Hard No: Secret Baby Enemies to Lovers Romance by Hazel Parker (fun to read txt) 📗

She is silent for a moment. The chilliness in her voice drops another few degrees when she asks, “How did you know he needed a chef? You already told me you don’t know him personally.”

“I don’t,” I say. “I just…”

“Just what? Heard about it on the gossip hotline? Is that what happened?”

She was speaking more loudly now. No, this was not going to end well at all.

“What is it you think happened?” I ask.

“I don’t think,” she replies, not yelling but not far away from it, either. “I know! Jamie told me what you did! How you bribed Monroe’s chef to take a hike and then got him to hire me in her place!”

“Steph, I—”

“How could you?” she interrupts, and now she’s yelling. “How could you just butt in and manipulate my life like that? How could you do this to me?”

That raises my hackles a little. “Do this to you?” I repeat. “I didn’t do this to you; I did it for you!”

“I didn’t ask you to!” The phone in my hand is practically vibrating with the volume of her voice over the line. “And I would never ask anyone to do something like this! I don’t need things done for me! I got to where I am today on my own! No favors, no interference from anyone else!”

My temper is getting piqued here. “Oh, so now I’m interfering? If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have gotten the gig!”

“Well, then I wouldn’t have gotten it!” she immediately shouts.

“So you’d rather miss out on a golden opportunity if I had a hand in helping you to get it?”

“If I didn’t earn it, then yes! God, Trent, do you have any idea how humiliated I was? Not just in front of Jamie, but in front of everyone! Monroe told everyone what happened! He laughed it off as a joke on your part, just another case of the shenanigans of the rich and famous, but what do you think something like this does to my pride?”

“Steph, come on—it was a recommendation, for God’s sake! It happens all the time!”

“Not like this!” she retorts. “You think that money just lets you go around doing whatever you want!”

“I was trying to do something nice for you,” I say, trying not to shout myself. If we start hollering at each other, there’ll be no way to defuse the situation. “Like a present.”

“I don’t need presents, not when it comes to my career! That’s mine, all mine, win or lose, stand or fall, on my own terms! I can’t believe you don’t know that about me by now!”

“It’s because I know you that I was sure you’d hit a home run with this! All I did was nudge things along in the right direction!”

“The direction I was going in was just fine without any meddling, in case you hadn’t noticed!”

I realize that anything I say at this point is just going to inflame her even more.

“Steph, I think we both need to calm down here,” I say.

My words are just more water thrown onto an already raging grease fire.

“‘We’ need to calm down?” she shouts. “‘We?’ Since when do you have any right to be upset by any of this?”

I’ve gone my whole adult life without a crack in the screen of my phone. I’m wondering if now my streak, and my phone, may end up being broken, I’m squeezing the device so hard.

I’m taking in a deep breath to try to say something that will begin to reign in this conversation when I realize I’m listening to a dead line. She’s hung up.

This has been a real day for firsts for me—I’ve been screamed at, raked over the coals, and hung up on, all in the space of five minutes.

My initial inclination is to throw my phone across the room. Instead, I set it down on my desktop. Then I pick it up, do a quick search, and dial. I’m not about to call Curtis to pick me up. He has no idea what’s happened, so there’s no chance he’d give me an “I told you so,” but if he had known what I’d been planning, he would have told me it was a bad idea from the start and been perfectly justified in saying “I told you so.”

Instead, I call the cab company and instruct them to be outside my office building as soon as humanly possible.

On the ride over to Steph’s place, the cab driver utters not a word, for which I am supremely grateful.

“Go. Away,” she says through the speaker. She’s madder than ever, so much so that she’s chopping her sentences up into individual words.

I am outside Steph’s apartment building, trying to get buzzed in. It does not look like I am going to succeed. Steph is refusing me access, and no one else has gone in or out for me to duck through behind. I thumb the call button and try again.

“I don’t want to see you right now,” she says, and although it sounds tinny coming over the little speaker, it’s still acidic enough to get her point across.

“Dammit, I’m coming in there,” I say.

“Not unless you can use your money clip as a lockpick.”

“Steph, we have to talk about this!”

“I don’t know that I’m capable of talking at the moment,” she says.

“Look, we can talk in person, or we can talk over this crappy intercom system. What’s it going to be?”

“Neither,” she says and falls silent. I push the call button again. No response.

In the movies, there would be a handy fire escape for me to scale up to her apartment window. This isn’t the movies. I have been roundly thwarted.

“Hey,