“Give me one more day—twenty-four hours—before you accept it. Can you do that?” I asked, tapping my foot as I waited for the elevator.
Despite knowing G was resolved to cut the cord, I wasn’t. If I could manage to finagle some time out of her, just a little bit, maybe I could change her mind that the secretary didn’t have her hooks as deep into Henry as Mrs. Callahan and G thought. I was certain someone was elaborating the story G’d gotten. Whether it was the secretary or Mrs. Callahan—my bets were on the competition—someone was making the exaggeration of the decade.
I knew how Henry’d looked at me for the past couple of weeks. I knew the extremes he’d gone to for me. He had feelings for me, somewhere in the range of moderate to intense, and they were growing. Each time we were together, I sensed the conflict growing in him, which meant he was wrestling with some degree of feelings a married man shouldn’t have for another woman. How could I know that and accept what G was telling me?
I couldn’t. I knew Henry too well to believe he’d bang any woman who was open for business. He might have betrayed me, but Henry wasn’t the run-of-the-mill cheater. Just because he’d cheated before didn’t mean he’d do it again for anyone willing to throw her panties at him. His secretary was not going to get him in bed. I didn’t doubt that she would try everything she could, but I knew Henry. I still had time. I was wheeling my suitcase through the hotel lobby by the time G cleared her throat.
“Out of respect for you and the effort you’ve already put into this one, I’ll grant you twenty-four hours more on the Callahan Errand.”
I checked the time and picked up my pace toward valet. I didn’t even have time for a smile.
“But the moment you find out Mr. Callahan was with the competition in that way, I want you to call me because I’m getting you out of there and on another Errand.”
“Do you want me to call you the moment I find out Mr. Callahan wasn’t with the competition in that way? Or should I just keep doing what I’m doing and close this one like we both know I’m going to?” When the valet pulled up in my rental and threw my suitcase in the trunk, I tipped him and sped away. See ya, Tampa. It’s been fun but . . . oh wait. No, it hasn’t been fun. Not even close.
“I can’t quite make up my mind if your confidence is genius or lunacy,” G said.
As I punched the gas, I let myself smile. “It’s a little bit of both. That’s why you put me on the Ten, and that’s why I’m going to close it.”
I STEPPED ONTO California soil eight hours later. Which meant I only had sixteen hours to locate Henry, verify that what I didn’t think happened last night actually hadn’t happened, and get my Errand back on track. Lucky for me I’d been able to sleep on the flight because I had my work cut out for me.
After grabbing a cup of bad coffee from an airport kiosk, I hurried to the Mustang I’d left in the garage last week and sped back to my condo. I might not have had any time to waste, but I wasn’t going anywhere—or closing any Errands for that matter—looking like a wrinkled, tired, shabby mess. If I traipsed into Callahan Industries looking the way I did and the competition hadn’t already won, she would declare an early victory. It was what I would do if our roles were reversed and she wandered up to the Target looking as though she’d just rolled out of bed.
The condo was just as I’d left it. Even though I’d “lived” in it longer than any other Errand’s housing, the condo felt about as inviting and personal as the hotel rooms I normally used. Feeling like I had no anchor was oddly depressing, so instead of dwelling on why that was and what I could do about it, I rushed into the shower and concentrated on what I was going to say and do when I saw Henry.
That kept me busy while I got ready, as well as during the drive to Callahan Industries. It was a sunny day and somewhere in the seventy degree range and after being trapped in the humidity and sludge of Florida for over a week, California’s dryer air was like heaven. It was my ideal kind of climate. Too bad it was everyone else’s as well. I’d make plenty of sacrifices to make San Francisco my home, but I drew the line at ungodly commutes, people stacked on top of people, and entry level houses nearing the seven-figure range.
I’d only made the commute to C.I. two times, and I was already burnt out on it. By the time I found a free parking spot, I was down to thirteen hours until the last grain of sand fell from the hourglass. I was tempted to kick off my heels and sprint for the headquarters building, but I’d sprinted plenty of time in heels. Comfort was a small price to pay when it came to the Callahan Errand.
