He's So Bad (5 page)

“I bought you naan, four samosas, tandoori chicken, butter chicken, and basmati rice. You do like Indian food, don’t you?”

I would joke with her and say no if I weren’t so hungry and the figures that I’d studied hadn’t revealed some bad news. Basically, buying this company was like buying a lemon.

I pat my pants pocket for my wallet. “Yes, I like Indian. How much do I owe you?”

She holds up a hand. “Nothing. I paid for it with your lunch card.”

I don’t know what the hell a lunch card is, and Zoe must see the question on my face.

“There’s a credit card that I used to buy Ralph’s lunch. He was busy all the time too—especially lately.”

“Why lately?”

She brings the food to my desk, takes each item out of the bag, and sets it on my desk, careful not to disturb my work. “Ralph has just been stressed out lately. Everybody’s been stressed out.”

“But not you, right?”

Zoe shrugs. “There.” She steps back. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

I wonder why she’s being evasive. Maybe she knows what I’ve just discovered.

“Could you get me that list of employees?” I ask.

“Oh, I left it here.” She picks up a folder at the corner of my desk. Her extreme smile has returned, and for some reason, it doesn’t irritate me anymore.

I take the folder. “Thanks, Zoe.”

“Call me if you need me!” She turns to leave.

“Wait, what’s her name again—the one who rides the motorcycle?” I ask.

“Carter?”

“Right. Thanks.”

She looks at me as if she wonders why I asked her that, but I don’t owe her an answer.

“Another thing—could you send out a company-wide email? I want to have a meeting tomorrow morning at nine.”

“Okay,” she says. And just like that, she seems to forget how interested she was in why I asked about Carter.

Carter Remington is one of the company’s most sought-after architects, but she’s been given the most mediocre projects. I’ve noticed a lot of incomplete project reports where clients decided to pull their account from the company. Carter hasn’t had one cancellation, and regardless of how much a client appealed to have her as their architect, she hasn’t been put on the project. No wonder she sits in that corner like a shrinking violet. There’s definitely been some funny business going on around here, and I plan to end it. Three-quarters of the architects on staff are under the age of thirty and were hired within the last three years. Ralph hired Carter; Grace hired all the others.

I figure out how to buzz Zoe and ask if she can get me all of Carter Remington’s, along with four other architects’, project packages. She gets them to me in less than fifteen minutes. As soon as I have the packages, I comb through them. What I see is some impeccable work, and Carter’s is the best of the bunch.

I look up to rub my tired eyes and notice the clock on the wall. It’s seven forty-five at night, yet the office hasn’t thinned out. I find that strange. Even Zoe is still at her desk. I buzz her into my office, and she comes right away.

“What can I get you?” she asks.

“Why is everyone still here?”

She looks out the window at the office and shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“Are they still working?”

“I guess.”

The fact that we still have a full house is pretty odd, but my mind is too full to deal with it. I rub my temples. “One more thing—can you get me all of the active project packets?”

“Yes!” It’s late, and her eyes are still bright.

“Thanks, Zoe. Once I have the packets, I want you to go home and get some rest. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Are you sure? I can stay here as long as you’re here.”

“No, go. I’ll be here all night.”

Her eyes grow wide. “All night?”

“All night.”

Zoe steps all the way into my office and closes the door. “So can I ask you something?”

I see the worry on her face. “You can ask me anything.”

“How bad is it?”

“How bad is what?”

“Are we really in trouble? There have been rumors that there’s no equity in this company.”

There
is
no equity in this company, but there’s potential. I know enough not to disclose any of that to my assistant. I show her my exhausted grin. “Don’t worry about anything. I’m on it.”

She reads my expression. It takes a while, but what has quickly become one of my favorite smiles returns. “Okay, active projects coming up.” She practically skips out of my office.

Once she brings me the active projects, I spend the night combing through them. I haven’t been this involved with the business of a company since the early days of A&Rt Media Group, before it got so large.

It’s three o’clock in the morning when I look up from the reports and rub my eyes again. I can hardly stay awake. The entire room beyond my office is dark except for one small light in the far corner. If I remember correctly, that’s where Carter sits.

