One Little Lie: An Enemies to Lovers, Second Chance Romance (Office Escapades Book 2) Read online

  One Little Lie

  Office Escapades Book Two

  An Enemies to Lovers Romance

  By Robin Edwards

  © Copyright 2018 by Robin Edwards

  and Second Chances Press

  All rights reserved.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited, and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher. Names and persons in this eBook are entirely fictional. They bear no resemblance to anyone living or dead. To protect the privacy of certain individuals the names and identifying details have been changed. This is a work of fiction. Any names or characters, businesses or places, events or incidents, are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  One Little Mix-Up (SNEAK PEEK)

  About the Author

  More Books by the Author

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  Prologue

  MORGAN

  FOR AS LONG AS I COULD REMEMBER, I’ve wanted to teach. I didn’t want to be a doctor, lawyer or any of the cliché professions, I just wanted to teach. I don’t think it mattered what grade level, I just loved the idea of guiding someone as they carved out their own path to self-discovery.

  When I was a teenager, my childhood friend Amber and I gushed at our weekly slumber parties about the other dreams that we had which included celebrity crushes with posters from Tiger Beat and Bop! Magazine plastered over our bedroom walls. We would laugh at all of the boys that we went to school with in junior high, knowing they couldn’t even compare because they were way too immature and gross for us. We didn’t think they were sophisticated enough.

  As we grew older, those conversations turned into plans of graduating college, getting a job and then falling in love with our Mr. Right. After we found who we were destined to be with, we wanted to get married and have kids of our own.

  I’m not sure where the idea of falling in love and living happily ever after in my very own fairytale came from, but I know it had something to do with my parents. To me, they had the perfect relationship and whirlwind romance. I loved hearing the story of how they met by happenstance while on separate vacations but by what I’d like to call a twist of fate, my mother and her friends were accidentally assigned the same suite by the hotel as my father and the rest of the bachelor party he was with.

  Both my mother and father volunteered for each of their respective groups to settle the confusion with the hotel. While the trip down to the lobby and the dust settling took only fifteen minutes, that’s all it took for them to spend the rest of their two-week vacation together and decide that they had built a lifelong connection.

  They had their little fights now and then but I idolized and admired the fact that they met as strangers but were happily married for 32 years until my father passed away much too young.

  I wanted that in my own life. That was my dream, and while I don’t think I’d meet someone in life that I’d want to marry after spending a two-week vacation with, I knew that I’d want it to last forever too but here I was at thirty years old, still completely and utterly single.

  This wasn’t what I imagined my thirties to be like. I figured everything I planned for would have happened by now. I mean, Amber and I created our vision boards and everything. It was supposed to come true for us too, shouldn’t it? It had to, that’s how life was supposed to work.

  It wasn’t entirely my fault that I was way behind what I envisioned for myself, that much I know. The winner of the blame award was given to the one and only Patrick Mitchell. He was the one man in my life I truly believed was the one. He was supposed to be my Mr. Right because we talked so much about our future together. Those talks included the idea of getting married, having children, where we’d like to live and what their names would be.

  It turned out to be a complete waste of my time. Not only did Patrick lie to me but he broke my heart. He broke it into a thousand little pieces, even super glue wouldn’t be able to fix what Patrick ruined for me. He practically destroyed the idea of happily ever after for me and call me naïve, but I wanted that for so long. He turned me into a cynical realist.

  At the time, he was my entire world, and I couldn’t quite handle knowing the hope I had for the future was coming to an end. When Patrick finally showed me his true feelings of how he really felt about the words ‘long-term relationship,’ which surprised the hell out of me since he was the one that brought it up so many times. I had a mental and emotional break down because of him.

  He planned to break up with me at a restaurant, my favorite restaurant and when it happened, I kept screaming at the top of my lungs at him. Looking back on the incident, not only did I startle the entire restaurant, but I also threatened to stab the back of his hand with the salad fork. I must have looked crazy or like a homicidal maniac because one of the patrons called the police on me. They forced me to apologize to him and promise I was going to stay away from him otherwise they’d take me to jail.

  Can you believe that? He broke up with me in the cruelest humane way possible, and I had to do the apologizing and in front of the entire population at Fairfield Steakhouse. Sure, my reaction was a little bit over the top, and some would say hysterical, but I had every right to be upset. Wouldn’t you? If you were in my place and the love of your life took you to your favorite restaurant and instead of proposing like I thought he was about to do, he says: I don’t think I can do this anymore. What would you have done? Same thing I’m guessing.

