by Vi Keeland
One appointment read “Iris flight landing at 5pm. Call to confirm at 4.” So I translated it to: Le vol d’Iris atterrit à 17h. Appelez pour confirmer à 16h. Then I decided to add a few tasks of my own for her to do:
Prendre rendez-vous avec rétrécis. Translation: Make appointment with shrink. At least that’s what I attempted to write.
Another reminder she had read “Victoria’s Secret sale ends. Order new unmentionables after getting paycheck!” I laughed out loud at that one. Charlotte was definitely the only twentysomething-year-old I knew who would use the word “unmentionables.” I gave her a good translation for that.
Commandez des pantalons et des soutiens-gorge. Order granny panties and support bras.
I was enjoying myself, getting into screwing with her, until I came to the next appointment. “Blind Date at 9.”
An unexpected anger bubbled up inside of me. Even though I had no right to feel that way, it didn’t cool the burn in my throat. Some asshole was going to take full advantage of Goldilocks. I wasn’t jealous—I was . . . protective. Deep down, buried underneath all that crazy, was a woman who believed in fairy tales. Her asshole fiancé had been dipping his pen in the company ink at the place she worked, and Charlotte still posted shit on Facebook like Just keep swimming and Create your own happiness. Some people never learn. She wouldn’t see that her knight in shining armor was an asshole wrapped in tinfoil until after he screwed her over. And it pissed me off that she was so blind. That feeling became immeasurably worse when I realized that her little Victoria’s Secret shopping spree likely directly correlated to her big blind date.
“Leave it on my desk,” I bit out without looking up. I’d smelled her walk into my office. And that only served to irritate me even more—that I knew her scent. That I liked the way she fucking smelled.
Charlotte placed the report she’d been working on for me down and turned around to walk out. Only she stopped in the doorway. “Did I do something wrong, Reed?”
I’d been giving her an attitude for a few days—since the afternoon I’d made the mistake of opening her calendar. “Nope. Just busy.”
“Can I get you some coffee or something?”
“Nope.” I motioned to the door without looking up from editing the brochure I was working on. “But you can shut my door on your way out.”
After my door clicked closed, I tossed my pen on the desk and sat back in my seat. The goddamn entire office smelled like her now. A few minutes later, I was still unable to concentrate, so I opened my laptop and fired off an email to my annoying assistant.
To: Charlotte Darling
Subject: You.
I would be most appreciative if you could reduce the quantity of perfume that you bathe yourself in. My olfactory receptors set off my allergy sensors twenty feet before you arrive in a room. Besides, a woman wears subtlety best.
Getting that off my chest, I was able to return my focus to actual work. Until a few minutes later, when a soft chime notified me a new email had arrived. I knew who it was from before waking my computer from the screen saver.
To: Reed Eastwood
Subject: Your olfactory receptors
It’s a shame your olfactory receptors are so sensitive. Have you tried exposing yourself to the allergen in order to desensitize the effect? Perhaps it might help if on occasion you would stop and smell the roses instead of trampling on the garden? The world is filled with bouquets of women. Besides, a man wears manners best.
The next evening, before I left for the night, I stopped by Charlotte’s office to drop off some receipts so she could prepare my monthly expense report. It was nearly eight, and I’d assumed she’d left already. Her voice stopped me right before I reached her door.
“And what’s the price of a sleeper cabin?”
Quiet, and then, “Hmm. Okay. And how big are the beds in the cabin?”
More silence.
“Wow. You don’t have something to fit two? Maybe a queen or something?”
She laughed. “Okay. Well, I guess that’s always an option. I’m not ready to book at this time. But thank you very much for the information.”
I didn’t want to get caught eavesdropping in the hall, but I also couldn’t resist being an asshole. Strolling into her office, I dropped my expense envelope on her desk and said, “Using a company phone at work to make vacation plans. Not very professional, Charlotte.”
She glared at me. I found her wrinkled nose, squinty eyes, and the pink heat rising in her cheeks to be cute. Wisely, I kept that thought to myself.
Charlotte picked her cell phone up from her desk and waved it in my direction. “I was using my cell phone, not the company phone. And my workday ended three hours ago. So technically, the only company thing I’m using is this chair.”
I hid my smirk. “Taking a trip somewhere? I didn’t realize you had earned vacation time already.”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I was only getting information for a train ride in Europe. I like to daydream about things I want to do, and sometimes the visual of what that looks like helps.”
It clicked. Under the Tuscan Sun. Yesterday she’d added Make Love to a Man for the First Time in a Sleeper Cabin on a Train Ride Through Italy to her Fuck-It List. If she knew I’d been stalking her list on the server, she’d take that to mean I was interested in being her bucket-list buddy, so I didn’t mention I knew what she was talking about. Instead, I chose a different path to walk. One that surely led straight to hell. “Perhaps if you spent more time working and less time daydreaming, you’d be more productive and wouldn’t have to stay until eight o’clock at night.”
Her eyes flared wide. She stared at me for a moment, then opened her desk drawer and ripped her purse out of it, slamming it down onto her desktop before banging the drawer back closed. Shutting her laptop, she stood and tugged her purse to her shoulder. She then proceeded to march toward the door where I was still standing. Not expecting her to stop when she reached me, I took a cautious step back, anticipating getting reamed out.
