Polished Slick (Natural Beauty) (2 page)

Ah, there’s Nikki
.

“If I don’t get these goddamned colors finalized within the next few days, we’ll have to delay the Polished Slick launch until fall. Not gonna happen.” She smacked a palm on the tabletop, and they all jumped.

“I’ve already purchased ad space in major beauty magazines and set aside time here to shoot the new campaign. There’s no wiggle-room here. We are
not
prepared to fall behind.”

Murmurs erupted from around the large table, and when Trinity looked at each of the other six present staff members, she found Jerry doing the same thing. If it wasn’t him, wasn’t her, then who was it?

Nikki took a bolstering breath and adjusted her ponytail holder. “Look, I know I promised if we got Polished Slick launched on time this year, I’d make Christmas bonuses happen.” She took off her sunglasses, rubbed the red marks on her nose between her thumb and forefinger, and fixed her red-rimmed green eyes first on Jerry, then pointedly at Trinity.

She got the hint. If there were a fuck-up, they were the clean-up crew.

“It’s been a turbulent two years with the breakneck pace we’re releasing new products, but I still mean it. I owe you guys big. Every one of you has grown this business in some way, small or large, and I value your presence here. I don’t want to lose a single one of you.” Coming from Nikki, it was downright gushing.

She adjusted the waistband of her peasant skirt so it rested under her belly, and put her hands on her spreading hips. “Trinity, you’ll be in charge when I’m out those few weeks with the baby.” She hooked one arm of her sunglasses into her ballooning cleavage and folded them closed atop the collar of her tank top. “I need you to prove to me you can handle the unpredictable. I need to know you’re not just good when everything is even keel. I’m grooming you to lead, so here’s your chance to break through.”

She was right, and Trinity perked up a bit.
That
would show her grandmother—the woman who thought the only good reason to go to college was to get a husband. Trinity could be a vice president of a hot young company by the ripe old age of twenty-five.

“Jerry!” Nikki snapped.

“Yes?” Jerry pushed his heavy blond dreads out of his face, and cut his eyes toward Captain Battle-ax.

“We talked about getting you an assistant so you wouldn’t have to work on weekends.” Nikki waddled over to the refrigerator in the break area and helped herself to a sport drink. She popped the lid and swallowed about a third of the stuff in one gulp. After sighing her satisfaction, she turned back to her team. “Until we fix this nail polish mess, I don’t trust bringing on any new staff.”

Jerry’s face fell, but to his credit, he kept his mouth shut.

“Everyone in this room has something at stake if Polished Slick doesn’t launch on time. I need to grow this business and
fast
. Natural by Nicolette needs to stay relevant by offering products modern consumers demand. I’m not just talking women, either. If we don’t fill that space in the stores, the big girls will gladly step in and take our market share. Big companies are taking their cues from what designers are sending out on the runways in New York and Paris. They’re already behind because they don’t have an ear to the ground. They’re not paying attention to the people who are really driving trends.” Nikki blew out a ragged breath.

Two years ago, Nikki decided
not
to sell her formulations to the major cosmetics company Rococo. They wanted to use Nikki, who happened to be a drop-dead gorgeous little spark-plug of a chemist, as the face of their new natural line. Rococo wanted to buy her formulas, package them under their corporation’s branding, and use her to promote the stuff, but they wanted to reserve the right to alter her formula at any time with Nikki’s name and reputation still attached. After very little introspection, Nikki refused. She’d had some award money that floated the business for a while, and then the Mitchells injected some money from the farm after Nikki and Charlie got married.

In about twenty months, Nikki was able to pay back the money she borrowed due to careful marketing and having products that just
worked
, although there had been a few bum formulations they all laughed about in hindsight. Trinity truly believed she owed Nikki a debt of gratitude for hiring her with no cosmetics experience. Her internship had been in pharmaceuticals. True, she’d had one of the highest GPAs in her class, but book smarts didn’t always translate to practical knowledge. Some of the smartest people she knew were complete idiots.

Nikki tucked her tablet under her arm, and walked slowly toward her private office at the back of the converted barn. Halfway there, she seemed to remember she hadn’t dismissed her crew. She turned around. “I’m running late practices this week to get Gabby and the rest of the all-star squad ready for the state dance competition.” She looked at Jerry, then Trinity, then continued her passage without another word.

