Bosshole Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Bosshole

  Copyright

  Wanna hang with the cool kids?

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Bosshole

  By Dakota Rebel

  Supernova Indie Publishing Services, LLC

  www.supernovaindie.com

  Powered by Your Imagination

  Bosshole

  by

  Dakota Rebel

  Griffin:

  I’m getting really sick of cleaning up my brother’s messes. He wanted to run this company all on his own, and now it’s on the verge of going under, so Dad is sending me in to try to save it. First step, cut half the staff. I never expected this fiery little hellcat to come after me and convince me to keep her on. The trouble is, I don’t just want to keep her at work, I want to keep her forever.

  Emma:

  When this bosshole came in and started firing people, me included, I may have lost my mind a little. It’s his company, and he can do what he wants, but he didn’t have to be a jerk about it. I don’t know what possessed me to go after him, but it got me my job back. But it may have also gotten me a lot more than I’d bargained for with my new boss.

  Copyright

  © 2019, Dakota Rebel

  Bosshole

  Cover Art by Supernova Indie Publishing Services, LLC

  Published by: Supernova Indie Publishing Services, LLC

  Warning: All rights reserved. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and occurrences are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places or occurrences, is purely coincidental.

  Wanna hang with the cool kids?

  Join the group on Facebook! The Rebel Street Team is the place to be.

  Chapter One

  ~ Emma Tillman ~

  “Did you hear?” Miriam asked, slipping into my office and shutting the door behind herself. “Max is gone.”

  “What?” I stared at her over the rim of my coffee cup, frozen halfway to my lips. “What are you talking about?”

  Max Dunn was the owner of Sliver, the photo editing software company I work for. Well, his family owned the company, but he was the CEO and ran the day to day.

  “Yup,” Miriam confirmed, dropping into a chair in front of my desk. “Some new guy showed up this morning and called a staff meeting for about half of us in ten minutes. You’re on the list, too. Conference room B.”

  What the hell? I’d just talked to Max on Friday and he seemed fine…a little stressed out maybe, but that wasn’t unexpected. Our sales had plummeted over the last three months and we were all a little on edge.

  “I’ll see you up there,” I said. “I’ve just got to finish this email. Save me a seat?”

  She nodded as she got up then left. I stared after her, my mind racing. What was going to happen now?

  ****

  “Good morning.” The hottest man I’d ever seen in real life strode into the conference room like he owned it. “I’m Griffin Dunn, and I’ll be taking over for Max.”

  He powered on the laptop and projected a sales chart onto the wall.

  “Over the course of the last six months, Sliver has been bleeding money like you wouldn’t believe.” He nodded toward the door, and everyone turned to look at an older woman who had walked in, a stack of envelopes in her hand. “This is Connie. She’ll be handing each of you an envelope containing a generous severance package. Boxes are being deposited in your offices or cubicles and I’ll need you to be out within the hour.”

  He walked out of the room, not bothering to look around at the stunned faces of twenty people who had just been let go at ten a.m. on the Monday before Thanksgiving.

  Connie handed me my envelope and I stared at it, shocked at what had just happened. Then I looked up and caught the gazes of every single member of my department. All of them were in this room. Which meant that this moron had just fired his entire operations team.

  “Emma?” Miriam’s hand landed on my shoulder. “Honey, are you okay?”

  “What?” I looked up at her. “Yeah. Are you?” I stood up and pulled her into a hug.

  “Oh, I’ll be fine. I only took this job to get out of the house. Doug has been begging me to retire for months.”

  “Will you excuse me?” I said, stepping around her. “I’ll call you later.”

  I walked out of the room, but instead of going to clean out my desk, I turned the other way and headed for Max’s office, assuming this Griffin guy would be there. And he was.

  “Excuse me,” I snapped, walking in without knocking. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Jesus,” he groaned, looking up at me. “Lady, this isn’t a good idea.”

  “First of all, you already fired me, so exactly what more can you do to me at this point? Second, I’m not here to cry or clutch my pearls. I’m serious, do you know what you just did?”

  “Yeah, I reduced overhead to try to keep this company from going under. Sorry I had to fire twenty people, but if the company folds, you’re all of out a job anyway, and at that point, you’ll get nothing. Your severance is more than fair, I promise you.”

  “I’m curious,” I said, sitting down across from his desk without being invited to. “How did you choose the people you cut?”

  “Why do you care? I’m not giving you your job back. So please, go cry to someone else, I have work to do.”

  Wow, this guy was a total dick. It would have served him right if I left and let him figure out on his own that he no longer had any customer service or inside sales staff left. But I couldn’t. I’d worked hard to claw my way to middle management in this company, and even though Griffin was a piece of work, his family had always been good to me and I felt I owed it to Max to warn this moron that if he didn’t watch who he fired, he’d have to shut down anyway.

  “I’m just wondering if you pulled names out of a hat or something,” I continued. “Because it couldn’t have been a decision based on our positions with the company.”