By the time I made it to the top floor of the executive building, I was pretty sure I would be tending to a few nasty blisters later. Just because a woman could run in a pair of take-no-prisoners heels didn’t mean a woman should.
The first thing I noticed when the elevator doors opened was the empty seat behind Henry’s secretary’s desk. There wasn’t even a half-empty cup of coffee or a powered-on computer to indicate she’d stepped away for a few minutes. Not good.
The second thing I noticed was Henry’s office. The door was closed, and it was dark inside. Not good at all. Double checking the time, I cursed under my breath when I confirmed that it was indeed a little past eleven in the morning. I didn’t need to have been an employee there for years to know that Henry Callahan was the guy who showed up when it was barely light out, before anyone else was even rolling out of bed. He had a work ethic that . . . well, rivaled anyone.
So Henry was missing. And his secretary was too. Even if I hadn’t received G’s it’s-all-over call last night, I’d be feeling a little uncertain. But knowing what I did and walking in to find them both M.I.A? Let’s just say I was feeling the opposite of confident. I was pretty sure I’d never felt less confident in my life.
I’d been so sure, so positively certain that Henry wouldn’t fall for her ploys and tricks. Not after the signals he’d been giving me for the past couple of weeks. Did I know nothing about my business? Or did I just know nothing about Henry Callahan? Neither prospect was reassuring.
I was still standing a step outside the elevator doors, briefcase in hand, gaping at the empty chair and office before me, when I heard the doors chime open behind me.
“Is this what I’m paying you a hundred and ten dollars an hour for? Because if that’s the case, I should have negotiated your hourly rate down. No one should pay more than eighty an hour for an employee to block an elevator door.”
If I hadn’t been deep in the middle of a relieved sigh, I would have spun around and thrown my arms around Henry’s neck. No, I didn’t know what had or hadn’t happened last night, but that he was there was a better sign than him skipping the whole day. At the end of that long sigh, I put a smirk on my face and stepped aside. “A hundred and ten an hour? I didn’t demand, request, or negotiate that rate. Hookers in Orange County don’t even make that much. Not even the really good ones.”
Henry chuckled as he stepped out beside me. His hair wasn’t wet from the shower, which was a good sign. His neck was clear of whatever marks a rookie would have left on him. His suit was fresh and unwrinkled, so it wasn’t the same one he’d worn yesterday, and he didn’t possess that lazy, sated gleam in his eyes all men did for twenty-four hours after getting laid. I allowed myself another internal sigh. I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure he hadn’t slept with his secretary, but I was about eighty percent sure. That was a lot better than two percent I’d been a minute ago.
“You’re one to talk. How much exactly do CEO’s of multi-billion dollar companies make for showing up a few minutes shy of noon?” I asked.
“I don’t know about those CEO’s, but this one just spent five hours in back-to-back meetings.” He inclined his head toward his office and followed me to it.
Eighty percent up to ninety percent. Where were the pom-poms? “Early day, eh? Someone must have gone to bed early last night.” I was fishing, but I figured that was better than just asking if he’d screwed his secretary last night.
Henry opened the
door for me and gave me a sidelong look. “Actually, I didn’t really make it to bed last night. Which explains these things”—he tapped the hollows under his eyes—“and this.” He held out his hand, which was just barely trembling.
My eyebrows came together as I flipped on the lights.
“Caffeine overdose.” He reached for a coffee cup on his desk as soon as he set down his briefcase.
My mind was back to playing ping-pong. It couldn’t decide if Henry not getting any sleep was a point in my favor or a point in her favor. “What exactly were you doing last night that kept you awake?”
His eyes shifted to his door—or more precisely, the empty secretary desk. “What I thought was going to be an evening of ironing out my schedule for the next month turned into something much more complicated.”
