Her Filthy Rich Boss (Irresistible Billionaires #3) - Summer Brooks Page 0,1
I had been in when I’d started. Life was fine, in retrospect. I may not like my job, and I may not have had the relationship I wanted, but it would all work out in the end.
Plus, I had a pretty great group of friends around me.
I bounced on down the path, exiting the park and re-entering society, headed toward my apartment so I could get ready for my very long, very unexciting day sitting on my butt after I’d been fired as the personal assistant to one of San Francisco’s least well known real estate developers, Henrietta Lin.
Of course, her relative anonymity was by design. She tended to sell to some of the higher-end clientele that resided in our fair city since she’d managed to corner the market back in the late nineties and wanted to keep their names out of the paper as much as possible. Had she started her business down in L.A., the anonymity wouldn’t be nearly such a big deal, but celebrities up here in the Bay Area liked to keep their privacy, well, private.
Not that I could blame them. It must be horrendous to have cameras shoved in your face at all hours of every day, putting your life out there on display for everyone and their mother to see and judge without ever bothering to understand the reality of life.
Then again, the money and the comfort that came with that sort of lifestyle didn’t sound all that bad most of the time.
Speaking of celebrities, as I stepped back out onto Lincoln Way, just at the corner, to my surprise, I saw a gaggle of the very cameras I had just been admonishing in my head. Shouts and yells accompanied the bright flashes of light just outside of one of my favorite delis.
“God, not today,” I groaned aloud. “I just want a bagel sandwich.”
A business guy in a nice suede suit turned his head to look me up and down the moment I spoke out loud. I saw the judgment flash through his eyes a second before the flash of a coin soared through the air, and a nice, shiny quarter hit me square in the forehead.
A thousand thoughts flew through my head at once, the first of which was that if I actually was a crazy homeless woman, it would be really unhelpful to give me a freaking quarter. Not a single thing could be bought with it. Especially a good bagel sandwich.
And my second thought was that the scrappy t-shirt and ripped leggings I’d donned that morning did, in fact, make me look like a homeless mess.
This was it. My actual breaking point. The moment when I lost all sense of self and the very few faculties that I possessed in the first place.
“I have a home, you know!” I hollered after the man, so caught up in my own embarrassment that I didn’t think about the fact that this was even more awkward. “A nice one, too! With a kitchen and everything. I’m just dressed like this because yet another guy told me he wanted to be ‘just friends’ after he’d just finished putting himself inside of me over and over again, and you know what, that does not make a girl feel good, okay!”
“Excuse me, would you be quiet?” A woman demanded shrilly as she walked past me, holding her hands over her teenage son’s ears.
“He’s going to have to learn eventually, lady,” I told her. “Hey, kid, never do that to a girl, alright? It messes with her feelings. It’s just mean.”
“Good Lord!” The woman huffed, dropping her hands and yanking the kid away before I could give him any sager advice.
Okay, I admit, something very strange had just come over me. I’d had a complete out of body experience. I didn’t even know what I’d been saying.
Until the moment that the world reformed around me, and I realized I’d just put my sex life on display for half of San Francisco.
Some sleazy looking guy walked past, grinning at me and making an abhorrently rude gesture with his hands that was far too disgusting to repeat.
“I am losing it,” I hissed to myself.
A bagel sandwich. That would make this all better. That, and the fact that I knew I was one of the millions in this city, and my sad little display of craziness would be completely forgotten within fifteen minutes.
A New York minute is nothing compared to the lack of an attention span that San Franciscans show.