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  My Boss

  BBW Romance Novel

  Review Reader Copy

  Not For Sale

  Jolie Day

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.

  The characters, places, and events portrayed in this book are completely fiction and are in no way meant to represent real people or places.

  Warning: This story contains mature themes and language. It is intended to be enjoyed by an 18+ audience only.

  Copyright © Jolie Day

  About this Novel

  Avery

  All I wanted was to get away from my small town in the middle of Nowhere, Illinois; and I thought that traveling all the way to New York City was my way of doing that.

  And it was.

  In New York, I found all the excitement and adventure I ever could have asked for…but even with my degrees in technology and economics, I couldn’t seem to find a job and I was running out of money. Fast.

  That’s when I ran into Joel Harper. Literally.

  Tall, dark, and handsome, Joel was known for being quite the charmer—a new girl on his arm every week—and I had no interest in him. Not one bit. Not until I learned that he owned the company I had gone to interview for. Not until he gave me a job as his assistant. Then suddenly, I couldn’t think of anything but him. Every inch of his body became the subject of my thoughts…

  And fantasies.

  What was happening?

  Joel

  She was unlike any woman I’d ever met.

  Where most women would have thrown themselves at me, Avery James resisted me with every fiber of her being and it just made me want her even more.

  It was dangerous for us to be together, I knew that better than anybody. But there was just something about her…something that drew me to her like some kind of strange, animal magnetism.

  But she was my employee. It was completely unprofessional of me to want her so, so bad. But I did. I wanted her and I would do anything it took to make her want me too.

  My Boss is a full-length standalone romance with an HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.

  My Boss

  Chapter One

  She felt alive. Every nerve ending in her body seemed to vibrate with her need as the body above hers moved into her. She couldn’t make out his face, but she didn’t really need to when he was making her feel like this. Like she was the most sublime creature in this universe.

  She cried out as he hit a spot deep within her, her nails scoring down his back, her teeth sinking into the thick tendons of his neck. The man above her groaned, his hips pushing more insistently against her, hands pressing up under her thighs, raising her legs higher up his body until he could hook her knees around his shoulders.

  The new angle made her whimper in ecstasy and pleasure, her head shaking back and forth on the pillow, the dark auburn locks of her hair falling over her face and sticking to her forehead as her chest heaved with heavy breaths. “God,” she moaned. The man above her chuckled deeply as he continued to pound in her.

  “Not quite,” he said, his voice deep and rich, making her shiver. “But I can see why you might get us confused.”

  She huffed out a laugh that quickly turned into a loud, long groan of pleasure. “Fuck!” she exclaimed as the knot in the pit of her stomach began to tighten. She felt herself grow closer and closer to the edge. “Please,” she whimpered as she felt him slow down, taking her away from that edge. “Please. Don’t stop.”

  “Patience,” he growled in her ear. She growled back, deep and low in her throat, nipping at his chin. He laughed again, nuzzling her nose as he gave a particularly firm thrust. She cried out, her nails tightening on his muscular forearms.

  “Yes!” she cried out. “Yes! Yes!” He thrust again and again and again, shoving her closer and closer to that edge. “Oh God, yes!”

  And then, suddenly, he stopped, his body pulling away from hers even as she reached out for him, attempting to pull him back. She moaned and whined and practically sobbed, begging him to return to her. But he just got further and further away.

  “Please,” she husked, the throbbing between her legs becoming almost unbearable. “Please come back!”

  *****

  It was still dark when Avery James awoke, sweaty and panting. Her long, auburn locks stuck to her forehead and neck like a second skin and she brushed the hairs away from her in frustration with one hand as the other tore the blankets from her lower half. It was too warm for covers, anyway, she thought as she extracted herself from the plush, queen-sized hotel bed. But she'd always needed something covering her body in order to sleep, ever since she'd been a child.

  But you're not a child anymore, a chastising voice whispered in her ear, wrapping around her like her mother's arms used to. You're grown. Act more grown. Avery nodded and subconsciously straightened her spine, closing her eyes for a long moment and then opening them, as if waking up for the second time. She felt the calmness of the room surround her for a long moment, before a distant honk made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. Avery swallowed thickly as she turned toward the window at the back of her room and saw the flicker of light peeking between the drapes.

  It wasn't morning yet; she knew that much. But here, there was really no night. The city moved twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There was no darkness anywhere; at least not in Manhattan. Perhaps, she should have sprung for one of the outer-boroughs—Queens or Brooklyn or the Bronx, even. But Manhattan ... Manhattan was the city that never sleeps. Avery had learned that the first night she'd gotten here, checking in at half past one in the morning, ready to sleep for days, just as a pair of colorfully dressed women walked past her in the opposite direction, wiggling their fingers at the doorman as he let them out.

