Desire: A Contemporary Romance Box Set

by R. R. Banks

  I took a quick glimpse over toward Cindy’s desk and saw the slight woman hunched over her computer, typing feverishly. I was fairly certain that she wasn’t actually typing anything of consequence and was instead just trying to do whatever she could to look busy so that she didn’t have to face the new Madam President. This never would have been a concern if Mr. Royal was still leading the company. Cindy was his secretary, responsible for all the same things as the classic 1960s version of the position, just without the shady innuendo. She answered phones, took messages, and typed up memos. If Mr. Royal needed something more than that, he came to me. As his personal assistant, I took care of all of the other musings of his mind, either helping him to accomplish what he was envisioning or doing what I could to rein him in and turn his focus back to more practical pursuits. It had once been an ideal job. Walter Royal was as hilarious and eccentric as he was romantic and impulsive, which meant that his ideas were often far-flung and a blast to try to follow, but also that it didn’t surprise me in the least that he had gotten swept up by the thought of a whirlwind courtship and marriage to a young, mysterious woman.

  Now the job was nothing short of a nightmare. Lucille Royal had been in the office for less than a week and I already hated her. She was cold and harsh, smiling only in that way that I half expected to see a forked tongue flicker in and out when she looked at certain people in the office. Her absconding with the doughnuts and coffee from the break room had resulted in a small riot, but that had gone nowhere but back into the conference room for an impromptu seminar about the importance of health and nutrition in the workplace. Being her assistant had left me feeling like a twelve-year-old hoping to get an interview for his school paper by shadowing a powerful CEO. She had me scurrying for juice and sourcing essential oils rather than doing anything that even closely resembled advertising. It had been an order to drive two hours to an herbal shop that turned out to be the tiny back room of a woman’s cottage to purchase particularly ominous-looking substances intended for “women’s uses” that pushed me to threatening to quit. Lucille had hung my contract over my head, though, and I knew that I was screwed.

  Knowing that I couldn’t delay it any longer, I knocked on the door and waited for Mrs. Royal’s response.

  “Yes?”

  Always pleasant.

  It had taken only two days for the saccharine smile and false enthusiasm to disappear and for the new president to start showing her true character. I wasn’t sure how many other people within the company had seen her the way that I had, but I knew that the changes that she had already implemented were just the beginning and that Mr. Royal would have been crushed to see even the beginning of her façade cracking.

  Not bothering to announce myself, I stepped into the office and closed the door behind me. She was sitting at the desk with a stack of files in front of her. There was something in her eyes that I might have called a glint if it wasn’t so dark. With a foreboding feeling in my gut, I walked up to the desk and dropped down into the chair across from her.

  “You wanted to speak with me?” I said.

  Lucille looked up at me from the paper that was on the desk in front of her, then back at it.

  “Yes,” she said. “I want you to bring this to H.R. for me and then assist with the removal.”

  I watched as she added her sharp, severe signature to the bottom of the page and then took it from her as she held it out to me.

  “Removal?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have a feeling that this might be an unpleasant dismissal and I would prefer that the former employee not cause disruption for the rest of the team.”

  I looked down at the paper she had handed me. It was a notice of dismissal letting the H.R. department know that she had decided to remove someone from their post. I glanced at the name and my eyes snapped to Lucille.

  “Snow Whitman?” I asked in shock.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I was really beginning to hate hearing that word come out of her mouth.

  “Why could you possibly want to fire Snow?”

  “I have my reasons,” Lucille said. “I don’t believe that I need to justify them to you.”

  I resisted the urge to crumble the notice up and turned, stalking out of the office. When I got a few steps away from the office, I looked down at the paper again, looking at the section where Lucille was supposed to indicate the reasoning behind her dismissal of Snow. This was not the first time that I had seen one of these forms, though all of the others that I had brought to H.R. had been from Walter. The others that I had seen had long explanations, detailing problems with the person and the specific breeches of contract that they had enacted to justify the dismissal. This page, though, only had one phrase. Incompatible with work environment.

  The simplicity of the statement made the entire situation even more frustrating. I had been working at Royal and Company for a few years longer than Snow had, and I had never seen anyone like her. She came in like she already owned the world, yet was never oppressive or arrogant. Instead, her confidence in herself seemed to have injected the entire office with more energy and enthusiasm, and immediately everyone worked harder and pushed themselves more. I understood why the new accounts always wanted her. She had a way of looking at a company and being able to create a campaign that made them feel as though they were the only focus of her life. Her work was unique and exceptionally effective, which was why Mr. Royal had been actively grooming her to step into a higher leadership position when he eventually retired. Now that Lucille was around, however, that seemed less and less like a realistic prospect.

  I took a few steps toward the H.R. office, but then changed my mind. If the She-Devil of Advertising was going to oust Snow, the least that I could do was give her a heads-up before security stalked down and escorted her out of the building. I made my way to Snow’s office and walked in without knocking. She looked up at me, more startled by my sudden appearance than she was irritated that I hadn’t announced myself before entering.