  “You seem to be a fairly smart girl,” he said, leaning forward and resting his arms on the desk. “Did you come up with that all by yourself?”

  And condescending, wow. He was getting less attractive by the second.

  Okay, no he wasn’t. He was arrogant and rude, but his bright blue eyes gave a hint that maybe he was forcing himself to be a hard ass. Or maybe I just wanted to see it there.

  “Hey, asshole, focus. You just fired your entire Ops team. You no longer have anyone in the building that speaks with customers or processes orders. There wasn’t a single marketing person in that room, even though we're overstaffed at nine men who haven’t reached an objective in a year and a half. The phones are ringing right now, and there’s not one person left out there to answer them. So, unless you’ve secretly hired a crack team of Sliver trained interns, you’re about to get a crash course in customer service.” I stood up. “Have a nice day, Mr. Dunn.”

  I walked out of his office, a little smug at the look of horror I’d glimpsed on his face before I’d turned my back on him and left to collect my things. Good. He should be worried. But it was officially not my problem anymore.

  Chapter Two

  ~ Griffin Dunn ~

  “Connie!” I yelled, racing out the door. “Have security stop that woman before she
leaves her office. Keep her there. And get me her name…and where her office even is.”

  I’d been so stunned by her moxie, that her actual words hadn’t registered until she was already gone from view. But she’d dropped a stunner on me for sure. I pretty much had pulled names out of hat. When we discussed it, we thought it would be the fairest to do random layoffs. Considering the staff was pretty evenly matched salary wise, it wasn’t feasible to just let the higher paid ones go. There were only two managers, besides my idiot brother Max, and their salary wasn’t that much higher anyway. So, we’d just plugged the names into an online randomizer and took whoever got spit out.

  It never occurred to me or my father to make sure it was evenly mixed by department. So, when Moxie girl stormed into my office and told me I’d fired everyone in customer service, it had been a little shocking.

  Also, I’d never fired anyone who tried to help me afterward. That was something that had blown my mind a little as well.

  On top of all of that, she was fucking gorgeous. I’d known my brother was fucking one of his employees, which was only part of why my father had pulled Sliver out of his control, and I had to assume it was her. Why else would she care so much about the company? She probably thought she and Max were going to get married, and she’d end up running this place with him.

  “Emma Stillman is waiting for you in her office, sir,” Connie said, handing me a slip of paper with an office number. “She’s on the third floor.”

  “This building is fucking ridiculous,” I said, walking past her toward the elevator.

  “Language,” Connie snapped, rolling her eyes.

  She’d been my assistant since I’d opened my first company five years ago. She hated my mouth and I hated her filing system, but we worked well together otherwise.

  When I got upstairs, it was deserted except for a security guard standing outside an office on the other side of the room. The cubicles throughout the wide space were totally clear and for a moment I felt a twinge of regret. But I hadn’t been lying to Emma. If I didn’t fix this mess Max had created, no one was going to have a job.

  “Thanks, Thom,” I said, nodding to the man from my private security team. “You can head back downstairs. I’ll only be a few minutes and we can go.”

  Thom nodded, glancing toward Emma’s door but not leaving.

  “What?” I asked.

  “She’s pretty pissed,” Thom said. “You might want to duck when you enter. I almost got a binder to the forehead. Maybe I should stay for a minute.”

  “Just go,” I said, trying not to laugh. “I think I can handle a hundred-and-fifty-pound woman on my own.”

  I opened the door and jumped at the sound of a book hitting the window next to me.

  “One-thirty, asshole,” she snapped before launching another book at me. “How dare you fire me then trap me in here with The Rock out there guarding the door like I’m a criminal?”

  “Calm down.” I shut the door and walked slowly toward the desk, my hands out in case I had to deflect any further flying debris. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

  “Why?” She crossed her arms and glared at me. Damn it, she was beautiful. Fire lit her honey-brown eyes and her breasts rose and fell with each heaving breath and I just wanted to bury my hands in her hair and kiss her breathless.

  “What?” I asked, shaking those inappropriate thoughts from my head. She was my brother’s girl.

  “What. The. Fuck. Do. You. Want?” she bit out. “I need to print out copies of my resume before IT takes away my printing privileges. Of course, there’s only one of them left. Smart move for a software company. But what do I know?”

  Okay, so next time I had to do layoffs, I needed to get some actual input. This one was a fail on me and dad, for sure.

  “Look Emma, I may have made a mistake,” I admitted. “I’d appreciate it if you could stay on and help me.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. I’m not. I’d like to explain everything to you, if you’ll let me. And you’re right, we didn’t think this through completely, we were just trying to save the brand. But there’s obviously more to it than I’d considered.”

  “Interesting,” she said, sinking into her chair. “So, half an hour ago, I was fired. And now, you’d like me to continue working here, alone?”

  “Not alone.” I sat in the chair across from her, keeping my gaze trained on her in case she went back into attack mode. “You can bring back two people for customer service and one IT person. Or you can hire new, if you don’t want to have to pick who stays.”

