Foundation: A Grouchy Geek Romance eBook

I don’t do relationships. I do calculations—and Nicole Kennedy is a problem I can’t solve.When my family’s engineering firm sends me to investigate a sinkhole at her house, I swear I feel a tremor in the foundation of my world.

She’s loud and crass and has no time for nonsense. She also seems to hate everything about me.

Which is normally fine, because I hate everyone. But…I can’t stop thinking about her.

I see her all the time, between the trench swallowing her yard and the corporate relay race our bosses insisted we both run.

Somewhere between all the sprinting and the soil analysis, I find a tiny crack in her armor. Maybe she’ll cut me some slack? Maybe I’ll figure out what makes her tick.

My assistant, Mark, stands outside my office door, timidly fidgeting with a crisp piece of paper. “I’m supposed to give you a message from the boss.” 

“I thought I was the boss, Mark.” I don’t look up from my spreadsheet. Of course I know he’s referring to the company owner, Tim Stag, but I suspect Tim and his wife, Alice, are going to ask me to babysit again while they go out with my best friend and her husband. Who happens to be Tim’s brother.

I can hear Mark breathing rapidly, and I glance up. He’s holding a cream colored hand-written note. The fancy letterhead means Alice helped write it, and that usually signifies a big ask. If Tim wanted a profit and loss report, he’d just send a text. 

Or shout from his office.

Mark rubs his fingers along the paper and shifts his weight, trying to melt into the door frame. I sigh. “I’m not going to watch his baby again if that’s what he’s asking. I told you to tell him no to that shit.”

“It’s something different this time,” Mark says, and walks into my office. He presents the paper to me. 

“Aw hell no. Definitely not. Tell him no.”

Mark flushes. “Donna said I was to tell you this is not negotiable.”

Donna is Tim’s executive assistant and is generally the final say in all matters of actual importance. 

“Hm.” I read it again.

Nicole—you will join the Stag Law marathon relay team, to compete in the Pittsburgh Marathon on Sunday, May 2. We will produce a faster collective time than Beltane Engineering. Alice will be adjusting meals accordingly. Participation is not optional.

—TS

* * *

“Well, shit,” I mutter. “Where do I even start with this?” I say that last bit louder, hoping for an answer, but Mark has already backed out of the office. 

Tim is an avid runner and, thanks to his perky wife yanking him out of a funk, he’s an avid joiner. If there’s a golf outing or boat rowing or softball opportunity to schmooze with other businesses here in Pittsburgh, Tim is on it.

He just usually knows better than to include me in this nonsense. 

Tim never tires of bitching to his family that Beltane has an unfair advantage in the corporate relay challenge. All the big firms bet money on the outcome, which they donate to charities. So of course the charities get in on it until the pressure is pretty high for corporate fitness bragging rights.

It drives Tim bananas that his staff at a sports law firm is not fitter and faster than a squad of gangly math nerds. While the Stag Law senior staffers are out perfecting their golf game to woo clients, the engi-nerds all seem to be distance runners. 

I give zero shits about any of this, but my boss repeatedly reminds me that our law firm represents a lot of athletes. It’s good for our image to appear competitively athletic. Then he reminds me that, as his director of strategy, I’m the one who said that last bit about our image.

Both of Tim’s brothers are huge runners, too, so Tim keeps trying to sneak them on the payroll so they count for our corporate teams. I point out that there’s no way to cook the books to include a retired pro hockey player or a world renowned glass artist on a law firm’s roster. 

I look down at my legs. Thick and solid, they will absolutely catch my cell phone if I drop it while I’m sitting on the toilet. But running? 

Do I have a treadmill desk in my office? Sure. But that’s mostly so I can angry-pace while I’m on the phone. I am not what you might call a runner. I am also not what you might call a person who exercises. 

I think back to all the times my mother insisted I go to the gym or go running to “slim down,” and how violently I had refused to do anything of the kind. There’s a war inside me, where one side is raging against my mother’s body shaming, and the other side is recoiling from anyone—including my sub-conscience—telling me I can’t do something.

I bite my lip. I consider the options. I remind myself that Tim is not my mother, and that his request here is fully related to his own dumb pride and has nothing to do with him wanting me to fit into any sort of mold of what anyone says a woman should look like.

I sigh and weigh my options, deciding I need to call my best friend to figure out why in the hell Tim thought I’d do this. 

