Tempting the Corporate Spy

by Angela Claire

  “I’ve already taken the liberty of transferring her to Peterson with your highest recommendation. She’s four floors above your office as we speak, and if she manages to find her way to the elevator tonight it’ll be a miracle.”

  “Jen!”

  “Don’t worry. She’ll have plenty to do. I sent that moldering old Rolodex with her too.”

  “All right then.” Liv sighed, pushing Jen’s hip off her desk to get at a paper she’d been sitting on. “I’m fine with whoever you hired to replace her. I assume that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Not exactly. But it’s a wonderful coincidence because I have fantastic news for you.”

  She smiled at her friend. “Somehow I doubt that.”

  “You know how interested I am in management dynamics and new approaches to corporate interflow?”

  “Well, kind of in one ear and out the other.”

  “Precisely when I was thinking about this problem with Cecily and what to do about it, I got a proposal from a management consultant who has some ground-breaking ideas on the subject.”

  “Miss Sealy?”

  At the sound of the deep voice, Liv looked around her friend’s shoulder to the door of the office suite. Jen studiously did not.

  There was a really cute guy standing there. Nice eyes, friendly smile.

  Liv usually didn’t care for Jen’s boy toys, but if this was her latest, Liv had to admit she was jealous. Of course, the guy had called Jen “Miss Sealy.” Maybe he wasn’t her love interest, but one of the countless junior analysts who followed Jen around from time to time, supposedly to learn the HR ropes. Come to think of it, other than his dimensions—he was tall, with broad shoulders and narrow hips—and the fact he was attractive, the guy standing in the doorway didn’t strike her as Jen’s usual romantic type. Not enough of the bad boy in him. But he didn’t look like one of Jen’s trainees either. Not well dressed enough.

  “Am I at the wrong place?” the guy asked, taking a tentative step into the office suite.

  “Now don’t blow your top,” Jen whispered, “but while your secretary’s desk is empty, we’re going to have a corporate consultant ‘shadow’ you.”

  “What?” Liv asked, too shocked to keep her voice down. “Me? What’s the idea there? I hate consultants!”

  “Don’t be rude,” Jen admonished in an undertone before she turned to the guy in the door. “Come on in and meet Liv, Jon.”

  “I’m not rude, I’m just…” Her voice trailed off by the time the consultant was right in front of them, all tall, dark, and handsome.

  “Hey.” He held out a hand to shake hers. “I’m Jon Foster.”

  Liv looked at his outstretched hand, then took it and stood up. Twenty-seven years old, a couple of fancy degrees to her name, and Liv still couldn’t get used to sitting in a real office and shaking hands and everything. Just like a grown-up. Who in their right mind was going to invest millions of dollars in something she developed?

  She squelched the thought. Fake it until you make it. That was what guys did, right?

  “Hi, Jon. I’m afraid you’re catching me off guard here.” She glared at Jen, who didn’t have the decency to look the least bit guilty.

  “No problem if you’re not set up for me yet. I know I pitched this idea very suddenly, but the timing seemed right.”

  “Just perfect,” Jen said. “Jon here consulted at Pitz and Lunder. You know, the law firm?”

  Liv shook her head.

  “Well, that place functions at a crazy pace. Jon consults on corporate organizational matters, such as admins and other things. It just so happened that right as we decided to replace your admin, Jon pitched this idea of evaluating the optimum use of resources. He starts out with one executive and then fans out. He’s going to do your evaluation pro bono even before we decide whether we want to engage him for tackling other parts of the organization.”

  “I don’t even know what that means, Jen. Evaluate me how? Like an efficiency expert?”

  “That’s an old-fashioned term,” the consultant said. “It’s more complicated than that, but I promise not to be intrusive. Forget I’m here.”

  “You two will get along great. He’s going to be exactly what you need,” Jen said.

  Liv flashed her friend another dirty look. Right. Some corporate-speak guy hanging around, distracting her with how cute he was and wasting her time by trying to discuss allocation or whatever. “I don’t need anything, Jen. So you can find some other guinea pig to”—she glanced sort of apologetically at the guy—“experiment on.”