  “Hi, Hunter,” she said.

  I noticed that she appeared to be building a statue out of paperclips and it temporarily distracted me from my original mission.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  She looked at her project and shrugged.

  “Madam President confiscated my files for the Diamond Mine account and I finished my other campaign presentations, so I figured that I would design some furniture.”

  “Well, not having access to your files seems to be the least of the worries that you have when it comes to Lucille.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I held the paper out to her and Snow dropped the paperclips before taking it. She read it in stunned silence for a few seconds before standing up sharply and glaring at me.

  “Are you serious?” she asked. “She’s trying to fire me for being incompatible? She’s the one who wanders in here and starts changing things, and I’m the one who’s incompatible?”

  “I’m sorry, Snow. I wish that there was something that I could do about it.”

  She sat back into her chair, shaking her head with a look of pure shock on her face. There wasn’t even the anger that I would have anticipated, just an almost hollow look, as if she didn’t know what she was supposed to do and didn’t want to step out from behind her desk because if she did she was going to have to really accept what was happening. After a few seconds of processing the information, she looked up at me and shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere. She can’t just fire me. She has to have a reason for getting rid of me, and she doesn’t have one. I’m not going to let her get away with it.”

  I felt a surge of hope.

  “You don’t have to,” I said, thinking about one of the more eventful firings that I had been a part of in the last few years. “Do you remember when that girl Tina was fired a couple of years back? There were about ten different reasons why she was eligible to be fired, but she said tha
t she wasn’t and threatened to bring it to court. I don’t think that it needs to go that far, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Anybody with eyes can see that the two of you don’t exactly get along.”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “And she wants more than anything to be more successful than you. So, let her try. Get out of her way for a while and give her a chance to see that it’s not competition with you that has kept her from being as successful as she thinks that she can be. If you just stay out of her sight for a while, I’m sure that the heat will die down and you’ll be able to come back without this turning into one big hot mess.”

  “What am I supposed to do? Hide in my office and pretend that I’m not here until she figures out that the reason that she isn’t as successful as I am is because she doesn’t have the skills that I do?”

  “No,” I said, my mind churning now. “You’re going to actually go away. Give her exactly what she wants. Be out of the office and out of her hair for a while.”

  “How?”

  “When was the last time that you took a vacation?”

  Snow looked off into the middle distance for a second as if she were trying to pull that memory forward.

  “Never,” she said. “Wait! Five years ago, I took three days off for that horrible christening.”

  “That was over a weekend, so you took one day off, and you came in for a couple of hours that Friday morning and then stayed late Monday, so you took exactly no days off.”

  Snow pursed her lips at me.

  “Never,” she said.

  “Exactly. That means that you have some serious accumulated vacation time. Ball it all up and take it.”

  She looked at me as if she wasn’t entirely convinced.

  “That would be about three months of vacation,” she said.

  “We’ll call it a leave of absence. Just go. I’ll take care of getting Mrs. Royal in there to back off for a while.”

  Snow nodded.

  “Alright. I’ll go. But do one thing for me.”

  “What?”

  “Steal back the Diamond Mine files and submit my preliminary ideas to the client. Explain to them that I’m taking a leave of absence, but that I will keep working on their campaign if they want me to when I return.”

  “I will,” I said.

  Snow pulled a huge purse out from under her desk and emptied her drawers into it. Swiping the paperclips into the bag and scooping her empty coffee mug into her hand, she walked around the desk and toward the door.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  I nodded at her.

  “Of course,” I said. “Go on. I don’t want her to see you before you go. Have fun while you’re gone, OK? This is your chance to be and do whatever you want. Take advantage of it.”

  I watched as she disappeared out of the office and down the hallway. When I was sure that she was gone, I walked back to Lucille’s office. She looked up at me with expectation when I stepped into the room.

  “So?” she said. “Did you do it?”

  “She’s gone,” I said. When a cruel smile came to her lips, I stepped forward and put the paper back on the desk in front of her. “But I didn’t have her fired.”

  “Excuse me?” she asked angrily. “I gave you specific instructions to have Snow Whitman removed from this office.”

  “And that’s exactly what I did, but what you didn’t seem to think about was that she has a contract. There are very specific guidelines regarding termination in that contract, and if you attempted to dismiss her outside of those parameters, you would be putting both the company and you personally at risk of a nasty lawsuit. I don’t think that that is something that you are really interested in dealing with in your first few weeks leading the company. Do you want to explain to Mr. Royal why you both fired his top employee and drained the company’s insurance because of a labor suit?”

  Lucille looked at me as if she was going to throttle me, but she didn’t move from her position behind the desk. I saw a glimmer of something in her eyes, but I chose to ignore it.

  “Has she left?” she asked, her tone quieter and more controlled now.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Where has she gone?”

  “Wherever she wants to. If there’s nothing else that you need.”

