Chapter 1

Anna

“God, Mom, I know. I’ll be there, okay? Please… trust me when I say I’ll be there.”

Across my desk, Kelcey waved me down, making eye contact with me, trying to scope out my attention. I couldn’t really not look, and I ended up caught in her web. Dammit. I focused on the phone even as Kelcey lit up knowing she’d captured me, sauntering towards the desk with a gleeful look. Save me. Tag-teamed by nightmares. At least Lucy wasn’t here.

Mom’s voice came through the phone, still sounding worried. “Will you be okay tonight, sweetheart? You can’t go working yourself so hard all the time.”

I was always working so late, I just tried to downplay it as much as possible so I didn’t have Mom worrying I was working myself too hard and Veronica showing up at my apartment out of nowhere to call me boring. Couldn’t really explain it was because I had Lucy trying to sabotage my every move, on top of people like Kelcey to put their jobs on top of mine, standing next to my desk with her hands clasped at her waist right now. What a nightmare.

“I know, I know. Just… there’s a lot going on around the holidays.”

“They should be throwing you a party and giving you a bonus, not making you work more.”

“I am getting a bonus and a party,” I said, which was the wrong thing to say, because her voice lit up.

“You’re having a holiday party? Oh, honey, you didn’t say. When is it?”

“Ugh—Mom, you can’t attend. You don’t work here.”

“I get Mom privileges. I can show up just to say hi and bring something. A little Christmas cheer for the office. When is it? Oh, never mind, I’m looking it up now.” I heard her clicking and clacking down the line before I could say anything to stop her, and I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Thursday! Honey, you should have said earlier. That doesn’t give me any time to prepare.”

“That’s because… you’re not… supposed to be there,” I said, punctuating every word like I was explaining to a small child. Speaking of small children, Kelcey mouthed help as if I didn’t know she wanted help, and meanwhile, down the office from me, Rickety Rick—that was Richard to his face, anyway—came out of his office holding a laptop that I was pretty sure wasn’t his. Rickety Rick was a menace breaking everything and never asking for help, a seventy-one-year-old man who refused to retire because this was his home , never mind that he was burning down the home for everyone else, while Kelcey was a twenty-four-year-old fast-tracked hire which was a nice way to say nepotism hire, breaking everything and always asking for help. Bless her heart, she was sweet, all smiles and sparkling blue eyes, but she was useless. Hard to say which one of them broke more things, but they both equally acted shocked when they broke something, as if it was their first time doing it.

Mom laughed down the line. “I know, I know. Promise I’m not going to make a scene! I’ll just be there to see my little baby.”

“Mom, I’m a thirty-two-year-old communications director with a master’s degree. I’m not a little baby.”

“Then you can communicate to them that I’m going to be there. Huh? Get it?”

I closed my eyes, letting out a long, slow sigh. “Ah… I get it. Listen, I’ve got a lot to get to, but—”

“Oh, you’ll be home on Saturday, right?”

“ Yes, Mom, I’ll be there.”

Kelcey mimed a phone to her ear, mouthing will this take long? Could she not hear me talking about getting off the phone? My head was going to explode.

“Okay, honey. If you have anyone you’re bringing…”

“I’m not. Just me.”

“Just saying, we would love to meet them.”

Oh, for crying out loud. I’d made the mistake of telling Mom I had a date back in October—not a romantic date, just saying we had a date set out for something around me meeting someone, and she’d been convinced ever since that I had a secret relationship she was always pestering me into giving up details about. “Uh-huh. Well, if I have someone, I’ll bring them. Okay, Mom, I really have to go—”

“Oh, if there is someone, let me know if they have any dietary restrictions, any allergies—”

“ Mom. I’m hanging up.”

“Okay, sweetie. Bye, I love you. Let me know if you want us to have anything on Saturday for them—”

“Bye, Mom, I love you,” I said, smashing the end call button, hitting the spot on the screen about a dozen times for good measure before I spun my chair to look at Kelcey. “So—”

“Hi, am I bothering you?”

“That would have been a question to figure out a minute ago. I’m all yours now, Kelce. What’s wrong?”

“Can you look at this page and tell me if I did something wrong?”

Oh, but wasn’t that lovely? I was sure she’d never in a million years have done something wrong. I couldn’t even fathom it. “You couldn’t just ping me on Slack?”

“I thought it was urgent.”

“Okay, okay, okay. Ugh…” I stood up, stepping around the desk, just as the door to Sean’s office opened, the man Sean was meeting with still lingering in the doorway talking on his way out. Kelcey and I stepped around it and got back to her desk, where she spun the laptop towards me, and I about had a heart attack.

“I was submitting this purchase order—”

“ Kelcey. For six hundred lights?”

“It’s for the holiday party.”

I pulled her laptop towards me, clicking through the page to pull up the invoice. Jesus. She’d sent it. The urgent problem was the notice they’d given that the order was above the usual volume and may take extra time to fulfill. “Are you trying to decorate for a holiday party, or are you trying to light up the whole city?”

“Six hundred isn’t that many,” she said, scowling. “They’re tiny lights.”

“Kelcey. It’s—” I gestured to the screen, but I needed to stop, get myself under control as Manfield walked out of Sean’s office, the bank guy, a man in a blue suit with stubble who could not have looked more British if he was wrapped in the Union Jack carrying a mince pie. I was not shouting Kelcey’s financial mismanagement to the world with the bank guy right there. I dropped my voice, speaking carefully and quietly. “That’s six hundred light strings. Each with one hundred and fifty lights on it.”

Her mouth fell open into a small o. “They didn’t say that.”