I get up and follow the light. The closer I get, the more I’m able to see who’s sitting there—it’s her.

S
he
is
bent over her desk. Her hand moves across the page like a needle across a polygraph machine. Carter has on earbuds, and I can hear the music coming from them. I’m surprised she hasn’t noticed me standing behind her. Judging by the intensity with which her hand is scribbling, she’s in the zone. I’ve been there many times before.

“
K
eep working
,” Carter told herself.

She felt Robert Tango behind her. His energy was like a mega wave, washing over her and wiping her out. Who would’ve thought that he would buy the company she worked for? She wondered if he remembered her. If he remembered her, then he would’ve hugged her, messed up her hair, and said, “Sup, Carly.” He’d always called her Carly instead of Carter. Then he would trot off into the woods with Vince, and they wouldn’t return to the main house until just before sundown.

Carter was five years younger than her cousin Vince and his best friend, Robert Tango, but because of the breadth of their personalities and presence, she’d always felt as though they were much older. All of Vince’s sisters and cousins had had the biggest crushes on Robert, and she wasn’t exempt. He had a natural way of flirting with every person in the room. The first time she’d played with herself, she imagined Robert Tango’s sensual and wicked smirk.

She’d seen him mostly during the summers when all of the families vacationed at their great-great-grandfather’s estate at Sag Harbor, New York. The house sat on fifteen acres of land adorned with green grass, healthy trees, and muddy lakes. The servants’ quarters at the back edge of the property was used as a guesthouse. That was where Vince and Robert stayed. Robert started joining the families on vacation when he was about eleven years old. For the first three years, when Robert and Vince were younger and not yet interested in girls, they spent the summer days swimming in the lakes, climbing trees, catching fireflies, and trying to avoid getting bit by ticks while doing totally gross things like looking for animal carcasses.

Four years later, when the boys turned fifteen, things changed. In one year, they grew taller and filled out. They looked more like twenty-year-old college boys than pubescent teenagers. They were also horny as hell. Vince’s sister Allie, who was the same age as Carter, used to accuse Vince and Robert of taking women twice their age back to the guesthouse.

“And do what with them?” Carter asked.

Allie just rolled her eyes and told Carter to grow up. Allie used to talk to Carter as if she knew nothing and Allie knew everything—seventeen years later, that hadn’t changed. Allie used her knowledge as leverage. She had always threatened to tell on Vince and Robert if Vince didn’t drive her to the movies on his moped or take her shopping for a new swimsuit or something else stupid. Once she made Robert Tango kiss her like he kissed the other girls. He happily obliged, and she never asked again.

Carter knew the kiss had scared Allie. They were taught that good girls waited to have sex with the boy they wanted to marry. Robert Tango had kissed her and dismissed her, and that broke Allie’s heart.

That same year, on the day after the Fourth of July celebration, Carter had ridden her bike into town for ice cream. The afternoon was humid but not hot. Her bike rolled to a stop in front of the ice cream shop, and she saw Robert and an older girl inside. The girl giggled about something. He watched her with a sexy smirk. Carter remembered pretending it was her he was watching like that. Then Robert put his hand on the girl’s thigh. She looked at her lap and back at him. They shared a moment. Robert whispered something in her ear, and they stood up.

Carter had felt her heart beating and thighs pulsing. They were walking toward the door, so Carter quickly rolled her bike farther down the street so Robert couldn’t see her when he walked out of the ice cream shop. Not that he would’ve recognized her anyway. He only paid her attention on day one, when all the families first arrived. He would mess up her long copper hair and say, “Sup, Carly.” Vince would stand behind him grinning, never correcting his friend. Vince laughed and jokingly called her Carly too. Admittedly, she liked the attention. They were the big boys. But she was a little girl, and the big boys only played with big girls.

The girl Robert had left the ice cream shop with was a big girl—not in physical stature but in rank. They got into her white Volkswagen Rabbit. The top was down. Robert put his arm around the girl’s seat as she sped off. Carter jumped on her bike and pedaled as fast as she could to follow them. As soon as the car turned down Madison Street, she knew exactly where they were going. Carter over-exerted herself, pedaling as fast as she could back to the estate, except she didn’t head to the main house.

