Shame the Devil (Portland Devils #3) - Rosalind James Page 0,3

you need the job, you don’t screw up. Job security’s my thing. Was my thing, because the resort’s up and running now and has a good manager, you’re not going to be spending that much time in Wild Horse, and you don’t need an assistant here anymore. A property manager, that’s all, and I can get that set up for you. Just say it, Blake. Rip off the Band-Aid. I’m a big girl.”

Except that she’d given up her shot. The chief clerk vacancy at the courthouse, when Betty-Anne had finally retired. The job she’d put in for, the one that would have set her up forever, the one everybody had said was hers. It actually had been hers, but she’d passed it up, because Blake Orbison had moved to town, he was building a high-end resort the likes of which Wild Horse had never seen, and he needed a crackerjack assistant to help him do it. She hadn’t known one single thing about the rich and famous, and she’d known less than that about the NFL, but she’d known how to get things organized and get them done, she’d done exactly that, and it had been the most exciting two years of her life.

She had a great resume now. Too bad she didn’t live in LA. Also too bad she hadn’t thought of all this before she’d passed up that chief clerk job. Elizabeth Kempworth had it now, and she’d be hanging onto it until they pried her computer keyboard from her cold, dead hands.

She was having some trouble breathing, but she was having no trouble sweating. Now that this was here, it felt bad. Specifically, she felt sick. That would be the final humiliation, vomiting on your boss as he fired you. She wasn’t going there.

“I’m not firing you,” Blake said. “I’m helping you find alternative employment.”

“Blake,” she said. “It’s the same thing.”

He scowled at her. “No, it’s not. OK, listen. I gave this some thought on the jet back from Hawaii.” A sentence that pretty much summed up their respective lives. “First, you take some comp time. Call it a week.”

“You don’t give comp time.”

“Sure I do. What do you call it when we finish something and I tell you to take a long weekend? Comp time. Meanwhile, I’ll make some calls and find you somebody else to work for. What do you want to do? This, or more of an office job?”

“Well, this, if I got to choose. This is the best job I’ve ever had. I told you so.”

He grinned. “Thought maybe you were just flattering me.”

“I don’t do that. You need to hear the truth. Who else is going to tell you, other than Dakota? But there aren’t a whole lot of challenging high-level assistant jobs in Wild Horse, have you noticed? Unless you’re calling the lumber mill, you’re going to strike out, period. Never mind, I’ll find something. That office job. Somebody’ll have one. Meanwhile, there’s unemployment. If you feel guilty, shell out some severance pay, because Idaho unemployment pays a max of four hundred a week, and I’m not paying the rent on that.”

Blake scowled at her. “See, this is what I’m talking about. You could flatter me a little. Or assume I give half a damn. Which is why I know you’re also helping pay your grandpa’s rent, now that your mom’s passed.”

“And once Dyma goes off to school in the fall,” Jennifer said, moving on from that with some semblance of briskness, “I’ll move in with Grandpa. Or we’ll both do it right now, if I’m making four hundred a week. Come on, Blake. Severance.”

“See,” he said, “I had a thought about that.”

She was still going for breezy and confident. He liked breezy and confident. You didn’t suck up to the boss, but you adjusted your manner to suit the job. “Except that you owe me,” she told him. “I was probably the most efficient woman in Wild Horse to begin with, and I’ve made strides, working for you. I’ve grown.”

Possibly in more ways than one. She knew she was turning red, and she felt the waistline of the Spanx digging into her flesh like the torture device they were. Why had she made those cheesecake brownies over Christmas? You couldn’t make them and not eat them, at least she couldn’t. Everybody knew that the better-looking you were, the faster you got hired, especially for the really good jobs. The kind of job there actually might be, now that Blake had