Penny McCusker - Emmy And The Boss

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To my husband, Michael, my kids, Mike, Erin

and Ian, and my large extended family.

Thanks for all the love and support.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Emmy Jones loved lists. You could, in fact, say that lists were her life. In her estimation nothing was quite as satisfying as knowing exactly what needed to be done and checking the tasks off one by one until the list was complete, then filing it away in the neat folder in the drawer where she kept her completed lists.

Organization was big with Emmy, too.

Lists and a good filing system couldn’t fix her wild blond hair—a tub of gel and a professional to apply it couldn’t get her curls to lie flat and sleek—or tone down her freckles or shrink her to a more moderate height than her lanky five-foot-nine. But lists could keep her life in order, and order was something that had been in short supply in Emmy’s formative years.

She believed in lists.

Lists had never failed her, and she’d never failed them. Until today.

Today, her fiancé had dumped her, making it practically impossible for her to finish her wedding list, which ended, obviously, with the actual wedding. The easiest way to solve the problem would have been to get Roger back, but she refused to do that. There were some things more important than lists—not caving in to a man who called her names, for instance. That was more important.

Rigid, he’d called her. Inflexible. She’d refrained from pointing out that those two words meant the same thing and the least he could do if he was dumping her was not waste her time by repeating himself. But then, it didn’t take long to fling out a couple of accusations and walk out the door. Or much courage.

“I’m better off without him,” she said to her best friend in the whole world, Melinda Masterson, who’d dropped whatever legal-eagle busy work she was doing to hurry into downtown Boston and keep Emmy from drinking herself into a stupor—which would have taken exactly two drinks. “He’s a boring, insensitive, egotistical, boring—”

“You said boring twice.”

“He’s twice as boring as most people.”

“I thought that was what you liked about him.”

“I liked that he was dependable.”

“Well, he was so dependable you could count on him to carry every conversation. Talking about himself.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Personally, I’m looking forward to forgetting him.” Lindy took a healthy swig of her martini to kick off the process, at least in the short run. “You should be, too, Emmy. You didn’t really love him.”

“I kept the ring.” Emmy turned the white gold engagement band with its single conservative diamond around and around on her finger, feeling her first sense of loss at the idea of taking it off. Maybe she hadn’t loved Roger, but she’d liked him. He was a nice, steady, unassuming man who never demanded more of her than she was willing to give. Until this morning. Suddenly he’d wanted to know why they never held hands or spent Sunday afternoon cuddled together on the sofa. He’d wanted longing looks and secret smiles. He’d wanted sex to last more than ten minutes. She wasn’t exactly the one ringing the bell on that particular alarm clock, and he thought she could do something to keep him on the job longer? Well, maybe he was right.

“He met someone else,” she concluded wondering why she hadn’t seen it right off the bat. He’d found a woman who’d made him realize he wanted more than the pleasant, comfortable rut they’d dug together.

“I could sue him for breach of contract. I am your lawyer.”

“It’s not worth the aggravation.”

“And you don’t really have any damages to claim, because if you ask me, he did you a favor.”

“Then I guess I should give him the ring back.”

“I say we hock it and fly to Vegas.”

“I can’t,” Emmy said, actually wishing, if only for a moment, that she could.

Lindy was everything she wasn’t. Petite, beautiful, wonderfully spontaneous. Emmy might have occasionally yearned to borrow Lindy’s spur-of-the-moment, completely worry-free philosophy toward life, but the truth was if she hadn’t been motivated to change for the man she’d intended to marry then she must be hopelessly set in her ways. “I have a new client,” she said, feeling her world shift back into place again. “And it’s a long way from Boston to Vegas. Hocking this ring will only get us halfway.”

“True.” Lindy gave the ring a look that couldn’t have been more disdainful if she’d had a degree in gemology and a loupe up to her eye. “When you were describing Roger you should have substituted cheap for boring.” Both times, the tone of her voice said. “So what are you going to do? Besides work, I mean.”

“I don’t know. There’s the hall, and the photographer—”

“And your list says you’re getting married in three weeks, so…What? You’re going to find some other guy? And if he’s the same size as Roger, the tuxedo will fit him so that’s one less detail that’ll need to be dealt with?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Emmy said, “the tuxedo can be changed right up to the last minute.”

Lindy laughed, which was what Emmy had intended. She’d been joking, of course. But there really should be something besides losing a deposit on the hall driving her to hang on to a fiancé who didn’t want her. Love was the obvious reason, but she wasn’t sure she believed in love—another saddlebag she was carrying around from her childhood. Not a lot of love floating around in the foster-care system. Mostly the people did it for the money. For herself, Emmy would settle for compatibility and affection. “How hard can it be to find another fiancé?”

“The guy at the end of the bar is kind of cute. You could slip something in his drink, or hide in an alley and coldcock the first likely man that comes along.”

“I could hit you over the head and then I wouldn’t have to finish this conversation.”

Emmy waited, but there was no smart-aleck retort from Lindy. She’d frozen with her martini glass to her mouth, staring over the rim.

“Are you going to help me or not?”

“I found him.” The glass thunked onto the tabletop, sloshing vermouth and gin over the rim.

Lindy tended to be a drama queen, but it had to be something earth-shattering for her to waste good alcohol, so Emmy turned around, peering through the midafternoon gloom of the hotel barroom. “The guy by the door? Tall, dark and disheveled?”