Bossy Grump

I go to the supply room and grab an armful of water bottles.

On the way back to his office, Andrew watches me from the glass wall his marketing team’s office suite sits behind. A girl from accounting peers at me through the gap in a horizontal blind made bigger by her finger.

God.

We won’t be able to hide the crisis forever.

Everyone can feel something dreadfully wrong, and they act like I’ll be the bearer of news, good or bad.

If we lose this contract, there’ll be resignations. No one wants to go down with a sinking ship.

And when people don’t come to work, I get their workload if it’s anything I can do. I’m not sure I can handle more without ending up in the psych ward.

I may have panic-called Brina to vent the day I found out Ward was my Dark Knight from the museum, but this place wasn’t HeronComm bad with her badass boss-turned-husband ruling over his people with an iron fist.

Not until today.

My hands are too full of Fiji bottles to open the door, so I kick it. Nick opens the door for me and grabs a bottle from my mound, rips the cap off, and starts chugging it like a man dying of thirst.

I restock the rest in the cabinet fridge.

Wardhole taps his pen like a gavel on his desk. My eyes snap to those hands, so strong and strangely calloused for a man who grinds away behind an office desk all day. They’re more like a carpenter’s fingers, weathered and imposing, far too good at making me imagine what they’d feel like brushing my skin.

“It’s got to be the personal factor giving Winthrope cold feet,” he grumbles, mostly to himself. “What the hell can we do about it?”

I admire how calmly he asks the question. He hasn’t lost his temper the way he often does—or maybe he only loses his temper with me.

Ha-ha. That bitter laugh in my head must translate to my face.

“Why are you smirking now, Paige? What’s so funny?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“Nothing.”

“It’s never nothing with you,” he says, dark whirls in his eyes ripping the truth out of me, stripping me bare.

Am I flushed? Send help.

I try to hide it with a laugh. “You’re just so calm with this Mayday situation. I was just thinking...maybe you only explode on me.”

“Not just you,” Nick adds with a wince. “You should see how he gets when he’s out of cereal. Ward eats peanut butter puffs like they’re going out of business.”

“Children, can we focus?” Ward asks, darting his eyes away with a hilarious tic of shame that says it’s true.

I snicker, trying to imagine him stuffing 'candy for breakfast' into that mortar of a mouth. So maybe he does have a human side.

Nick snaps his fingers loudly, banishing the thought.

“I’ve got it. We need a reputation wash. The same kind of service I hired to spruce up my internet footprint the last time Osprey was on my ass,” Nick says with a smile, holding out his open hands like he’s just solved string theory.

“Huh?” Ward looks at him. “That was online only. And it didn’t fool Osprey and his machine for very long when your ex was still gallivanting around, talking about your sordid...history.”

“That’s not the point,” Nick snaps, huffing out a breath.

“What’s a reputation wash?” I ask.

Nick turns to me. “It’s like cleaning your personal history. Teams go into Google results, social media, wherever, and try to rank up the positive results over the bad.”

No one says anything. Ward and I exchange a lost glance.

“Trouble is, Winthrope isn’t dicking around on Instagram or Twitter. Plus, The Chicago Tea has a top spot in Google news. Nobody’s going to bury Osprey’s crap with the media empire he’s built. We don’t need a reputation wash. We need a time machine, Einstein,” Ward tells his brother.

Nick’s shoulders sag. His eyes flick back and forth, a shade greener than Ward’s, searching for alternatives and failing.

“Look, he doesn’t want to do business with us because he thinks we’re spoiled frat boys. We need to look old, artsy weird, and boring.”

“No shit, Sherlock. We need to look like our grandparents, but we both know the ship has sailed on that, no thanks to...never mind.” That last word is a whisper as Ward’s eyes meet mine before shifting to Nick again. “Short of defying relativity and re-doing our lives, what you’re asking for is impossible.” He pauses. “And frankly, there is no reputation rinse. Not for real. You saw how fast it was over and done for you.”

“Nah, but that was me. Your reputation isn’t trashed beyond repair, Ward.”

“What?” Ward asks.

I plaster myself to the wall and watch.

“You don’t have a hundred miles of nasty blog posts and tweets like I do. You haven’t dated enough famous girls and had the infamous breakups. You didn’t have Carmen Seraphina crawling over barbed wire, always coming back—”