One Way to Succeed (Casas de Buen Dia Book 1) (13 page)

“Great!” he said, pulling her close. He tipped her chin up and kissed her lightly. She couldn’t help but compare his peck-like caress with Rick’s seductive lips. She closed her eyes and pushed it out of her mind. Rick wasn’t an option. And for all of the ways Rob measured up poorly versus Rick, at least he had never dismissed her for being a woman. As often as she had moved for his career, he had never done it to prevent her from using her education and building on her experience. He didn’t think she needed them, of course. But, it wasn’t his fault that she’d had to settle for hotel management and waitressing. 

Later, around midnight, she woke up next to Rob, her head resting on his shoulder. She listened to his light snore for a few minutes, thinking about how easy it had been to fall back into bed with him. She felt her eyes sting with the advent of tears. Were they tears of relief, or joy, or love? She spread her fingers out on his smooth, bare chest and wondered.

No, she decided, feeling no reprieve from her answer; they were tears of sadness and loss. She rose from the bed and put nightgown back on before lying back down, her back toward the sleeping man next to her.

Friday afternoon, Amy stepped into Rick’s office to ask for permission to leave early but not offering an excuse. Rick had simply waved goodbye at her, not looking up. He was ready for the week to be over too. He had given up on mending fences with Amy. She had finally told him she was pissed off because he didn’t select any of the women she had listed to interview for COO.

Well, she wouldn’t understand, he concluded. And it wasn’t her call. Further, if something as little as that could come between them, he didn’t see much hope in reconciling things with her. Even if they managed to recover some of the passion they’d discovered the Friday before, it was clear that she would only find other objectionable things about the way he ran his company. It simply wasn’t going to work.

On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he was ready to let her go. She had done so much for the company in ten days, and if he could just wring another month or so of productivity out of her, then he could possibly have a COO in place before she left, which would mean filling the admin role again wouldn’t be so urgent.

But then, there was that unexplainable attraction between them, something he knew would be hard to replicate, and something that he knew she felt, too. Or had felt, too.

On the one hand, he was ready to give up on her; on the other, he simply couldn’t.

Rick walked to the front lobby after he heard Amy go out the door, and watched her little BMW zip down the street and around the corner. He shook his head and stuffed his hands in his pockets. As he turned around to go back in the office for his jacket, he caught Sandra looking at him with a crooked smile.

“What?” he asked gruffly.

“Nothing,” she said, meeting his eyes. “I wondered how long it would take for you to mess up this hire, too.”

“Then, it’s not ‘nothing,’” Rick retorted, using his fingers to put air quotes around “nothing.” “And what do you mean, ‘too?’” More air quotes.

“Other than me, no woman has worked in this office for more than three months that I know of,” she said. “Amy’s only been here two weeks, and you’ve already blown it.” She wasn’t mocking him, he realized from her tone. It was straight-up, honest criticism.

“But you’ve only been here a year,” he pointed out.

“Actually two, and that’s about four times longer than any other female. Don’t you think there’s a pattern here, Rick? Is it that you can’t keep it in your pants, or is it they can’t keep their hands out of your pants?”

Rick was taken aback. Sandra had never spoken to him like this before. But rather than get angry at her for it, he vowed to keep his composure.

“Well, maybe women aren’t meant to be in the construction business,” he offered, shrugging and holding his hands palms up like he wasn’t sure what the answer was.

“Oh, like your mom?” Clearly, Sandra wasn’t letting him off the hook. “She’s no good at it either?”

Rick took a deep breath and looked at the clock over Sandra’s head.

“Hey, why don’t we all knock off early,” he said. “I think we’re all a little tired and testy, and I have somewhere I need to be before five.”

~

The girls at the vet’s office had Busker ready for him when he arrived. They had brushed him until his hair shone and wrapped new, bright orange tape around the cast on his leg. Obviously, Busker had become a favorite in the weeks they’d nursed him back to health. On the phone a week earlier, the vet told him it was taking much longer for Busker to recover because he’d developed an infection from the bad break in his leg. Then, the vet said he needed Busker to stay an extra day because Rick had agreed to pay to have him neutered before he came back for him. But Rick wondered if the assistants’ fondness for the mutt had something to do with the mutt’s extended stay.

