Love Handles (13 page)

“Did Ellen really fire Richard because of me?”

He began walking back to the stairs. “Who knows? She probably doesn’t even know herself.”

“But now we need a CFO.”

“Hire him back.”

“I can do that?” She hurried to catch up to him. “Of course I can. Hold on. Quit walking so fast.”

Reluctantly, he slowed.

“My first act as owner is to instruct my executive vice president to rehire the CFO.” She smiled. “It’s your fault he got fired. So fix it.”

He scowled to intimidate her, but she just smiled. “He wasn’t very important. He didn’t have the power his title implied.”

“Not important to you maybe,” she said, “but who knows? Maybe he was the quiet little engine keeping this place running. Dotting all the i’s and crossing the t’s. Unrecognized hero.”

“He was an accountant. They use numbers, not i’s and t’s.”

Her smile hardened. “Do it.”

After a second he decided this wasn’t a fight he should waste his energies on. “All right.”

She beamed. “Today?”

“Is that your wish, Your Mightiness?”

“Yup.”

“All right. Then we better finish the tour so I can get right on that.”

She nodded. “On with it, then.”

He looked down at her, a sinking feeling in his stomach, and wondered for the first time if Ellen would have been a better alternative to this deceptively cheerful pain in the ass.

No. Bev might have a stubbornly optimistic streak, but it wouldn’t be enough to keep her happy in a business that thrived on misery. He would have to accelerate her inevitable slide into disillusionment and get her back into a preschool where she belonged.

He’d be doing her a favor.

B
efore the day was out Bev had working keys to her grandfather’s house in Oakland, knew which doors were real and which were water heater closets, and was relieved to be out from under her senior VP’s family roof. Aside from the panoramic view of San Francisco Bay, the house on Alondra Avenue was remarkable only for its total lack of personality. The estate service had packed up most of her grandfather’s things, putting them in storage until Bev’s mother was ready to face it all, which Bev feared would be never.

The next morning, after a choppy night’s sleep in an unfamiliar house, Bev walked through Fite’s front door with a vase in her arms. “I brought in a few flowers to cheer up the place.”

“Oooh, sweet peas!” Carrie popped up. She’d taken out her braids, leaving her hair in a kinky triangle that ended at her shoulders. “I love those!”

“They’d naturalized near my grandfather’s house.” Bev rearranged the long stems in the water. “I’m not sure how long they’ll survive in a vase, but it was worth a shot.”

“I’ll take care of them.” Carrie petted the soft curve of one petal with the tip of her finger. She bent close and sucked in a deep breath. “They smell like candy.”

“More where that came from.” Bev took one last sniff of the sweet flowers before heading for the elevator. Liam had insisted the stairs were the only way to her grandfather’s executive suite, but there had to be some way of getting there via the elevator; the original building designers wouldn’t have skipped a floor.

She stepped inside and frowned at the number plate. Sure enough, one of the middle buttons had been taped over with a square of scrap plastic. Shaking her head, she scraped it off with her fingernail and pushed it, happy to feel the car creak and rise, understanding her. She rolled up the plastic and tape and stuck it in her shoulder bag, feeling powerful as the doors opened into the gleaming wood floored hallway, right in front of the glass door to her grandfather’s lair.

Lair. She needed to think of a name for the place. It was hardly an office, with all those toys in it. She pulled out the set of keys she’d acquired the day before—a fist-sized wad—but the door was already open.

Reclining in a leather recliner with his back to the door, Liam had a phone to his ear, his feet up on the window, and didn’t bother to look over when Bev came in and dropped her bag next to him on the floor.

“Good morning, Liam.”

He didn’t move except to tilt the phone closer to his ear. “That’s shit. We can’t hold production that long.”

Bev waited, knowing it was the first of many attempts to put her in her place. She looked at her watch. Maybe she could go get her coffee, fortify herself, buy some time.

“Tell him to call me before lunch or forget it.” He leaned back and shoved the phone into his pocket. Chewing his lip, he frowned at the city.

“I was just going to get coffee,” Bev said. “Would you like to join me?” Getting out of the building would help diffuse some of his cockiness. Get him off his home turf.

