Love Handles (Oakland Hills #1)(6)
Her eyes narrowing, Ellen hauled up her orange, metal-studded, moose-sized purse and dumped it on the desk. “Richard didn’t wait for her. The girl just inherited his ass and he didn’t bother to stick around, the dumbshit.”
“She coming back soon?”
Apparently not considering Liam might have a different opinion on the matter, she exhaled loudly and pulled out a lipstick. “God, I hope not. We just FedEx’ed the papers down to her. But she has to find a notary and, quite frankly, it seems clear she is just as lazy as her mother. My big sister got pregnant at seventeen just to avoid homework, then made a career out of marrying for money.” She exaggerated the “marrying” with air quotes.
Liam knew better than to swallow Ellen’s character judgments, but he felt a surge of panic at the thought of one selfish stranger’s signature standing between Fite and disaster. “Wendi set the line meeting at one.” He kept his tone neutral.
She jerked the cap off a tube and twisted the bottom until a stump of her signature crimson lipstick appeared. “Meetings should never be so close to lunch. You thought you were nice rehiring that loser, but it just hurts the rest of us.”
“You’re going out?”
“Hitting the stores, but maybe I’ll make it back in time.”
If she did, she’d just confuse everyone and push out the deadlines—revising and deleting and chasing new ideas—then contradicting herself next week. Most of the team could withstand her withering contempt for their choice of footwear, but her unstable, inconsistent management was torture. “All right, maybe we’ll see you.”
Ellen disappeared behind the swing-arm mirror clamped to her desk and lifted the lipstick to her grimacing mouth. Familiar with her method of dismissal, Liam left her and went to find Wendi.
He found her with the men’s sample patternmakers holding up a bolt of thin, black stretchy fabric that, to his alarm, she was instructing be cut into shorts. “Liam! Check out this sick sample yardage. It’s got 3D stretch or something, totally new.”
He nodded hello at the patternmakers, who drew back in fear and got busy at the opposite ends of the table, and took Wendi’s arm in one hand and the fabric in the other, guiding her out of earshot. Ignoring her disappointment, Liam shoved the roll back onto a storage rack.
“Too shiny,” he said. “Our Fite guy can't look like he's running down the street in Victoria’s Secret.” If Darrin, her new boss, saw what she was doing, Liam would never be able to convince him to keep her.
He strode past the cutting tables, nodding but not speaking to the staff. “Move the Spring meeting to eleven,” he called over his shoulder, knowing she had followed. “I want everyone there with whatever they've got so far. We’ll be quick so it doesn’t spill into lunch.”
At five-foot-barely, Wendi was having to jog to keep up with his six-three stride. “But you said one.”
“Now I'm saying eleven. Just whatever they've got. I realize it's a surprise.”
Wendi's brown eyes widened under her Tina Fey glasses, her mouth dropping open. He watched her struggle to hold back her whining that the designers and their assistants were certainly not ready, had planned on cramming through the lunch hour, and would tear her apart when she delivered the summons. “That's in fifteen minutes,” she choked out. “And Ellen just went out for lunch, and she’s usually gone for hours.”
Liam raised an eyebrow and looked at her.
“Oh. Right.” Finally understanding him, she broke into a full run in her kitten heels and tore off past the patternmaker's tables on the far side of the floor. She threw open the door and clattered down the stairwell.
Design assistants couldn't afford to wait for the elevator. An irony, given the ridiculous shoes they liked to wear. Even at a fitnesswear company, the young fashion graduates teetered around in sexy stilettos or whatever they thought was sophisticated and hot, no matter how impractical for a person who was going to be doing thinly disguised manual labor for ten hours a day.
If Ed hadn't liked looking at the young pretty legs so much, he would have let Liam outlaw the heels. Everyone should wear athletic shoes or something they could move around in. They were a fitness company, for God's sake, not a New York cut-and-sew house. They stood for something.
But he wasn't quite in charge, was he? Not then, and not now. No, he was just responsible for the final result. Everyone came to him and he told them what to do, but ultimately it had been Ed behind every policy, every rule, every hire in the building.
And now it would never change. Ed had died and left the company to his spoiled descendants who would finally sell out Fite, take the cash, and leave Liam at the whims of whatever transnational holding company swallowed them up.
Just because Ed had wanted to leave it to a blood relation. As if Liam hadn’t loved him more than his family ever had.
“Liam!”
He turned to see Wayne Woo, the men's new production patternmaker, waving at him from behind a rolling rack. Liam kept walking. “Can't stop. Late for a meeting.” Which almost cheered him up, knowing how desperate the designers would be for him to be very, very late. It was cruel of him to move up a big meeting like that, but he was pissed off. At Ed, at the company, at himself.
But Wayne didn't give up so easily, chasing him down near the row of humming sewing machines outside the stairwell. “I've been working on this all night.” Wayne shoved something on a hanger at him. “I resolved the chafing problem in the Fite the Man shorts. And the seams are flat along the hem, though we can't press these goods too hard or they'll shine—”