Prologue

PROLOGUE

Tara

“ W inners never quit, and quitters never win …”

If I had a dollar for every time my mother said those words to me, I would be sipping wine on my own private island off the Amalfi Coast at this very moment.

When I cried about hating ballet, she squished my feet into those ugly pink flats and made me go to practice anyway. When I told her that I wanted to change my major from Business to “something more creative,” she threatened to stop paying my tuition. And when I told her that I was seconds away from telling my first real boss to go fuck himself, she would only sigh and give me her tried and true words of advice.

She insisted that all my late-night emails were “wasteful whining,” that my screams of hatred were “misplaced admiration,” and that all the times he made me work over a hundred hours in a single week were “much-needed character building.”

After two long years of working for him, I’ve finally accepted that none of those things are true.

Preston Parker is a terrible, grumpy boss. That is it. End of discussion.

My mother can call me a “quitter” all she wants, but she’ll never know what it’s like to work for a man like him. A man whose ego is bigger than all of New York and Vegas combined.

Yes, he can make any woman wet by uttering a single syllable from his perfectly molded mouth. Yes, his deep emerald and grey eyes are downright breathtaking, and the way he’s able to make any suit look like it was made explicitly for him, never ceases to amaze me.

But I’ve had more than enough.

I can’t take working for him anymore, and I’m finally drafting the two weeks’ notice I should’ve drafted the very first month we worked together. (No, the very first week we worked together.)

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. I can’t start this story from the bitter end or the miserable middle. I need to start it from the very unfortunate beginning …