“Venti cappucino. I’ll be in my office.” He got up and walked out the door, Bev staring after him.

Then she laughed. So that’s how he was going to play it.

She would go along for now, see how badly he wanted to fight her. She walked back out of the building to the café on the corner, added a ginger-spiced muffin for him, and returned to his office with a tray balanced in the crook of her arm. The door was closed, so she knocked. Waited, knocked again.

Finally, he shouted, “Come in!” and Bev went in, tray in hand.

There, sitting around the conference table at the far end, a large group of smirking, well-dressed people stared at her, at the dorky owner who had apparently been sent for coffee like an entry-level design flunky.

Only one person didn’t look over. Liam, at the head of the table, was absorbed with an orange track jacket he was holding at arm’s length.

Feeling her face get warm, Bev gripped the tray in her hands and made herself walk across the floor to him. She hadn’t met most of these people yet, these cool-looking young women with perfect makeup and exposed, toned upper arms. Some of them looked away, lips pressed together, while others glued their eyes on Liam to see what he would do next. From the tension in the air, Bev figured they all knew who she was.

With each long, awkward step across the room, Bev tried to remember the details of all the mean-girl teen movies she’d seen over the years to decide her best next move. The hostility came in waves off one woman she’d met on the tour—Rachel, with the gray tape across her cubicle opening—and worse, shimmering with her enjoyment of Bev’s situation. Two women at the opposite end gaped at her feet like they’d never seen Danskos before.

One woman began to laugh, barely trying to hide it. The sound of her amusement crawled up Bev’s spine like a sleek, poisonous spider.

Bev wondered what Liam was planning next: the coffee wasn’t right, artificial sweeteners were metabolically damaging, the muffin wasn’t low-carb, there wasn’t an available seat so could you please go get us a few more chairs?

She stopped walking, balanced the tray in one arm, and pulled out her cell phone with a shaking hand. She pretended to study it, pushed a button, then looked up. “Excuse me, everyone, but I’ll have to delay our introduction a little longer,” she said, forced a smile. “Liam, you can catch up with me later.” Then she turned around on her heel and marched out of the room, still carrying the coffee in one hand and pretending to answer the phone in the other.

Instead of the elevator she hurried into the stairwell and ran up the stairs, the cardboard tray listing to one side, and reached her executive suite winded and shaking.

Maybe clogs weren’t going to cut it in this business. She looked down. She was in another black suit, which that morning had felt like firm authority but now felt like suburban dentist. She went over to her desk and set down the tray, picked up her coffee, and gulped it down hot. She would not fight Liam head-on. She would not. There were better ways—quieter, gentler ways—of—of—

Of what? What was she doing?

She sat down. She was taking over the company. Not just playing around, she really wanted to do it. She would do it.

She reached over, picked up Liam’s cappuccino, and sucked that one down too.

Now she could think. With her veins pumping caffeine and her nerves straining like rubber bands, Bev paced the office and worked through her options. First, she would not fire anyone. Secretly she thought that was why her grandfather had chosen her, because she would find a way for everyone to get along. Second, she would learn everything about everybody in the company and choose one of them as her right-hand woman. Or man, though she hadn’t seen many of those. Which brought her to her third point: she would stop thinking about Liam.

No, first she would stop thinking about Liam.

She sat down and stared out at the vent pipes on the neighboring rooftops, thinking about Liam. About the way he’d looked, his hair slightly damp like he’d just come out of the shower. How his dress shirt fitted his shoulders. The hint of guilt in his eyes while he was trying to put her down, that he probably didn’t think she could see.

With all the radioactive energy of two hundred milligrams of caffeine, she got up and went looking for HR. Let him think he could scare her into hiding. She’d quietly learn about the people laboring along at every level and figure out how to win then over. Whether they liked it or not.

Even him.

Chapter 8

T
wo days later Liam watched Wendi arrange the line into groups on the rolling rack next to his desk. “Did you bring Bev the binders?” he asked.