  “Nonsense,” Jen said briskly. “This is the perfect place for Jon to start his evaluation. You’ve got all this empty office space from the last bout of layoffs, and extra computers—he’s going to crunch some benefit numbers for me while he’s here, so you can set him up on Cecily’s computer and he can spend a few days looking at what she did, or didn’t do, for you. And then of course he can interview you and make recommendations.”

  “An organization has to examine how it operates every once and a while, Miss Altman,” he added, “to keep everything running at top speed. Pitz and Lunder, for example, was a real sweatshop, but for all they were driving their people, they weren’t getting the proper returns. With just a few tweaks and behavioral modifications, I was able to change that.”

  “I’m sure you were,” Jen assured him. “That’s why we’re placing you with our newest up and comer. Liv’s a rising star here.”

  Jen’s usual shameless plug left Liv cold, seeing as how she was still kind of annoyed at her.

  “I’ll be going now,” Jen said airily, giving Jon a little wave.

  “I’ll walk you to the elevator.” Liv grasped her friend’s elbow, steering her out.

  “No need. I know how busy you are and I wouldn’t—”

  Liv hustled her friend out and shut the office door behind them. “This isn’t funny.”

  “What?” she responded, all innocence, sauntering over to the elevators.

  “A consultant? Please. I don’t need a consultant. Why pick on me? What are you really doing here? Trying to fix me up, maybe?”

  “Get over yourself, hon. You have a lot to learn.”

  “So you keep telling me. About what, though? That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  Jen shook her head reprovingly. “Management and corporate theory can improve the status quo, Liv.”

  “Even if I did believe that”—she pointed back to the closed office door—“are you trying to tell me you didn’t notice how cute that guy is?”

  “Of course I noticed. I’m not dead from the neck down like you are these days. But I wasn’t trying to fix you up. Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not in seventh grade for God’s sake.”

  Liv eyed her suspiciously. Those seventh grade fix ups had been disastrous. Adolescent boys paired with Liv always ended up pining after Jen. Adult boys, too, come to think of it.

  “I merely thought that if you weren’t ever going to make time to date a real guy, you could at least have a reminder of what you’re missing.” Jen jabbed the button for the elevator and it uncharacteristically came right away.

  She stepped in and smiled at Liv. “And it’s free. So go back in there and put that gorgeous guy to use.”

  “I’m not even going to respond to that ridiculously easy double entendre,” Liv said irritably as the doors closed.

  When she went back into her office, Jon was still standing there, waiting for instructions, maybe, or an invitation to sit down. He smiled at her tentatively. Yep, first impression still held. Absolutely adorable. An annoyingly predictable heat flushed her cheeks. Someday she was going to forget about tackling piracy on the Internet and do something really useful, like figure out how to save women from blushing when they were nervous.

  She didn’t have a lot of practice around hot guys. That was Jen’s thing. Liv had always gone for the geeky guys who could speak computer with her.

  “You didn’t know I was coming, I tak
e it.”

  “Uh, no. Afraid not.” She laughed. “I didn’t even know my secretary was leaving.”

  He was dressed casually in a plain white oxford and khakis, but so cool looking it made her glance down at her own clothes. She wasn’t in her usual “I’m a responsible adult” outfit because it was the once-a-week Jeans Day at the company. So she was wearing the standard t-shirt and comfortable jeans she always wore when the nine-to-fivers cleared out of the building. My Morning Jacket blazed out from the front of her shirt.

  He gestured at it. “I like that group.”

  “Yeah. Me too.” Like duh? Why else would she be wearing their name on her chest?

  Jon looked around at the suite, complete with leather couch, coffee table, and fiftieth story view of the city. “Nice.”

  “I’ve got a connection in HR. They assign the offices. I hope you’re not going to recommend me out of here and into a cube.”

  He grinned, a lopsided, not-quite-full smile that made him even better looking. “I like cubes. They’re cost efficient.”

