The Rockstar Who Loves Me

Song 6 ♫ Unhappy Hour

For the first time since I'd been an Ultra Beauty and Spa employee, I was glad for the anniversary event. It always required intense work hours, backbreaking shifts, frantic phone calls to suppliers and all-nighters.

And that was only for the preparations prior to the event.

On the event itself, which typically lasted a whole week, it was like every day was the Miss Venezuela. Perfect hair, makeup and a blinding smile for ten hours a day, in the face of customers who weren't satisfied with fifty percent discounts and extra freebies.

It was exactly what I needed to get my mind off of things. Things, being my newly developed nightly nightmares about planes going down, mingling with other sort of dreams about my seat mate that were more pleasant but nonetheless scary.

It was the Friday before the event week. After spending several days in a row sleeping for three hours—partially because I needed to use the wee hours to align with our new South Korean suppliers—I had agreed to go on an outing tonight with Tae Yang to try this famous barbecue he talked about.

I defined it as an outing because it was just a dinner among new friends, not a date. Dawn kept saying I needed more friends around my age, so that was what I was trying to do here. Nothing else.

Even so, it was all I could think about as I sat in the middle of a team huddle with Bryce, the investors, a rep for the shop floor assistants, the marketing team, HR and Dawn. I sat beside her exclusively so we could exchange pointed looks every time Bryce was being Bryce. Like now.

"What do you mean we don't have all shifts covered?" he asked Lily, the most senior shop floor assistant, who acted as the team lead for all the part-timers. "We've been working on this for months, why is it so hard to coordinate?"

Lily was visibly sweating as she said, "Well, Kyle quit because he moved out of state and Hayley's about to give birth."

"Why don't we have replacements?" Bryce volleyed back.

Why couldn't we replace him? Ugh.

"Lily," I said. "If we can't fit everyone in the schedule I'll help you out."

She sagged in her seat. "Thank you so much, Cee."

Unfortunately, my offer made Bryce zero in on me. "By the way, are we sure we'll receive the new product shipments in time?"

"Yes." I nodded. After begging for days, I'd managed to overnight enough products to tide us over for the week. "We'll receive the crates tomorrow and I'll work over the weekend to catalogue them and stock them."

All by myself. With copious amounts of coffee and an assorted string of curse words keeping me motivated.

The main investor of our brand, who was no other than Bryce's Mom, turned to me. "I hope we won't need to airfreight anymore in the future. As an employee of this company, you need to think of our bottom line."

Like mother, like son. As if it weren't her offspring who demanded to have these products in stock for the anniversary event. The implication that it was somehow my incompetence what led to extra airfreight fees made me want to take off my stiletto and throw it, pointy end at her.

She'd never liked me, but ever since she discovered I'd dated her precious son and dared to break up with him, while daring to remain in his employ, she absolutely hated my guts.

I blinked. "I'm sure I can still call them and cancel the whole thing. It would certainly save us money."

"No," Bryce barked. "We need those products. Without them we're behind the competition and if we want to stay in this business, we can't afford to continue on that trend."