Instead, her eyes closed, hands raised, and her fingers frantically began typing in the air.
Seriously. Fucking. Nuts.
And so beautiful when her nostrils were flaring.
She hit what I presumed was the imaginary “Enter” button, took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and walked out of the office without another word.
I might’ve watched the sway of her ass the entire way out.
We both needed goddamn counseling.
CHAPTER 16
REED
After a few more days of avoiding her at all costs, it was no longer possible when Iris showed up at a business lunch with Charlotte in tow. Matthew Garamound, our CPA, my brother, and I were already seated. Even though I was annoyed at her presence, I stood when she walked toward the table. Nodding my greeting, I pulled out the empty chair next to me, while Garamound did the same for Iris. “Charlotte.”
“Actually, I’m going to sit next to Max on the other side of the table if he doesn’t mind. I wouldn’t want my perfume to bother your allergies.”
Iris’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t have a perfume allergy.”
“It’s something I recently developed.”
Max flashed his annoying-as-shit megawatt smile and stood to pull out a chair. “My brother’s loss is my gain.” He leaned toward Charlotte, closed his eyes, and inhaled dramatically. “You smell amazing.”
I grumbled something about his unprofessionalism under my breath as the five of us sat down. It quickly became apparent that Charlotte was going to avoid eye contact with me, which I initially thought was perfect until I realized that when she wasn’t looking in my direction, it permitted me unlimited opportunity to stare at her face. She was so goddamn distracting. I had to force my eyes to pay attention to something else, so I studied our CPA.
Matthew Garamound had to be ten years older than my grandmother. His hair was silver, his skin tanned, and he always wore a tie with an American flag
pin. He’d been the company’s CPA since Iris had opened her doors, and the four of us got together four times a year like clockwork—two weeks after the end of each quarter. Only we’d just had our quarterly meeting a month ago, and we never brought an assistant to these types of things.
After the waitress took our drink order, Matthew folded his hands on the table and cleared his throat. “So . . . you’re probably wondering why we’re getting together today.”
Max leaned to Charlotte and whispered, even though we could all hear him, “I’m actually wondering what perfume you’re wearing.”
I answered through gritted teeth. “How about you try to keep the harassment of employees limited to when you’re lying on the couch in their offices.”
Matthew looked between the two of us. While I sported a scowl, my comment seemed to please my little brother.
“Yes, well anyway,” Garamound continued, “I asked Iris and Charlotte to pull this meeting together today because I, unfortunately, have some bad news to deliver.”
I immediately assumed he was sick. “Everything okay with you, Matt?”
“Oh.” He realized what I thought. “Yes, yes. I’m fine. This is about the business and one of your employees. Namely, Dorothy.”
“Dorothy?” I furrowed my brow. “Dorothy’s sick?”
Iris took over the conversation. “No, Reed. Everyone’s health is just fine. Why don’t I start at the beginning? As you know, I’ve been having Charlotte compile a list of our cleaning vendors so that I could consolidate the number of partners we use and receive a bigger volume discount on services. As part of that project, I had her list all invoices paid for each vendor during the last sixty days.”
“Okay, yes, I knew she was working on that.”
“Well. She came across a few invoices that were paid wrong—a transposition in numbers. For example, one invoice was for $16,292, yet it was paid for $16,992. Another one was for $2,300, and it was paid for $3,200. None of them were off by a lot—all less than a thousand dollars each. But Charlotte noticed it on four different invoices, so she mentioned it to me. Now, Dorothy is almost as old as I am, and she’s been with me as long as you boys have been alive, so I assumed maybe she needed stronger glasses, and I went to speak to her.” My grandmother’s face fell, and I knew what was coming next. “She acted really strange. So I asked Matthew to look into some of the transactions.”
Garamound picked up where Grandmother left off. “I did an audit of her transactions over the last twelve months and found that she’d transposed numbers on fifty-three different invoices. Like the ones that Charlotte found, they weren’t very big mistakes and at first glance seemed to be a simple transposition of numbers. But the errors were never in our favor. In total, those fifty-three payments were overpaid by more than thirty-two thousand dollars. When I dug a little deeper, I found that each payment was being made to two different accounts—the right amount was going to the vendor, but there was a separate ACH payment being made for the difference, and all of that was funneled into one account.”
I exhaled a deep breath. “Dorothy has been skimming.”
Garamound nodded. “Unfortunately so. I haven’t gone back to the beginning of time—but it’s been going on for at least the last few years.”
“Jesus. Dorothy is like family.”
Iris had tears in her eyes. “She has a sick grandson.”
Swallowing that news, I tasted salt in my throat.
Charlotte chimed in, her own eyes about to overflow. “Choroidal metastasis. It’s extremely rare in children. She’s been taking him to Philadelphia for experimental treatment that isn’t covered by insurance.”
“I had no idea.”
The mood of lunch took a drastic turn after that. It was one thing to catch an employee stealing, but entirely another to catch a long-term one who had a damn good reason. We all agreed we needed to give the situation some thought and that we’d reconvene at the end of the week to discuss how to handle things.