Twenty minutes later, she’d reached the guesthouse. The white Rabbit was parked in the short driveway. Carter quietly rolled her bike to the side of the house and leaned it against the wall. The window at the front of the house was open. She looked through it, but they weren’t in the living room. There wasn’t much to the tiny house other than a living room, kitchen, a bathroom, and one bedroom with two twin beds for the boys.

Carter crept around the side of the house. The bedroom window was open. She heard the girl moaning and Robert grunting. It hadn’t taken him long to get between her legs. Carter could only watch him thrust in her for so long. The sight of him enjoying sex with another girl made her sick to her stomach. From that moment on, she had been determined to get over her crush on Robert Tango. After that summer, it was pretty easy. He and Vince turned sixteen and stopped coming up to Sag Harbor for summer vacations. They would go summer skiing in Switzerland, New Zealand, and sometimes Canada.

So it had been so many years since she’d seen her cousin Vince’s best friend. She’d almost run into him at Allie’s wedding. Rumor had it that he only stayed long enough to watch Allie exchange her vows because weddings made him nervous. Although one drunken night, when Allie came to San Francisco to visit her, Allie confessed that she thought Robert left early because he couldn’t bear to see her marry another man.

“And you know this how?” Carter asked.

Allie gave her that same look that used to make her feel like a dork. “I just do.”

“Did he say that to you?”

“No, but I know.”

For the first time ever, Carter saw right through her know-it-all cousin. Allie’s declaration was merely wishful thinking.

Earlier that day, when Carter had slammed into Robert in the courtyard on her way back to her motorcycle to retrieve the new set of drafting pencils she’d bought and left in the storage bin, Carter had thought for sure he would recognize her. He didn’t.

As soon as Carter had graduated from high school and entered college, she shedded her oversized T-shirts and baggy jeans for form-fitting V-neck T-shirts and tight jeans. She dyed her bronze hair black and sliced her long tresses. Her parents had bought her a sensible, fuel-efficient car for college, but Carter got a job as a waitress at a local coffee shop and traded the car in for a motorcycle. A motorcycle had been her primary vehicle ever since.

Carter didn’t choose to work late because Robert Tango was in the office. She was pretty sure the crush she’d had on him had fizzled out. She had a client who wanted to change the blueprint mid-construction, and she was figuring out how to alter the structure without losing the integrity. So far, it couldn’t be done. Now Robert Tango was standing over her shoulder. She had lost her concentration and was just scribbling anything to make him think she was too busy to be disturbed.

“Still doing it the old way?”

Butterflies fluttered in Carter’s stomach. Maybe he’d finally remembered her. She turned to face him. It was as if stage lights illuminated his face. Robert Tango had been a beautiful boy, but wow, he was an even better-looking man.

“The old way?”

He nodded at her hand. “Drafting.”

“Oh.” She shifted in her seat. “I start by hand drafting then use CAD. It works for me.”

Robert lifted his mouth into a dreamy, lopsided smile. “It’s pretty late—what are you working on?”

“Um, my clients want me to redraw the plans.”

Robert furrowed his eyebrows. “The Sparrow Carter Municipal Library project?”

She nodded.

“What do they want to change?”

Carter’s legs and hands were shaking. She tried very hard to control them. “Um, one of their donors wanted to add a last-minute wing in their honor or something.”

He grunted thoughtfully. “Can I see?”

“Okay,” Carter said off-pitch.

As he strolled over to stand beside her, she noticed that he had loosened his collar. Carter couldn’t help but take a deep, slow whiff of him. Robert smelled of curry and sweet soap and shampoo. She had to remember that he still had a reputation of a heartbreaker. Of course, she wasn’t the bond-and-breed type. She’d never pictured marriage in her future. Not that she denounced marriage. If a man came along that she wanted to spend forever with, then so be it. Could that man be Robert Tango, the ladies’ man extraordinaire, who was probably into far more glamorous women than her? Carter doubted it.

