand daring to defy him.
His jaw was square, chiseled as if from stone. His cheekbones hollow, his nose angular and proud, befitting of a Roman emperor.
His eyes were nearly black, and even though he didn’t look at her, she’d had the sense that if he did, it would slice her neatly in two.
And then there was his mouth.
She had never given much thought to the shape of a man’s mouth. But his was mesmerizing. Firm and uncompromising, and her first, immediate thought was what it might take to get him to smile.
She was, after all, expert at managing the moods of others.
She’d always had to be.
She found she wanted to manage his.
It had been an instant crush. Swift and painful.
She had never felt such an immediate attraction to another person in her life. But then, she had never seen another human being as beautiful as Luca Salvatore.
Of course, what she had discovered very quickly after that was that his personality did a lot to balance out those looks.
He was the most difficult man she had ever known.
Not the most frightening. No. Luca wasn’t the type to go around hurting people. That would imply intent.
No, the thing about Luca was that he lived in his own sphere. And in that sphere the only thing that mattered was his goal.
He did not believe in pleasantries, he did not believe in compromise.
She had watched him cut a swath of terror through his staff with his willingness to fire people at will, and his near impossible standards.
That was how she had ended up with her job.
She had been standing next to his assistant—the third one he’d gone through in that month—when he had fired the other woman.
Polly had never seen a person look both relieved and devastated at the same time. Until she had come to work at Salvatore. Then it was an expression she saw often.
And when the woman turned to walk quickly out of the building, she had definitely looked both.
Upset because she had lost her job, relieved because it meant she would never have to deal with Luca again.
And then, for the first time, Luca had looked at Polly.
She had been right. It had been like being cleaved in two.
Even knowing what she did about him, what an ogre he was, how difficult he was, she had been immobilized by his beauty. Those dark brows had been locked together, his irritation written in every line of his face. She had been frightened, for a moment, that she was about to be on the receiving end of his philosophical sword. That she was about to be the next casualty of his mood.
She knew, in that moment, that she could easily be...ruined by him. That he could take her life and bend it around his with ease.
And she would always have to be on guard for that.
“What is your name?”
“Polly. Polly Prescott.”
He had looked at her. As if he was scanning her. A machine taking a diagnostic of an object.
“Do you have any experience acting as an assistant?”
“Yes. I’m an intern. I assist whoever needs it.”
“Brilliant. You’re hired.”
“I’m what?”
“Polly Prescott, you’re now my assistant.”
“I have school.”
He had laughed.
“I will make whatever arrangements necessary for you to continue with your studies and integrate the hands-on experience that you’re getting at the company.”
That was her first experience with just how far Luca was willing to go to get his way.
There was no end to how far.
Her employment contract had been—and remained—one of the most ridiculous things she had ever seen. She wasn’t simply a full-time employee, she was on call. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Which was how she found herself storming into Luca’s building at midnight. It wasn’t even a strange occurrence.
She entered the code in the lift that would take her upstairs to Luca’s penthouse.
She was long past being impressed by the beauty of the place.
If only the same could be said of the man.
He made her heart stop beating every time. Made her breath catch in her throat. And she saw him for extended periods of time every single day. It was still like that.
The good news about Luca was that he was so incredibly difficult to deal with that there was no romanticizing her feelings for him.
The truth was, she was in lust with him. An inconvenience, but hardly fatal.
Sure, it consumed her every waking hour, as did he, but she was aware of it. So that made it...fine.
And possibly not even her problem soon enough.
On a whim she had applied for a job in marketing at a major Milan fashion house two weeks prior. She had been shocked when they’d called her. But they had found out that she had been an assistant to Luca for the past five years and had been intrigued. From there she’d had three phone interviews, and that morning, she had gotten the call that the job was hers if she wanted it.
She was an intriguing prospect, but more than that, she had been Luca Salvatore’s personal assistant for longer than any other person had ever managed to keep the position. Luca was famous.
The breakthroughs his company had made in nanotechnology for medical use were extraordinary. And it wasn’t just a team that Luca had hired to make these breakthroughs. Many of them had come from him personally.
He was a genius. There was no question.
He was also renowned the world over for being one of the most difficult bastards on the planet.