The staff was quiet, sitting very still until Nikki shut her office door. Trinity knew Nikki well enough to have caught the drift. They were grown-ups. It was time to work.

“Well, let’s get on with it,” she said, clapping her hands in accompaniment.

The staff just stared at her for a few long, uncomfortable seconds, then one by one, folks pushed back their chairs.

The way Trinity interpreted the situation was that the look Nikki cast at them had meant, “Fix this shit,” and Trinity was going to do just that.

She couldn’t help but notice when she scooped up her papers that all the staff had cleared the table except one person.

Jerry wore an expression of quiet amusement on his face. One side of his mouth was ticked up into a dangerous smirk, and he had his arms crossed over his chest.

He was either teasing her, or gunning for a fight.

So mature.
She scoffed, and stood with her papers. Why bother wasting time figuring it out? When she was his boss, she’d wipe that smug smirk off that lazy bum’s face for good. And then she’d fire him.

* * *

Trinity harrumphed, spun on the heel of her boat shoe, and stomped away, but Jerry stayed put, drumming his fingers against the tabletop and trying his damnedest not to curse out loud.

What’s with that chick, anyway?

It took nearly all his patience to deal with Nikki’s mood swings, and he was used to those. They graduated in the same class, and even as a teenager she’d been somewhat intense. Not that they ran in the same cliques back then. They had a lot of science classes together and had been cordial, but not exactly
friends
.

Nikki hadn’t been friends with
anyone
, really. She had been too wrapped up in dance, and everyone knew she had the talent to go pro. She hadn’t even given Charlie, the guy who’d end up being her husband, the time of day back then.

Jerry had always assumed Nikki hadn’t paid much attention to him, but the longer he worked for her he the more he understood that Nikki noticed almost everything, even if she didn’t speak on it. In fact, at their commencement, she’d approached and quietly congratulated him on his admission to the university he’d eventually dropped out of, and then walked away, leaving his jaw flapping.

He hadn’t announced it, but somehow she’d heard and filed the information away, perhaps thinking it’d be useful later. That’s how Nikki was.

He rubbed his eyes, leaned the back of his neck against the top of his chair, set his gaze on the ceiling, and groaned. The late nights had caught up to him months ago, and now he’d entered the stage of exhaustion where even his well-honed autopilot was nearing the crash and burn stage.

Back in college, he’d been one of those guys who could stay up all night playing video games in the dorms, then make it to eight a.m. classes like it was no big deal. At age thirty-two, however, staying up late to compile reports and fix bugs in the database were going to break him. Add to that all the social media tedium he had to stay on top of. He was in front of a keyboard all the time, and it was crazy-making.

Damned shame. At the height of summer, he couldn’t shut down his computer to go surfing for a few hours. Well, maybe he could, but if he went, he’d probably have to respond to e-mails between waves.

Things had to get better. If it meant increasing his exposure to that prudish little twit of a junior chemist for the short-term, so be it.

Why do the cute ones have to be so fucking annoying?

He rolled his head left to right, and worked out the cricks in his neck with a cringe. It’d been yet another night sleeping upright in his desk chair. Not that he’d complain. He appreciated the job—it was practically ideal for his skill set, even if the hours were burdensome. Freelancing had been great, but he wasn’t the hermit people made him out to be. He was tired of working from home all the time and
liked
being around people…at his leisure. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t let half the county drop by his place unannounced to play with his video game systems.

When Nikki had offered him the job, it’d seemed like a win-win situation. He wouldn’t have to cut his hair or remove his piercings to go to work—which every other company in the area made his hiring contingent on—and Nikki got a smarter tech guy than she could otherwise afford. During his salary negotiations, since Nikki absolutely couldn’t come up any more on the dollars end, they agreed he’d only work from the office four days per week. What he didn’t know at the time was he would be working
seven
days per week. Nikki probably hadn’t expected that either. She usually shot straight from the hip, even if she had to slap on a sweet smile to administer the bullets.