  Without waiting for her to come up with something else that she might want me to do, I left the office, closing the door behind me. I knew that this wasn’t the end. It couldn’t be. I might have been able to keep Snow from being fired today, but I didn’t delude myself into thinking that that was going to stop Lucille from doing anything that she could to remove Snow from her presence and her company. She was going to try to find a way to oust Snow and I worried that there was little that anybody could do to stop her. Hopefully her efforts wouldn’t be enough and that Mr. Royal would return in time to see that his blushing bride was nothing short of a scheming bitch. He might have turned over control of the company to her, but until it was fully in her name, which was something that I could never see him doing, she only had limited power. He could still come back and prevent her from causing any further damage to the empire that he had spent the vast majority of his life building.

  Chapter Five

  Snow

  “Your boss rewarded you for not taking your vacation every year by giving you more vacation time?” Robin asked.

  I nodded from where I lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  “So that leaves me with an even longer time than I thought,” I said. “Fourteen weeks. More than three months of having absolutely nothing to do because that crazy bitch wants to get rid of me.”

  “You are the only person I’ve ever known who would complain about having three months of paid time off just handed to you.”

  “It wasn’t just handed to me. I earned it. It was part of my perks package. I just happen to have never used it until I was just forced to. I don’t think that’s something to be excited about.” I flipped over on my side to look at him. “What am I supposed to do? I live and breathe work.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “I didn’t get successful because I didn’t work hard.”

  “You could have taken her route and just fucked your way to the top.”

  Robin suddenly dissolved into a cascade of giggles.

  “What’s so funny about that? It’s disturbing.”

  “I just thought about the fact that she got to the top by being on the bottom.” He giggled harder for a few seconds and then suddenly went silent, his eyes widening as if something astonishing had occurred to him. “Or maybe the top,” he said. “What do you think? Mr. Royal is pretty old.”

  I tried to withhold the shudder that coursed through me at the thought.

  “I would really like to not think about that any more if it is all the same to you.”

  “OK.” Robin looked around the room, his expression as though he was at a loss of what to talk about if he couldn’t continue down that line of conversation. After a few seconds he jumped, the thought that snapped into his mind seeming to startle him. “Oh! I can’t believe that I forgot to give this to you.”

  He leaned over and started digging through the bag that he had shoved under his chair when he sat down.

  “What?” I asked.

  He sat up and held a wrinkled brochure out toward me.

  “Look what I found.” He said. “Alright, look what was given to me by my date last night.”

  “Name?” I asked, glancing at him through slightly narrowed eyes.

  “I have absolutely no idea. But that’s not the point. Look at this. I thought of you as soon as I saw it.”

  I took the brochure from him and looked at it. The cover had an image of a cozy-looking cottage tucked into woods, a curving stone trail leading up to its idyllic door.

  “The Enchanted Woods?” I asked, reading the words swept across the cover in elaborate script. “What is this?”

  “Open it!” Rob
in said, bouncing slightly in his chair.

  I opened the brochure and saw a picture of what looked like a luxurious hotel room and then another of a spa-like bathroom.

  “A hotel?” I asked.

  “A retreat,” Robin said. “It’s an adults-only wilderness retreat without all the unfortunate wilderness aspects. You get to stay inside and get pampered and I’ve heard that there are some pretty beneficial services.”

  “Services?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Robin said. “I’ve heard that they are fantastic for relieving stress and planning extraordinary experiences for their guests.”

  “What types of extraordinary experiences?”

  “Every person gets a customized plan, so I don’t really know what they would do for you.”

  “And this made you think of me?”

  Robin nodded. I knew that there was something more to that than he was telling me, but the chances of him actually explaining it were next to nothing.

  “And now that you have all this time on your hands, you don’t have any excuse not to go for it.”

  I stared at the brochure for a few seconds, unsure of how to feel about it.

  “Well, I’ll think about it. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll think about it.”

  “Good,” Robin said, sounding far more delighted than I would expect him to sound about a glorified adult summer camp. “Want to go up to the Wishing Well? I’m getting hungry.”

  I nodded and swung my legs off of the bed to stand. It felt strange to look at my closet door and not see the outfit that I would wear the next day hanging there waiting for me. It was a ritual that I went through each night, selecting my clothing, laying it out, ensuring that I was ready to get up and get dressed in record time the next morning so that I could linger over the starter cup of coffee that would carry me through until I reached the office and the blissful coffee and doughnuts that were awaiting me. My eyes narrowed and I felt my jaw twitch slightly.

  Doughnuts.

  Twenty minutes later we were sitting at the same table at the Wishing Well that we always did. It had always felt like tradition, but now it felt like routine. Predictable. As if there wasn’t any other option. Robin flipped through the night’s menu. It seemed that the dessert night had been enough fanciness for the bar for a while and everything had gone back to normal for the time. That meant that I already knew what I was going to order, and, despite all of his hemming and hawing over the menu, what Robin was going to order, too.