Aggie the Horrible vs. Max the Pompous Ass

by Lisa Wells

  Max held out his hand. “Richard, so nice to see you again. I hope Ms. Johansson hasn’t caused you too much grief in the short time you’ve spent with her.”

  Richard glanced at her and chuckled. “On the contrary, Aggie’s a delight.”

  “You’re such a peach.” She laid her hand on his arm. “I bet you say sweet things to all the women sent to fetch you.”

  Max stiffened at her flirtatious tone. Something had happened between Aggie meeting Richard and their arrival in his office. Could she seduce a guy in three minutes? Of course she could. Did they already have a date planned?

  Richard glanced around. “I must say, I love the changes you’ve made in your office. By the way, how is Mrs. Deverish? I take it she had her baby. I hope everything went well.”

  Richard had met Max’s assistant many times and still referred to her by her last name, but with Aggie, he was already on a first-name basis. “She’s doing great. I’ll let her know you asked after her.”

  Aggie cleared her throat. “Now that I’ve shown Mr. Harris to your office—”

  “If I’m to call you Aggie, then you should definitely call me Richard.”

  She beamed. “Thank you, Richard. Mr. Treadwell, I’m leaving now.” She pulled the to-do list out of her jacket pocket. “This list won’t complete itself.”

  “Don’t forget the toilet paper. I added that to the list, right?” The taunt was out before he could stop it. And the reason was pathetic. He wanted Richard to think twice before getting involved with his assistant. He wanted Richard to think of Aggie as somehow beneath his attention. Which made Max a first-class ass. Like the five-star general of asses. He’d have to apologize to Aggie. But right now, he was willing to own the title of ass and do whatever it took to kill any budding romance between the two.

  Spots of color entered her cheeks. “All I recall seeing on the list was Preparation H. Extra strength.”

  He forced a chuckle. She gave as good as she got. If she ever did meet his father, at least she’d be able to hold her own. Then again, why would she ever meet the man? “Be a peach and add it,” he said.

  Richard held out his hand to Aggie. “I’m looking forward to seeing you again.” Then he turned to Max. “Before I leave today, I insist you give me the name of the company who redesigned your offices.”

  “I’ll be sure and do that.”

  Aggie shut his door with a sharp click. Hell, he’d been so upset with her over the rocks, he’d forgot to ask her to put the phone on do not disturb. And, now that he thought about it, he should have scratched off a few of the things on the list. Things not necessary for Aggie to do. His gut told him he would come to regret that lapse in memory.

  Chapter Eleven

  Aggie stood stiffly in the outer office and glared at the wadded list in her hand, a mangled ball of compressed anger, and then at her screeching feet. She’d carefully chosen her shoes to impress Max with how effortlessly she could dress the part of his assistant. Their design was not suitable to trudge around the city, running errands.

  First of which would be to locate his damn rocks. Because…well…because they were obviously his tangible security blanket. Meemaw was hers. Even the fiercest of warriors needed a safety blanket to come back to after a battle. She took a deep breath and exhaled noisily. Now that she’d moved events into perspective, he was justified in his downward spiral upon learning of their demise. Understandable. Which meant the guy was still in the ballpark of redeemability.

  She carefully unwadded the list and read. Dry cleaning. Grocery shopping. Wine shopping. Drop everything off at the condo. Water plants. Dust. Change bedsheets. She wadded it back up. “Salvageable my ass. I work for a first-class prick.”

  Only one thing could explain this list.

  Max had shown up to work with the preplanned goal of goading her into quitting. Before he even knew she’d screwed up, his intentions were set. For some unfathomable reason, over the weekend, he had decided he didn’t want her as his assistant and had come up with this list to get her to abandon her job—contract be damned.

  Puzzling the change of attitude, she forwarded the phones to his desk and caught a whiff of Ms. Grace’s perfume. It wiggled loose a memory of her mentioning she had invited her son for dinner, and she expected Max to join them. That had been Thursday night. Aggie didn’t see Max on Friday because she’d asked him to stay home while she put the finishing touches on the office. Had Mr. Treadwell, over dinner, convinced Max that Aggie wasn’t of the right caliber to be his assistant?

