P.S. You're Intolerable (The Harder They Fall, #3)(5)

This time, I wasn’t able to school my reaction. “I’ll be traveling with you?”

“Of course. You’re my assistant. Do you think I won’t need you assisting me simply because my location changes?”

I shook my head. “No. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You do have a passport, don’t you?”

“Yes.” My passport was one of my most prized possessions.

“Do you have a fear of flying?”

“No. Flying isn’t a problem.”

His chin lowered. “It’s settled. You’ll travel to Zurich with me. Make the arrangements.”

He turned away from me, his full attention on his computer again. I guessed I was dismissed, even though I had a thousand questions about what I was supposed to do.

I closed my notebook and stood, pausing to ensure he was truly finished with me. When he didn’t look up, I walked to the door.

My hand was on it when he called out, “Catherine.”

I turned back. “Yes, Elliot?”

His gaze swept over me. “Don’t forget to write down my schedule.”

“Got it. Black ink only.”





Chapter Three





Catherine





Five Months Later


For the one-hundred-and-eleventh day, I arrived at the office at eight a.m., sat down at my desk, flipped open a notepad, and neatly wrote Elliot Levy’s schedule in black ink.

And at the bottom, following the notation for his last meeting of the day, I included a postscript—which I’d been doing for a hundred and one days.

Yesterday’s had been: P.S. Are you even human?

The day before: P.S. You remind me of porridge.

Today’s: P.S. You’re intolerable.

Then, like I always did, I precisely sliced that strip off the bottom, slid it inside an envelope with all one hundred and one of the others, and returned it to its place at the back of my desk drawer beneath my box of tampons. In my current condition, I absolutely did not need them, but I’d found tampons were the best deterrent for most men. Though I regularly questioned if Elliot was a cyborg, I couldn’t picture him willingly touching feminine hygiene products either.

This was my only form of rebellion. Those postscripts allowed me to release a tiny drip of the anger I swallowed down on a daily basis. When Elliot’s demands became unbearable, I took out my envelope, ran my fingers over the one-inch strips of “fuck you very much,” and immediately calmed.

The therapist I’d been forced to see when I was a teen would have been proud…ish.

Once that was complete and my desk was back to its pristine condition, I ran through the routine I did before Elliot arrived for the day. Lately, it had been: bathroom, break room, bathroom, emails, bathroom, bathroom, bathroom.

The bean was more of a cantaloupe now and seemed to think my work time was her party time. She used my bladder as a bouncy pillow, which meant I spent far too much time running to the restroom.

If Elliot had noticed, he hadn’t said a word.

That was unusual for him since he never held back his opinions on my work.

Davida was in the break room, dipping a tea bag in a mug and chatting with another exec assistant, Raymond, who worked for LD’s chief lawyer.

Davida wasn’t who I’d initially pegged her to be. Beneath her cool professionalism, she was a sassy, foul-mouthed mother hen. We’d become allies then friends, despite our thirty-year age gap and the fact that Davida was a freewheeling, unmarried, and happily childless lesbian, and I was a soon-to-be single mother.

I’d quickly learned the assistants on the executive floor stuck together. We were the only ones who understood each other’s haunted looks weren’t from seeing some “fucked-up shit,” as Raymond said, but from putting up with our bosses’ demands.

And lately, Davida had started covering for me when I needed to dash to the bathroom for the seventeenth time of the day.

Davida and Raymond stopped talking at the sight of me. They couldn’t have looked more different. Davida was a silver vixen, while Raymond was a slim, twentysomething Black man with a smooth, bald head, horn-rimmed glasses, and an affinity for tweed and comic books, but their wide-eyed expressions were identical.

“Darling,” Davida drawled. “You’ve popped.”

My hands flew to my belly, which had barely fit in my dress this morning. Most of my clothes were a tight squeeze, and I still had more than two months to go.

I’d been lucky I hadn’t gotten very big yet. That all flew out the window over the weekend. Little Girl had made herself known.

“You look good, though,” Raymond assured me. “Not a cankle in sight.”

As I made myself my one cup of coffee for the day—we’d reconciled my second week of working for Elliot Levy—I huffed a laugh.

“Come see me at the end of the day. It’s very sexy,” I told him.

Raymond shuddered. “Thanks, sweetie, but I’ll pass. Pregnancy is a mystery to me, and I plan to keep it that way.”

Davida propped her hip on the counter. “But is it a mystery to Elliot? Or have you finally talked to him about it?”

Pressing my lips together, I shook my head. “Not yet.”

Raymond snickered. “You’re wilding. Surely that man can see with his own two eyes there’s a baby on board.”