The Billionaire Bargain #1(6)
FOUR
The next day, jittery from lack of sleep (I kept waiting for the phone call telling me I was being let go) I made my way carefully across the marble floor of the Devlin Media Corp lobby carrying the Unholy Grail—by which, of course? I mean Jacinda’s coffee. And I do mean carefully. My heels might be sensible but my supervisor certainly wasn’t, and if I spilled one drop of the nonfat organic free-trade low-sugar gluten-free raspberry-blackberry-French-vanilla latte with extra strawberry whipped cream and a dusting of white chocolate sprinkles that Jacinda had sent me out on a quest for, she would have my head.
I wish I was being figurative when I said that.
“Hey, girl!” Kate called out to me from her receptionist desk where she was comfortably ensconced amidst her natural habitat of phones, candy, and water-cooler gossip. “Did the witch send you out for more sugar-free unicorn blood?”
“With an extra shot of newt’s eyes and a scoop of ground virgin’s heart on top,” I deadpanned. “Locally sourced, of course.”
“Of course,” Kate agreed, eyes wide and innocent. “Hey, you still up for happy hour drinks tonight? There’s a two-for-one special on margarita pitchers down at this new place, and Stevie tells me they are divine.”
“It sounds fun,” I said wistfully. “I’ll text you around four, okay? I should know by then if the crone is going to keep me afterwards to clean up any messes that have spilled out of her cauldron.”
“You gotta stand up to her!” Kate said, frowning. “Your social life is dying, girl. It’s on life support. We’re paging the doctors, the CPR is having no effect, apply 30 ccs margaritas, stat! There’s more in heaven and in earth, Lacey, than is dreamt of in your philosophy of work.”
“You’re mixing your references,” I told her, mock-frowning. “What was that, E.R. and Hamlet? I would not watch that spin-off.”
“Stevie’s doing this whole Shakespeare thing for grad school,” Kate said with an eye-roll and a sigh so long-suffering that paleontologists could have carbon-dated it to the Mesozoic era. “I swear, I hear those lines in my sleep. Sometimes with scholarly commentary? Speaking of that which by any other name would smell as sweet, how’d things go with Jason the surfer boy-babe? Was he hot enough for you, or what?”
“Don’t ask,” I said. I tried to fit as much foreboding into those two words as possible, but unfortunately, Kate has built up an immunity to foreboding. This is what happens when I talk to people about my love life; they develop an incredible tolerance for hearing about complete disasters. I should train news reporters to cover hurricanes and earthquakes.
“Well, now I have to ask,” Kate said with an eye-roll so dramatic it could have applied for its own actor’s union card. “Spill!”
I sighed, resigned. “Well—”
And then my phone rang, the Imperial March ringtone I had saved for Jacinda. I popped it open, mouthing apologies to Kate. She rolled her eyes again. Girl was going to sprain a muscle doing that someday.
Jacinda’s voice rang shrill as a police siren through speakers, stabbing into my eardrums like an icepick: “Where the hell are you? I’ve been calling for ages.”
I quickly checked my phone display. Yep, this was her first call this morning. Her Bitch to English dictionary must have been out of date. “I, uh—”
“Whatever,” she interrupted, displaying a less than Sherlockian interest in uncovering the truth, “I’m not interested in your excuses. If you haven’t gotten my caffeine to me in the next five minutes, so help me God—”
I mouthed more apologies to Kate. She pouted, rolled her eyes—seriously, I was starting to worry about the strain on those muscles; was I inadvertently setting her up to need eye surgery before her time?—and mouthed back, Happy Hour. You will tell me EVERYTHING.
? ? ?
Jacinda kept steamrolling over my explanations all the way through the lobby, up the elevator, down the hallway and into her office. Let me tell you, trained operatic sopranos could have learned a thing or two from this woman about breath control. She didn’t even pause as she hung up the phone, breathlessly launching headlong into another attack as she clicked it shut and switched to berating me to my face.
“Why the hell didn’t the Chronicle get the press release? Every bitty little broadsheet in the Bay Area is running our apology today, and you somehow manage to miss the f*cking Chronicle? This completely undermines my credibil—the company’s credibility, it’s like you’re trying to run this place into the ground—”
The paper didn’t have the press release because last night, Jacinda had snatched it out of my hand at the last second and insisted that she needed to make some last-minute changes and would personally see it to the newspaper herself, since “who knows if you’ll even make it there; wouldn’t be surprised if you got distracted halfway there by all the pretty colors.” There was no point in bringing this up, though; Jacinda wasn’t interested in the truth, just spreading around blame.
I stared at a point just to the right of her immaculately constructed blonde beehive, just close enough to look like I was looking her in the eye, and tried to appear contrite and ashamed. The faster she felt vindicated, the faster this conversation would be over, and the more likely I could get through it without bursting into tears.