That was the cost of brilliance, she supposed. When she was being charitable.
Tonight she didn’t feel all that charitable.
Tonight, she had a new job offer. Doing something she actually wanted to do, instead of just being Luca Salvatore’s girl Friday. Or whatever she was.
She was practically his nanny. That was the truth of it. She was in charge of running interference between him and all of the people who needed to deal with him on a daily basis. There were some days when he just simply couldn’t raise his head and be bothered to spare a civil word for people he was supposed to have meetings with, and often, it was her job to go in his stead and do the communicating.
She was in charge of procuring his food, his clothing, making sure that his hotel room was exactly as he would require it. She often went ahead of him to major events and made preparations for his lodging. She managed a massive team of people, and Luca only ever had to deal with her.
It was, he had explained many times, the only way that he could concentrate on his important work.
To minimize and streamline the unimportant details.
Her job was fashioned entirely of unimportant details.
And yet she also knew that those so-called unimportant details had to be managed with precision, or her mad genius of a boss would fly into the kind of rage that nobody wanted to deal with.
She let out a long breath, steeling herself, when the elevator reached the top floor.
And the doors opened, and she stepped into Luca’s pristine antechamber before using her key card to unlock the door.
She stepped inside. “I’m here, Luca.”
She had called him Dr. Salvatore initially. He was quite anal about that. But she had been given permission to call him Luca three weeks into the job.
It had been strange.
It still was.
Because it humanized him.
And nothing about him was human.
“I’m in my room.”
She could tell by his voice that he was in a mood. But then, if he called at midnight, he was always in a mood. He kept the strangest hours of anyone she had ever known. Sometimes she wondered if he slept at all. The truth was, he probably plugged himself into the wall for a couple of hours at the end of every day.
Maybe took off his head for a few minutes and stuck it on a charger.
She strode through his massive living area, her shoes clicking on the black marble tile. And went straight into his bedroom.
He emerged from his walk-in closet just as she did. Wearing nothing but a pair of black pants, resting low on his hips.
He was the robot, but when she saw him her brain short-circuited.
Those broad shoulders, equally broad chest. His well-defined pectoral muscles, his abs...
If she touched him, she would probably find that he was made of steel, rather than flesh and bone. But she had never touched him, so the temptation to do so remained.
After all this time, being in his bedroom shouldn’t signify. Seeing him shirtless shouldn’t signify, and yet it did.
There was something obscenely sexual about his chest hair. She couldn’t get over it.
He was ten years older than her. And her boss.
If she ever confessed her fixation with him to a medical professional she would be clinically diagnosed with daddy issues. But no matter how many times she told herself that she couldn’t stop the fixation.
Regrettably, she had learned that for her a sexual fixation was a near impossible thing to exorcise when the object of said fixation was in her path continually.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I need to pick a suit. For tomorrow night’s speech.”
“You have to do it now?”
“Yes,” he said, as if she was the foolish one. “I need to practice the speech. And everything needs to be as it will be tomorrow.”
“You can’t practice in the venue right at this very moment.”
“Everything needs to be the same with me,” he said.
She felt the last straw descend upon her, and crack her patience completely in half. It had been a monstrous workload in the lead-up to the Singapore conference and Luca had been worse than usual. She’d been toying with taking another job as things got more and more hectic. But she’d been...torn.
Because Luca was...she’d been right. When he’d looked at her the first time she’d known he could destroy her and in many ways she’d let him. Her life revolved around him. Her every move, her every breath.
She’d thought about leaving but she had also felt paralyzed by the thought of a life without him.
Now though...
She could see herself far too clearly.
She’d told herself it was lust. She’d told herself she was armed against all things thanks to her dysfunctional childhood, and in reality she’d...
She’d been holding herself back because of him. Not taking new jobs, not realizing her own potential because she’d let herself get obsessed with him.
Or worse.
Her chest hurt when she looked at him and what was that emotion exactly?
She didn’t want to know.
She could see he was exasperated, he didn’t like having to explain himself. He also didn’t care if she was tired. He didn’t care if she was upset.
He cared about himself.
She’d put herself in the exact position she’d promised she never would.
