Demanding Boss Page 4

  “You can’t come in here late looking like that. Who taught you how to dress yourself? And you’re late. No, don’t speak. Weston Publishing is one of the biggest publishing houses in the state, and there are hundreds of people who would love to have your job. If you can’t bring yourself to get here in the morning, then don’t bother coming back to work. We can replace you in seconds.”

  Her eyes go wide and shocked, color draining from her face. She looks like a beautiful ghost, tragic and waif-like. “Yes, Miss Monroe. I’m… I’m sorry about last night. That was unprofessional. It won’t happen again.”

  Her voice trembles and on the last few words she can’t hold back her tears. She covers her face with her hands as she runs from my office.

  Shit.

  I’m still catching up with what exactly it is I said. I already regret half of it; the poor girl didn’t deserve to be lambasted for coming in late with a hangover. It’s not her fault that my ex is an all-mighty bitch. Dammit.

  I didn’t expect her to apologize for last night, either. I’d assumed she wouldn’t remember anything about it and it would be pretty hypocritical for me to hold anything done under the influence against someone.

  It must have taken some nerve to talk to me about it. And then I went and tore strips off her. I feel a sick lurch of guilt and jump to my feet.

  Maybe if I hurry I’ll be able to catch her and apologize.

  By the time I make it through my side of the offices, it’s clear that Wendy has left the building. Her things aren’t at her desk, and Amelia is sending me a disapproving look that makes me wince. Shit. I make my way out to reception and wait for Donald to deign to notice me.

  He’s terrible at his job, but he’s also excellent eye candy and manages a mixture of disdain and apathy that seems to really work for the kind of people visiting a publisher’s office. He’s sketching a dress languidly at the moment, and I have to clear my throat several times before he will even look up.

  “Miss Monroe the second, what can I do for you today?”

  “I want to send a bunch of flowers,” I say. I didn’t know that this was my plan until this second, but now I’ve said it and it’s perfect. Wendy has probably gone home and I can’t blame her for that. It’s much better for her to get a bunch of flowers and an apology so she knows she’s safe to return to work tomorrow if she needs to.

  “Okay,” Donald drawls, bringing the flower company we usually use up on his computer. “Any particular theme?”

  “Something apologetic,” I say, waving a hand. “I want the message to read ‘I’m sorry about today and I hope you feel better’.”

  “Are you sending one to everyone in the office, or just to one person in particular?”

  I send him a warning glare. “Just to one person, to Wendy.”

  “Wendy?” Donald frowns. “Who is Wendy? Someone from Legal? I thought I’d met all their new starts but they’ve been bleeding personnel lately.”

  “Wendy, my new PA. She’s been working here a week and you took her out drinking last night?” I can’t keep the snap out of my voice, and my irritation only increases as he looks up at me with an expression that can only be termed ‘pitying’.

  “Oh my god, Patricia. Wanda. Her name is Wanda. Have you been calling her Wendy all this time?”

  I blink, taken aback. Immediately every interaction with my new PA flits through my mind, starting with that first disastrous meeting, where she didn’t respond to her own name for a good five minutes. Holy shit.

  “So her name isn’t Wendy Smith?” I ask slowly.

  “Not even close. She’s Wanda Novak, she only goes by Smith on her CV because she got more responses that way. People are racist.”

  Wanda Novak. The writer I’ve been trying to find for over a week. The possible savior of my whole book line.

  I ignore whatever else Donald is saying and dash out of the building, onto the street. There’s no sign of Wanda anywhere. I’ve chased her away.

  8

  Wanda

  I’m crying on the bus home, that’s how pathetic I am. I can’t believe that I thought I could walk into the Patricia Monroe’s office wearing no make-up, with my shirt all rumpled and get her to be okay with me making a pass at her the night before. She must be so disgusted with me.

  I knew that I wasn’t good enough for this job. I knew that from the moment I got the offer. I knew it had to be a mistake and that I wouldn’t be able to last, and look how right I was. I couldn’t make it as a writer and I can’t make it working for Patricia Monroe.

  It’s time for me to accept the truth: I’m a failure. I should just settle down with a practical job and take care of my grandad. No more dreaming for me.

  I wonder if I should bother sending in a resignation notice, or if my meeting with Miss Monroe was basically a dismissal. I mean, the rest of the team might be able to forget that I’m the girl who got drunk on one-and-a-half drinks on a Monday evening, then had to be carried home by the boss, but Patricia Monroe certainly isn’t going to.

  There’s a little old lady sitting opposite me, and the more I cry, the more she rummages in her bag. I have the horrible feeling that she’s trying to find a handkerchief for me, so I’m grateful when my stop comes up so I can get off and hurry towards my flat.

  Normally, I like to talk to the elderly people on my bus route. There’s a gentleman who tells me the same story every time I see him, about how he met his wife when they got caught in the rain together and had to share a newspaper to keep the rain off their heads. There’s also a really sweet old lady who gives me the best tips on growing tomatoes. One day I’m going to have the best garden.

  But today, I just can’t handle any further embarrassment. It’s been bad enough without having to try to convince a stranger that I’m going to be okay.

