Folk Around and Find Out (Good Folk: Modern Folktales #2)(18)

Finding my voice required several stunned moments and I finally managed, “I’d say this is more than fair.”

He grunted, a sound of both acknowledgement and impatience. “Fine. Moving on.”

A tad flustered by the generosity of the position’s compensation and Hank’s rushing me through everything, I cleared my throat of nerves and opened the laptop. Reading the password on the sticky note, I logged in with exceeding carefulness and breathed a silent sigh of relief when the machine unlocked on my first try. It’s surprisingly difficult to type a random series of letters, numbers, and symbols when someone is watching over your shoulder, especially if that person is radiating antagonism and looks like a Barbie doll’s (or Ken doll’s) beautiful but dissolute older brother.

I methodically clicked around the desktop, opening the Wi-Fi window to ensure I was connected, then I opened a browser and navigated to Google. “Good. Well. That all seems in order. What about FastFinance?”

When he didn’t answer, I glanced up at him. His wide mouth wasn’t curved in a frown anymore and his intelligent eyes held mine with sharp candor.

“What about FastFinance?” he asked.

“Uh, there’s a password for FastFinance. How do I—or, wait. Do you use something else for payroll and reconciliation? A different system? QuickBooks? Mint?”

Hank tilted his head to the side and his stare turned calculating, as though I’d said something interesting. Or I was something interesting instead of something to be merely tolerated. “We use spreadsheets for all that.”

My mouth dropped open and I forgot to be nervous. He had to be joking. “I—you—what?”

“We use spreadsheets. They’re saved on the desktop and the naming should be self-explanatory.”

“Spreadsheets?” I croaked. This is a joke. “What about reconciliation between your bank accounts, credit cards, and your expenditures? How do you categorize for taxes?”

Hank’s perusal suddenly felt shifty and he scratched his jaw. “I download the bank and credit card statements and you copy/paste them into the spreadsheet.” At my continued horrified expression, he added, “The spreadsheets are all backed up on the cloud. Why? Should we use FastFinance?”

Not thinking before responding—what the heck did I care if he used spreadsheets or stone tablets, I wasn’t staying more than two weeks—I said, “Yes! Definitely. I would. FastFinance and systems like it automate so much. Creates invoices, paychecks, tax forms. You can run profit/loss statements whenever you want, check expenditures every month for trends. Hank, I know you said this was a full-time position, but you might not need someone full-time if you used FastFinance. Adding categories is a snap and makes reconciliation so much faster. Payroll might be able to be automated if you link it to the club’s payment system.”

The side of his mouth ticked up and he studied me intently, a seasoning of censure in his tone as he said, “You’ve been here five minutes and you’re already trying to make yourself redundant.”

“No,” I said with mock sweetness, folding my hands over my lap and crossing my legs. His eyes darted to my bare knees, then away. “I’m not trying to make myself redundant. I’m trying to bring you into the twenty-first century. How old was your last bookkeeper? One hundred?”

“He was ninety-five.”

When I saw that Hank wasn’t joking, I barked a laugh. “You’re serious. Your last bookkeeper was ninety-five?”

“Yes. And his stage name was Father Christmas.”

“What? He had a stage name? Why?”

Hank leaned his shoulder against the doorjamb, settling in for story time. “We used him in all the holiday shows. He’d dress up like Santa and tell customers whether they were naughty or nice.”

Unbelievable . . . and hilarious. “And if they were nice?”

“They’d get a front-facing lap dance on the house in the main room.”

Unable to stem the impulse, I smiled. “And if they were naughty?”

“They paid double the price and got a back-facing lap dance in the champagne room.”

Entranced and oddly thrilled, I asked, “Which is better?”

Something like a grin spread over Hank’s typically stoic features, his hazel eyes sparkling like topaz as his eyelids lowered by half. “It depends on whether they like it naughty or nice.”

Staring up at him, I could hear myself breathing and feel the beat of my heart and nothing else. His words were liquid fire in my veins. I’d forgotten how devastating his smiles were, how sinister-looking, and how they made me instantly feel.

Suddenly, I was sixteen again, gazing starstruck at Hank Weller’s sinfully addictive face as he gave someone—never me—a tempting, mischievous grin. Whenever I thought of the Hank from my youth, the word tempting always came to mind, something I wanted but I knew would ultimately be bad for me, and I’d try not to faint from swooning.

Hank’s grin wanned as our gazes held and tangled. At least to me it felt like they were tangling.

Abruptly, he dropped his attention to the floor, then someplace in the vicinity of my knees, and then he cleared his throat. “Listen, you can’t wear that kind of stuff in here.” He flicked his hand toward my clothes, all his earlier charismatic mischievousness evaporated as though it had never been.