Luca wasn’t manipulative, not in the slightest. In that way he was nothing like her parents. But the core issue was the same. She cared for someone who didn’t care for her. She bent and twisted her life to suit someone else’s needs when she’d sworn never to do that.
And if she took a step back and tried to be somewhat sympathetic to the gorgeous billionaire who always got his way, she could appreciate that it must be frustrating to him to try and explain the way that his brain functioned to mere mortals who couldn’t even understand what nanotechnology was, much less how it functioned in a medical setting.
She found she had difficulty drumming up sympathy for him, though.
And the truth was, she didn’t need to. Because she had another job offer. What was she doing standing in her boss’s bedroom in the middle of the night while he stood there shirtless, demanding an opinion on which black suit he was going to wear to speak to a room full of people?
She wasn’t afraid of him. She never had been. He had said many times it was one of the things that he appreciated about her.
She met his complete, uncompromising, blunt nature with relentless cheer. Sometimes with sharpness, but always with efficiency. She had learned that half the problem he had with his past assistants was that they simply crumpled beneath the pressure of working for him. He had appreciated her backbone.
She doubted he would appreciate it now.
“Luca, I cannot believe that you called me out here in the middle of the night to help you choose a suit so that you could rehearse the speech.”
“Why? It is entirely consistent with everything you know about me.”
The problem was, she couldn’t even argue with him.
She was going to anyway, though. “But surely you must understand that it’s unreasonable.”
“It is part of your employment contract. You’re on call.”
“Be that as it may, no normal employer would ever subject an employee to this.”
“At what point have I ever pretended as if I was a normal employer? No one else is like me. You know this.”
“No one else is like you,” she said, looking up at the gilded ceiling in his bedroom. “I sure as hell hope so, Luca, because I don’t think the world could withstand having another human being on its surface that behaved the way that you do.”
“Honesty is appreciated, attitude is unnecessary.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I am running on two hours of sleep because you got me up at two in the morning after staying at the office with you until midnight. I was finally about to go to sleep and then you call me to come down to your personal residence, where you are half-naked, asking for help with something that is simply not pressing by the standards of any other human being. You are a robot, Luca. And I have tirelessly put up with you for the last five years. And I’m not doing it anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
It was all abundantly clear now. She was at a crossroads. She’d been tempted to just stay on the beaten path. To just keep on going. To just stay with Luca and stay stagnant. His favorite piece of office equipment, rather than pursuing her own dreams.
Her own life.
She had to put a stop to it.
She had to be her own best advocate because what was the point of anything that had happened in her whole life up to this point if she failed herself now?
“I quit.”
“You must be joking. Nobody quits.”
“No. You fire them. Because you find fault with everything they do, and I’m the one person you couldn’t find fault with. But I find fault with you. I quit. I’m done. I’m going home and I’m going to bed.”
“You cannot quit,” he said.
“It’s too bad. I am quitting. I have another job, and I don’t need yours. I’m getting into marketing. I’m not going to be your sprightly little gofer, running to and fro doing whatever you want.”
He looked incensed. Outraged. She had never seen precisely that look on his face before. She had seen him inconvenienced. She had definitely seen him angry. But this was something else. “We have a massive exhibition happening in Singapore next week.”
“I am aware. I have planned nearly every detail of the exhibition because I’m the one that’s had contact with every presenter, every person involved at the venue, everyone managing food, lodging—”
“You cannot quit before the exhibition.”
“I can. And I will.”
“You will not. You will give me two weeks’ notice as your contract dictates.”
The exhibition was all he cared about. Not her upset. Not what he’d done. And she found it sparked a fury she couldn’t quell.
“You and your contract can go to hell.”
She turned around. And she was just about to walk triumphantly out of the room. Finally. She ignored the tugging in her chest, she ignored the feeling of being bound to him. She ignored the pang of regret that she was never going to see Luca in person ever again, and she was just about to crow her victory, her freedom, when he spoke again.
“If you do not give your proper two weeks’ notice, I will ensure that you never work anywhere else ever again.”
She turned around. “I already have a job.”
“Cara, if you think that I do not have the power to remove you from that position before you even begin, then these last five years have been for nothing. Because you have never truly known me. Two weeks. Or your professional life is over before it even begins.”
