This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 Claire Adams
Chapter One
Ian
This is what happens when you do favors for friends.
Jonathan asked if I’d do him a solid and give his friend an interview since we needed to hire a new secretary. What were the words he’d used? Smokin’ hot AND intelligent? I looked over my steepled fingers at the girl sitting nervously on one of the two chairs on the other side of my desk. The chairs were maple, straight-backed, very fine craftsmanship but no cushions, so whoever was sitting there would have to perched upright, slightly uncomfortable. At attention, if you will. My own ass was luxuriating in an ergonomic leather executive chair—Tuscan leather, mahogany accents, ability to recline, retractable footrest. I was reclining now, as a matter of fact, wishing that I had not agreed to do this favor for Jonathan. I mean, this girl, Daisy, was attractive, sure, but she dressed in such a way that was trying to disguise it, with her black A-line skirt that went past her knees, her blouse buttoned all the way up, those black, school marm oxfords. This girl didn’t need a job; she needed a goddamn crash course in fashion.
But we’d just sat down, and if I didn’t at least go through the formalities, I’d have to endure Jonathan’s bitching, and I already heard enough of that as it was.
“So,” I said. “You’re friends with Jonathan?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. She cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said again, a little more loudly. “We met at the gym.”
“And you were previously employed at . . . where?” I leaned forward and rifled through some papers on the desk, though there was nothing there that would give me any clues about her previous work experience.
“Shear Genius.”
“The hair salon?”
“Yes. I was the administrative assistant there.”
“You were the secretary.”
She shifted. “The administrative assistant. I handled all the reception duties, scheduling, payroll, filing, and some light bookkeeping.”
I nodded. “Okay, right. So you were the secretary.” I hated shit like that; it was like calling a janitor a custodial engineer. She was answering phones and making appointments and doing reminder calls; therefore, she was a secretary. Maybe she wasn’t fetching coffee or transcribing things on a typewriter, but she was still a secretary. “That’s essentially what we’re looking for here,” I said. “Someone to answer the phones, manage the calendar, keep the office in order.”
I decided not to mention that the reason for the vacancy was because I’d slept with the last secretary, and then there’d been this little misunderstanding about the true meaning of “no strings attached.” I had explicitly stated that, whispered it in Annie’s ear, in fact, right before I fucked her across this very desk, and she’d been more than agreeable.
“I did all of that at Shear Genius,” she said. “I’m a very organized person, and I think the best way to ensure that a business runs smoothly is to keep things organized and maintained.” She continued to espouse on what she thought a business needed to run successfully. I tuned this out and watched her talk instead. Watching someone talk can often give you a whole lot more of information about who they are than the actual words that are coming out of their mouths.
This was often how I’d decide whether or not my company, Hard Tail Security, was going to take someone on as a client. I was in the Marines for ten years, signing up for recruit training the day I turned eighteen. It was hell, of course, but paled in comparison to all the shit my dickhead stepfather put me through. I left the Marines at twenty-eight, after three deployments. Jonathan and I ended up reconnecting; he’d gone to college after high school and had graduated with a degree in business, but had taken an interest in Japanese jujutsu. We’d gone out to get drinks, had a few more than we intended, and started shooting the shit about how great it would be to start a security firm. Perhaps not the most glamorous or enlightened origin story, but there you go.
We started small but grew every year—last year we provided security for the community event when the Dalai Lama came to speak; our services were also used regularly for Seamus McAllister, who ran a high-stakes underground poker club, but also when he threw his daughter’s sweet sixteen. (Besides the poker, Seamus was the biggest mover of illicit drugs in the city, renowned for his ability to always be able to escape being sentenced, though the cops and D.A. had certainly tried.) In other words: our clients ran the gamut from the holiest of holy to the morally deficient. We didn’t discriminate. Well, we did, but it wasn’t based on the criteria that some other companies might have used.
I continued to watch Daisy talk, still not really hearing what she was saying. She was earnest, honest. She was the sort of person you could trust not to slack off if you weren’t around to oversee what she was doing. All good qualities, but the drama with Annie was still fresh in my mind—the tears, the pleading, eventually, the threats. I didn’t do well with anyone threatening me, and I finally had to tell her, in no uncertain terms, that she needed to back the fuck off. I’d never hit a woman, of course, but in that case, it had been especially tempting. She couldn’t take no for an answer. When a guy can’t take no for an answer, he’s a misogynistic asshole; when it’s a girl, she’s just persistent, or, as Annie claimed, in love.
Not that Daisy was anything like Annie. Annie had put her goods on display from day one, favoring short, tight skirts, ultra-high heels, and blouses that her cleavage was just begging to be released from. Daisy didn’t have any of that on display, but my highly trained eye could tell that under all those prudish, dull clothing, she had a banging body.
Annie was still calling me, was the thing. She wasn’t calling from her number—I didn’t know whose phone she was using—but I kept getting these calls from random numbers I didn’t recognize. Sure, it could’ve been some scam or telemarketer, but I knew it was her. Daisy wasn’t like her in the least, I knew that, but I didn’t want the distraction.
Now she was looking back at me, the tip of her tongue coming out of her mouth to wet her bottom lip. She had stopped talking and was waiting for me to say something, maybe to respond to whatever it was that she’d just been saying, though I hadn’t heard a word of it. I laced my fingers together and stretched them, bending my fingers back, arms extended. This was a tactic I often used when caught in the situation of being expected to answer a question I hadn’t been listening to. Let a few seconds go by and then do something physical—it didn’t have to be anything big, it could be something as simple as smothering a yawn—and then respond however you felt. Your response didn’t even need to have anything to do with what the person had just asked.
“We’ve had a lot of interest in the position,” I said, relaxing my forearms. I leaned my head to one side, then the other, and felt a vertebra
te in my neck crack. Ah. That was better. “I don’t know if Jonathan mentioned that to you or not.”
“No,” she said, looking down at her lap. “He didn’t.”
“I’m only telling you this because we’ve had a number of qualified applicants. So it’s not going to be an easy decision to make.”
“I completely understand.”
We sat there for a minute, neither of us saying anything. I leaned back in my chair. She was waiting for me to speak, but I was enjoying watching her squirm in the silence. Awkward silences can tell you a lot about a person. Some people will immediately try to fill them with chatter; others will shut down, and others will start fiddling with the nearest thing they can get their hands on. Daisy, while she looked a bit uncomfortable, folded her hands in her lap, looked me in the eye for a second, and then looked over my shoulder, toward the window, as though something very captivating had just caught her eye.