Page 578 of Manhattan Bossholes

“Nina, no he’s not,” I grabbed a pillow and tossed it at her, hoping she didn’t see my red face.

“Oh, but he is, you’re just too stubborn to admit it. And methinks he might have a little thing for you.”

My heartbeat quickened, but I tried to ignore it.

“Methinks?” I laughed at her. “Okay, Shakespeare, maybe I need to get you out of the stacks.”

“Whatever,” she said as she tossed the pillow back where it belonged. “I’m just telling you what I observed.”

“Maybe it was pure hatred you picked up on? Because we’ve had a bumpy getting-acquainted stage.”

“Well, as the Bard says, the course of true love never did run smooth.”

“True love,” I sputtered, mustering up a laugh. “Please.”

But a teeny tiny part of me wondered if a guy like Cameron could ever fall for a girl like me.

I choked on the thought. Yeah right. We’d be lucky if we got to tolerating each other.

9

CAMERON

“Nooo,” I groaned, rolling over in bed to check why my phone was blowing up. “It’s early!”

Once again, my Veritique alerts were going off, but I couldn’t think of a single thing that could be causing problems. We’d had a blissfully stable few weeks, and while I couldn’t completely credit Felicity for the positive change, it sure felt like she had something to do with it.

I squinted at my phone. “What the hell is #RingingintheRomance?”

It wasn’t a hashtag I was familiar with. Not that I had a hand in every single thing the media department was doing, but still. They at least included me in emails when something was going to launch. I scrolled until I found a link and clicked through it.

“Oh, fuck,” I said when it took me to Lucy’s Snug account and I saw a still of me and Felicity from the night we had our meeting in the Veritique showroom. “What kind of bullshit drama did she cook up?”

Signing Lucy was a no-brainer, but I still wasn’t completely comfortable with how much freedom we’d given her, within certain parameters, to post what she thought would be the most effective without having to get sign off on it from me first. When we’d put together the contract, she’d argued she knew best what her followers would respond to. I couldn’t exactly argue with that—but that didn’t mean I was always thrilled with how she got her results.

“I know I’m going to hate this.”

Boris decided I could use some support and jumped up beside me in bed. He refused to sleep next to me, opting instead to sleep close by in his own luxury dog bed.

I pushed play and discovered that Lucy had zoomed in on us bickering about why the Aeternum ring wasn’t right for Felicity, and ended the clip with me describing how the perfect ring would complement her. What I hadn’t realized in the moment was the way Felicity looked at me as I described the symbiotic relationship between ring and wearer. Her eyes were locked on me, and her expression shifted from anger to awe as I spoke. Lucy had added little floaty hearts around us toward the end of the clip.

Okay. Not terrible. I couldn’t actually see the ring in the clip, so she hadn’t blown our reveal, and I stood by everything I had said, so the message in the video was solid. But why was everyone reposting the clip and tagging Veritique along with #RingingintheRomance and #CamLicity? It was good content but didn’t seem viral to me.

Then I read her caption.

“How swoony are these two? The Veritique CEO and his Marketing Associate have been hiding a romance from us…so when’s he gonna put a ring on it? C’mon, Cameron, pop the question and make Felicity yours for good! Team #CamLicity!”

I jolted upright. No, this wasn’t happening!

But the more I scrolled through social media, the more I realized it had already happened. CamLicity was everywhere—there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. And worse, as much as I hated the idea of a fake romance with Felicity Rhodes, the rest of the world loved it.

Veritique was going viral in a big way, and not for something negative for the first time in ages.

It didn’t matter. Lucy had gone against my plans. I’d said that a fake romance was out of the question. I’d forbid it. I was about to type out an angry email when I paused to consider what I’d said that night, so I could repeat it in writing in the message.

Fuck me. I’d never actually forbidden it. I’d ended the brainstorming session but never outright told Lucy not to proceed with the fake relationship. Clearly, she was an “ask forgiveness not permission” kind of person.

A text popped up from Felicity. “Can we talk?”