He’d hang in there and do his job, but that damned junior chemist strutting around like the crown princess of Naboo really had his hackles up. They’d been hired at about the same time, but Trinity thought because of the nature of her job she had seniority. He didn’t bother arguing with the little sprite, even if she was dead wrong. If it gave her self-confidence a boost to think she had some authority over him—he was okay with her thinking it. Girls liked that kind of shit. Still, she was getting bossier with each passing day, and had no reason to be. Even if she got a promotion, she still wouldn’t be his supervisor. No one supervised him, not even Nikki. It was kind of in his contract.

“Another goddamned distraction,” he mumbled, shutting his laptop lid.

The chair at his left scraped the concrete floor as some staff member pulled it back. He looked up, expecting to find Trinity nagging him with a red-hot poker at the ready or something, but instead watched Juan Garcia plop into the seat.

Jerry had known Juan since back in the day when Juan was a migrant farm worker who spoke about seven words of English, and Jerry was a teenager who drove rather badly. He still drove badly, but on purpose, usually.

His first time in Chowan County, Juan had been around twenty, and Jerry had nearly backed over him in the parking lot of Bear’s Stop and Go when he bent down to pick up a quarter.

Juan went back to Mexico after the harvest season that year, and came back the following spring to stay for good. He’d met Edenton’s resident Latina spitfire, Mercedes, and spent the entire winter hoarding scratch to get back to her. Good thing, too, because he managed to knock her up in that short time he’d been around the first time. That was fifteen years ago. Juan hung out at Jerry’s place a lot when he needed time away from his kids. They were cute, but loud. Nikki hired Juan as a favor to Mercedes and hadn’t regretted it yet. He handled all of the shipping and deliveries of N-by-N products, sometimes driving as far as Asheville to personally deliver large orders.

“I know that look on your face, Commandant Rouse.” Juan propped his chin up on his fist and wore his cheesiest grin.

Jerry cringed. “Commandant Rouse” had been one of his gamer names. He’d had to change it after some kids who disagreed with one of his online reviews ganged up and took him down in an MMORPG. They depleted his life force so severely that he couldn’t play again for about ten days. That had been the only game he’d ever played where the characters were capable of real-time comas. He’d panned it fantastically in his review, calling it an “epic waste of money and brain cells.”

“What look?”

Juan made a waffling motion with his hand. “The
I am plotting a diabolical plan
look. I have seen that several times before. Each time ended in
el caos
.”

“Look, I said I was sorry about the powerboat thing. You never told me you couldn’t swim, or I wouldn’t have let you put on the skis. You grew up on the coast. How the fuck is it you can’t swim?”

Juan rolled his dark eyes and groaned. “I forgot about that one. I still want to learn to surf, though.”

Jerry forced out a breath through his clenched teeth. “If I ever get out to the beach again, I’ll let you know. Really, I swear, I’m not plotting anything this time. I’m just thinking about this nail polish craziness and how it’s going to further sap the life force out of me. I’m running out of steam, man. Between the work and my mother…”

“Yeah.” Juan leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. He rubbed the sparse stubble on his chin for a moment, and then said, “You know, it’s kinda strange to me that anyone around here would want Nikki to fail. More jobs here means more money all around.”

“I’m following you.”

“So, it’s unlikely the saboteur is a full-time employee. We’ve been here the longest. We have the most to lose.”

Jerry scanned the massive barn, and itemized the small staff. There was Trinity at her bench, preparing a new batch of insect repellant. She cut her eyes at them in a warning then looked away.

Nikki’s grandmother—Gramma Stacy—sat on one of the overstuffed sofas. She hummed as she plastered labels onto make-up remover bottles. She’d put her Lumberton house on the rental market and moved up to Tyner to help Nikki. She wasn’t likely to screw things up, unless she was just that kind of masochist.

Francine and Daisy were a mother-daughter contract worker team hoping to get hired on permanently. The duo came from a long line of soap makers, and soap was something new for Nikki. Their pay was pretty much dependent on how many pieces the company sold, and soap was all Francine and Daisy knew. Didn’t seem likely they’d be there to spy, given they’d tried selling the soap by themselves in the past, but didn’t have the marketing power.