How Not to Marry a Billionaire - Ashlee Mallory

1

There had to be an easier way.

There had to be an easier way for a girl to make a living that didn’t require me sitting here pretending my boss didn’t have his hand on my upper thigh.

What? Did he think I was that hard up for a job that I wanted to be groped by a balding senior partner with a wife and seven kids at home? A guy who had to wipe the spit from the corner of his mouth that collected when he spoke longer than a minute?

His hand crept higher like some kind of tarantula.

He was getting bolder. Last time he stopped at my knee, and when I’d recovered from my shock and pushed him away, he’d laughed and pretended it had been an accident. I’d laughed it off too. What choice did I have?

I, Jane Carmichael, was just a twenty-eight-year-old attorney with student loan payments higher than my monthly rent, who’d landed this job four months ago in a market where they were hard to come by. Sure, I would have preferred to remain at my job at Legal Aid, a job that I started at right after law school. At least until that seemingly perfect April day I arrived home early from a three-day training retreat to find my live-in boyfriend of four years doing the dirty with another woman on my brand-new Pottery Barn sheets. I moved out of Eddie’s condo that same day after answering an ad for a roommate from Craigslist.

It quickly had become clear that the measly pay I received from Legal Aid wouldn’t be enough to cover rent, student loans, my car payment, and other necessary bills like, you know, gas and groceries. So I’d reluctantly left my job at Legal Aid for a job here. If the exhaustive hours and constant pressure for more and more billable hours weren’t stressful enough, I also was stuck dealing with the nauseating attention of one Troy Jenkins, one of the senior partners and my direct supervisor.

Yes, I realized my life was in the crapper.

Troy’s hand was still on my thigh, only now his breathing was getting noticeably louder even as he kept his gaze on the folder in front of him, pretending to be hard at work in case anyone happened to be passing by the conference room and looked in.

As I saw it, I had two choices. I could laugh and push his hand away, scold him like it was all a harmless prank. Then wait for the next time it happened. And it definitely would happen again. This was, like, the fifth similar incident since I started here, the last one where he “accidentally” hit his arm against my boob.

The other choice was—

A high-pitched scream filled the room. It wasn’t mine.

I stared down. My beautiful turquoise PIX Patrol Montblanc pen, a present from my now ex-boyfriend, was embedded in the top of Troy’s hand. Troy held his hand out in front of him and we stared at it in horror. His eyes were wide and his already pale complexion had whitened three shades.

Almost involuntarily, a giggle bubbled out of me. An actual giggle. I don’t think I’d giggled since I was fourteen and my best friend, Penelope Ferrara, laughed so hard she actually peed herself a little.

Suddenly, the conference room where we were working on discovery for a big sexual harassment suit we were embroiled in—yes, I understood the irony—was filled with paralegals and attorneys, drawn by Troy’s scream. Chaos ensued as he was surrounded. Someone pulled the pen from Troy’s hand, and immediately a rush of blood oozed out, dripping down his hand and splattering onto the white marble floor.

“Look what you’ve done,” Troy screamed at me, looking a little green now as he wobbled on his feet.

“What happened?” someone asked, and for a moment, Troy’s eyes locked on mine. It appeared he was momentarily at a loss for words that would explain why his hand had been in the way of my pen.

Suddenly, I was tired. Tired of the whole mess that was my life.

I’d busted my butt working my way first through high school, then college, and finally, law school just so I could spend sixty hours a week dodging the errant hands of my creepy boss. There had to be another way. One that definitely didn’t involve putting myself through any more humiliation.

I stood up. Man, I wanted to lay into this guy, expose his groping hands to the whole firm—if they didn’t already know. But Tucson