She’d kept him happy that entire summer, and by the end of it he’d saved enough money to emigrate to the States where he’d worked his ass off doing what he still thought of as donkey labor. Anywhere he could find it.
The girls, long-legged American beauties, had found him.
He punched in the cell number the attorney had given him. It rang and rang and then a robotic voice announced that the number was no longer working.
OK.
Maybe that was a sign…
Except that she had a regular phone as well as the mobile and he had that number, too.
Quickly, he punched in the numbers for the landline. The phone rang five times. Then another electronic voice announced that there was no one there to take the call.
At the sound of the tone, please leave a message.
Marco cleared his throat. “Emily. This is Marco Santini. Do you remember me?”
He winced. Of course she would remember him. Not even twelve hours had gone by since they’d met. Since he’d kissed her like a man who’d lost control of his sanity.
“What I mean to say is that I have a job for you. A one-day job. Playing piano.” Stupido! What else would it be? “At the ceremonial opening of that building we talked about, Twenty-two Pascal. You’ll get some good publicity out of it. Press, TV, that kind of thing. We’d intended to fill the atrium with flowers but that fell through and we thought, my designer thought, candles and some flowers and a piano, a white Steinway grand…”
Marco clamped his lips together. Talk about information overload!
“If you are interested, please call my Human Resources manager, Jane Barnett, at 212-555-1740 She is the person who will handle the arrangements. You will meet with her. You will not see me at all…”
He rolled his eyes as he let his pathetic little speech trail off. Then he said a brisk “Ciao” and ended the artless call.
******
Wasn’t this supposed to be the age of the paperless office?
It wasn’t, and without his PA to sift thr
ough reports and memos and cull the ones that didn’t require his attention, he never got around to compiling the documents he needed for tomorrow’s trip to Europe.
Just before noon, he made an attempt at involving the girl sitting in for his former PA. Bad move. Within minutes, she was in tears. When he asked—calmly, he was certain—what the problem was, she said that he talked too fast, wanted her to do too many things at once, and what on earth did he mean when he said “Tell Moscow that I agree.” Tell whom in Moscow? And to what did he agree?
Marco started to explain, heard his voice rising, wondered, albeit briefly, if any of this could even remotely be the reason so many assistants flew the coop abandoned that as nonsense and shooed the girl from his office.
He had lunch at his desk—the temp grew so flustered at the idea of phoning in his order that he did it himself. A green salad with oil and that special vinegar on the side. No, he did not know the name but how many types could there be? Cheese on a roll. Not just any cheese. The one his PA’s, all of them, always knew to order. And not just any roll. The long one without seeds and, Cristo, why would he know what it was called?
The deli clerk who took his call was new—was this a day of new-to-the-job fools? So it was no great surprise that when his lunch arrived, it was the wrong roll, the wrong cheese, and the salad on the side was all wrong.
He stuffed everything back into the bag it had come in and tossed it into the wastebasket.
Coffee. At least he could have coffee. His PA always made it and no way would he ask the trembling girl outside his door to do so.
Marco pushed back his chair and got to his feet. Surely they made coffee in the staff room. The sight of him would probably send everybody scuttling but his mood was going from bad to worse and, frankly, he didn’t give a damn whether they scuttled or not.
His phone rang. He grabbed for it and snarled, “What?”
It was the garage, with the first good news of the day. His Ferrari had not been stolen. It had been misplaced.
“Misplaced?”
Misplaced. The manager launched into an explanation. Marco cut him short, thanked him, hung up the phone and made a note to find a different garage.
The phone rang again. “It’s Jane Barnett,” his HR manager said.