STEP BY STEP (2 page)

Monica pursed her lips, revealing tiny
wrinkles that suggested she might have been a smoker at one point in time. “I just
remembered I have a meeting this morning.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “Do you want me to go
or should I stay here?”

“Come,” she said as she stood up. She
fished around in one of her desk drawers and pulled out a legal pad and handed
me a shiny silver pen. “You can take notes for me.”

The desk on her phone rang and she sighed
audibly, as if it were an inconvenience to answer it.

“I know, Tiffany,” she groaned. “I’m on
my way. Tell Mr.
Woodfield
, we’ll be there in a
minute.”

Monica motioned towards the door as she
slammed the phone down and ushered us out.

“Is Tiffany your assistant?” I asked. I
hated to be that annoying new person with the fifty million questions about
every tiny thing, but if I was going to blow them all out of the water, I
wanted to know who everyone was, what they did, and how the firm operated.

“Yes,” Monica replied.

“So we’re going to a meeting with Mr.
Woodfield
?” I asked as we arrived at the elevator bay down
the hallway. My heart thumped hard in my ears. I hadn’t seen him in ten years.
Would he even recognize me?

“Yes,” Monica replied, only this time I
sensed a slight annoyance in her tone. “And Mr.
Halston
.”

The elevator dinged as the doors parted
and we stepped in with a group of at least seven other employees. Monica
slammed her hand against the button for the sixth floor and pressed the
door-close button. She clearly had no Mirabelle.

“Hurry up,” she said as we practically
ran down the hallway and towards a conference room. It wasn’t my fault we were
late, but she was acting like I was holding her up.

She flung the glass doors open and we
took a seat in the only two remaining vacant chairs as twenty sets of eyes
watched our every move.

PRESTON

“You do realize the meeting started at
eight o’clock, Ms. Murphy,” I said as Monica scurried into our boardroom. “It’s
ten past.”

“I know, Mr.
Woodfield
,”
she apologized with averted eyes, her voice low. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen
again.”

The woman was easily twice my age and it
felt weird scolding her, almost like scolding my mother. She was a decent
employee most of the time. Dedicated. Loyal. Hardworking. She’d been with the
firm since the beginning
;
long before I’d come in and
bought it out five years ago. But she was aging out of the cutthroat world of
advertising, and it was only a matter of time before I was going to be forced
to cut her loose and bring in fresh, raw talent.

“Okay, so getting back on track,” I said
as I turned towards the rest of the group. My eyes scanned the table,
nonchalantly keeping track of who was engaged and who was just bullshitting me.
I liked to know who my blue ribbon employees were at all times, and I was never
afraid to trim the fat if needed. “Today we’re talking about the Johnston
account. Ruthie, can you pass out those packets?”

My eyes continued scanning the room, one
by one picking out the ones who looked hung over or the ones texting on the
phones under the table as if no one would see them.

My secretary, Ruthie, was a sweet,
middle-aged woman who often stared at me a bit too long. She’d do anything for
me, and I loved that about her. She was easy to take advantage of, but that was
her own fault. The word “no” was not in that woman’s vocabulary.

“You done yet?” I asked Ruthie as she
slowly waddled around the
twenty foot
table, passing
out packets. They seemed to stick to her thick fingers as she struggled to pass
them out. We were already ten minute behind schedule thanks to Monica’s
tardiness, and back-to-back conferences calls filled up the rest of my day. “Time
is of the essence, Ruthie.”

She scrambled back to her seat and
cracked open her laptop until my presentation was projected on the overhead
screen behind me.

“As I was saying.” I cleared my throat.
“The Johnston account.
Spintz
, where are we with that?”

My number two guy, yet another
happy-to-please moron, pulled out his notebook and took a look at his notes.
His face turned beet red as it always did anytime he had to talk in front of a
large group.

“I just spoke with their publicity
department and their vice president of marketing and advertising,” he said.
“They’re starting up a line of nutritional supplements that they’d like to have
sold via independent distributors. They’re thinking of going the word of mouth
route first before plunking all their money into tangible advertising.”

I palmed the table in front of me,
bracing myself into a hunched over position as my head fell between my
shoulders. “We know that,
Spintz
. We went over that
last week. Tell us something we don’t already know.”

Spintz
looked confused. He always attempted to
read my mind, as if he was searching for the words he thought I wanted to hear,
but he never could. I prided myself in being a bit of a hard ass. Being
unreadable meant that my employees tried that much harder to please me.
Hardworking employees meant someday soon I’d have the number one ad agency in
all of Manhattan.

“What did you tell them,
Spintz
?” I asked, spelling it out for him and enunciating
every last syllable. “We do hard ads. Tangible marketing. Things you can see,
feel, and hear. How did you sell them on our services? That’s what I want to
know.”

I was going to need a new number two
soon. Incompetence in my firm was simply unacceptable.

“Oh,”
Spintz
said, his eyes focusing on the tablet in front of him. “They were pretty firm
on what they wanted. I told them I’d come up with a marketing plan and they
said they were open to a pitch. I thought we could brainstorm in the meeting.”

