The Intern: A Sweet Lesbian Romance Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  1: New Boss

  2: Family Tradition

  3: First Day

  4: Blowing Off Steam

  5: New Routine

  6: New Feelings

  7: Dirty Dancing

  8: Rich Girl's Mistake

  9: Family Chat

  10: The Next Day

  11: Good Bad Decisions

  12: Princess Charming

  13: One Night

  14: New Experiences

  15: The Shadow

  16: Next Day

  17: Father/Daughter

  18: Head Hunted

  19: New Sheriff

  20: Interview

  21: Making Up

  22: New Boss

  More from Mia Archer

  Free Sample: Second Chances

  1: Party Invite

  2: Dragged to the Beach

  3: Beach Bravery

  4: Jealousy

  5: Unbelievable Changes

  6: Disbelief

  7: Shattered Dreams

  Want More?

  More from Mia

  The Intern

  A Lesbian Romance

  By Mia Archer

  Copyright 2016 Mia Archer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.

  First digital edition electronically published by Mia Archer, January 2016

  Let your fantasies come true with Mia Archer…

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  1: New Boss

  I didn’t intend to start the day questioning my sexuality, but the girl I saw hopping onto the elevator certainly brought my professed heterosexuality into question!

  To say she was stunning would be the understatement of the century. Of the millennium. I knew, objectively, that there were beautiful girls in the world. And that was how I’d always thought of pretty girls when I looked at them. Objectively. It was always in a “oh wouldn’t it be nice to look as good as her” mix of admiration and envy. It was never with the sort of eyes that sent a bolt of fire running straight down to the core of my being and made me seriously reconsider everything I’d ever thought about the way the world worked and which way my sexuality leaned.

  I mean sure there was the occasional experiment back in college, but who didn’t do that? Experiments were just that: experiments. Not the foundation of a relationship.

  But damn. Looking at this girl with her perfect face. Brown hair that spilled down past her shoulders. The sort of body that would make a goddess sit up and take notice. Looking at her was making me want to lay one hell of a foundation, if you catch my drift.

  I shook my head. What was I thinking? This was just some random pretty girl making her way through the lobby at my building. It’s not like anything was going to happen. It’s not like I was going to go up and chitchat with the girl or try to get her phone number or anything.

  Still, it was nice to dream. Even if it was only for a moment.

  Then she disappeared behind an elevator and I was brought back to the boring mundane reality of my existence. People in suits and business appropriate dresses making their way through the lobby to take the elevator to whatever floor they slaved away on at Zeidner Corp. I was up on seven which was pretty low on the totem pole.

  And I’d just missed an elevator because I was so busy staring at that pretty young thing who didn’t look like she could even be out of college let alone working here. When I was already running late. I sighed. Christine was not going to be happy.

  “Damn it Nicole,” I muttered to myself as I jabbed at the up button on the elevator with perhaps a little more force than was strictly necessary. “Are you never going to get it together?”

  A lady standing next to me gave me a funny look, but I ignored it. I didn’t recognize her and it was a big company filling an entire damn skyscraper, so it’s not like she was an immediate concern. No, my immediate concern was being at my cubicle by 7:45am on the dot because, as Christine was so fond of saying to the people she was berating in the morning, “on time is late.” Never mind that the business day wasn’t supposed to start until promptly at eight. What was a little wage theft when they were getting around those pesky laws by making everyone salaried?

  I sighed again as the elevator opened to take me up to my own personal daily hell. This definitely wasn’t how I’d imagined life going when I graduated and got a job here five years ago.

  The doors swished open on our floor and I quickly made my way to my cubicle. Mercifully Christine’s office was obviously dark. It wasn’t unusual for her to show up anywhere from fifteen minutes to a half hour late, she definitely didn’t hold herself to the same punctual standards that she expected of her employees, but it also wasn’t out of the ordinary for her to show up early just so she could get in some yelling before the work day had actually started.

  Either way it looked like I was going to be safe sliding into my chair and powering up my computer. The elevator dinged and I resisted the urge to prairie dog out of my cubicle and see who was coming through. The clicking of heels was more than enough to let me know exactly who it was. I stared with a quite slow-moving panic rising inside me as the ancient computer, nothing but the oldest and cheapest for our department, booted up at a speed that would make a glacier seem positively speedy in comparison.

  Finally it booted up and I hit my password and even managed to pull up a spreadsheet before the clicking stopped at my cubicle. I turned around with the biggest smile I could muster on my face, though it was difficult when I got a good look at Christine and her usual morning expression carrying her usual morning cup of coffee that she refilled religiously, making her office smell like a cut-rate coffee house thanks to her bad breath. She had a scowl in her eyes and her lips were puckered up looking like a cat’s asshole.

  Not a good look, but then again there really was no such thing as a “good look” when it came to Christine.