Wendi nodded and shoved her glasses up her nose. “What’s she going to do with all that old stuff?” she asked, then added like the infant she was, “Some of those lines went back into the nineteen hundreds.”

“She wants to learn as much as she can about the business.” Which should keep her busy for a couple weeks, at least. That and the rolling racks of samples he’d had delivered to her office. “She has no background in apparel and doesn’t want to screw things up with her ignorance.”

“But the binders are just full of spec paperwork and production stuff that’s totally out-of-date now. They’re not even on the new database. And we don’t source in half those countries anymore.”

He continued to rearrange the line samples by delivery date, not interested in explaining himself to an entry-level assistant. Ever since he’d rescued Wendi from Ellen, she’d latched onto him without any of the subservient reserve he’d nurtured in the rest of the team. He missed it.

“And why is she making boards?” Wendi continued. “She asked me for her own glue sticks and foam core.”

Liam turned his head away to hide his grin. “I suggested she sketch out a few ideas of her own. And share with us her first impressions at the line meeting on Monday.”

“On Monday?” Wendi gaped at him. “When Darrin and Jennifer get back?”

“Maybe they’ll find her fresh perspective useful.”

Wendi snapped her mouth shut, her eyebrows flying high on her forehead, and Liam suspected she was imagining the same thing he was.

Bloodbath.

It would be an awkward but necessary experience to convince her she would be happiest owning the company from a distance. Orange County was only about six hundred miles away—an easy flight, once or twice a year. At the most. He’d made sure Wendi had told her all about her experiences as Ellen’s assistant and left a stack of HR paperwork about the dozens of young, talented people who had quit under her thumb—some within a week. Bev wouldn’t be selling to Ellen now, not with her determination to be nice.

But she would tire of being here in person.

In the meantime he’d keep her busy. For the rest of the week he kept her snowed under useless minutiae in the guise of “Training.” She kept to Ed’s suite and the business offices, far away from him and the product development team. By Friday, the staff had accepted his description of her as a temporary technicality and was getting optimistic about Ellen’s lengthening absence.

Friday night he was so optimistic he left before seven, the first time in months, and even made it to the 24-hour Safeway before dark. He parked in his condo’s basement garage, a luxury he never failed to appreciate, and took the elevator up to the twentieth floor, humming and smiling to himself.

But when he got to his door he paused, hand on the doorknob, and felt his mood turn black. The condo, with its expensive one-eighty view of the Bay he seldom got to appreciate, was now distinctly, unhappily occupied.

Though they sounded happy enough. He let the door slam behind him, dropped his keys onto the shelf by the kitchen, went to the fridge for a beer.
Not again.

He strode across the carpeted hallway as loudly as he could, closing his eyes when he got to the bedroom door, which was open. “April.”

He heard muffled exclamations and groans, bodies rolling across the mattress, and finally, feet on floor struggling into pants. “Uh,” said a male voice.

“Oh, God,” April groaned, sounding like an exasperated teenager, which she hadn’t been for seven years. “He’s just my brother. You don’t have to go. ”

“Yes, you do,” Liam said. “No bed of your own?”

“You know I—” April began.

“I meant him.” Liam leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed and eyes still closed.

“I should go,” the guy said. “Nice to meet you, uh—”

“Her name’s April,” Liam said.

“He knows my name!” April said, then sighed. “Right?”

Silence. Jeans zipping, one foot hopping on the floor as a shoe was pulled on the other. Hurried breathing, then his throat clearing.

“Right?” Liam asked him.

He skulked past him in the doorway. “Maybe I’ll see you around.” The guy fled down the hall and out the front door.

After a few long seconds, April stalked over to him. “You can open your eyes now.”

“Handsome guy,” Liam said, peeking out at her. “Not too bright though.”

Her face was torn between guilt and anger. “Couldn’t you have waited a few minutes?”

“That’s my bed. Thank God I didn’t.” He glared at her, not kidding anymore. “What’s wrong with the couch? Where you sleep?”

She bit her lip and looked away. “He said he’s got a bad back.”

“I’m going to make us some dinner while you wash my sheets.”

“But I told you, we were just getting—”