  Just watching them stumble out had given Avery heart palpitations. She'd never been allowed to go out this late at night back in Illinois. Her father had worried after her safety, even though nothing had ever happened in their tiny farm town. No girls ever went missing in Greenfield, as far as she knew. But he'd kept her on a short leash, using that cliché "as long as you live under my roof" line. Sometimes, she wondered if her father had escaped from some fifties sitcom. Her mother had never been like that.

  Not that Avery remembered much of her mother. The woman had died when she was eight and she didn't have any older siblings around to tell her stories. Her father didn't even like to say her name and her uncles never came to visit. She didn't even know if she had any grandparents or great aunts or uncles on her mother's side. If her father had family other than her, he'd never said anything.

  Avery wondered what he thought of her leaving. She was over twenty years old, after all, so there wasn't much he could do about it. And he didn't have any money with which to find her. Hell, until last week Avery never even had a cell phone. She wasn't in need of one back in Illinois. Their town was so small that her father could call her name on one end and she'd hear him all the way on the other side.

  Besides, there was nobody else that she needed to call besides her father. She didn't have much in the way of friends back in Greenfield. She'd hung out with some of the kids in high school, bonding over their desire to get away from their rural Illinois life and to just be free from the usually barren farmland. In high school, everybody was eager to start their lives anew somewhere else. After graduation, however, half of her “friends” had ended up pregnant or married and on their way to being pregnant. The other half had either gone to college or decided to stay in town and work on their parents' farms or help out in their local shops.

  Avery had been one of the few students in her class of fifty to go
to college more than an hour away from home. She'd chosen Northwestern—which had offered her the best scholarship, by far—and attained two degrees in three years. The first was in business and the second was in economics. She figured one of those degrees would have to take her somewhere and prayed that place would be out of the reach of her overbearing father. Daniel James had visited her every weekend he could get away from his own grocery store, making sure that his child was eating every day and able to afford everything she needed for her classes. More often than not, he was there to convince her to leave college altogether and come home with him.

  "Hank Grayer has been waiting on you," he told her once. "He said you'd make a fine wife if you'd just come home and give him a chance. I think he's right."

  Avery didn't have any interest in Hank Grayer.

  "There's also Mason McCreery; he's a handsome young man, ain't he? And his father gave him six acres for his graduation.”

  She had no interest in Mason McCreery either. Both were boys that she’d gone to high school with and both were the kind that needed their mothers to set them up with “nice” girls, because they weren't charming or confident or smart enough to find wives on their own.

  Her father eventually gave up attempting to talk her into marrying one of the “nice young men” and started luring her into blind dates instead. Which is when she made the decision to leave.

  It took over a year to save up enough money from her job at the market for a plane ticket and a month’s stay at the very hotel she was now standing in, but it had all been worth it. Because she was here, in the city she’d dreamed of her whole life.

  Pushing apart the drapes, Avery blinked down at the cars that raced by on the streets and the lights that twinkled all around. Advertisements, shop signs, and even traffic lights added to the ambiance. Despite the noise that enveloped her all hours of the day, Avery didn't regret her decision to leave at all. She could deal with the honking, the street vendors yelling, and even the construction down the street. To her, this was far less oppressive than the stillness of Illinois.

  She had two more weeks of this before she'd be forced to head back home. She had paid in advance for the room and had some cash saved up for food, but everything else she had would go toward another plane ticket home if she couldn't land a job before her time ran out.

  Looking out at the sparkling, car-filled wonderland in front of her, Avery prayed it wouldn't come to that.

  Chapter Two

  One of the few luxuries Avery allowed herself every morning before she went job-hunting or interview hopping was a grande caramel mocha from the café around the corner.

  In Greenfield, anything fancier than straight black coffee with some whole milk and sugar (if you had a particularly sweet tooth) was hard to come by. Most farmers that needed the caffeine boost were up well before the sun rose and ninety percent of the shops opened after daylight broke. The lone café in town rarely had more than the basic dark roast and decaf. Sometimes, they didn’t even have the latter. Coffee was not meant as a luxury item in Greenfield; it was a tool used to keep adults awake through their long days of work. In October they added cinnamon as a fall option, and peppermint in December. But that was it.

  The first time Avery entered a café outside of Greenfield, she’d been almost overwhelmed with the choices. It had been her first day on campus, where they had one of those chain coffee shops, ready to make you anything you so desired in two minutes or less. Avery had never needed to wait a full two minutes for coffee (it was always freshly brewed in Greenfield; just waiting to be poured into a mug or thermos), so she figured that it must have been something unique or special. After all, there were all those fancy words up on the menu. She’d heard of lattes and cappuccinos before, of course. On television and from out-of-towners passing through to visit family and whatnot. But she’d never seen them on a menu right before her very own eyes.

  It was such a simple phenomenon, she knew, but having so many options lined up right in front of her was not something she’d had the luxury of getting used to up until that point in her life. It was one of the more embarrassing reasons she’d wanted to travel to and—eventually—live in New York City; the coffee options. She’d mourned the loss of her daily mocha after leaving school and had gone so far as to save up the money so that she’d be able to have as many as she wanted when she eventually left Greenfield behind. When she’d finally arrived at her hotel in Midtown, she’d been overjoyed to find the café, with its outdoor seating and friendly wait staff.

