Rule zero: never date the boss. She kept it for eleven years. Then came Matthew Murray.
Taylor Quinn learned the gatekeeper’s craft from Diane Whitaker, who hired her out of a temp pool at twenty-three and taught her everything: be the infrastructure, never the romance; your desk is a toll booth, not a confessional; and the org chart is not a dating pool. Three bosses, eleven years, and the line held — through the married one, the terrifying one, the chaos one. Then four years as the executive assistant to Matthew Murray, the one boss who never blurred it. Never reached. Never once crossed a line. He waited.
But Diane’s rule was built for men who reach. It has no defense against a man who waits. Every 5:15 AM triage, every rerouted flight, every crisis she solves before he knows it exists — the whole architecture of her discipline is failing, and the failure is him. If the rule falls, it takes her career, her identity, and the one piece of wisdom she carved into her desk: no one can be boss and boyfriend fairly.
She’ll have to decide whether eleven years of discipline is wisdom — or the last wall between her and the one man who earned the other side of it.
The Executive Assistant is Book 5 of the Taylor Quinn contemporary romance series: a steamy slow-burn boss/employee romance about power, patience, and the rule that was never built to survive him.