“I see… can I try something?” he asked.

She shrugged, giving him permission to do whatever the hell he wanted.

Carter watched the amazing way he effortlessly traced the pencil across the page and occasionally erased. The rumor was that he had no experience, just a lot of money. Everyone thought he would ruin the company. Half of the architects at Kennedy Creative, including herself, were actively seeking employment elsewhere.

Robert handed the pencil back to her. “There.” He gave her that lopsided smile that had always made her stomach drop as if she were riding a rollercoaster.

Short of breath, Carter studied the blueprint. It was amazing. He had removed a series of walls and put them in different places without disturbing the existing structure.

“But how did you even know?” she asked.

“How did I know what part of the structure already exists?”

“Yeah.”

He looked at Carter in a way that made her suspect he finally recognized her. “I’ve been studying the active projects. You’re a solid architect, Carter.”

The way he looked at her. Carter thought she would burst from desire, so she dropped her face to break eye contact and took a deep breath. “Thank you.” She was slightly disappointed that he still had not recognized her.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

It turned silent. When Carter looked up, Robert was watching her. Carter’s heart pulsated just as fast as the nerves in her pussy. For sure he was making her panties wet.

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “I guess we should close shop. What do you think?”

“I guess so, since you fixed my dilemma.” The way she grinned—she was definitely flirting. So she erased the smile right off her face.

“I’ll meet you at the door in five?” he said.

“Five minutes?”

He smirked. “Yes.”

Carter gulped. “Okay.”

Her entire body tingled as he gave her one last look before walking quickly back to his office. Her breaths were shallow, and her head was dizzy. She thought she would pass out. Robert Tango was her boss. Not in a million years did she think she would ever say those words.

S
he’s flat-out pretty
. Carter has a face that makes me think of bushy trees, plush grass, and fireflies. I don’t know why I feel that way around her. I shut off my computer, grab my things, turn off the light in my office, and head to our rallying point. Carter’s already standing in the doorway wearing her black motorcycle jacket and holding her metallic red helmet. Those objects make for a tough exterior, but the delicate skin of her face and hands are signs of a soft interior.

I shun the desire to picture myself with my face buried in her pussy. Entertaining that fantasy would feel like a huge step backward.

I tap her helmet. “I’ll walk you to your motorcycle.”

“Okay,” she says.

I search the wall for the light switch.

“They’re automatic,” she says.

I snort. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

We walk in silence. Carter seems nervous. I hope I haven’t crossed any lines. Grace has already said that my reputation precedes me, so I make sure I keep a safe distance between us. The automatic lights cut on as we make our way down the last hallway that leads to the exit. We walk out into the dark morning. The mist is thicker in the courtyard than it was when I arrived to work.

“You have a lot on your mind,” I say to break the ice.

Carter looks at me. Her face is young but definitely that of a woman. I would say she’s about twenty-five or twenty-six, which is a little young for my tastes. I like a woman who’s at least thirty. From that point, the sky’s the limit.

“Why have you been reviewing my work?” she asks.

I hesitate. She thinks I’m checking up on her. Maybe that’s why she’s so anxious. We enter the parking garage.

“I spent the day reviewing everyone’s work. I’m trying to figure out each person’s strengths and weaknesses.”

“Then what are my weaknesses?” she asks.

We walk right past the elevator and up the ramp to the next level.

“You really want to know?” I ask.

“I asked, didn’t I?”

“You’re heavy on the construction.”

She grunts thoughtfully. I watch the wheels turn in her head. We’ve just walked through the second level, and now we’re heading up to the third level. As we round the corner, I see her bike parked right next to the elevator.

“Are you afraid of elevators?” I ask.

She jumps as though I’ve interrupted her deep in thought. “So Ralph always says, more is more and less is less. Are you saying he’s wrong?”

I hesitate. “If he advocates being heavy-handed, then yes. Don’t get me wrong, you do damn good work.”

We reach her motorcycle, and she straddles the seat. “Just good?”

I frown to consider the question.

She snorts. “Sorry to make you uncomfortable. Good is good enough.”