“I’m sorry; I can’t disturb him. We get a lot of phonies trying to reach him. Press, stalkers, you know.”
“I just told you. I’m a consultant,” Dylan said, giving up the fruitless email search. “Do I look like a stalker?”
The kid shrugged, indifference written all over his fawn-colored, freckled face. “Stalkers come in all kinds. I’m sorry, but if you don’t have someone to vouch for you, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“Look, there has to be someone you can call.” Dylan’s voice went up a few notes with her mounting desperation. Jared’s email last night had made it clear he wasn’t to be disturbed. She didn’t want to call Kaplan and explain that she had been kicked off the Technocore campus for seeming like a stalker. It wouldn’t go over great with the partners.
The guard’s indifferent expression stared back at her as heat began to radiate from under her collar and up her neck. Glancing down at his golden nameplate, she tried again. “Charlie, I’m making an effort. Will you please work with me?”
“Ma’am, really—”
“Good morning, Charlie.” A rumpled man in a sweater breezed past the security desk.
Dylan noticed the badge clipped to his belt loop. Taking a few quick steps sideways, she knew what she needed to do. It was better to risk the guard calling the police than be the inept subject of Kaplan office gossip. Gritting her teeth, she dashed past the security guard toward the elevator. Sliding into the elevator with the startled man, she felt a small sense of pride as she watched the shocked guard jolt out of his chair.
“Hello,” she said to her elevator companion. “I was trying to reach Marta Woods, who has, apparently, left the company. Would you know who I should contact in her place?”
The man gaped at her for a minute as the doors began to close. Dylan tried to smile, as if being chased by a security guard were normal. Pressing a hand to a wrinkle on her coat, she jumped from the entrance, squeaking, as Charlie’s right arm shot between the sliding doors, his hand wiggling. The man jolted, knocking his glasses sideways and stifling a screech.
“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to step out of the elevator, please,” Charlie said, straightening his jacket with his free hand as the doors retracted. Dylan debated swatting him and trying to make a run for the stairs. They were probably unlocked in case of an emergency. Sidestepping Charlie’s arm, Dylan bumped into the man, who seemed to recover from the shock of witnessing a campus break-in.
“Hang on, Charlie. You’re here for Marta? Are you with Kaplan?” Dylan watched as Charlie’s face went slack with surprise, his hand dropping like deadweight.
“Yes. I’m scheduled to start today,” Dylan said, flattening the sleeve of her coat, where Charlie’s fist had been moments before.
“Hell. I remember her mentioning that. Charlie, she is okay to come with me.” The man leveled his glasses and pushed his graying hair around his head. Dylan wasn’t sure if the gesture was meant to make his hair lie flat, but it had the exact opposite effect.
“Oh. Okay.” The poor guard looked completely deflated.
“I’m sorry for the confusion, Charlie,” Dylan said as the doors began to close again. He looked so distraught that she felt a smidgen bad about the whole thing. She turned to face her savior, who was busy staring at her shoes.
“You move very quickly in those things.”
“Thank you. I’m Dylan Delacroix.” She held out her hand and did her best to look dignified after a near brush with trespassing charges.
“Steve Hammond, COO. I’m taking care of Marta’s responsibilities until we find someone new. Her departure was rather sudden, and unfortunately I dropped the ball on this,” he said with a slight frown.
The doors opened, and he stepped out, continuing to speak as he walked. “I don’t believe Marta had a space prepared for you before she left, so we’ll stick you in her office for now. I’ll have an intern come by to help you get set up,” he said, expertly navigating the maze of cubicles and hallways. “I have a nine a.m. meeting with Tim.” He glanced down at his watch, frowning again. Dylan was starting to marvel that the frown had not become a permanent fixture on his stubble-covered face when he stopped in front of a bland office door. “I’ll be back after my meeting to check on you and get things going.”
“Sounds good to me. When can I expect you?” Dylan said, shifting her satchel from one hand to the next.
“Whenever Tim decides we are done.” The corners of Steve’s mouth sank deeper.
“All right. I’ll get the lay of the land until then,” Dylan said, trying to keep her disappointment at bay.
“Take care.” Steve turned and marched back down the hallway.
“Right,” Dylan said to his back. Sighing, she turned to her office. Marta was clearly not a sentimental woman. Papers and trinkets still covered her desk. Pulling open a drawer, she found a series of take-out menus, pen caps, and an assortment of detritus that she decided was better boxed than analyzed. As if on cue, a timid knock drew her attention. Glancing up from the crush of papers, Dylan found a pale young man slouching in her doorway, holding a brown moving box as if it were a shield.
“Hello,” Dylan said, watching the pink splotches in his cheeks creep toward his white-blond hairline.