  Uh oh.

  “Do you mind if I sit right outside your office to start with?”

  She nodded at the cube that Cecily had vacated without her noticing. She got so wrapped up in her work most of the time that she didn’t pay attention to anything going on around her. She would have liked the chance to say goodbye to Cecily, the woman she’d worked with for over a year. Thank her. Maybe she’d pop up to Peterson’s. “Yeah. Sure. There’s a phone. Computer. The works.”

  He sat at the now-empty desk and turned on the computer, a ridiculously easy task but one her former secretary rarely managed. It didn’t matter. Whatever Liv needed on the computer she, of course, did for herself.

  “Kind of lonely around here,” he said.

  Her office was on one of the floors that had been fully occupied before the latest round of layoffs. The corporate guys at the top were always trying to “cut the fat”—only below them of course—or operate “lean” or whatever the hell they called it. The last attempt had left the floor relatively deserted and her with a lavish office, thanks to Jen’s pull.

  “I have to admit, I still don’t understand what it is you’ll be doing here…er, consulting on, I mean.”

  “It’s a micro-approach to corporate mechanics. That’s why we start with one employee at a time, usually a high potential one like you. It’s a period of observation at first. I tend to sit in for the admin in order to check the organizational skeleton, if you will, with no buffers, and then I work outwards.”

  Sounded like corporate-speak to her. She looked at him blankly and he laughed. “For now, I’ll just sit out here, go through your secretary’s files, and observe the pace of the office. I have those benefit numbers to crunch for Miss Sealy as well, sort of a freebie for the opportunity.”

  “I still don’t think I’m a good place to start,” Liv objected. “I work by myself in my office and I’m not sure Cecily had any files.”

  “Well, let’s take it one step at a time. You’d be amazed what I can glean from this approach.”

  “If you say so.” Liv leaned over him and flicked a few keys to delete Cecily as the user and add him. “Let me help you get set up on the network, then. You’ll need a password.”

  “Uh, let’s use—”

  “Don’t tell me!” she warned automatically. God, for whatever kind of corporate management guru he was, he must be an absolute neophyte at computers. “Type it in yourself.”

  “Oh, right. I always forget about that part. I put yellow stickies with my password all over the place.”

  She nodded, appalled at the thought. Good thing she never let any document of consequence go any farther than her own laptop. Corporate policy required it be on the network as well, but she had her work so tightly secured no one was getting to it but her. No one in this company, certainly, and though it was kind of bragging to admit it, no one at all, anywhere.

  “Just kidding,” he added. “I’m not quite that bad. Almost, but not quite.”

  He typed something, then retyped it at the cue as she watched. He wasn’t anything like the kind of guys she usually hung out with, computer programmers at heart, all of them. He had longish hair—not too long, but enough to fall over his eyes and force him to brush it away casually. Black and sort of curly, it dusted the top of his collar. She wondered how it would feel to run her fingers through it. Despite the wave, she didn’t think it would be all bristly, since it looked shiny and sort of silky. His skin didn’t look bristly either but tanned and smooth, though with his coloring he would probably have a five o’clock shadow by the end of the day, like James Franco.

  “Okay, done. I entered it in twice.”

  Being so close, Liv noticed the color of his eyes when he looked back up at her. Blue with long lashes. She must have been staring at him too long, because he cocked his head as if to ask a question. She stopped hovering and stood up. Most of the guys she knew—and again, she couldn’t help comparing him—weren’t keyed into even the most basic social cues. She could have stared at them for ages when they were at a computer screen and they wouldn’t have noticed. She’d have to grope their crotch or something before they’d stir. And even then it was a maybe.

  “So how did you end up being a consultant?” she asked, to get her mind off his dark blue eyes—and groping his crotch. “Or are you a novelist or actor or something trying to make ends meet?”

