Page 223 of One More Kiss
Chapter2
MAY
Bailey slappedat the sound of her alarm going off. Surely it wasn’t five a.m. already! She’d only just managed to slip into sleep. She groaned and turned the alarm off after she forced her feet onto the floor.
It was one of those mornings where coffee was not optional, and if she even closed her eyes for another second, she would end up passing back out until noon. Her phone rang, and she rolled her eyes. “You have got to be kidding me.” She slid the Answer Call button on her iPhone and forced a smile into her voice. “Good morning, Mrs. Lawson.”
“Bailey, dear, so glad you’re awake.”
Like that stopped you from calling every hour all night.“What is it?”
“I decided against the red rugs.”
“Oh?”
“I think they would look dreadful with the pale yellow curtains.”
You think? If only someone had told you that! “That’s a brilliant observation, do you have a color you’d prefer to go with?”
“Robin’s egg blue! I don’t know how it came to mind, but I think the pale yellow with that particular shade of blue would look phenomenal.”
Bailey rolled her eyes, Gertrude Lawson would love the pastel colors for another hour, and then she would surely be calling Bailey back to tell her just what she truly thought.
“Okay, Mrs. Lawson, I will get the new sketches put together and swing them by this afternoon.”
“Oh.” Her disappointment was apparent even through Bailey’s sleep-addled brain. “It’s going to take you that long?”
It wouldn’t if I’d had some damn sleep! “Would ten a.m. be better?”
“Oh, yes, that would be wonderful. See you then!”
“Bye!” Bailey used her most cheerful voice and then let her head fall back against her pillow.
When she’d made the decision to become an interior designer, she hadn’t considered the fact that her clientele would consist of snobby rich ladies who would completely ignore her advice and then change their minds eight million times before it was completed.
And then, when it looked horrendous, blame her for the mess up.
“Ugh!” She rubbed her eyes with had hands and forced herself into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Since Brooklyn was at her boyfriend Tucker’s, and Emma was with her boyfriend and soon-to-be husband Owen’s house, the apartment was quiet.
She turned on some music to try and jazz her up for the day and before long was sipping the strongest coffee she could make while applying foundation to cover up the dark circles under her eyes.
Dark circles that Mrs.- pale-yellow-and-robins-egg-blue Lawson had put there. She’d hired Bailey just over a month ago to get her house ready for an Independence Day celebration she wanted to throw.
At least, that’s what it had been originally. Bailey had been ecstatic for the new client and had put together an entire red, white, and blue theme before Mrs. Lawson had torn it apart and decided she wanted to go with Easter colors, in the summer. Bailey had tried to steer her away from them, but she’d gotten angry and reminded Bailey just who worked for whom. Since then she has made every waking, and non-waking moment, in Bailey’s life miserable.
She finished applying her makeup and was out the door with her middle-of-the-night phone call notes by six-fifteen. Coffee in hand, she made her way down the street and to her office.
She had been lucky enough to get picked up by one of Dallas’s most prestigious design companies and had been working her ass off toward a promotion that still hadn’t come for the last six years.
It was a vicious cycle, and she was getting tired of the rat race.
Per usual, the office was empty, and she took a seat in her tiny cubicle to get to work. The woman who ran the company, Cecilia Cane, wouldn’t be there until noon at the latest and would do nothing but nap and drink vodka in her office until it was time to go home.
The woman’s parents had purchased it for her, and since then, she’d been surviving because the designers she hired kept everything running smoothly. They had a solid reputation, but no one outside of the office knew about Cecilia’s habits.
Bailey continued typing her new notes in and tweaking the computer designs she had for Mrs. Lawson’s living room.
Before she knew it, it was nine a.m., and the cubicles around her were filled with employees.