  The police had every right to take me to jail, but they didn’t because I think they felt sorry for me. They smelled the desperation and took pity on me, but I didn’t want to be pitied. I just wanted all of it to be some kind of horrible nightmare. I wanted Patrick to take back everything he said, and I’d forgive him. I was even willing to go back and act like nothing ever happened but we couldn’t, the damage was done, and life just didn’t work that way.

  I guess you could say that I was a complete failure and that it was almost the beginning of the end. Instead of letting things consume me and create an overindulgence in food, alcohol or some other commodity as a way to soothe my pain, I went the cowards way out and ran away instead of facing the difficulty head on. I ran all of the way to the other side of the country to California. I was a complete coward. I could have handled things differently, but in the end, that was the decision I made.

  I wish I could say that I didn’t regret it but I actually did. I mean, I was an active and independent woman from Chicago. I could control an entire classroom full of students, but I couldn’t handle a simple relationship. I felt like there was something wrong with me if I couldn’t even find a man who wanted to spend the rest of his life with me the way that my mother and father did during the two weeks they spent with each other.

  I d
on’t know what I was thinking or what whimsy came over me, but the idea of me being a failure in a family of success stories cemented the idea of accepting a teaching position in San Francisco, California. I wanted to get away from everything and start over; I uprooted my entire life for it. I didn’t think once about the consequences of doing so.

  Back home, I taught English Lit lecture at the local community college, but I had to get out of there as soon as possible. I had to get away from Patrick Mitchell. Although my reactions were my fault, he was the catalyst for all of the whimsical decisions I made after that. He didn’t want me enough, and eventually, I realized he never would.

  I had the vision of getting married, the American Dream and all of that - the dream with the husband, son, daughter and a dog. Patrick and I would have had great careers and a beautiful house to come home to. It would have been a cute little one with a white picket fence around it, and we would have lived happily ever after in it. Patrick not wanting those things with me made me realize what we had wasn’t going to work if we envisioned two different destinations.

  What I didn’t expect besides the hysteria was the break up becoming too much for me after a while. The overwhelming feelings I suffered led to the mental and emotional breakdown. I was overwhelmed because I was always reminded of him, I never could move on. My friends were also his friends, and everywhere I went, I ran into someone that knew him as well. I was tired of being asked: you aren’t here with Patrick? Where is Patrick? Let’s double date, it would be so much fun!

  I wasn’t going to get over the pain of being left by someone I spent every waking moment with for two years if I was surrounded by the same environment he occupied. Whenever I thought about my future, he was always included in my daydreams. He was a part of the plans that I created for myself. I never once thought about a scenario that didn’t involve him. I had the natural expectation he would always be in my life. I guess not.

  So here I was, standing in the middle of my classroom at John Hill Academy, a private school. I started as a temporary substitute position for my old college roommate who officially occupied it but her maternity leave turned into a sudden decision to be a stay at home mom, and I was the lucky winner of a permanent teaching job.

  Despite wanting to have children, I’ve never been the kind of woman that grew up around them. I wasn’t precisely a domesticated woman. I may be independent and want the American dream, but I didn’t know my way around a kitchen. I barely knew how to take care of myself.

  A few weeks ago, there was a school bulletin that was sent to the faculty and staff about student enrollment, and the school budget was cut. It had been declining slowly for years due to the abundance of new schools with innovative curriculum popping up in the area, and they were affecting our reputation for being the top school in San Francisco for young children to attend for their education.

  For years, John Hill had a waitlist a mile long, but over the past couple of years, there were so many cancellations due to parents choosing to enroll their kids in the newer institutions instead. I guess it was the hype of trying something new that encouraged the parents to seek an alternative school.

  As an act of remediation, the administrator decided to make a sincere effort at first at identifying parents who had higher income levels because he wanted to recruit those who saw the value in their children getting the best education available, who took pride in it and were willing to spend whatever it took to get it.

  The downside of this was when the decisions the administrator was making eventually were made because of his greed. I think he became so obsessed with saving the school, he ultimately realized that if he could pull it off, he could benefit from it too. The faculty and staff weren’t the only ones affected, the children became affected also.

  John Hill could house only 500 students at most, and the more he welcomed new children from wealthy households, the more impacted John Hill became. The classrooms were started to fill up beyond the regulatory capacity of 25 students per class, so he began to raise the price of tuition and the students were on scholarships that only covered the old rate, had to find a way to hide the increased costs.