  That had to be it. He didn’t like Meemaw, therefore it made sense that he wouldn’t like Aggie, either. Like father, like son. Her first instinct had been the right instinct—Max was a smug bastard.

  She stomped to the elevator, cursing him with every step. Fuck him all the way up asshole mountain. It would be a cold day in an Arizona sauna before he provoked her into quitting. Two could play this asshole game.

  Standing inside the elevator, she wiggled her toes to make sure she still could. She could, but barely. First stop home. And then the rocks.

  Twenty minutes later, she quietly let herself in the front door of Meemaw’s and her home.

  “What in tarnation are you doing sneaking in at nine thirty in the a.m.?” Meemaw said, causing Aggie to startle and nearly pee herself. “Please tell me you haven’t already gotten yourself fired.”

  She sighed. Meemaw had worked the third shift last night. Aggie had hoped to find her conked out and snoring. “Not fired. Just changing my shoes.” She couldn’t blame Meemaw for her lack of faith.

  Meemaw glanced at Aggie’s shoes. “Why did you wear those shoes to work?”

  “I don’t have time to explain. I’m in a hurry. I’ve got lots of important things to do today.” Like buy toilet paper. She would buy the cheapest damn toilet paper she could find. Maybe even steal a roll from a hole-in-the-wall gas station. The kind you could read a newspaper through.

  “Agnes?” Meemaw followed her inside her bedroom.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I know I sound like a scratched record, but please do us proud with Max. Prove to him just because we’re poor doesn’t mean we’re trash.” Meemaw grew up in North Blue Ridge, in a three-room house with dirt floors. Her dad was mean as a wild pig and her mom a drunk. The town’s population stood at seventy-one. Ranked number one worst neighborhood in Kansas City.

  At sixteen, after she got kicked out of the fancy school she went to on a scholarship, she quit school and ran away. As far as Meemaw knew, her parents never reported her missing. Maybe because they didn’t care. Maybe because they never noticed. Meemaw held three jobs at one time and moved into a one-room apartment located over a dry cleaner in East Blue Valley. A town with the impressive population of 1,595. Ranked number nine on the list of ten worst neighborhoods in Kansas City, so to her that was a step up. That’s where she fell in love, got her heart broken, and gave birth to Aggie’s mother.

  “Meemaw, he doesn’t view us as trash, because we’re not trash.”

  Meemaw sat on Aggie’s bed. “If he doesn’t, he has friends and family who do. Working for him gives you a chance to prove them all wrong.”

  Aggie laced her fingers with Meemaw’s. Her hands were old and worn out from her early years of hard labor as a maid, a cook, and a bartender. “I hate that it matters so much to you what people think of us.”

  Meemaw drew her into a big hug. “I love that you don’t. It means I’ve done something right raising you.”

  “Oh, Meemaw, you’ve done everything right raising me. Anything I do wrong is on me, never you.” Aggie stepped out of her grip. Her heart squeezed at the brightness in Meemaw’s eyes.

  “If I raised you so right, you’ll impress him just fine.”

  She smiled tightly. She would behave at work. She would keep this job. Buy him expensive toilet paper. “I’ll prove to him my manne
rs can compete with the best of them. But please get it out of your head that he and I will end up an item. We’re not.”

  “Give me one good reason.”

  The guy loves a dead person. “I don’t go for the asshole types.”

  “Agnes LaBelle Johansson, have you forgotten who you’re talking to? Don’t make me put soap in your mouth. I’ve told you a hundred times, smart people don’t need sentence enhancers to get their point across.”

  Ever since being told she was dumber than dirt by the guy who got her pregnant and then dumped her, Meemaw had been sensitive about the opinions of others. That’s the day she vowed to never be called dumb again.

  “I know. You’re right. I’ll remember to use my smart words.”

  “And one more thing,” Meemaw said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I love you, dear.”

  Aggie’s heart squeezed. “I love you more.”