  “At least you can make it in on time,” she said finally after inspecting my cubicle. I knew exactly what she was doing. Looking for anything that she could use to rain down terror. Sometimes I left some paperwork out overnight just to give her something to yell about, it was a quiet form of protest that wasn’t likely to provoke the sort of reaction that being late would, but I hadn’t had time this morning since I was already running late because I was mooning over some hot young thing who was probably a good five years younger than me anyways if she was still in college.

  “Good morning Christine, good to see you too,” I said.

  Her scowl deepened, but it’s not like she could do anything about it. Everything I said had been perfectly delivered in a pleasant and cheery tone. Never mind that in my head I was thinking how that phrase meant “go fuck yourself Christine, and I hope you get fired.”

  Finally she finished her inspection of my cube and she was moving along. No doubt taking stock of exactly who was already in and who was running a little tardy. If the tardy ones were lucky they’d just get a stern email threatening them. If they were unlucky and Christine was feeling particularly salty this morning then they’d get called into her office to get chewed out which was never a particularly fun experience. I was just glad I’d avoided it for one day.

  No, instead I could get directly to work. I fired up the corporate logging software that made sure all our work was accounted for and started
pushing numbers around. The facts and figures that made the world go ‘round at ZeidnerCorp weren’t going to generate themselves, and God help us if we didn’t get work done in a timely manner.

  A message popped up in the window. I smiled when I saw it was from Amber.

  “How’s dragon lady this morning?”

  “Off doing her usual inspection of the department looking to see if anyone’s running late,” I said. “I take it you got here on time?”

  “You bet I did. Damn she’s such a bitch.”

  I shook my head and minimized the chat window as I heard clicking moving towards my cubicle again. I dreaded the day Christine realized that people could hear her coming because of her fondness for heels, but it’s not like I was going to say anything to her either. She moved past, a clicking shark sniffing the water for blood, and I brought the window back up.

  “She’s really in a foul mood today. Usually she’s in her office gulping down her coffee and surfing the net by now.”

  “Must be something irritating her,” Amber sent back.

  I frowned. Something irritating Christine usually meant something was going to be irritating me. Sure enough she came clicking back past my cubicle and I heard her stop at the door. I closed my eyes and did a quick five count before turning to smile at her with the best and most insincere smile I could muster.

  “How can I help you Christine?” I asked.

  “How is the work coming along on the Johnson merger?” she asked.

  “I should have that ready for you by the end of the day today which will give you enough time to look it over before it needs to be turned in,” I said.

  When I first started this job I figured that would be enough to get Christine to jump for joy. I’d learned the hard way that it didn’t. From the smile that came to her face, smiles were never pleasant on her face, I knew that I was about to get some of that same feeling. I braced for it.

  “Well isn’t that nice? Since you seem to have so much free time you won’t mind going ahead and reviewing some of the numbers for me, will you? Then when you’re done with that I have a couple of other things that are ready to be sent up but need to be reviewed first.”

  I bit back a couple of comments that were forming in my head. She was the one who was supposed to give final approval for everything that was done in the department. That was a big part of her job, aside from assigning stuff out which she’d started foisting off on me six months ago. She’d never been this brazen before about trying to get me to run approvals. Damn it.

  “Whatever you say, Christine,” I said.

  As soon as she was gone I was back at my computer typing furiously, but it wasn’t for any sort of analysis. No, I needed to vent to someone, and Amber was the only person I could vent with even though she was on the other side of the floor. It was set up in a big square with Christine’s big glass office in the center. That glass on all four sides was part of the reason we knew she was in there playing games on social media most of the time instead of actually doing any work.

  Lord help us all if she ever decided to actually check the chat logs for her department. Lots of heads would roll that day. Lots more than usual, at least.

  An email popped up and I looked over more on instinct than anything else. Answering that ding was almost a Pavlovian response on this floor. If it was from Christine and it was urgent and you didn’t answer it right away then you could be in deep shit.

  I sighed when I saw who it was from. Not Christine. It was from someone who should be a shining beacon out of this shithole. A headhunter. The only problem was there was at least one person who’d been canned for responding to a headhunter using their work email. So I deleted it like I always did, might as well have a record of being loyal for the IT people to look at, but not before looking at the email.

  It was familiar enough. I’d seen it enough times that it was burned into my head. This lady must not be very good if she was desperate enough to keep pinging people, and on their work email no less, but I’d seen her name and email, Janet Yeager, often enough that it was memorized. I’d even forwarded one of her mails to my personal account in my early days before I knew that was strictly verboten around here.

  I sighed. I was sorely tempted to respond today, but no. Better a crappy job than no job, right?

