All Chapters of My New Boss Is the Man I Had a One-Night Stand With: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

40 Chapters

Chapter 31: Clean It Up

"How do you even know all this?" Sloane stared at Josephine."Marcus Holt." Josephine said it without guilt. "Before he got terminated. He talked a lot.""Aren't you worried about getting fired for gossiping?"Josephine smiled — slow, satisfied, completely unbothered. "With you standing next to me? Absolutely not." She tilted her head. "Everyone saw what happened to Marcus. Nobody's touching you. Which means—" She spread her hands. "You are the safest person to gossip beside in this entire building."Sloane opened her mouth.Closed it.Walked away before she could say something she'd regret.✦✦✦✦✦She stepped around the corner, pressed her back against the wall, and called Nina."I have them." Nina's voice was steady now, the panic replaced with exhausted relief. "We're in the lobby. Heading home.""Don't let them come back up." Sloane closed her eyes. "Ever. No matter what C

Chapter 32: Don't Make Me Your Enemy

"Give me your mouth."The words landed like a match on gasoline.Sloane went completely still. The document in her hands. The destroyed office around her. The man behind the desk looking at her with those black, bottomless eyes like he'd just said something completely reasonable."I'm sorry—" Her voice came out strange. Thin. "What?""You heard me."She had. That was the problem.Her fingers tightened on the papers until her knuckles went white, until the edges bit into her palms, until the physical discomfort gave her somewhere to put the electricity crackling through her chest."Don't," she said."Come here, Sloane."Something snapped.She threw the documents at him.Not gently. Not accidentally. She drew her arm back and threw them — papers exploding outward, pages catching air, the whole stack fanning apart and raining down across his chest, his desk, the floor aro

Chapter 33: You Absolute Dog

"How long," Declan said quietly, "have we been together?"Sloane blinked. "I'm sorry?""You told the bar. My brother. Half the company." His voice was low, precise, a scalpel where most men used a hammer. "You said I was your boyfriend. So I'm asking — how long have we been together?"She stared at him.He's not asking about Cole. The realization hit her like cold water. He heard the name and he's still — he's asking about the bar. The gossip. He's—"Two years," she said, because it was the first number her panicking brain produced.Declan's eyes narrowed.He was doing math. She could see it — those dark eyes calculating, measuring, running timelines against each other. Three years ago. The bar. The elevator. The night she'd spent three years outrunning. Two years. The gap between them.What is he figuring out?Whatever it was, he kept it behin

Chapter 34: Human Punching Bag

Claire Bowen descended the staircase of the Pierce family estate like a woman who had rehearsed the entrance.Every step deliberate. Every movement calculated. The kind of woman who understood that presentation was power and had built her entire life on both.The housekeeper nearest the bottom stair didn't look up — nobody who worked in this house looked up when Claire was in a mood — and Claire walked past them all with the particular energy of a woman whose son had been crying for forty minutes.She found Jamie in the sitting room, face red and swollen, bottom lip still trembling."Come here." She swept him up, silk dress and all, and held him at arm's length. "Tell me. Who upset you?""Brother," Jamie hiccupped, his small face collapsing again. "Bad brother. He said I was a nuisance."Something shifted behind Claire's eyes — fast, sharp, gone."Now, now." She smoothed his hair with manicured fing

Chapter 35: She Knew Her Face

The moment Sloane walked back into that office, her hands decided to betray her.She set the coffee down too hard.The cup hit the saucer with a crack that split the conversation in half. Coffee sloshed over the rim, spread across the side table in a dark, spreading stain, and every pair of eyes in the room snapped to her simultaneously.Oh no.One of the executives — the one who'd been talking the most, the one with the practiced confidence of a man performing for his audience — seized the moment immediately."Really." He turned to her with the expression of someone who had just been handed a gift. "You can't even serve coffee properly? That needs to be remade—""Mind your own business."Three words. Quiet. Absolute.Declan's voice filled the room and then emptied it of everything else.The executive's mouth closed so fast Sloane heard his teeth.Declan's fingers — long,