“Are you Ms. Delacroix?”
“Yes. Can I help you?”
“I’m Brandt Fenner. I’m your intern.”
Dylan was concerned for the guy. Was he afraid of her? Or just painfully shy? He was practically hiding in his flannel shirt, which was strategically worn under a fleece jacket to make him look bulkier.
“Hi, Brandt. You can call me Dylan,” she said, holding out her hand. Brandt looked as though he were being asked to walk under a ladder holding a black cat. He shifted the box to one arm and took her hand with a surprisingly firm grip for someone who seemed like he might be sick.
Brandt’s skinny jeans were baggy on his tall frame, and he had the standard Nordic features some longtime northwesterners had. If Dylan had one guess, she would probably say he had about ten generations of distinctly blond relatives living fifteen minutes from here.
“So should I start clearing out Marta’s stuff for you?”
“I’ll take care of it. How about you come by in an hour to cart the box off to wherever former-employee paperwork goes?”
“Will it count against me if I don’t help?” Brandt practically shuddered as he asked this.
“Count against you how?”
“You know . . . since you’re”—he looked at the corner of her office as if it would help him find the right words to complete his sentence—“picking who to fire.”
If he hadn’t looked so terrified, Dylan would have laughed. She wasn’t going to suggest anyone be let go. But if she did, it would be an expensive middle manager, certainly not a minimum wage graduate student intern. Dylan gestured at the door. “Does everyone here think I’m going to fire them?”
“Maybe? That’s what the last consultant did.”
“If anything, I’m more likely to suggest you be rearranged. In truth, I can’t fire anyone. That is all up to Tim, Steve, and the rest of the brass. I’m here to observe and make suggestions.”
“Oh,” Brandt said, uncoiling. “Well, I have a few things to wrap up from my last assignment. Would it be okay if I come back in an hour?”
Dylan decided he was simply one of those people who appeared to be afraid all the time. “Of course. When you come back, maybe you can give me the grand tour. I haven’t even found the restroom yet, let alone the coffee maker.”
“Bathroom is down the second set of cubicles to the left, past the green emergency-exit door. The coffee stand is on the top floor as close to Tim’s office as our clearance badges will get us,” Brandt answered in a factual manner.
“Great. See you in an hour.” She took the box from his outstretched hand.
“I’m in the basement with the other interns if you need anything. Have a good morning,” Brandt said, defaulting to the
standard polite greeting that all Seattleites used with strangers. Dylan chuckled to herself as she started placing files in the box. You could be terrified of someone in this town, and it was still mandatory to wish them a good day.
She wasn’t sure how long it took to clean out Marta’s desk. All Dylan could say for certain was that Marta was a pack rat and that she was behind schedule. At some point Brandt had shown up to take away the box and bring her a few more, along with a cup of coffee in a ridiculously shaped brontosaurus mug, mumbling something about the office being a “green campus.”
Taking a sip from the dinosaur, Dylan pulled out her laptop and began spreading out her Technocore paperwork. Looking at her schedule, she started identifying places where she could shorten meetings to make up for lost time, until a subtle tapping on the narrow glass window of her door pulled her attention away from the screen. Waving at Steve, Dylan tried to hide the mug behind her computer and appear professional. The last thing she needed was for Jared to get a call about her brontosaurus obsession in addition to her penchant for skirting security protocol.
“I see you’re settling in nicely.” Steve gestured to her computer, and Dylan got the sense that he was referencing the mug behind it.
“Yes. Thank you for sending Brandt; he’s been really helpful.” She nudged her mug more toward the center of her screen.
“Is Brandt the intern they sent you? Good,” Steve said without waiting for confirmation. Pushing his hands through his salt-and-pepper hair, he continued, “So I’m here because it doesn’t look like you’re going to get the chance to speak with Tim today.” He exhaled in a way that conveyed more than exasperation. “I’ve asked that he make it a top priority for this week.”
Dylan blinked at Steve for a minute, regrouping. “I don’t need more than twenty minutes. Is there any way that I could schedule a call with him?” She thought back to Jared’s incomplete notes in his initial project brief and cringed. She really needed about three hours.
“I’m sorry. Tim made it clear that his day is packed. But I have you on the docket for first thing Thursday.” This time Steve didn’t wait for her to ask another question. Turning toward the door, he said, “Please let me know if you need anything else to get settled in. Enjoy your coffee. You can always get more upstairs.”
“Thanks.” Dylan’s tone was as lukewarm as her beverage. Glancing at her coffee, she tried to silence her anxiety alarm. There was no way that she could waste a week waiting for Tim. Even if she couldn’t meet with him for a full three hours, she absolutely needed him to send out a company-wide memo letting people know she was here in a friendly capacity. Given Brandt’s initial reaction, if she tried to interview employees without it, they might run screaming at the sight of her.
