Blocks away from the main drags in the center of town, the courtyard was quiet, almost spookily quiet. Amy sat still and closed her eyes. She concentrated on her breathing, her heart beat, the sensation of a caffeine-induced electric current coursing through her limbs. What a magnificent way to start a Monday morning, she thought.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” A voice jolted her from her trance.
“Oh,” Amy said, jumping up and knocking her latte onto the ground. She bent over to retrieve it and looked up at the scruffy young man who had interrupted her reverie.
“I’m Amy Prentiss,” she said, holding out her hand for a business-like shake. “I just started working for Rick and I just wanted to stop by and see what we’re working on.”
The young man ignored her outstretched hand. He stood with his hands on his hips.
“I don’t recall Rick talking about any Amy,” he said. “Do you have a business card or something?”
“Uh, no,” she said. “I’m just an admin.”
Immediately, she regretted it. If this young man was someone whom Rick contracted with frequently, calling herself “just an admin” wasn’t going to get them off on the right footing.
“What happened to Gloria?” the young man answered.
“I’m not sure, but I’m her replacement.”
He stepped back and unabashedly looked Amy up and down as if measuring her appearance against his memory of the woman Amy had replaced.
“Hmmm,” he said, finally, stroking his chin and motioning at the rooms behind him. “You want to see inside?”
Apparently, she had passed muster, whatever his criteria were for approval. Amy nodded and followed him to the small office.
“I didn’t get your name,” she said, standing behind him as he unlocked the door.
“Don. I’m the finish guy. I do paint and finish carpentry.”
Amy spent a polite amount of time following Don around the property and nodding appreciatively at his workmanship. He warmed up to his subject quickly, and it was clear that he was proud of what he did. They parted friends.
She had just parked about a half-block down the street from the newly dubbed Corona Inn where she had once worked when she saw Rick come out of the front of the building and clasp hands with a man who looked like another contractor. The sight of him—her first since she left him at the office garage Friday night—sent a shiver through her body. She held her breath, sat, and watched him at work.
Too far away to hear what either man was saying, Amy could nevertheless tell that Rick was in control of the situation. He stood tall and relaxed, showing no hesitation on his end of the conversation. It was a demonstration of quiet authority, and to Amy, it was an aphrodisiac. Now she knew she couldn’t get out of the car until he left.
“Oh, my!” she whispered. “Breathe! Look away and breathe!”
Rick finished with his discussion, slapped the contractor on the back companionably and jumped in his truck. His face turned slightly in her direction, but it didn’t register recognition. She hoped he hadn’t seen her, even though there was nothing wrong with what she was doing. Her only concern was that she’d have to greet him the first time since Friday in public. She wasn’t sure she would handle it well.
They needed to act normal, she vowed. The last thing she wanted was for people to think she was sleeping with the boss. But how could it not happen? The way they both had embraced in the casita, it was clear that neither of them had seduced the other. The attraction couldn’t have been more mutual, could it?
Once Rick left, Amy got out of her car. But then she decided to skip taking a tour or visiting the single-family home on the north side, and she stepped back in to the Z3 and headed to the office. Driving slowly through the Warm Sands neighborhood, enjoying the warm fall morning, she noticed a beautiful stand of trees towering over a shabby, crumbling fence and a tumbled heap of dead and dying mesquite bushes on the south side of the quiet street. She stopped and backed up the car. The mess comprised at least two lots—maybe three. It was rare to find an undeveloped lot this close to downtown, especially in the midst of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.
How could it still be here? she wondered. There was no real estate sign indicating it was for sale. Why hadn’t someone built something fantastic on it? It would be perfect for a low, sprawling mansion, or a small hotel. She noticed a rather nice small inn just two doors away. Perhaps the zoning was right, too.
Amy looked for number on the garage door of the house across the street. She drove up to the next intersection and took note of the street name. She needed to share this with Rick. She didn’t know if he ever had the chance to build something new from scratch, from the dirt up, but this would be a perfect place to do it.
~
Sandra greeted Amy a bit coldly when she got to the office, and Amy jotted a note on her ever-evolving “to-do” list to ask the receptionist to lunch sometime this week. She really wanted to maintain a good relationship with the only other woman in the office by finding out and fixing whatever might have caused this apparent, sudden distance between them.
Amy turned on her computer and grabbed a cup of coffee while she waited for it to boot up.
She had beaten Rick into the office, giving herself some time to bury her head in the tasks she’d started the week before and take her mind off of the prurient aspects of her job. But, first, she left a note on his door.
“Let me know when you’re in. Amy,” she wrote.
She wanted to talk to him as soon as possible about wanting to keep their new relationship, whatever it was, secret. She waited anxiously. An hour passed before he walked by her open door. She could hear him pause in front of his, and then walk back toward her.
He leaned around the transom. “Meet in my office?” he proposed in an all-business tone.
Amy looked up from her computer. “Yes, right away,” she said, sounding as efficient and cool as she could. She got up, straightened the creases on the front of her khaki pants with sweaty hands, and walked into his office with a notebook.