  Three hours later, Aggie stood in the lobby of Max’s condo, arguing with the concierge to let her on the key-needed elevators. “I work for him. I’m his assistant. This is his dry cleaning.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but not once in all the years I’ve worked for him has he asked an assistant to bring his dry cleaning to his apartment. That is a task Glenda does for him on Wednesdays.”

  Aggie bit her tongue. The ass already had someone doing this for him? Regularly? “Fine, call him. He’ll tell you I have permission.”

  She tapped her toes while the guy stepped away from his station and called Max.

  “My apologies. You may go up.” He didn’t look sorry. He looked like he didn’t like to be wrong. He handed her a piece of paper with six numbers on it. “This is his entry code. It changes daily.”

  Of course it changed daily. Max would never settle for an out-of-the-box, Walmart-purchased security system. He’d have one with all the bells and whistles you could only get from companies who offered customized installations.

  Max lived on the thirty-seventh floor in a condo in downtown Kansas City. Twenty seconds later, she stood inside the doorway of his home. Luckily, no one could see her face or hear the beat of her heart against her ribs. Ten of Meemaw’s and her home could fit inside his open-floor-plan condo.

  Aggie followed Instagram posts of the rich and famous. But she’d never been so up close and personal with how the other half lived.

  Meemaw had, because she’d once worked for the fifth wealthiest woman in Kansas City, but not Aggie. Meemaw refused to let teenage Aggie work as a maid to help pay the bills. “Holy smokes,” she said, taking it all in.

  She kicked off her pink Crocs and grimaced at them. They were an atrocity to the fashion-minded. An abomination. But a lifesaver to those who spent hours on their feet. Meemaw owned a closet full of them.

  Aggie stuck the whole grocery bag in the refrigerator. Max could sort the food out when he got home. She placed his rocks on his kitchen table. After she finished the other to-dos, she’d arrange them in the memory box she’d bought at Hobby Lobby and then prop her “I’m sorry” card in front of it.

  Still carrying his dry cleaning and Dollar-General-sales-aisle toilet paper, she went in search of his bedroom. She might have done the right thing when it came to the rocks, but doing the same with the toilet paper was asking too much.

  “This place makes what I did to his office appear about as amazing as a runway model on a diet.” No wonder he’d been underwhelmed. “I gave you a Cadillac and you prefer Ferraris.” According to Meemaw, Max was thirty years old, and his business was at the start-up stage. How did he afford such luxury?

  Realization bitch-slapped her, and she winced. “You’re a freaking trust-fund baby.” She despised trust-fund men. Meemaw’s heart and pride had been broken by a smooth-talking trust-fund baby. A guy who pretended to think Meemaw could fit into his world until he’d gotten what he wanted out of her.

  The last door on the left revealed the master suite. A room not in the tiniest bit dominated by the unmade king-size bed, chest of drawers, and a magnificent armoire.

  “I could fit two king-size beds and Dolly Parton’s wig collection in here.”

  There were two doors. She opened one, and a dream bathroom greeted her. Clawfoot tub and a shower that could host a major-league baseball team. She placed the cheap toilet paper on the turned-down seat, left the room, and opened the other door. A gasp escaped her parted lips.

  The master closet! The crème de la crème of any home. Decked out with all the organizers a person could ever dream of owning. Before she left today, she would take the room’s measurement and share them with Meemaw. When Aggie was little, she and Meemaw used to dream of the day they had a home with a closet bigger than any Meemaw had ever had to clean. So they had a tiny notebook where they kept the dimensions of the ones she’d cleaned over the years.

  Mr. Trust Fund had a whole row of custom suits organized by color. Just for fun, she mixed the two black suits she’d picked up at the dry cleaners in with his blue suits. And then mismatched several pairs of shoes in the shoe organizer.

  Smiling, she zipped back to the massive bed. A bed Max Treadwell slept in. She quickly stripped it of its soft white sheets. What thread count were they? Did he wear pajamas? Or go commando? Hmm. That question begged for an answer. One by one, she opened drawers and conducted an undetectable search.

  None of them contained pajamas.