Chapter 36: I've Been Thinking About You

The train rocked through the dark tunnel and Sloane gripped the pole so hard her knuckles went bone white.Her reflection stared back at her from the black window opposite — pale face, hollow eyes, four canisters of baby formula at her feet like an anchor. Around her, strangers scrolled phones and dozed against the glass, each sealed in their own world.She was completely alone in hers.Claire Bowen.The name kept surfacing, unwanted and sharp. She pushed it down. It came back.She'd heard the gossip on the forty-second floor. Declan's half-brother's mother. Destroyed a marriage to take the position. Old money, younger woman, a son born into a family that never fully accepted her.She hadn't connected the name to a face until tonight.Until a woman with manicured hands and a designer coat looked at her on a Chicago sidewalk and said her old name like a prayer.Like she'd been waiting to say it.

Chapter 37: Add Some Salt

"Help you?" Sloane looked at her mother across the coffee shop table and almost laughed. "Claire. Declan Pierce cut off his entire family years ago. Everyone in that building knows it. What exactly are you going to do for me from the outside of a locked door?"Claire's mouth tightened. The admission sat between them like a stone neither of them wanted to pick up."I know you hate me," Claire said quietly."I don't." Sloane said it simply, without heat. "Hate takes energy I've already spent."Disappointment was the right word. Disappointment so complete and so old it had calcified into something that barely felt like anything at all. You couldn't hate someone you'd stopped expecting things from."The milk powder." Claire leaned forward, grasping at something lighter, something safe. "I saw you carrying so much of it. Why do you need—""I like it in my coffee." Sloane stood. Picked up her bag. "I've said everything I came to say

Chapter 38: Don't You Dare Move

Sloane stood alone in the executive pantry and stared at the espresso machine like it owed her an apology.Salt, she thought. If I could just find salt.She opened the refrigerator. Ice maker. Nothing else.She checked the drawers. Napkins, stirrers, a tiny jar of agave that would not accomplish what she needed it to accomplish.She opened the cabinet above the machine. Coffee beans, filters, a spare portafilter.No salt.She stood there for a moment, hands braced on the counter, and thought about what she was doing — genuinely contemplating sabotaging her own job by seasoning the CEO's coffee — and felt the first real laugh of the week trying to climb up her throat.She pressed her lips together and killed it.Don't, she told herself. Don't find this funny. This is not funny.But she knew the truth: even if she'd found a full saltshaker, she wouldn't have used it.B

Chapter 39: Strawberry Marks

The temperature in the pantry dropped ten degrees in an instant.Sloane felt it the moment the question left her mouth — felt the shift in Declan's body, the way the air around him changed, like a pressure system rolling in off the lake. His jaw went tight. Those black eyes went cold in a way that was different from his usual cold — deeper, older, the kind of cold that came from somewhere that had never fully healed."It seems," he said softly, "that you have a lot of nerve."Oh no.She opened her mouth to walk it back — I didn't mean anything by it, forget I said it, Mr. Pierce, I'm so sorry—His mouth came down on her neck.Not a kiss.A bite.Sharp, sudden, the pressure of his teeth against the curve of her throat — and Sloane's entire world reduced to that single point of sensation. She gasped. Her spine arched. One hand flew to his jacket lapel and gripped i

Chapter 40: Fever

Jamie Cross looked up at her with red-rimmed eyes and a chin that wouldn't stop wobbling, and Sloane made a decision she was probably going to regret."Okay." She lowered her voice to a whisper. "But it has to be our secret. Just yours and mine. Nobody else finds out. Can you do that?"His wet face transformed instantly — sorrow to delight, like flipping a switch. "I love secrets!""I know." She held out her pinky finger.He grabbed it with both hands, squeezed once, and sealed it with the gravity of a four-year-old who had just made the most important deal of his life.She knew — she knew — that Claire had orchestrated this. That Jamie hadn't wandered to PIERCE Tower alone. That his knowing her name, calling her sister, was Claire's doing — a breadcrumb left deliberately, a door pushed open.But Jamie himself was just a child.Same age as her six. Same wide eyes. Same complete, devas

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