  “No. Nothing as lofty as that. I got my master’s in corporate theory and that’s about as high as I go in terms of aspirations. No big purpose to it or anything, but it pays the bills and I do like it. I was actually an admin myself while I was getting my degree, believe it or not. Women executives seem to like having a guy for their secretary.”

  “Fancy that,” she muttered. One who looked like him, for sure.

  “So, for now, give me whatever you would give your secretary to do. We’ll interact on that level while I evaluate. You’d be amazed how often a corporate bureaucracy is structured to foster myths that don’t suit it anymore. You know what I mean?”

  She smiled slightly. “Not really, but I’ll leave the management theory to you. I will point out that, unless your number crunching will occupy you all day, you might want to bring a book here, or your iPod, or whatever. Or plan to surf a lot.”

  “Hmmm.”

  She wondered what he made of that, a little worried.

  “I tend to hold off on interviewing a subject until I’ve been in place long enough to achieve optimal use of both our times, but just as a primer, what is it exactly that you do? Miss Sealy said you were some kind of genius and were developing ‘something’ that was going to make ‘somebody’ invest a lot of money in the company.”

  “Jen’s my biggest fan. A bit of an exaggeration though. I’m just working on prototypes.”

  He cocked his head to the side again. “Okay, enough said. But if it works out, I wouldn’t object to stock options as part of my eventual consulting arrangement. A lot of folks at Google are hanging out now on yachts. That kind of thing.”

  She laughed. “Is that your master plan?”

  He leaned back, relaxed, stretching his long legs out. He had running shoes on. Bright green Nikes with black stripes. She knew once Jen tore her eyes off his handsome face and hot bod, she’d be correcting the footwear.

  “I don’t have any big plan,” he said easily. “Just getting along.”

  She wasn’t sure she even knew any guys who weren’t driven toward some grand purpose, in one sense or another. If not monetary then academic at the very least. Of course, she didn’t exactly know many guys these days, especially in the biblical sense. Or any.

  “You don’t approve?” he asked.

  “Of what?”

  “Not having a plan.”

  She shrugged. “No. That’s fine. It’s not my place to approve or disapprove anyway. I’m not used to it, that’s all.”

  He glanced around the plush corporate space. “I don’t
have to ask whether you have one. You’re doing pretty well for yourself for, what…thirty?”

  The fact he’d guessed she was older than she really was shot a flare of irritation through her, which it shouldn’t have. Looking too young wasn’t a plus for a woman’s career path. But she couldn’t help the frown. “I’ve always been pretty serious,” she admitted.

  That was an understatement. Concentrating on school and then on work, on what she could do with her mind, had been a welcome distraction from a home life structured, such as it was, by a single mother who didn’t know the meaning of structure. For as long as she could remember, Liv had gotten herself up for school—and checked in on her mom who was more likely than not passed out from rum and sleeping soundly. Any extracurricular activities Liv made it to back then were thanks to a ride from Jen’s mom, her own being too scattered to get around to it.

  Not that this hot consultant needed to hear all about her personal baggage on the very first day. Or ever. Only Jen knew how Liv had grown up. Maybe that was why she cherished her old friend so much. Jen knew the whole of her, not just the supposedly successful young go-getter. If it wasn’t for scholarships, and a dedicated high school counselor’s insistence on her pursuing them, Liv probably wouldn’t have even gone to college.

  So yeah, she had a plan. A plan to never end up like her own lovely, damaged, destructive mother.

  “Is something wrong?”

  She glanced at Jon, who was watching her, sitting up straighter in his chair.

  “No. Of course not. What could be wrong?”

  And there wasn’t.

  “I don’t know. You got a funny look on your face right then. Sorry. Maybe I read into things too much. An occupational hazard.” He got up and wandered over to the coffee stand, picking up the pot and swirling around the mud that passed for drinkable when Cecily was making it. “How about I freshen this up? As in, dump it out and make us another pot.”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  She watched as he poured the sludge down the drain, emptied the grounds, put in a new filter and measured out what looked to be the proper amount. When the stream of hot brew started up, he turned to her expectantly. “So your job involves computers, correct?”