“They did. They absolutely did. The price should also have been a clue, because it’s going to cost you to buy roughly one hundred thousand tiny lights.”

“They offered a bulk discount, so I figured it was saving money.”

I pinched my brow. “I am sure that they did offer you a bulk discount. Okay—relax. No worries. I’ll send this on to Daniel and he should be able to get it canceled or just brought down to the right quantity, no problem.”

“I can do it,” she said, sitting down at her computer.

“ Please allow me. I have something else to update Daniel on anyway,” I lied, standing up taller as Sean came out of his office, a heavyset older man with a neat mustache and one of maybe three people here who did his job, and of course he was the one retiring. “Why don’t you get back to the client reports?”

“Ugh, I was hoping to take a break from all those,” she muttered, but she relented, going back to the computer and tabbing away to get to where she’d barely started the client reports. But hallelujah, she wasn’t screwing anything else up.

“Anna,” Sean said, slowing down on his way past me but not stopping, “I’m just heading to see Gloria for something, but is ten minutes from now a good time to have you in my office before I leave for the day?”

“Ten is good. Something wrong?”

“No, just a more complicated question that’s going to take a second to ask. Tricky little job I need done, and I trust you. I’ll see you then.”

My heart skipped a beat, a nervous energy tightening in my stomach. If he went to me specifically with the tricky little job he wanted to discuss in private…

Sean Dobbs was our executive communications director, the role I’d had my eyes on since I started here five years back. When he announced he was retiring, it was a free-for-all through the department trying to scope out who might be his replacement, and it had slowly whittled down to either me or Lucy Masters, mostly because Lucy was a ruthless attack dog and had picked off the competition one at a time, convincing them to step back or sabotaging them. And for a while, I’d been convinced she’d even find a way to take me down—it was hard to stop a person who’d traded all their morals for self-importance—but if Sean wanted me specifically for a tricky job now of all times, then maybe—

“See you then,” I said, standing up taller, and I was just starting back to my desk when I heard, from the other end of the office,

“No, Rick—don’t—let me—”

It was more than three desks away. That was officially not my problem. I kept my head down, walking back to my desk, close to where night had settled over the city through the window, only to find everything good came to an end. One little glimmer of hope with a comment from Sean, and immediately, like a dog to meat, there was Lucy Masters, sitting on my desk, giving me that self-satisfied smile that only stood out more for her cherry-red lipstick, her chin up and resting on her hand, one leg crossed over the other.

“Looks like someone’s working late tonight,” she said, with that cat-that-got-the-cream tone just about dripping from her. She had her pinstripes on today, her favorite—sleek black pantsuit, blonde curls swept to one side, short nude manicure still tidy from where she’d gotten it done just last the other day. All put together, just for me. Wasn’t I flattered?

“What do you want, Masters?”

“Preston, darling, dearest. Not good for you to work overtime every day. All work and no play makes Preston a dull girl.”

She could at least try to be transparent. She and I always worked until it was just the two of us in the office, and then it was the frustrating game of not wanting to be the first one to leave the office between us. Obviously if I slacked off, she’d pick up that slack and take Sean’s position, and she wasn’t above harassing me openly to get me to leave.

“Don’t you have something to be doing?” I said, and she raised one neat eyebrow.

“Like the digital media platform?”

Oh, that’s what this was about… I walked past her, sitting at my desk, and I slid my computer away from where she had her ass parked. “You snooze, you lose, Masters.”

“How did you even get the documents for that?”

I knew her computer PIN, obviously. It wasn’t my fault she’d kept all the files stored locally so that nobody else could finish up the job, so I’d just helped her adhere to best practices so I could get it done. And file it away under my name. It wasn’t anything Lucy hadn’t already done a million times. But I didn’t need to give her the gratification of the answer, so I said, “Christmas miracle.”

“Santa came around and dropped them in your stocking, did he? Guess you’ve been nice this year, Preston.”

“Anything with your fingerprints on it is definitely a lump of coal, so don’t jump to conclusions. You should be grateful I stepped in to finish it. Your documentation has room for improvement.”

She smiled wider. “So, on the naughty list, then.”

I sighed. “Masters, if you’re done sitting on my desk, can I get back to my job now? You should probably get back to yours if you want to finish tonight.”

She slid down, heels tapping on the floor, before she turned away. “One of these days I’ll get through to you, darling. Ciao.”

“Ciao, bella. ” I sighed, hard, turning back to my computer, only to find—once I alt-tabbed trying to go back to what I was doing—a notepad document left saying I’m not letting you have all the fun alone, sweetheart, and then below it, merry Christmas. My blood ran cold in my veins, sitting there staring at the screen—between Rickety Rick breaking something, Manfield strolling through the place, Kelcey whining about her job, and the office being mostly empty this late, nobody would have actually noticed Lucy poking around on my computer, and it was anyone’s guess what she’d swiped from my files while Kelcey had me. Christ, I didn’t know what the hell I was thinking, stepping away from my laptop without locking it in an office where Lucy Masters worked.

I went through every window, hitting undo or history everywhere I went—nothing. I groaned. No signs left of whatever she’d done, which meant it was time for the game of figuring out what she was trying to swipe out from under me so I could get it done first.

Plus, I wasn’t—well, I wasn’t supposed to be locking stuff away on my own laptop and keeping Lucy from contributing, so it wasn’t like I could really go to Sean about it. So I was on my own with the damn game.

Or… maybe I didn’t need to play. Maybe this meant she’d be distracted with whatever she’d gotten and not have the time to pick up whatever tricky little job Sean had for me.

Okay. Maybe I was winning this. Maybe I was doing all right.

And maybe she wasn’t going to rattle me.

Mom probably was, though.