“Where were you this morning?” he asked, sounding anything but besotted with her. His voice was all business.
“I drove around, scouting for potential properties,” she answered flatly. “Do you want me to close the door?”
Rick nodded. As soon as she turned back around to face him, he reached for her. His kiss was urgent and demanding, and she responded in kind. It was exactly the confirmation she needed, and had needed it as soon as possible. He held her face to his, his fingers deep in her hair, his other hand pressing tightly on her back. She pressed her hips up to his, and felt his crotch stiffening. Finally, he let his lips move up to her eyes, her forehead, and her hair, and she leaned against him.
“We have to keep this a secret,” she whispered, surrounded by his arms.
“Yes, I agree,” Rick said, his lips next to her ear. “Whatever this is.”
~
Neither of them seemed to be in a hurry, but eventually, Amy pulled away, and Rick let her go. She sat down on his couch, and he slipped quickly behind his desk. She imagined he was relieved to be able to hide one particular part of his anatomy behind it.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s see if we can get some work done.”
“Agreed,” she said. “After all, that is what we’re here for.”
“Right,” he answered, stretching the word out while holding her eyes. “We have to figure this out sooner or later.”
“So, hey,” she said, opening her notebook and finding the address she had written down. “I found this property this morning. I think it would be an incredible location for a small hotel, and it’s greenfield. There’s nothing there now but dirt and some nice palm trees.”
“Where?” He looked pleased.
She read the address.
“Oh.” His face dropped. “Yes, I know the property. Every developer in town does. We’ve all been trying to get our hands on it for years, but the old lady who owns
it lives in Mexico, and no one has been able to get her to sell it. No one knows why she’s hanging onto it.”
“Money, perhaps?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Rick sat back. Finally, they’d both come back down to earth and could practice, if not actually perform, some semblance of businesslike decorum. “I understand some of the offers people have made for it were pretty astronomical. It seems she just doesn’t want to part with it.”
“Or do anything with it?”
“Neither.”
“Well, maybe I can look into that,” Amy suggested.
“No, it isn’t worth your time.” Rick shook his head. “I’ve been around long enough to know when a seller isn’t going to sell.”
Amy frowned. Was he making a comment on her naiveté? Yes, she was new to the business—brand new, in fact. But she had been so excited about her discovery, she couldn’t help feeling deflated. Maybe this job wasn’t going to work out, she thought. Maybe the emotional highs and lows were going to be too extreme, now that she cared so much about what he thought of her.
“Hey, don’t take that wrong,” Rick said, apparently noticing her despair. “I’m glad you’ve still got an open mind about these things. Perhaps I’m a little jaded after doing this for more than a decade. So, don’t stop looking. Just believe me, that property isn’t going to work.”
“No, I don’t mean to question your judgment,” she said, waving off his concern to convince herself. “And besides, I’ve got plenty to do.”
“Any chance I could see a list of possible COO candidates today?” he asked.
Amy nodded. “I’ll work on that first.”
“Thanks,” he said and turned to flick on his computer. “Let’s meet again this afternoon.”
He sure seems good at turning his emotions off and on, Amy thought, walking back to her office and sitting down. She needed to develop a little bit of that skill. She’d never had to use it in an office setting before, but now was the time. If they were going to convince everyone in the office that nothing was going on between them but work, she needed to get good at keeping her feelings at bay.
Later that day, she had the list of potential COO candidates ready, and they met again in his office, this time with the door open. She handed him a thick file, filled with summaries of each candidate she’d located, their resumes and print-outs of any news stories she had found about them on the Internet.
“How did you find all of this stuff?” he asked, clearly impressed with the amount of information she’d been able to dig up. “Did these guys give this stuff to you?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “None of them even knows we’re looking at him or her. I used a few data services I have used in the past. You’d be surprised how much you can find out about people without them even knowing you’re doing it. Resumes are easy. It’s the personal stuff that’s harder.”
“These are legal sources?”
“Absolutely, but you do pay for them,” she said. “Surprisingly, less than you might expect.”
“Well, let’s take a look,” he said. He gestured toward the big work table, and Amy felt an involuntary smile cross her lips. Suddenly, she could imagine using that big table for …
No! she told herself. Don’t go there. Focus!
They sat side by side, and he flipped through the first few pages slowly. She had put the material on the candidate she thought has the best choice on top, and he seemed to consider the guy worthy as well. He looked at the next one slowly as well. When he got to the third choice, however, he glanced at the first page of her summary, and didn’t even pull off the paper clip holding the information about the candidate together before flipping past it.
Amy leaned over and turned over a corner of the rejected packet to see who it was. Too bad, she thought, I thought Diana was a good possibility.
He continued through a few more of the candidates, and then flipped another one over, unread. She glanced at it as well.
The two packages he refused to look at were both about women, she realized. But she held her tongue. There was one more woman toward the bottom of the pile, but still worth considering. When he got to her, he flipped it over, too. He then pulled out three of the packages, and handed them to her.