“So, are you and Busker headed for the PetSmart?” the young clerk—he couldn’t remember her name—asked as she ran his credit card and completed the paperwork. “Going to get some nice bowls and some toys?”

“Uh, no,” Rick said. “I’m just coming to take him over to the shelter. I told you, he’s not my dog.”

The clerk looked up at him and frowned. “You’re kidding right?”

“What do you mean? No, really. He’s not my dog.”

“No, I mean you have a chance to have a dog like Busker and you’d pass it up? What? Do you travel all the time? The girlfriend doesn’t like dogs? You’re allergic?”

“No, I just don’t have much time—”

“Oh, forget it!” The clerk stood up, threw her shoulders back, and grabbed a webbed leash off a hook behind the desk. “Let’s go get this over with.”

She was crying by the time he led Busker out the front door and helped him into the pickup’s high seat. Rick wondered how she could work there if she got so emotionally attached to the animals.

“Or is it just you?” he asked Busker as he started the engine.

Busker looked him dead in the eye, and wagged his tail energetically. As the truck pulled forward, he slid down on his belly and put his head between his paws, looking contented and happy, his eyes still not leaving Rick’s face.

“Oh, that’s how you do it, huh?” Rick said, smiling down at him. “Eye contact. That’s it? That works for you?”

Busker barked a quick retort and his tail banged against the passenger door.

“Well, as much as I like you, I’m afraid you are going to have to win over someone else,” Rick said, reaching over and scratching Busker’s ears. “I will call and check on you, though. Okay?”

An hour later, Rick left the shelter with more paperwork. The two intake workers hadn’t been too sympathetic. Why didn’t he keep the dog? they asked. Why was he abandoning it? Rick explained that he had hit the dog with his car, paid for his care, but couldn’t adopt it. He showed them the paperwork from the vet.

“See, this is the day I brought him in,” he pointed to the date at the top of his $3,500 bill. “He didn’t have a collar, and we don’t know who he belongs to. Perhaps now his owners will find him.”

“Maybe,” one of the clerks said. He didn’t sound convinced. “But we have much more trouble placing large dogs like him.”

“But his owners may have been looking for him all this time. Now, if you put him in your weekly page in the Desert Sun, they’ll know where he is,” Rick continued to argue. “Anyway, I thought large dogs were easy to place.”

“If he’s been missing for three weeks, I’m sure his owners have given up,” the second clerk chimed in. “If they even cared.”

“But he was clean and groomed,” Rick added. “He didn’t look like a stray.”

“No chip, no collar,” the first clerk pointed out. “They probably brushed him and kicked him out, hoping some sucker would pick him up, and they wouldn’t have to pay us to take him.”

“Oh, there’s a fee for bringing in a stray?”

“It’s an abandonment fee.”

“But I’m not abandoning him.”

“Then, what would you call this?” The clerk looked disgusted.

Forty dollars and a lot of guilt later, Rick left the pound. At least he got assurances that the shelter wouldn’t put Busker to sleep. He’d get to stay until he was adopted.

~

Saturday morning, on a plane to San Francisco, Rick looked over the COO candidates’ resumes. Kent would put them through his checks, making sure there was nothing nefarious in their pasts, nothing that could come back to interfere with their ability to do their jobs. 

Looking out the window as the plane climbed over the San Jacinto Mountain range, Rick remembered the hikes he once took with his dad up the east face of the mountains. They had hiked up from the Palm Springs Art Museum parking lot to the Palm Springs Tram once. Another time, they hiked from the Cahuilla Indians’ trailhead at the end of Mesquite Avenue up to Idyllwild, carrying everything they needed on their backs and camping along the trail for two nights.

Why had his father left? he still wondered. Why did he let Rick’s mother kick him out and take his business? But, more importantly, why was Rick still obsessing about that? His father had made no effort over the decade before he died to get in touch with his son. Maybe, Rick allowed, it was time to give it up—to recognize that whatever Rick wanted his father to prove, he had been incapable of.