  One of them held a bevy of boxer shorts. Silk and cotton were represented. She looked at the labels. Ellen. Tommy John. Calvin Klein. Brand loyalty didn’t apply to him. Did that filter over into his sex life? Did he have a blonde, a brunette, a redhead on speed dial? Did he change them out the way one did underwear?

  She took a pair of Ellen boxers off the top. Watching the Ellen Show was one of her guilty pleasures. She would have never imagined someone who took themselves as seriously as Max did would wear Ellen underwear. Maybe the guy had a hidden fun side.

  She laid the boxers on the bed in the spot she imagined that area of his body would be if he sprawled himself there. “How well do you fill these out?” she murmured. “Well enough there’d be spillage when you have a hard-on?”

  She climbed up on his bed on all fours and imagined—

  Her phone rang. Max. Fuck. She scrambled off his bed.

  “Hello.” She forced herself to sound polite and not guilty of just perusing his drawers and imagining blow jobs. She may or may not have succeeded.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Max asked.

  She stopped breathing. Did he know she’d just been thinking inappropriate thoughts where he was concerned? Get a grip. Of course he doesn’t know. “If you’re asking did I buy your toilet paper, the answer is you’ll have to wait and see for yourself.” Meemaw would be proud she didn’t use the word fucking before the word toilet.

  He cursed. Was it because her less-than-stellar attitude toward doing his chores surprised him, or did he simply not like wait-and-see games? Did the rich boy prefer immediate gratification? If that was the case, she pitied his girlfriend.

  “I mean, did you find what you were looking for in my drawers?”

  The room grew disconcertingly still. She swallowed hot embarrassment, and sweat slid between her boobs. How did he know? She glanced around. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.” Oh God. Had her lips opened while she imagined giving him a blow job?

  He sighed. “I have a maid cam in my bedroom. What exactly were you looking for?”

  Sweet baby Jesus. “Your pajamas.” She glanced around the room, trying to figure out where he’d hidden a camera. Maybe…he hadn’t…fuck…

  “Why?” On the surface it sounded like a perfectly normal question, but the strange timber in his voice told her otherwise.

  “To lay them out after I turn down your bed.”

  “Darling,” he spoke the words in a smooth ho
ney tone, making her want to lick him like a coffee-flavored ice cream cone, “I sleep in the nude.” Or maybe it was what she’d been thinking of while on all-fours that had her imagining long, languid licks.

  Desire ricocheted through her, causing her to squeeze her legs together. Yep. She wanted to lick Max. What was it about this guy who could make her mad and horny at the same time? “Figures.”

  “What does that mean?” He sounded amused.

  She reminded herself he was a trust-fund baby. The enemy. Not someone to lick or have sex with or get all emotionally gooey over. “A guy who has a maid-cam in his bedroom is obviously a pervert. Anything you think you saw is off-limits for reprimand.”

  She had a lot of dreams to accomplish in life before letting loose her gooey side with any man. Like travel outside the country. Live in NYC for a year. Lick a man’s coffee-flavored ice cream–lathered cock. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. That was a brand-spanking new addition to her list of things to do before settling down. Max was changing her.

  “My bed is out of the focus range of my camera.” The words sounded like they slipped through clenched teeth. “I’m not a pervert.”

  Her body sagged in relief. Thank God. Remembering he was still there, still watching her reactions, she straightened. “Did you call to harass me?”

  “Actually, I called to let you know I need you to work late tonight.”

  “Tonight’s not a good night. I have a date.” With her vibrator. This need wasn’t going away with a cold shower.

  “Cancel it.” The demand didn’t hold room for argument.

  Which was fair, considering their contract. But that didn’t mean she had to go down without a soft swing. “All right, but Bill won’t be happy,” she said and promptly ended the call.

  Chapter Twelve

  Later that evening, Max pushed back from the conference table. Aggie had finished reorganizing a brainstorming chart they’d been working on for the past few hours. At some point, she’d removed her jacket. Now, her shirt showed signs of coming completely untucked from her ass-hugging skirt. If he wasn’t mistaken, she wore a man’s dress shirt. And he wasn’t mistaken. He did, after all, own a closetful.