  “Ok, hotshot,” she said, swiveling back and forth in her chair. “I’ll call three people tonight and have them back tomorrow. I know the company is in trouble, so I’m not going to demand a raise. But I am keeping my severance check. You know, for the hassle.”

  “That’s not really how severance works,” I told her. But a smile was pulling at my lips. She was really something. No wonder my brother liked her. “Just get my assistant the names of who you want to bring back.”

  “Miriam Cole, Justin Mason and Kathy Monaghan. Kathy was sleeping with Max, is that going to be a problem for you? She’s the best customer service person we’ve ever had.”

  “Kathy was sleeping with Max?” I asked. “How do you know?”

  “Everyone knew.” Emma laughed. “They were discreet and he really didn’t show her favoritism, but they were…I don’t know, just different around each other. Do you mind?”

  “If she’s good at her job I don’t care.” I shrugged, trying to sound nonchalant, but I was secretly thrilled that it wasn’t Emma who was sleeping with Max. Not that that didn’t mean she hadn’t in the past, he tended to get around any and all offices he’d ever worked in. And he had this way about him that women were always grateful for the time they had with him, and never angry or upset when he moved on. I never understood how he did it.

  “Great.” She stood up and grabbed her purse. “See you tomorrow.”

  “It’s eleven,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, but see, I was fired this morning. So, I’m going home. I start my new job tomorrow.” She walked past me and opened the door, staring at me until I got to my feet and followed her out.

  “New job?” I fell into step beside her as we headed to the elevator together.

  “Yeah.” She reached out and pushed the down button. “I’m the new CFO of Sliver Software.”

  “Whoa,” I said, turning to glare at her. “Where in the hell did you get the impression— “

  “Shut up,” she said, stepping into the elevator. “Someone has to save this company. And I don’t think it’s going to be you. So, I’ll see you at nine a.m.” She pushed the door closed button and I just stood there staring at her.

  “We start at eight!” I called out, reaching to try to catch the door.

  “Whatever,” she said as it closed in my face.

  What in the actual fuck had I just gotten myself into?

  Chapter Three

  ~ Emma ~

  “Why don’t you just fold the company?” I asked, staring at the horribly dismal spreadsheets in front of me. We were two days into this process and I still couldn’t figure out what had happened to this company. “I mean, I know I just started as CFO, but this is a mess.”

  “You are not the CFO,” he argued.

  “Then why am I here going over these books for you?” I asked, blinking innocently at him.

  In my defense, I did have a degree in Business Accounting, and Max had employed a bookkeeper with absolutely no background in finance, so detangling the profit and loss sheet was going to be easier for someone who’d actually worked for the company for a while. The bite was going out of Griffin’s tone every time he argued with me about my new position, so I figured by next week at the latest I could go ahead and order my new business cards.

  “Whatever,” he said with a sigh. “Look, I’ve built many companies from the ground up, but saving one is not exactly my
forte. Looking at all of this, can you see a way to get back in the black?”

  “Not right now,” I admitted. “Let me take this stuff home and I’ll go over it this weekend and we can regroup on Monday to come up with a plan.” I started gathering up the binders we’d spread all over the conference table then closed the laptop.

  “No, I need you back here tomorrow,” he said, getting to his feet and stretching. “I’ll have the marketing team assembled and we need to come up with a strategy to bring in new business.”

  “Tomorrow is Thanksgiving,” I reminded him.

  “And?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I stared at him, slamming the binders on the table and putting my hands on my hips. “It’s a federal holiday, no one is going to be here.”

  “You and I are going to be here,” he argued. “If you want to be CFO, this is what’s required.”

  “I don’t know if I want to be CFO,” I countered. “This company’s in real trouble.”

  “You’re so fucking infuriating!” he yelled, slamming his fist on the table.

  “I’m fucking adorable,” I argued. “And I’m fucking hungry and tired. It’s four o’clock the day before Thanksgiving, if you want to talk to the marketing team, we’d better get our asses down there before they leave for the weekend.”

  Spending all this time with Griffin over the past few days, I’d realized he couldn’t be any more different than Max. Griffin was uptight, rude and still a total dick to everyone. But he was so smart. Not that Max was dumb, but he never really seemed to have a mind for business. Max just wanted to have fun; Griffin wanted to win.

  We walked down the hall together, his shoulder occasionally bumping mine. Every time he touched me sparks shot through my body. I detested having this reaction to him. I wanted to hate him. But I just couldn’t.

  Since the first day we’d met, I’d seen something in him that he fought really hard to keep buried. He seemed to use his attitude to cover up his real self. I’d seen a kinder person peek through a few times. He was always nice with his assistant, Connie. And once or twice I’d caught him looking at me with something other than exhaustion or disdain in his expression. A softness, not affection exactly, but maybe appreciation? I had helped him quite a bit. And it probably didn’t hurt that I knew more about the company than anyone else left in the building.