  The children from these families could not financially afford the increase in costs. They ultimately had to make the decision at taking their child out of the only school they’ve ever known and away from their friends and place them into public school farther away from home which meant longer commutes and a complete change in the routines for their households.

  I’m not sure if anything he was doing was illegal, but it seemed like he was getting away with it because although parents were pissed off at him, that’s all they did about the situation. No one seemed to be suing the school let alone did anything about it except enroll their children elsewhere.

  Despite Administrator Williams’ claims, I believed he cared more about the money he was bringing in than the well-being the children under his guidance. Changing the way the private school operated and educated children was a vast undertaking that I don’t think Mr. Williams quite comprehended but somehow he identified an area within the budget to hire an organization to fully implement the rest of his School Facilities Master Plan instead of using the budget for something special for the students.

  He decided to hire a company called SP & Associates to solve the side effect of his poor decision making. He hired them to handle a whole cluster fuck of a situation because Mr. Williams had no idea how to make the rest of it work or if it would even work. I could not believe he hired a marketing and advisory firm to determine the fate of our school and the lives of children he wanted to bring in and all of the children he tried to kick out. A marketing company, I couldn’t believe it! I really wanted to meet the man who was helping him ruin so many lives. Holy fuck, we were screwed.

  Chapter One

  MORGAN

  I was running late again and it was the worst possible day to do so because today was the day SP & Associates would be invading our school to interview everyone, take a look at the budget, sit in all of the classes and activities to review and critique our teaching methods. Their goal was to not only identify the black hole crushing the life out of our school but also to assist in determining the proper strategy to bring in the rest of the demographic of children Mr. Williams wanted and to fix the other problems he created because of his greedy decision making.

  Most of all, the individual that would be performing most of the assessments and recommendations was a complete jerk. I didn’t sign up for this, and I definitely didn’t sign up to deal with that asshole. The month from hell hadn’t even officially started yet, and he’d already gotten under my skin.

  I don’t mind being interviewed, and I’m completely okay with being watched, but I’ve never appreciated it when some cocky son-of-a-bitch who didn’t know one ounce about the education system. Including the audacity he had when he made condescending remarks during my phone interview with him about how he thought I handled my own classroom. I may have not been at this school very long compared to the other faculty here, but I’m not new to being an educator. He didn’t have the slightest clue what proper education was.

  He seemed to think that after asking a few questions, he knew everything there was to know about me and probably projected how my teaching methods affected future enrollment. I didn’t think his assessment was competent, but it wasn’t as if his evaluation was set in stone because these were early thoughts he had but I was determined to change his mind over the next month. I’ll be damned if some incompetent stranger affected my financial stability, job and city I’ve now come to love.

  Thank goodness, I’ve only dealt with him over the phone and could have hung up on him at any point during the interview, but once he arrived today, I wouldn’t be able to make him disappear using the magical powers I obviously didn’t have. I could give him a piece of my mind though and shove his assessments up where the sun didn’t shine.

  First, I needed coffee and lots of it. I also needed to find a wa
y for my leg to go through this pant leg faster. I hopped on one foot trying to manage such a simple act of putting on a pair of slacks. Instead, I missed the hole completely and toppled over.

  “Ouch! Son of a bitch!” I cursed out loud that included several other profanities after I landed face first on the wooden floor.

  My bedroom door opened with gusto and my roommate Kennedy stood in the doorway, giving me a puzzled look as I rubbed my sore knees. “Why in the hell are you on the floor with half of your clothes on? Aren’t you late for work?” she asked.

  “Yes, I am late for work again,” I grunted as I slowly stood up, trying to pull the rest of my clothes on. “I don’t want to hear another word.”

  “Whoa, I wasn’t going to say anything.” Kennedy held her hands up in defense.

  “I know you, and I know what you were thinking or at least what you were about to think.” I eyed her as I stared at my reflection in the mirror before I put on any makeup. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the kind of woman who could walk outside without it.

  Kennedy, however, was everything I wasn’t. She was my complete opposite. In fact, she was everything I’ve always wanted to be. She was a blonde hair, blue eyed goddess. I was a frumpy brunette. She was a hit with men while I was always nominated as the best friend. I was the person men asked if they could be introduced to my female friends. She was also the early bird, but as you can see, I definitely wasn’t. While Kennedy had her life in order, I chose to run away from mine.

  “I think you need some coffee ASAP, that’s why I came in here to see if you wanted any. It’ll do you some good and would help get rid of that morning crankiness of yours. Have you had any yet?”

  “No, I haven’t. I don’t have the time, I’m already late as it is.”