I settled—or collapsed—into the chair in front of his desk. “More complicated?” If more complicated included Henry and her getting tangled up in the sheets, I couldn’t decide whose neck I would wring first: hers, his, or mine.
“Every month, I get together with my secretary to go over my next month’s schedule. As you can imagine, it can take a few hours, so we usually wind up staying late and I order in Chinese or something.” Henry slid off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves before settling into his chair. “Melanie’s only been here a few weeks, so she wasn’t familiar with how these schedule meetings go. Probably my fault since I didn’t specify that grabbing some dinner meant delivery spread over a conference room table.”
I could guarantee that whatever she’d done had been all her fault. Henry had given her the opportunity she needed, and she ran with it. It was exactly what I would have done.
“Anyway, after my last meeting yesterday, I came back here to find her gone. I waited for a while until it was evident she’d left for the day, then I gave her a ring to see if something had come up and we needed reschedule the meeting. She told me she was ready for our meeting and waiting for me.” Henry cleared his throat. “At the Presidential Hotel.”
“Classy,” I muttered before realizing I should have kept that thought to myself.
“If it’s any consolation, she assured me she was waiting in the Presidential Hotel’s restaurant,” he said, trying not to smile.
“It’s only a consolation if that’s where she actually stayed,” I replied, inadvertently glaring at her desk.
“Which brings me to the next point,” he said, lifting his finger.
I shook my head and huffed. Of course she didn’t stay in the restaurant. She had her eyes on an eight-figure payout. “After dinner, she casually invited you up to—what a coincidence”—I made my best shocked face—“the room she’d rented for the night. Of course, for nothing more than coffee and to finish banging out that monthly schedule.”
Henry’s smile went up a little higher. Probably because I’d practically puckered up around the banging part.
“Are you jealous? You couldn’t be.” Henry’s forehead wrinkled as he leaned closer. “The woman I knew didn’t allow herself to be jealous. She chose to run away before she could feel anything at all.”
I hadn’t expected the conversation to take a turn in my direction, and I was unprepared for it. That’s probably why his words felt as if he’d shoved them four inches deep. “Let me assure you that that day I walked in on my fiancé enjoying someone else’s company, I felt plenty of emotions. So many and so extremely that the only option other than me committing two crimes of passion was running away.” I locked eyes with him. “Now if you’d so kindly never bring up that day again, I can get on with living the rest of my life a bit more peacefully.”
Henry opened his mouth, and I could almost hear the words on the tip of his tongue. One particularly potent glare from me clamped his mouth closed again.
“Any time you’re ready to get back to your story, not ours, I’m all ears.”
“And what if I’m still ready to get back to our story?” he asked, leaning back in his chair. Smart man.
I smiled sweetly. “Then I’m all claws.”
With a shake of his head, he took a chug of his coffee. “You’re right and you’re wrong about what happened at the hotel. Melanie wasn’t waiting for me in the restaurant at all, so when I called her—yet again—she said she was up in her room getting ready and asked if I’d come up so we could start going over things instead of wasting time.”
Melanie-whatever-her-real-name-is was one ballsy bitch. “And by then, you weren’t feeling a hundred warning flags? You really thought your pretty new secretary was asking you up to her room so you could go over your monthly schedule while she finished putting on her lipstick?” Henry had always been book smart, not street smart, but a guy could be the street-dumbest person out there and not miss the signs that chick was throwing at him.
Henry lifted an eyebrow. “Do you want to know how long it’s been since I’ve been hit on? Or laid for that matter?” He squeezed his eyes closed as his face went a shade or two redder. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get that personal. Apparently TMI runs away from me when I’ve overdone it on the caffeine. Remedying that now.” He tossed his coffee cup in the wastebasket.
I found both of those things hard to believe. Mrs. Callahan and he were obviously having problems, but I still found it difficult to believe that his wife—or whoever else—managed to keep her hands off of a man like Henry. He made things like morning-after guilt totally worth it. I found it just as much, if not more, unbelievable that he hadn’t been hit on recently. Whether it was a barista handing him his coffee and casually sketching her number onto the side of his cup, or the neighbor who got up early to ogle him as he left for his morning run, or a young secretary, women hitting on Henry was as irrefutable as gravity.