At the end of lunch, Iris turned to me. “I have an appointment uptown. Could you give Charlotte a lift back to the office?”
Max responded, even though Grandmother hadn’t spoken to him. “I can give her a lift.”
“It’s a Tuesday, you don’t usually come to the office.” I buttoned my suit jacket. “Don’t you have a massage or some other pressing business to attend to?”
My brother slipped his hands into his pockets and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Nope. I’m free all afternoon.”
We already had embezzlement going on at the office; the last thing we needed was a sexual harassment suit. I put my hand on Charlotte’s lower back. “We have actual business to discuss. So we’ll see you back at the office.”
Neither of us said a word for the first five minutes of the drive back downtown.
Eventually, I broke the ice. “Good job picking up on that check inconsistency.”
She stared out the window and sighed. “It doesn’t feel so good. It feels pretty lousy, actually.”
“It’s never fun to discover that a person you’ve trusted has betrayed you.”
“I know. Believe me, I know. But it’s Christian that I feel badly about.”
“Christian?”
“Dorothy’s grandson. He’s only six. And the cancer isn’t just in his eye. He spent months sick from the treatment of a tumor in his lungs only to have it metastasize to his eye. He should be playing peewee baseball instead of being home-tutored and living in hotels with his mom while she desperately runs him around like a guinea pig.”
I caught myself rubbing at a spot on my chest, but it was inside that hurt. I side-glanced over at Charlotte. “How do you know so much about his illness?”
She shrugged. “We talk.”
“You talk? You’ve only been at the company for what—three or four weeks?”
“So? That doesn’t mean I can’t make friends. You know that cute picture of him in the Boy Scout uniform on her desk?”
I didn’t but skirted the issue. “What about it?”
“Well, I commented about how cute he is on my second day, and she just broke down crying and told me the story. We went to lunch together a few times after that.” She paused. “Now I’m the person who got her into trouble.”
“That’s not on you, Charlotte. She got herself into trouble. I understand you feel badly. But you did the right thing.”
Charlotte gazed out the window as a moment of silence passed. She was so damn sensitive to everyone’s feelings, which was admirable but also a detriment sometimes when it came to business. Although when you’re talking about a kid with cancer, all bets are off. The entire situation was horrible.
“What are you going to do to Dorothy?” she finally asked.
I glanced over at Charlotte and then back to the road. “What would you do if you were in my shoes?”
She took some time to think about her answer. “I wouldn’t fire her. She really needs the job. What she did was absolutely wrong, but I don’t know that I wouldn’t have done the same thing given no other alternative. People aren’t perfect, and sometimes we need to balance the one wrong they did with all of the rights they’ve done. Dorothy has worked for you for a long time and was helping her daughter and grandson.”
I nodded. We were both quiet for a long time after that.
It was Charlotte who finally brought us both out of deep thought. She turned to me. “I appreciated the French translations, by the way. I never thanked you. Thank God for Google, though, or else I might’ve accidentally bought granny panties for my upcoming nonexistent trip to Paris.” She rolled her eyes.
“I see you checked my work.” I chuckled. “And, de rien. You’re welcome.”
“So why did you stop the French lesson at the point where I scheduled ‘Blind Date’?”
Trying to skirt around the question, I said, “What do you mean?”
“You stopped translating my schedule right at that spot. It was like the second-to-las
t item, and you decided to stop right there. That was random. Is there no French translation for ‘blind date’?”
Shit. How was I going to explain that one?
Well, Charlotte, I stopped translating because the idea of you going out with some random man makes me feel violent.
“I was no longer having fun with it, so I stopped.” Clenching my jaw, I glanced over at her and asked, “Anyway, why are you going out on a blind date? In this day and age, you have access to so many ways of meeting people. Someone like you doesn’t need to resort to that.”
“Okay . . . what do you mean, someone like me?”
Of course she wanted me to spell it out.
“Someone . . . attractive and with an outgoing personality doesn’t need to go on a blind date. It’s too risky, especially in this city. You should really do your homework before you agree to meet someone.”
“Like you? Is that what you do? You get background checks done on the people you date? Kind of like how you checked up on me before the Millennium penthouse showing?”
“No. Although I would have no problem doing that. But I wouldn’t be going on a blind date in the first place.”
“By the way,” she said, “I never asked. If you knew I was lying on my application that day, why did you agree to show the penthouse to me?”
“Because I wanted to teach you a lesson, humiliate you for wasting my time.”
“You get a rise out of humiliating people?”
“If they deserve it? Yes.”
I could feel the weight of her staring at me. My tie suddenly felt like it was choking me. I loosened it a bit.
“What?” I snapped.
“Have you dated anyone since Allison?”
Great. I was trapped in this car and wouldn’t be able to escape this question. I had no desire to discuss my dating life with Charlotte.
“That’s none of your business.”
The truth was, there’d been a few meaningless trysts, but nothing more significant.
“Well, you seem to think that my business is your business, so maybe you should think first before offering me dating advice.” She let out a long breath. “‘Blind Date’ was just code anyway.”