I look at the time and figure it’s late enough in the morning that I can call my best friend without pulling her out of some sort of baby nap. Emma is married to Tim’s brother Thatcher, and the whole damn herd of Stags is about as fertile as a pack of rabbits. She and Thatcher just had their second bunny in as many years. 

Since my family are a bunch of assholes and I’m not giving up any of my precious time with Emma, I’ve become an honorary Stag family member. Tim is still my boss, though. We do work to keep each other at a bit of a distance—him because he has control issues and me because he reminds me of my hyper-controlling parents.

It’s different with Emma, though. I pretend to be a grouch about her babies, but I know how many health struggles she overcame to get them here. Hell, I helped her find the right doctors for her epilepsy when we lived together in college. 

Emma’s phone rings and rings. I’m about to hang up in frustration when she picks up on the tenth ring. “Nik,” she whisper yells. “I got them both to sleep! At the same time!”

“If I pretend to be excited for you, can we skip ahead to my drama?” I am excited for Emma. I know how important sleep is for her, and how rarely her kids succumb to this state. She knows I’m just fucking with her. I have an image to maintain, after all.

“Spill,” she says, louder now, and I can hear her walking down the hall of her house. I fill her in on Tim’s memo, and she laughs loudly. “He was just over here complaining about the marathon again yesterday. You know how he gets about not-winning.”

“I do, but how did he determine that *I* am the great, curvaceous hope for Stag Law? I mean, isn’t his wife the next logical step?” 

Each of the corporate teams is supposed to include at least one person who identifies as female. We don’t exactly have a ton of women working here at Stag Law, something I’ve been working on ever since I arrived a year ago. Tim’s wife is the corporate chef here and I know she at least exercises occasionally. I’ve seen her in actual running clothes in the past. 

“Well,” Emma says with her mouth full of something. She must be trying to cram in a meal before her fawns wake up. “If I tell you, you can’t tell them you know.”

“Fuck a duck, is she pregnant again? What’s that—four for them? Five?”

Emma laughs. “Three, Nicole. Tim and Alice will have 3 kids. She’s angling for 4 and he wants to stop at 3, if you care about the family debates.” I do not care about this debate. Like I said—I’m keeping some distance.

“Is there anyone else at work who can do this,” I mutter, as if Emma would know the answer. I mentally scroll through the other female employees, and can see why Tim sent me this invite. The rest are all knocking on retirement’s door or pregnant. I sigh. 

“Will you come with me to buy some workout clothes? That seems like the sort of thing I have to try on in person.”

“Ooh, a trip to the mall is a great idea. I need bath fizzies for once I’m allowed to submerge again. Pick me up at 6?”

I make plans to go shopping with Emma, promising that I’ll be nice to the baby when I pick them up. I’m not actually a monster—I am glad my friend found her perfect life partner and have admitted that the two of them owe it to humanity to reproduce their sexy genes. I just don’t know anything about kids and they make me nervous, like I might break them or fuck them up as much as my parents did me.

I look up the details of the race online. I’ll have to run five miles. In a row. I don’t know if I can do that. That’s more than three times the distance from my house to my office, and I don’t even walk that far each day. Can people really run that far without stopping? 

“Mark!” I shout for him to come back. He pops his head around the doorframe again. “Can you get me a coach or something? What’s it even called when someone shows you how to run?”

Mark’s face breaks into a relieved grin. “That’s the good news,” he gleams. “Mr. Stag also forwarded me a schedule for training events. He has a whole series of memos about team building and workplace morale and cardiovascu—”

“Yeah, yeah. I get it. Shit, Mark. Do you know how my ass is going to look at a team jog? Don’t answer that.” He backs out of the office again.

Mark emails me the schedule and training information for the relay team. Is Tim serious with this bullshit? The training program starts this month. In January. It’s not like we have an empire to run or anything—we all have plenty of time for speed work and zone dieting, whatever the hell that is. The good news about all of this is that the city finally finished work on that recreation path along the river. 

My townhouse in Lawrenceville is at least walking distance from the running path so I don’t have to run along the sidewalk while all the hipsters stand in line for ramen and barbecue. 

Still, though. Running in the snow translates to Tim Stag giving me another raise. I pull up the company calendar app and pencil myself in for a meeting with the CEO.