“Back to the hotel room,” I said, trying to get both of us back on track. “What happened? I’m guessing work-related activities weren’t included.”
Henry shifted, diverting his eyes. Uh-oh. “She had the door propped open a bit when I arrived, so when I asked if it was okay for me to come in, she told me to make myself comfortable. She was in the restroom, so I assumed she was finishing getting dressed or doing her makeup or whatever you women do in there for hours at a time.”
I rolled my eyes. “We also use it for actually going to the bathroom. From time to time.”
Henry smiled. “I didn’t think women were capable of such things. You’re so delicate and feminine and—”
“We also fart.”
Henry and I laughed until I realized I’d just said fart in front of a Target. There were several words an Eve never even considered uttering when working an Errand, and fart was at the top of that list, along with poop, labia, and scrotum. Not a person alive could say one of those words and still remain sexy.
“Well, this woman was doing something else. Something way, way else,” Henry said as his laughter rolled to an end. “I was busy powering up my laptop and getting some files from my briefcase, so I didn’t notice when she came out of the bathroom until she was standing a few feet in front of me. By then, it would have been impossible not to notice her.”
I had a few guesses why—she came out wearing some va-va-voom number and fuck-me heels, or she came out in a sheer nightgown with the high-beams on stand-by, or she came out mid-zip to ask him to finish zipping her up. I’d used all those tactics, and I expected my competition to be adept at them. Otherwise they weren’t worthy of the title “competition.”
“What made it so impossible not to notice her?” I tried to keep all emotion from my voice. I wasn’t sure it worked.
Henry shifted in his seat again. “Because she wasn’t wearing any clothes.”
Some filthy words filtered through my head. They were as prolific as they were creative, but they came from a place of irrationality. From my standpoint as an Eve, the competition sauntering up to Henry Callahan in her birthday suit was a gift to me. Even if I hadn’t known Henry for years, I knew enough about him to know that.
That the competition’
s great big plan was to offer her naked self up on a fake gold platter was laughable. Henry Callahan wasn’t the kind of Target who’d do a woman the instant the goods were offered. That wasn’t the way he worked. He required finesse, a slow-simmering romance . . . his Errand was far more delicate than any others I’d worked, and not just because we were ex-lovers. The competition had effectively thrown herself out of the game by missing the mark big time.
I should have been rejoicing. Throwing imaginary confetti into the air. But I wasn’t. I was fuming, feeling like lava was about to explode from the top of my head. Skanky, slutty bitch. That was what kept playing on repeat through my red-hot head. Those were the emotions of a jealous girlfriend, not a triumphant competitor. Realizing that only made me more angry.
When I realized the guy sitting across from me was appraising me with that curious look again, I pulled myself together—partly—and reminded myself that I was the best in the business because I didn’t let emotions get in the way of success.
“She was naked? What was that you were just saying about no one hitting on you?”
Henry shrugged. “Whatever that was last night was not her hitting on me. I mean, when you hit on someone, you smile at them a bit longer than you would anyone else, or you ask them out to dinner, or you buy them a drink. You don’t show up to a business meeting without any clothes on while your boss is drafting a quarterly report to his shareholders.” Henry shook his head as though he couldn’t imagine why a pretty young woman would throw herself at him without any (or much) warning. That unassuming way of his had piqued my attention all those years ago. To Henry Callahan, he was nothing special—at least no more than anyone else.
“Sorry to burst your hitting-on-protocol bubble, but she was hitting on you, Henry. Hitting on you hardcore.” I cleared my throat. “At least, she was definitely hoping to make your core hard.” When I gave him a teasing wink, he wadded up a sticky note and tossed it at me.
Great Exploitations: Sin in San Fran Page 6