“Let’s look into these three,” he said. “I think they all look promising. Good job.”
Amy accepted the pile and glanced at the names. She had been right. All three were men.
What the hell? She got up, turned on her heel, and took the papers back to her desk. She closed the door of her office, sat down, and fumed.
Was his mother right? Was he incapable of working with a woman in his office above the level of an admin? If that was the case, what did that mean for her future?
~ Ten: Rick ~
Rick had to figure out how to keep Tom happy and on his construction team before he could concentrate on the three candidates for COO he’d chosen out of Amy’s pile. He made some phone calls to the people he usually used to put up signs at his construction sites. He explained that he needed something smaller than usual, something appropriately priced considering the low visibility it was likely to have on a street with so little traffic. The off-the-cuff bids he got still seemed expensive for the value the sign would bring.
“Guy, could you come in here?” he called over the intercom to his part-time marketing guy.
“Sure boss,” Guy answered and walked through Rick’s office door a half-minute later.
“I’ve got this problem,” Rick said. “Sit down.”
Rick explained the issue, the challenge of finding a way to give Tom a little publicity without spending wasted money on an expensive sign in such a low-traffic area.
“Any other ideas come to mind?” Rick said. “How can I help this guy out and keep him on by crew?”
Guy frowned and thought for a few long minutes.
“Nothing comes to mind,” he said. “It makes even less sense to spend more on newspaper ads than on the sign. No one even reads the newspaper anymore. Except online. I could check online ad costs, but even those will likely be more expensive than just going with the damn sign. And if that’s what Tom wants, at least you know you’ll keep him happy that way.”
One Guy was gone, Rick decided to ask Amy about it. How quickly she’d become his go-to person, he realized, even as he regretted the admission. Still, she’d done some PR before, hadn’t she? He walked into her office, asked for permission to interrupt what she was doing, and sat in the chair across from her desk. He explained his challenge with Tom.
“Let’s create a Facebook page and feature Tom and the Corona Inn project on it this week,” she said quickly, as if she’d been working on coming up with the solution for days. “I’m thinking that once he saw it, Tom would love it. He’ll have no idea whether it will do him any good, but my guess is, it won’t matter. He’ll just love being the star of the page for a week.”
“Just the week?” Rick was trying to catch up. “The page would only be up for a week?”
“Well, every week, you could do a different blog post—actually, I could write it for you, but no one would need to know—featuring one of your contractors,” she said. It seemed like she believed in the idea, but for some reason, she wasn’t excited about it. “It will give them some publicity, it will cost you virtually nothing to set up, and we’ll spread word about the page with a few early page boosts.”
“What are page boosts?”
“Oh, you pay Facebook a little, say fifty bucks, and it will post your new page on a bunch of other people’s feeds based on the criteria you give them.” Her delivery was deadpan.
“What are feeds?” he asked.
Amy rolled her eyes. “That’s the stuff a person sees when they look at their page. Basically other people’s posts, messages directly meant for them, new items, stuff Facebook’s algorithms decide matches their interests.”
Rick didn’t need Amy’s eye roll to understand how stupid he sounded: all of this social media activity
was going on and he had no idea how it worked. “How do you know all this stuff?”
“How do you not?” she said it flatly, without any hint of humor.
Rick blinked and hesitated. Something seemed amiss. Her answers seemed wooden. Hadn’t they just exchanged a fairly meaningful kiss in his office? Hadn’t he just accepted three of her suggested COO candidates without question?
“Hey,” he said, reaching an arm across her desk, inviting her to give him her hand. “Is something wrong? You seem a bit out of sorts.”
Now it was Amy’s turn to hesitate. She neither leaned toward him nor took his hand. She sat back and then did that thing that women did: she crossed her arms over her chest and leaned away. He knew the gesture: it meant “I’m now taking care of myself, not you, and I’m not in the mood for your sweetness.”
“Nothing is wrong,” she said, using the same tone of voice Rick had heard women use since he was old enough to observe them—the tone that said, “Something is very wrong, and I’m sorry but you’re going to have to figure it out yourself, sucker.”
“Okay.” Rick knew he wasn’t going to find out any more for a while. These things usually took some time, and eventually he would figure out what he’d done wrong, or what had happened to her, or whatever. But he knew he couldn’t press.
“Do you think you can set up this Facebook page?” he asked, moving ahead.
“Yes, but shouldn’t you ask Guy to do it?”
“I talked to Guy a minute ago, and he didn’t come up with the idea, you did. Don’t you want to do it?”
“No, boss,” she said with a tinge of sarcasm. “I’m perfectly willing to fill in when the men in the office are unable to deliver.”
“What does that mean?” Rick said. “Is that some kind of reference to the gender imbalance here? Did you get that from my mother?”
“No, Rick,” she said. “I got it from you. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got plenty to do. I would like to get that Facebook page up by the end of the day. Does Guy have some photos on his computer I can use?”
One Way to Succeed (Casas de Buen Dia Book 1) Page 10
