Devastated (Anger Management, #1)(18)

“Thank you,” she said with a shy smile as he handed it back to her.

“Go lay down before you pass out,” he reluctantly said, as he shifted his attention to his own treadmill, wondering how he was going to manage to get through another day of this bullshit sentence when movement from his right drew his attention.

“What the hell are you doing?” he couldn’t help but ask as he watched the woman who should be making her escape grab onto the treadmill and tried to pull herself onto it.

“Working,” Kylie said with that determined look in her eye that he was becoming familiar with as she dragged herself up and-

“How about we just have you going back to taking notes during the morning meeting?” Hunter suggested, wondering if he should pick her up only to shrug it off when she managed to roll off the treadmill with a pained groan and a mumbled, “Okay.”

---

April

Maybe she should see if he wanted something for lunch?

“Do your fucking job!”

Maybe not, Kylie decided with a sympathetic wince for whoever was on the other end of that phone call. Doing her best to ignore the large angry man pacing in front of her desk, she shifted her attention back to the email that she was supposed to be reading and resisted the urge to sigh as she deleted it since it was no longer relevant because that’s what she did.

Busy work.

That’s all she did, all day, every day, which was probably the reason why she was bored out of her mind. Every day was the same. She got up, told herself that today would be different, got dressed, grabbed her iPad, forced a smile on her face, and reminded herself that things could be worse as she wrote down all the tasks that he gave her to keep her busy and out of his way before she did it all over again the next day. Whenever she made the mistake of offering to do more, he leveled a glare in her direction and sent her out for more honey glazed soy nuts by a company that didn’t exist.

So, instead of doing the job that she’d been hired for, she was going through old emails and running the occasional errand when she should be helping him, making phone calls, and doing anything and everything that he needed help with to ensure that his business was running smoothly. Instead, Kylie was sitting here, looking through old emails and doing her best to pretend that she didn’t see the large stack of files on the coffee table that had her boss reducing another unfortunate soul to tears over.

“You didn’t send the file!” Hunter snapped, barely sparing a glance at the stack of files that she would love to get her hands on, but unfortunately for her, it just wasn’t meant to be. With that depressing thought in mind, she deleted the next email and decided to grab something for lunch before she moved onto the next batch of sexually explicit emails meant to entice her boss into becoming someone’s sugar daddy.

“You didn’t send the fucking Rerum Corp file over!” Hunter snapped angrily as he stormed back her way right around the time that she decided to take the scenic route back around the desk, through the sitting area and past that stack of files where she came to a stop.

“Find the fucking file or find a new job!”

Deciding that she’d rather spend the next four hours hitting grocery stores looking for phantom nuts instead of listening to him yell, Kylie knelt down by the coffee table, and quickly searched through the stack of files until she found the file that he was looking for. Once she pulled it out, she quickly headed towards the nearest exit, pressing the file into Hunter’s hand as she made her escape and quickly made her way to the kitchen. When he didn’t yell for her to come back, Kylie decided that she had time for a quick bite. After she whipped herself up a sandwich, she grabbed a bowl of grapes, and after a slight hesitation, she grabbed another plate and made him a sandwich, because even though he was an asshole, he actually wasn’t that bad.

In the past five years, she’d had six different bosses who’d treated her like crap, talked down to her, snapped at her, and went out of their way to make her life a living hell simply because they could. They’d never succeeded, but not for a lack of trying. They simply didn’t have what it took. Hunter O’Mallery on the other hand…

Could very easily make her life a living hell thanks to that contract that she couldn’t figure a way out of, but so far, the only horrible thing that he’d done to her was make her get up before the crack of dawn, exercise, and fill her day with boring, repetitive busywork to keep her out of his hair. This probably wouldn’t end up being her favorite memory, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be her worst. Realizing where her thoughts were heading, she forced herself to focus on making lunch.

Normally, they grabbed their own food, but she knew that if she didn’t make him something that he’d probably forget to eat. After she made him a sandwich, she rinsed another bowl of grapes, added a bowl of chips, and made a glass of chocolate milk for him since that’s what he usually drank for lunch when he actually remembered to eat, which wasn’t often. When she was done, Kylie placed everything on the tray that she normally used so that she could eat alone in her room and headed back to the office where she found him sitting at the coffee table, glaring down at whatever was in that file she’d handed him.

After she placed her food on the desk along with the bottle of water she’d grabbed for herself, she carried the tray over to the sitting area and placed it on the coffee table, noted that his glare was now directed at her, and bit back another sigh as she headed back to the desk where a fun-filled day of sorting through old emails awaited her. Picking up her sandwich, she took a bite, moved onto the next email and-