  How am I ever going to tell my grandfather? He’s so proud and so hopeful, and if I tell him I’ve failed at yet another thing, it might do him real harm.

  I scrub hard at my face and try to swallow the next sob. I can’t just cry the rest of the day away, I need to get started on finding a new job. My bills won’t pay themselves.

  As I turn toward my apartment, I hear someone calling my voice and I stop still in the street. Has someone who knows me seen me like this? For a moment I consider darting away and hiding in the laundromat across the street until they go away.

  I’m know Mrs. Agnieska really well. I’m sure she’d let me hide in the back and read magazines.

  Then I see who it is and my heart skips a beat. Patricia Monroe, gorgeous and perfect, standing outside the door to my apartment building.

  Did she come all the way here just to fire me? After everything she said in her office? Surely she knows that I got the message loud and clear.

  “M-miss Monroe!” I stammer a little. “I’m so sorry again for last evening. I can’t believe how badly I behaved.”

  “No,” Mis Monroe says. There’s no sharpness to her voice, and unless I’m imagining it, her beautiful eyes seem fixed on my face with an intensity that is kinder than she’s ever looked before. “I’m the one who should apologize, Wanda. I should never have talked to you like that.”

  “You called me Wanda,” I say dumbly. “You never call me Wanda.”

  “That’s because I was told on your first day that your name was Wendy,” she says with a grimace. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know I had your name wrong.”

  That is actually really reasonable. All this time I thought she was doing it on purpose, and instead she just didn’t know it wasn’t my name. It makes me feel a little better so I unlock my flat door and shyly gesture inside. “Would you like to come up?”

  “Sure,” she says with a small smile and I smile back.

  My apartment looks messy and cheap, and I blush as I bustle around getting her a cup of coffee just the way she likes it, then settling on the broken armchair so she can sit on the couch. She looks uncomfortable perched on the edge of my beat-up secondhand couch with a chipped cup
on her knee.

  “As I said, I’m sorry about what I said. I’ve had a terrible morning, but it was no excuse to take that out on you. Can you forgive me?”

  Her ice-blue eyes bore into mine and I’m sure she’s sincere. “Of course. It was my fault for being late and for everything else.”

  “Let’s talk no more about it,” she says briskly. “I’ve got something else I want to bring up. Are you the person who wrote the manuscript sent in to Weston just over a year ago called ‘Angels in the Mirror’?”

  This question is so far from anything I expected her to say that for a few minutes I’m speechless. I’m pretty sure my mouth has dropped open. Eventually I nod.

  “Amazing. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say all at once, the words tumbling out of my mouth in a rush. “I know my book wasn’t any good, but I figured you’d forget about it, not that you’d try to track me down to tell me in person.”

  “What? No! That’s not what’s going on here.” Patricia looks at her cup in confusion for a bit and then puts it on the floor. “I’ve been looking for you because a spot has opened up in my new Lesbian Erotica line and I want to offer you a book deal.”

  I’m pretty sure this is the closest I’ve ever come in my life to passing out. There’s a rushing noise in my ears and the room spins in a sharp, jerky circle. Patricia is still talking but I’m having trouble focusing on her.

  “An amazing book, just brilliant. I want to put it in the lead position, actually. Everything was great in the manuscript when I first got it...except...” and here she pauses in a way that dashes cold water over me and drags my attention back to her face.

  She looks kind of embarrassed, and I cringe to think of this beautiful, amazing woman reading through my clumsy prose and thinking about all the ways it’s been done wrong.

  “Except?” I prompt quietly.

  “Wanda, it’s the sex scenes. They’re awful.”

  “The sex scenes?” It’s not as bad as I’d feared, that’s not the whole book after all. But still it comes with a pang to know that she hated something I wrote so much.

  Patricia smiles reassuringly at me. “It’s why you got a rejection the first time I read your manuscript. I thought that there would just be too much work involved to bring the sex scenes up to the quality of the rest of the book. It seemed better to wait for your next book to come out. But don’t worry! I’m getting hold of a ghostwriter, and he’ll get the sex scenes all sorted for us.”

  As she’s been speaking, there’s been this feeling like tiny butterflies bubbling in my stomach, and the more she talks, the more intense it gets. And with it, this soft delightful feeling that maybe this might actually be the moment that I get everything that I dreamed of. But the moment that she says the words ‘ghostwriter’, my stomach clenches in horror.

  I spent hours slaving over my book, writing it out by hand and then typing it up on my old PC with the ‘e’ key that didn’t work properly. I cried over the characters and struggled through long nights of writer’s block to get it finished. It’s my baby.

  I’m not letting anyone else write part of it.

  “I’m sorry,” I say out loud, the firmness in my voice surprising me. “I won’t sign a deal where I’m no longer the writer of my own book. Thanks for the offer, but no thank you.”

  9

  Patricia

  This cannot be happening. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.

  Plenty of terrible writers put their manuscripts on my desk. I’ve read every terrible novel out there. This just isn’t one of them.

  Does she really not know how much talent she has? So many writers have massive egos, but she seems to have no confidence in her ability at all.

