Corrupting My Billionaire Boss's Heart novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Cart Girl
Mara's first morning on the club's beverage cart ends with her fired on the 4th tee. Then he reads her name tag.
The beverage cart had a rule sheet taped to the steering wheel, and the first rule was underlined twice.
"Never enter a tee box while a member is addressing the ball."
I read it at 5:58 on my first morning, in a green polo that smelled like the dry cleaner's plastic.
I was twenty-four, and I had been an employee of Cardinal Ridge Country Club for a few minutes.
My dad had been dead for five weeks.
His last note was folded in my back pocket.
It said, "Go see Birdie Fenn at Cardinal Ridge. Tell her I said the cart job."
So I had gone, and Birdie had handed me keys without asking a single question.
She had only squeezed my face in both hands and said, "You have his eyes."
Now she was gone, and I was alone on a hill at dawn with forty bottles of water and a cart that wouldn't brake.
I pressed the pedal on the slope above the 4th hole.
The cart rolled anyway.
It rolled quietly and politely, straight down the cart path and onto the tee box.
A man stood there in a gray polo with a driver over his shoulder, and he had just begun his backswing.
The cart bumped his bag stand.
The bag fell over.
Forty golf clubs hit the grass in one long, expensive clatter.
He lowered the driver and turned around.
He was tall, with dark hair going gray at the temples and a face that hadn't moved in years.
His eyes were the color of wet slate, and they went from the bag to the cart to me.
"It is 6:01," he said.
"I'm sorry. The brake is soft."
"Tuesday and Friday, 6:00 to 8:30, this course belongs to one person."
"Then somebody should have told the cart."
Something crossed his face that wasn't quite a smile.
It left again before I could be sure.
"Pick up the bag," he said.
I picked up the bag.
I was lining up the last club when a golf cart whined over the rise behind me.
Four women in white tennis skirts climbed out, laughing, and one of them held a plastic cup of iced coffee.
She was blonde and thirty and flawless, and she looked at me.
"Ramsay, darling, is this the help you hired to ruin your morning?"
"Zara," he said.
That was all, just her name, flat as a table.
"She's wearing last season's polo," Zara told her friends.
"Her hands are filthy. Look at those nails."
I looked at my nails.
They were short and clean, with a little grease from the cart, because I had checked the brake myself.
"They're clean," I said.
"Excuse me?"
"My nails. I fixed the brake line with a paper clip so your friend's drinks wouldn't roll into the pond."
One of the friends snorted.
Zara tipped her cup, very slowly, and her coffee spilled over the front of my polo in a brown, cold sheet.
"Oops," she said.
Nobody breathed.
The coffee was freezing, and my heart was loud in my ears.
I did not cry, because my dad had taught me you never cry in front of a person who wants you to.
So I took the iced coffee cup out of her hand, filled it from my cart's water tank, and poured it over her white skirt.
"Oops," I said.
Zara screamed.
One of her friends said, "Oh my God," with real delight.
Ramsay Branwell, I would learn later, had not been spoken to like that on this course in eleven years.
He stood with the driver in his fist and looked at the soaked skirt and then at me.
"Miss," he said, in a quiet voice that made his friends stop laughing. "You're fired."
The word went through me.
"For what?"
"For everything. For the hour. For the cart." His jaw tightened. "Leave your keys in the tray."
I was shaking, but I took the key ring off my finger and set it in the cup holder.
Then I turned, because it was the only dignity left.
"Wait."
He had read the name tag over my left pocket.
It said MARA K, because the club printed first names only and a last initial.
But he had picked up the pay slip fluttering from my cart's tray, and that said Mara Ketterman in black type.
He read it twice.
I watched the color drain out of his face, until he could not move.
"Who sent you here?" he whispered.
"Nobody sent me."
The driver slid out of his hand and fell on the grass.
"Un-fire her," he said, to no one, to the whole morning.
Then he walked off the tee box, straight toward the boarded-up building on the ninth fairway, and did not look back.
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