I sucked a long breath in through my
teeth. The level of incompetence and lack of professionalism in that room was
impressive that day. “Does anyone here want to take over the Johnston account?
I need someone here with an actual degree in marketing to pull their head out
of their ass and come up with a marketing plan that will blow the Johnston
people out of the water.”

The air was silent save for a few rogue
coughs and a couple clicking of pens. No one wanted to volunteer.

“Anyone?” I asked again, my eyes scanning
the room. Not one of the twenty people sitting around the conference table
would even look at me. “Do I need to hand select someone?”

“I’ll do it,” a woman’s voice tailed down
from the end of the table. It carried a sort of unwavering confidence that
couldn’t possibly belong to a member of my team.

“Who said that?” I asked, my eyes
scanning each face one by one until it landed on a young girl sitting next to
Monica. Somehow I’d missed seeing her there.

“I did,” she replied. She brushed her
long, silky blonde hair over her shoulders and sat up straight, eyes locked into
mine. She was gorgeous.
Absolutely stunning.
And young as fuck.
Not only that, but I felt like I’d seen
her before.

“Who are you?” I asked as I made my way
towards the end of the table.

“Mirabelle Baker,” she replied, her lips
curling into a sweet smile. Mirabelle Baker.
My former
kid-stepsister.
Sitting in my office, in the flesh. “Intern.”

“What the fuck is an intern doing in our
meeting?” I asked, my question directly focused towards Monica as I tried to
wrap my head around seeing Mirabelle again, all grown up and hot as fuck.

Monica shook her head and turned away.
She knew me well. Most of my questions were rhetorical.

“If I may, sir,” she said, her voice fell
out of her perfect, soft lips with a sweet air of confidence. “I have some
ideas.”

I crossed my arms, studying her face, and
nodded. “Alright. Go ahead,
intern
.”

“I think what they need is a social media
explosion,” she began. “Let’s blow up Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus and
buy out ads on all the big health websites like Spark and
MyFitnessPal
.
If we can start with this brand that no one’s ever heard of and then suddenly
it’s all over the place, that’s going to have a longer tail than a slow,
gradual build up plan.”

“Okay,” I said as I soaked in every
luscious word that fell from those sweet lips. Her beauty was distracting,
slightly throwing me off my game and tilting the room. “Continue.”

“If we use the right marketing copy and
target to a younger audience, I think we’re golden,” she said. Her eyes grew
excited as she spoke, like a passion had been ignited inside of her. The
slightest shake in her voice could be heard as she continued. “Everyone knows
millenials
and younger have the most spending money, and
they’re the ones most focused on looking good and being healthy and having that
rock star body. That’s where need to be focusing all efforts. If we do it right,
their brand should become an overnight success.”

She clapped her hands together for
emphasis as her face was plastered in a huge grin. She was in her element, that
was for sure, and I’d never seen any of my other employees get one tenth as
excited as she had just become.

“Mirabelle Baker, you said?” I asked,
still studying her face and pretending not to know her. I knew her all right. I
knew her well. The geeky, brace-mouthed, pimply little thirteen year old was
now a full-blown woman with legs a mile long and curves in all the right
places.

“Yes, sir,” she replied. The
long lashes that framed her big, blue eyes were only amplified by
the perfect little arch in her brows
. Not only was she sexy,
but
she was fucking smart as a whip.

“How old are you, Mirabelle?” I asked,
her name leaving a taste in my mouth like hot brandy.

“Twenty-three,” she said. She attempted
to read me, as if she wanted to know I was going to love or hate her for being
so young.

“I assume you’re going to school for
marketing. Is that correct?” I asked.

“Advertising, yes,” she replied, her
shoulders squaring back. “After this semester, after this internship, I’ll
graduate magna cum laude with my B.S. from Southern Georgia State.”

She was onto me and playing the game
right back, point for point. We may as well have been strangers though, at this
point in our lives. I hadn’t seen her in ten years.

“Bravo, bravo,” I said, pressing sarcasm
into my tone as I clapped my hands. “Isn’t that sweet.
Magna
cum laude.
How about that.”

Her eyes shifted as her fingers nervously
traced her collarbone and she looked down at her notebook. I was being as ass,
I knew that, but it was for the best. She was a smart girl, the kind of girl I
needed on my team, but I wanted to knock that shiny, newfound confidence right
off her face and injected a little bit of hardness. I needed to break her down
and mold her into the cutthroat ad exec I knew she could be.

My lips curled into a wicked smile as I
realized I’d just found my new project. Mirabelle Baker was going to be my next
shining star, whether she liked it or not. I was going to take her under my
wing, and she wasn’t going to have a damn choice in the matter.

MIRABELLE

“Is he always like that?” I asked Monica
the second we took refuge in her office. I could still feel the way his crystal
blue eyes pierced into me, and I’d have given almost anything to know what he
thought of me. I wanted him to like me, as much as I hated that fact.

“Pretty much,” she said with a defeated
sigh as she shook her computer mouse and turned her eyes to the screen. “You’ll
get used to it.”