The landing in San Francisco was smoother than usual, and it took Rick only minutes to pull his luggage out of the overhead container and head up the stairs for the BART light-rail into town. He got off at the Powell Street station and walked a couple of blocks to a café on Union Square. As a destination, it was cliché, he had admitted on the phone, but it was still fun to sit on the square and watch people—from over-costumed, uber-self-conscious South Bay residents in the city either slumming or shopping at Saks, to the wanna-be trendy teenagers, slouching along the park’s paths, trying to look unconcerned about how they appeared, when their No. 1 concern was exactly that: what they looked like.

“What’s this all about?” Kent said, halfway through their lunch of olives and charcuterie. He gestured at Rick’s body, from head to toe. “You seem so uptight, so unsettled.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Rick tried to dismiss his friend’s insight. “I am at the end of three big projects, and I’m not sure where we go next. I can’t afford to buy into what’s available. I’m afraid I’m getting priced out of my own market.”

“Well, maybe,” Kent said. “But I have a feeling it’s not about your pipeline of projects. What I’m seeing in your posture is some kind of disappointment, maybe more of a personal nature. Is it that Amy?”

“No!” Rick said, a little too emphatically.

“Oh, so that’s what it is!” Kent responded quickly. “So what happened? Did she tell you to go take a hike?”

“Well, first of all, that’s not on my mind at all. I’m not at all interested in her.”

“Methinks thou doth protest—“

“No!” Rick repeated. “It has nothing to do with her. I’m just worried about how I can move ahead, given what has happened to Palm Springs real estate prices.”

“I don’t believe you,” Kent said, lowering his voice. “I have known you too long to not be able to read your body language. This isn’t as much about business as it is about a woman.”

Rick took a deep breath and looked away from his friend. “Okay, you’re right,” he relented. “On the one hand, I wish I hadn’t kissed her. On the other hand, I’m sorry I didn’t sleep with her. But, now it seems to have ended before it really even got started.”

“So that’s how you decide when to move on? When it gets complicated?”

“I guess that came out wrong,” Rick admitted. “What I mean, honestly, is I don’t know what happened. One night we’re close to falling in bed with each other, and the next week, she is giving me the cold shoulder. I hate to be so full of clichés but I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s like she got to see the real me, and now she hates me.”

“Well, did you ask her?” Kent asked, pushing his plate to the side and leaning back with his Scotch. “Did she tell you what happened?”

“Yes, but I don’t know whether to believe it,” Rick said. “It had something to do with my mother telling her I’m a sexist pig.”

“So did you do anything to prove your mother right?”

“Oh, Christ,” Rick said, leaning forward, resigned. “Okay, here’s what happened.”

He explained the search process for the COO, including both Amy’s brilliant approach to finding candidates and her reaction to the top three he picked to interview.

“The last thing we did, before she turned a cold shoulder, was narrow the candidates down to three top prospects,” Rick explained.

“And my guess is all three were men,” Kent said, as if he had this figured out all along.

“Yes, they were the most qualified,” Rick said.

“You ass!” Kent slammed his cocktail glass on the table and leaned forward, nearly meeting Rick’s forehead with his.

“What? Why am I an ass?” Rick looked honestly bewildered.

“How fucking dense are you?” Kent asked. “I’ve known you for about fourteen years, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So, by now, I know what your big issues are. Don’t you think your problem with your mother has gone far enough?”

“What’s that got to do with this?” Rick asked. He knew exactly what Kent was getting at, but he was damned if he’d admit it.

“You can’t even see what a misogynist you’ve become on account of your issues with your mother,” Kent said. “But how can you expect a woman, especially one as competent as Amy, to not see your idiocy? How can you expect her to accept this?”

“I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.” Rick sat back and looked away. He wanted to end this conversation while he and Kent were still friends.

“No, I’m sorry, but it’s you who can’t see what’s going on here,” Kent said. “And that, my friend, is standing in the way of everything.”

Having made his point, Kent called a truce. “We’ll talk about his later, my friend,” he said. “Let’s drop it now and enjoy the city. I never take a whole day to just wander around.”

They spent the rest of the day checking out some of the city’s microbreweries and walking. Having just barely uncovered the touchy subject of Amy, they abandoned it and talked about state politics, and the movies Kent had seen lately. Rick had to defer to his friend on the latter topic; given his work habits, he hadn’t seen a movie in years.