  Yes, we need to fix the sex scenes. I won’t deny that. But that is a small problem in the grand scheme of things.

  Simply put, I wouldn’t go for a book I didn’t believe in. There is enough there that I’m willing to eat the cost of a ghostwriter just to get this book out there.

  I just need to get her to believe in the novel as much as I do.

  “Lots of writers use ghostwriters to enhance their work,” I promise. “It’s really not as uncommon as you would think.”

  “You don’t understand,” she insists. “This is my baby. I’ve worked on this book for so long. I can’t give it up.”

  She looks so sad. I want to tell her that the problem will just go away. But publishing is a tough business.

  “Listen,” I say. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘kill your darlings?’ That’s what needs to happen here. No one is perfect, but you have something that’s really good here. It just needs to be polished.”

  “You don’t understand,” she says, exasperated. “I have a vision for this book.”

  “Yeah, and you’ll have a vision for the rest of your books. You’ll learn from this process and you’ll have more creative control over the others as you get better.”

  “There won’t be any others if this one gets messed up by a ghostwriter.”

  Wanda is getting more tearful and determined as we talk. I’m going to need to pull out the charm to convince her of this.

  She reaches for a tissue to wipe her face. Her nose and cheeks are turning red.

  “Wanda,” I say, gently. “You’re a fantastic writer. I have no reason to lie about that.”

  “I know I’m not fantastic. If I were, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I would have made a career for myself as a writer by now.”

  “Creative careers can be fickle,” I assure her. “It’s not a reflection of you. You’re young still, and you’ve already gotten your first offer! That’s incredible!”

  “No, I’m serious, Patricia. I don’t want to do it if I can’t do it the right way.”

  “The book is fantastic. We just need to fix it up for publication.”

  “Then tutor me. Let me do the book myself. I can do better. I promise.”

  I feel an uneasiness in my stomach. As good as the rest of the book was, those sex scenes were pretty extraordinarily bad.

  I wonder if I should let her prove herself. She’s passionate about this, but passion does not always equate to a quality product.

  I believe that she’ll try really hard. I just worry that it won’t be enough.

  Still, my heart breaks as I look at her. I’m not made of stone. I am moved by tearful begging for another chance.

  “I have to be honest, Wanda,” I tell her. “The sex scenes weren’t just bad. They weren’t believable.”

  Brutal honesty has to be the first step, I suppose. She needs to know what the problem is if we’re even going to discuss having her try to fix it.

  “What do you mean?” She asks, wiping away her tears.

  “Well, not only does it read like it was written by a virgin, but it reads like it was written by a virgin who has never been kissed. I like the characters and their emotional connection, but it’s as if the sex scenes were written by a teenager whose only experience with sex is their tenth grade health class.”

  The flush across her face increases. She’s blushing. Maybe I was a little bit too harsh.

  I have to get the point across somehow though.

  “Oh, well…” She begins to stammer. “I can take another look at it. If I can make a convincing emotional connection between the characters, I can make a convincing physical connection…”

  She trails off. She’s obviously getting flustered.

  I cock my head at her odd behavior. A lightbulb goes off in my head.

  “But you’ve been kissed before, of course,” I say. “Haven’t you?”

  “Oh, um…” She starts to trail off again. Her flustering is becoming full-on embarrassment.

  “Gosh, Wanda, are you going around kissing everyone in town?” I tease.

  “What?! No!”

  I chuckle at her reaction. “Relax, I’m only teasing you.”

  “I know, but…”

  “N
o buts,” I say. “If you’re going to convince me to let you take a crack at rewriting those parts, you have to be less timid about talking about it.”

  “Yeah, I can do that.”

  “You know that writing is baring your soul to your audience. You need to get more comfortable with doing that in your sex scenes. Just think of good experiences you’ve had with that. Write what you know.”

  Her flush deepens. Her face is so red it’s practically purple.

  “Lots of writers write about things they’ve never done before…” She says, quietly.

  Oh my god. I knew it. She is a virgin. She has no experience. That’s why her writing doesn’t match the rest of her book.

  That’s bad news though. It means this will be much harder to approach.

  If it were a matter of clarity, then maybe I could coach her through it. The problem is that she’s writing about something that she’s never experienced, but that her audience likely has.

  “Wanda, we have to be realistic about this,” I tell her. “If you’ve never had sex and your sex scenes aren’t believable, then that’s not a problem we can fix in a timely fashion.”

  “What? No! I can learn! I swear!” She insists.

  “Come on, Wanda. Even giving you examples of sex scenes at this point would just be me asking you to plagiarize. There’s no shame in hiring a ghostwriter.”

  “Patricia, I can do it. Please, let me prove it to you.”

  “They were bad. I mean, really bad. The writing was stilted and it doesn’t match the rest of the book. A book that you should otherwise be very proud of.”

  I can almost feel her heart break as I look at her. This is making me feel like a real jerk.

  More tears start to fall and her face crumples in disappointment. I don’t think I’ve ever felt worse about a rejection. And this isn’t even a rejection!

  I don’t have the time to coach Wanda through this. I would be devoting way too many resources to one writer and one book. Sending these handful of chapters to another writer is the right thing to do.