  Whatever. I got back into the groove of things and tried not to think about Christine. Of course not thinking about Christine and how unfair it was working under a dragon lady of epic proportions naturally set my mind to thinking about other things, and it seemed that the one thing on my mind more than anything else was that girl I’d seen in the lobby. I wondered what she was doing here. She could’ve been going anywhere. Sure there were young people who worked here, I was still technically in that “young” category even though I’d been with the company for five years since graduating, but there was something about her that kept pushing her to the forefront of my imagination. An imagination that was going to some particularly not safe for work places the more I thought about her.

  I was in the middle of thinking about a particularly wild frat party I’d gone to my junior year where I made out with a girl to get the crowd going, though to be honest I’d been a little excited at the excuse to have some fun with a friend who I thought was pretty damn hot. Only in my imagination it wasn’t the girl from my memory I was kissing. It was that girl from the lobby.

  Well now that was odd. Not that I was thinking about girls considering my experience. Just odd that it would come up now. Sure I hadn’t exactly dated much, work took care of most of my spare time, and so it felt a little odd that I was suddenly thinking of any sort of dating, let alone dating a girl.

  I was pulled out of my reverie by a ding, but not the sort of ding that meant I had a message from Amber or someone else on the floor. No, this was the sort of ding that immediately filled me with a sense of dread because it meant an email, and an email usually meant Christine needed something.

  I hated it when Christine needed something. Why couldn’t that girl from the lobby need something? Yeah, I’d love taking care of her needs. Only the hot thoughts of the sort of fun I could have with her if I’d had more than a moment of staring at her dumbfounded from the other side of a closing elevator door were dashed when I saw the message. From Christine.

  Damn it.

  “In addition to your work on those approvals I’m also going to need you to go over the schedule for the next month and make sure we’re not missing anything,” she said.

  I rolled my eyes and this time I let out a small groan. She expected me to do scheduling for her on top of everything else? That was her job, damn it. She was sitting in there playing games and having a grand old time collecting her huge salary and meanwhile I was sitting here doing her job and not getting paid anything extra for it. It was pissing me off. It was enough to make me do something drastic.

  Like open my chat window with Amber and shoot off a message complaining. Hey, I wasn’t going to do anything too crazy. Talking back to Christine could be a career limiting move. People still told the story of poor Patrick, a guy who’d given her the finger in the middle of a meeting and walked out after he’d had enough of her bullshit. She’d given him a bad reference even though that was against company policy and the poor guy ended up having to move across the country to get a job considering how tight-knit the community was.

  Tight-knit enough that Christine’s counterparts thought she walked on water. Not tight-knit enough that they knew what a raging bitch she could be. Mostly because she kept everybody strictly under her thumb and no one ever got out to spread stories at other companies.

  “I can’t believe she’s trying to make you do that bullshit,” Amber said.

  “I know, right? I’m already doing her damn job. Isn’t that enough for her?”

  “Nothing’s ever going to be enough for her. Remember Patrick?”

  I hadn’t actually known Patrick, his epic departure happened well before I started working here, but I th
ought of him on the regular.

  “I have to do something about this, but I’m not sure what,” I said.

  “Maybe if you try something other than flipping her the bird in the middle of a meeting?” Amber sent back.

  I sighed. She did have a good point, even though something told me this was going to end in disaster even as I flipped back over to my email and started drafting something. The fact was there just wasn’t a chance I was going to be able to take on anything else without working even more ridiculous hours than what I was already being forced to endure. We’re talking the sort of hours you hear about medical interns or young lawyers who think they’re going to make partner pull. Not the sort of hours someone pulls when they’re stuck in a department with no hope of advancement because they’re stuck in a Catch-22 with a boss who will ruin their career whether they work hard or quit.

  Damn it. I was starting to get mad. I was starting to feel something I hadn’t felt in awhile. Backbone. Just a little, but it was enough to make me draft a response.

  “Christine, I would love to take this on but if you’re going to do that then I’ll have to request that you do the approvals or take some of the other work that you’ve given to me as I won’t be able to do all of it in a timely manner.”

  I hit send and immediately regretted it. God that was a stupid move. I found myself wishing we had one of those email systems where you could recall an email as long as it hadn’t been opened yet, but of course that wouldn’t have mattered in this case anyway. No, the response came back almost immediately.

  “My office. Now.”

  A feeling of dread came over me as I stood and made my way towards the giant glass ice cube in the center of the floor. I suppose whoever designed the damn thing thought it was supposed to look all cool and modern, but for everyone who worked here it had become a symbol of the constant terror that was this department.

  I sighed as I opened the door. I thought I might make it through a morning without yelling at her. Not for the first time I thought back to a voicemail I got a couple of weeks ago from a head hunter asking if I was interested in other opportunities in the area. I hadn’t responded because I knew Christine would torpedo any chance I had with another department as soon as they called to verify employment.