Reaching the office door, I pause just outside the room and knock before leaning in. He’s not at his desk. Damn, maybe he’s not here at all.
A sudden tingling sensation washes over me and I whirl around to find Tyler standing in front of me, towering over me, so very close. There’s a pulse of power to this man that is a bit unnerving. As is the way he stares down at me with hooded eyes.
“Can I help you, Ms. Wright?”
“Allison,” I say and I have no idea what comes over me, but I add, “and if you can’t bring yourself to say her name, just call me Allie. Lots of people do.”
His eyes narrow, the angles of his handsome face darkening to what might be anger, but he’s just too damn reserved to know. I immediately regret my comment, and since I can’t take it back, I quickly add, “Nothing has been done on the auction. It’s a concept, not an actualized event. I can change that, but time is not my friend, nor our friend. I need manpower. I need help, and at least one extra person.”
He studies me again and does so with such intensity that I think he’s assessing my very character in this very moment. I expect questions, I expect rejection. Instead, all he says is, “Consider it done. You’ll have help tomorrow.” He steps around me and enters his office.
I rotate with the intent to follow him inside his office, but as soon as I’ve done so, I find he’s stopped as well, and he’s now in front of me again. “Something else, Ms. Wright?”
Again with the Ms. Wright, I think, and I wonder if he’s trying to present a line between me and him. Why? Because he does so with everyone or because he didn’t do so with the other Allison?
“I’m going to stay in the house,” I announce. “Thank you. It’s a good way for me to be close to my mother without suffocating her.”
“It seems we’ve met at the right time,” he replies, and then he seems to read between the lines, to sense something in me that has him asking, “What do you want to ask me?”
“Why did she leave?”
His lips press together and he cuts his stare, almost as if counting down the beats to control before he turns away from me and walks into the office. He then rounds his desk and sits down behind it. I’m still in the hallway, just beyond the office, and I’m not sure if this is a dismissal or an invitation, but I choose the latter, boldly following his path but pausing on this side of the desk.
Forcing confidence, I sit down in the chair in front of him.
“You don’t know how to take no for an answer, do you?”
“I wasn’t aware you gave me an answer at all,” I state, not sure why I need to know about Allison the way I do, but it’s not about the necklace.
“She left for personal reasons, Ms. Wright,” he replies. “And not everyone is the open book you are about your personal affairs.”
I feel those words with a sharp pang, but I reject them as well. There was a time when he would have been right when I was indeed an open book, but I am far from that place now. But rather than say so, which would, in fact, make me an open book, I find myself challenging him instead. “Would you have hired me without knowing my motivation to take the job?”
“No,” he says, leaning closer. “I would not have hired you without knowing your motivation for taking the job. What else, Ms. Wright?”
“Do I know your motivation for hiring me for the job?”
He leans back in his seat. “I need the auction to be a success. Isn’t that obvious?”
It should be, but it’s not. “I don’t think it is,” I say.
He doesn’t deny my statement. Instead, he asks, “Does my motivation matter?”
“Maybe,” I say, “and you answered my question. I do not know your motivation. Why do I feel like I’m part of a story and I’m the only one who doesn’t know the secrets written on the pages?”
“When you look for something that isn’t there, you create something that is.”
“And yet, when you don’t look closely at what’s around you, sometimes you miss what is right in front of your face.”
“Sounds like one experience you had is dictating this experience,” he counters.
He’s probably not wrong. “Hopefully that’s true and my gut feeling doesn’t become a problem because I’ve decided I want to do this. I really want to do this job.”
He studies me a long moment, seconds ticking by, his blue eyes unreadable, before he says, “Goodnight, Allie.”
Goodnight, Allie.
He’s used my name and it feels like an answer, but it also becomes a question. I’m just not sure what the question is just yet.