A Duke by Default (Reluctant Royals #2)(23)
He turned, still holding the ear coverings over his head, and there she was.
Dammit.
She leaned against the doorway of his workshop, quite comfortably, as if she’d been there for some time. She held a folder or something to her chest, but Tav fixated on the way her lips were parted and her eyes were fixed on him.
Her gaze skittered to the ground, but in the second during which they’d locked eyes, Tav had felt it like a solid thing knocking into him. Desire. He wasn’t a fucking mind reader, but he was old enough to know when someone was giving him the eye. Portia had been thinking something decidedly naughty. About him.
Fuck’s sake.
“Need something?” he asked, sounding more aggrieved than he’d meant to.
She stepped forward, expression polite and professional. Good. Between their age difference and the fact that she was working for him, Tav had no interest in knowing what exactly had been going through her mind a moment ago. He wasn’t trying to become some kind of midlife crisis cliché.
“I was talking to Jamie about the website and he said that my initial plans look good, but nothing could be changed without your approval.”
Website?
“The site is fine as it is,” he said, glad she’d landed on the topic most like being dunked in ice-cold water for him.
“Actually, it’s not. It’s really not.”
“It lists our name, phone number, and address, and it has pictures of the products and their prices. What else does it need?”
She opened her folder and pulled out a slim, sleek tablet.
“I should have known you’d have that hingmie with you,” he muttered as she approached. She always seemed to have her nose stuck in her phone or tablet, and her tapping away at a keyboard was generally what alerted him to her presence around the building, allowing him to avoid her.
She leaned back against the table next to him, leaving a bit of space between them. That didn’t stop the scent of whatever perfume she was wearing from drifting over to him. Delicate. Floral.
Tav sighed.
“So. Here is your site,” she said, pulling it up.
He glanced over to placate her, but what he saw drew a grunt of perplexed disgust from him.
“Why do the pictures look stretched like?” he asked, taking the proffered tablet from her. It looked like someone had copied the photos on Silly Putty then pulled.
“Because you’re not optimized for mobile. You also have a weird pop-up that blocks the site and is really hard to close out unless you’re on a desktop or have a large screen.” She took her tablet back, as if she didn’t quite trust him not to drop the thing. “The majority of hits to the site these days are coming from mobile devices, in case you were wondering.”
“The pop-up is for people to sign up to be notified about sales,” he explained. That’s what the designer had told him when Jamie had forced him to commission a site upgrade. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually had a sale or even looked at the email addresses that had been compiled. “Can’t people just look at it on their laptop?”
“I guess they could. But when I navigate to a site that I can’t access because of a pop-up like that, I keep it moving and find a store that cares enough not to annoy me. Customers are fickle. You shouldn’t make them work to see what you’re selling.”
Tav couldn’t argue with that. “Okay, so you want me to . . . optimize for mobile, then? Because of the hits?”
“Well, no. I want to make a completely new site.” She swiped her fingertip over the screen and now he was looking at a different site. It had his business’s name on it but bore no relation to the monstrosity she’d just clicked away from. It looked clean and modern, but with a background like a faded medieval tapestry to give it an aged look. Simple but engaging. He didn’t know tech, but he knew what good, solid design looked like.
“This is just a mock-up,” she explained as she scrolled. “But there’ll be a separate page for the armory, with detailed lists of products—I’ll talk more about that later. One page for the European martial arts lessons. Another for Jamie’s workout classes. A history page, with information about the armory building itself, and the history of Scottish swordmaking. And there’ll also be a gallery with photos and videos, like of Jamie giving a quick workout lesson that people can do at home, and you in action with that thing.”
She inclined her head toward the grinder.
Tav abruptly pushed off of the table to face her. “Why do I need to be recorded?”
Her brows raised again. He had the oddest compulsion to smooth his fingertip over one dark arch as it scrunched in annoyance.
“You don’t have to do anything but what you were doing just now, except I’ll be recording a couple of minutes of it.”
“And throwing it up on the internet for everyone to gawk at. I don’t see the point of it,” he said, shaking his head. “Jamie’s lessons I understand, I suppose—people can get a taste of the boot camp and see how fun it is. But I’m certainly not inviting strangers here to grind with me.”
Portia licked her lips, then pressed them together.
“Actually, I was invited here to grind with you, as you put it,” she said. More brow scrunching—he was fairly certain she was capable of carrying a conversation with just her eyebrows. “But since you’re too worried that I’m going to cut you, in the meantime I’m trying to set you up with a website that will attract potential buyers. And if what I just watched is any indication, video of a large, attractive man using a power tool to hone a sharp object is going to induce a significant portion of the population to at the very least click, and some portion of those who click to buy.”