Brother to the Boss (Managing the Bosses 8)

“What two—you’re shitting me, right? Arthur and Richard? Are you serious? I wasn't doing anything with them. Sure, they were flirting, but before you happened to appear I was going to politely get rid of them. Except you showed up before that was possible. And like you said, I was just making sure that they enjoyed their experience here. Not really something to convene the court about.”

“So, what? You're allowed to flirt as part of doing your job, but I'm not allowed to be a maybe a little flirty with some women who are more likely to come back because of it? Don't you think that's a bit of a double standard? Who owns the club?”

Erica growled at him and spun on her heel, stalking back toward the man she'd been teaching before she came up to find out what was going on with Anna. Mark watched her go. She really did look good when she was angry. Maybe he would tell her that, sometime when she wasn’t already angry with him.

***

Mark didn’t get a chance talk to Anna again. He made his way around the course and through the club building, chatting with the occasional guest and dealing with the million minor crises that made up the rest of his day. Erica had seemingly made herself scarce or was ignoring him, because every time he passed by she was too busy to even look up. Mark didn’t say anything to her about it. If she wanted to sulk, that was fine. He did hope, though, that she would calm down by the time that the club closed.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. When Mark finally dragged himself up to his rooms after the building had finally been closed down and the last employee cars had left the parking lot, she was sitting stiffly in one of the chairs, a book in her hands that she obviously wasn’t reading by the time he opened the door, because she was looking over the top of it at him.

“Yes?” Mark asked, unfastening the knot of his tie and working it loose with a sigh of relief.

“I want to talk about what happened earlier,” Erica said, setting the book down without marking her page. “Maybe we could’ve handled it better.”

“We?” Mark laughed. “I think I handled it just fine. You were the one with the irrational jealousy problem.”

Erica’s lips flattened into a thin line, her eyes narrowing. “Don’t act like that, Mark. You were just as jealous of Arthur and Richard, apparently, regardless of the fact that we were both doing the same thing. Which is why I’m trying to approach this like a mature adult.”

“So now I’m immature? I’ll tell you something, Erica. We weren’t both doing the same thing. I was talking to the woman. Sure, she was a little flirty, but she wasn’t handing out the kind of blatant bullshit that Arthur and Richard were shoveling. And you let them get away with a hell of a lot of it before you said a word to stop them.”

She shook her head. “Unbelievable. I try to approach this with some degree of humility, and acknowledge that I could have spoken to you a little more nicely about the woman you were talking to, and you turn around and treat me like I’ve committed some horrible sin. Yes, they were flirting. Men always flirt with me.” She threw up a hand. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m generally considered pretty attractive. Guys come on to me. I don’t fucking ask them to. But a lot of them get pretty offended when you tell them that you’re not interested, so in a case where I’m trying to keep them happy with the club, I’m going to push that moment back a little in order to have a better chance of my rejection not ending in them storming out.”

“Wow,” Mark said, stripping out of his suit jacket. “You talk about humility and then you come up with something like that. What? Men can’t handle rejection from you because you’re just so perfectly gorgeous?”

Her expression tightened. “Last I checked, you were one of the guys who thinks I’m gorgeous.”

That wasn't quite the way that Mark had intended it to go. “I am,” he said, feeling suddenly guilty. “I do.”

“Unless someone else agrees with you?” Erica demanded. “Then my looks are clearly just overstated and I should shut up?”

“No.” Mark sighed, and stepped forward. “That's not it at all. You're right. I overreacted and I shouldn't have talked to you like that about it. It's not your fault those guys were trying so hard to get in your pants.”

“No,” she snapped, “it isn't. And it's nice that you want to apologize now, but why couldn't you have earlier? Why did you have to make it this big thing where I'm so in the wrong?”

There was hurt in her voice, and in her face, and Mark wanted to step forward and take her in his arms. He resisted the urge. She obviously wasn't going to be in the mood for it.

“I guess I'm just... It's a lot of stress on me, running the country club, and it's been making me kind of irrationally angry about things.”

“I know that it's a lot of stress on you,” Erica said, and her voice had softened. “I try to help you with it as much as I can. You know that.”

“I do know that.”

She sighed, and her crossed arms loosened just a little. “So, you're not actually mad at me for what happened with those guys?”

Mark meant to say that he wasn't. He really did. But he paused, just for an instant, because he did think she could have said something sooner.

Erica must have seen it in his face, because she cut him off before he could even speak, shaking her head.

“You're unbelievable, you know that? What makes you think that you have any say in who I speak to anyway?”

He stared at her. “You mean that? Seriously? Like you're not sleeping in my bed every night? Sharing my drawers? Of course I get to have some say in who you speak to.”

“No,” she hissed. “You don't. The fact that I'm fucking you, and that we maybe even have what I would call a relationship -- although tonight has put that on tenuous footing, for the record, because you're acting like an ass -- doesn't mean that you get to say who I talk to or how. I'm not going to give you or anyone else that kind of control over me!”

“But you want it over me?” Mark demanded. “You were the one who got angry first. I was willing to let the whole thing with those guys go. I didn't say anything to you about it the night that it happened for a reason, you know. But you just had to get all worked up over the fact that I was speaking to a guest. Which is my job.”

“It's my job, too!”