  In the mornings, Avery would make her way down the block with a newspaper and a sharpie, sit down at a table, and order her drink from one of the bright, smiling faces that approached her. Usually, the person that took her order was in their late teens, early twenties, or somewhere around her own age, and she could see flashcards sticking out of their apron pockets, which they’d sneak peeks at when they thought nobody was looking. Students, Avery easily surmised; perhaps kids that had, like her, decided that New York City was the place to be to further the course of their lives. Sometimes, she wished she had come to the city for university. What would it have been like to work at a café like this while she slept in a cramped studio apartment with several other small-town hicks who’d just come to further their education or live life in the “fast lane”?

  Maybe, Avery thought, as she woke for real—several hours after the first time that morning—she’d go for her Masters in Engineering. Maybe she’d have the chance to sleep in a cramped space with a half a dozen other twentysomethings just like her.

  Not until you get yourself a job, a voice in the back of her mind whispered irritatingly in her ear. You’re already running out of money. There’s only 14 days left. Stop daydreaming!

  The voice sounded like a cross between Avery’s father and her sophomore history teacher from high school; a class in which Avery had always found herself gazing out the window at the football field. Not that she particularly liked football or sports of any kind, but she’d always found that watching grass grow was far more interesting than anything Mr. Porter had to say. His voice kind of droned in her ear like white noise, even when she was listening. He’d chastised her so many times for not paying attention to him that eventually the poor man had just given up and stopped trying.

  Still, her father tried to get her head out of the clouds.

  “It’s time that you settle down now, Avery,” he’d said countless times in the last couple of years. “Get yourself a husband, buy a house and start giving me grandchildren.”

  Avery’s father was obscenely old-fashioned. He’d been taught that men made the money and did all the labor to bring home the bacon—both literally and figuratively—and the women tended to the house. Her mother, from what Avery could remember, had always yelled at him for that.

  “She can make her own decisions!” she remembered hearing her mother yell at her father once. “It’s the goddamn 21st century! She can have a career if she wants to.”

  “What good is that going to do her?” Father had yelled back. “How is that gonna get her a husband and get us grandkids? Don’t you want grandkids?” It didn’t matter. Avery’s mother would not have lived long enough to see them in any case. Avery herself didn’t even care much about having kids, anyway. She wanted to live her own life first.

  Their voices continued to echo in the back of her mind as she showered and dressed for the day. It was the middle of summer, so she chose a pair of jean shorts and a modest tank top that covered her buxom breasts and fleshy mid-section. One of the pluses of small town life was that you didn’t need a car to get around and the scattered farms in Greenfield were within walking distance to most of the shops and buses. Avery had always preferred to walk than to drive, anyway.

  Slipping her feet into her old pair of work boots, she made a mental note to go shopping for sandals downtown later. After tying her hair up into a messy bun as she’d seen other women her age doing, Avery tucked her keys and wa
llet into her pocket. Checking her new cell phone for any notifications, she walked out of her hotel room. There were none, of course; just as many contacts as she currently had logged into her phonebook.

  Avery sighed and shoved the phone deep into her pocket, feeling it against her thigh with every single step she took. She’d been applying to every job she could find in the Classifieds section of the paper; both jobs that she was underqualified and dramatically overqualified for. But she’d received zero calls, despite her two degrees and near-genius I.Q.

  Perhaps, Avery found herself thinking, she’d waited too long to start the job search. She had, after all, taken time after college to work in a grocery store instead of pursuing a career in business or technology like she’d originally planned. Maybe potential employers were turned off by her “simple” upbringing and roots and were looking for somebody a bit more streetwise—or younger. Since arriving in the city, Avery had seen plenty of people she thought must be teenagers, at least, but dressed in expensive business suits and talking on phones that cost more than her four-week stay at a relatively nice hotel.

  Toddlers, she’d found herself thinking, with a better grip on their life than I have ever had.

  That didn’t stop her from trying, though. If anything, it kept her going. She could wear an expensive suit, yell into the receiver of an expensive phone, and make important decisions for an important company if only somebody would give her the chance to prove herself. All she needed was a chance. One. She was a hard worker—she had the muscles and grades to prove it—but without anybody to see that in her, she would just be stuck in the same rut for the rest of her life.

  No, she thought. Nothing more. Just a stubborn no.

  The café was bustling with activity when Avery walked in—as usual. The line stretched from the counter, along a glass pastry window filled with croissants, danishes, and breakfast sandwiches, zig-zagging until it nearly reached the heavy glass doors. As Avery stepped through, her nose buried in her paper and her red pen posed to circle any and every nearby job opening she could find, she felt her shoulder knock into what felt like a brick wall. Her body turned completely around, her feet shuffling to keep up with the momentum and avoid twisting her ankle, until she was staring into the eyes of a startled college student, their noses practically brushing.