The question was how to get to him. Dylan was almost positive she couldn’t just walk through Tim’s door without some kind of security card. Frowning down at her coffee, she felt her mind reaching for the thread of an idea. Pushing her hair back, she toyed with the handle of her mug for a moment before it came to her. Brandt had mentioned that the coffee cart was close to Tim’s office. If she waited by the coffee cart long enough, surely he’d have to come out.
After snatching up the dinosaur and cramming a few papers into her bag, Dylan hooked the three free fingers not dedicated to the mug around the door handle and pulled it shut. Her head began to spin as she looked for the elevator hidden in the sea of cubicles. Finally, she marched to the first occupied desk she found, read the nameplate, and cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Deep. Could you direct me to the elevator?”
The woman’s pixie cut shot up, a look of horror stuck to her face. The nail file she had been using moments before hung limp in her hand. “You scared me! Just because I’m in a cube doesn’t mean you shouldn’t knock.” Deep’s expression went from shocked to offended in the span of five seconds.
“I’m sorry. You’re right—I like people to knock on my padded walls as well,” Dylan said with more spunk than she meant to. Deep stared, her bright-pink lips parted in surprise. Arching an eyebrow, she tilted her head back and started laughing, shaking her bangs off her forehead. When she finally opened her dark eyes, Dylan got the sense that she was being appraised. After a moment Deep smiled.
“I like you. You’re secretly saucy under that beige corporate attire. Follow me.”
So much for people fearing her. Apparently, Deep found her so unintimidating that she was willing to insult what Dylan considered one of her more flattering professional outfits. Walking behind Deep, she noticed a small bar code tattoo on the base of her neck and smiled at another local custom. In Seattle you could be tattooed, pierced, and pixied and still have a desk job.
“Are you the replacement for Marta or the person they’re bringing in to fire me?” Deep asked casually.
“The latter. Except I don’t have plans to fire anyone. Just make the company run better.”
“Sure. I’d totally buy that if I hadn’t seen Office Space. You are a productivity consultant, correct? Should I call you Bob?” Deep laughed. Dylan didn’t think she could be more surprised. Office Space jokes were part of the productivity consultant territory, but it was unusual for people to make them in front of her.
“You could call me Bob, but Dylan would be better.”
Deep looked at her and sputtered. “Bob Dylan. Ha! Good one.”
“Actually, Dylan is my first name.” Deep’s face froze midgiggle. She figured Deep could take a little heckling, so she waited until they reached the elevators before adding, “I was named for him, though, so it isn’t a bad guess.”
Deep smirked. “You are secretly sassy. Where’re you trying to go? Or should I ask who you’re trying to fire?”
“I need to get to the coffee cart,” Dylan said, wiggling her empty mug.
“Don’t we all?” Deep sighed, leaning in with her badge and punching a floor. Dylan smiled as the doors closed. Secretly sassy was something she had been accused of exactly never in her life. Anal retentive, yes. Sassy, no.
As the doors opened, she saw exactly what Brandt had meant when he’d said the coffee cart was as close to Tim’s office as it could be. A quick scan of the floor yielded only a coffee cart, a few tables, a restroom, and a massive door labeled TIM GUNDERSON, FOUNDER. That was it. Dylan looked over at the barista, who was rapt, tuned in to a romance novel complete with a shirtless pirate on the cover. She thought she’d be embarrassed to be reading that in front of one of America’s wealthiest CEOs, but then again, she couldn’t really be embarrassed by her literary choices in front of a man who drove an aggressively red Roadster.
Dylan took a step toward the cart, shifted her dinosaur mug onto the counter, and asked for another coffee, please. Sooner or later, Tim would come out to use the restroom, and she’d be ready for him.
Three cups of coffee and two hours later, Dylan was starting to wonder if Tim was a camel. She had begun her waiting process by reviewing Jared’s spotty notes and addressing her timeline problems, but by her third cup, Dylan began to feel the unfortunate combination of caffeine jitters and short attention span kicking in. After fifteen minutes of her tapping on the coffee table and staring into space, the barista had given her the pirate romance, which Dylan had begun to read against her better judgment. She’d concluded that as long as she left the book open on the table, no one would even know it was a pirate romance. Besides, she would only read it until Tim appeared, at which point she would politely return it to the barista.
All this had been about fifty pages and one daring rescue ago. Dylan had reached the part where the captive duchess began bandaging the wounded, misunderstood pirate captain when the sound of Tim’s door smashing into the wall behind it made her jump. She looked up in time to see the vestiges of his hoodie heading into the bathroom. Shaking off the caffeine jitters, Dylan stuffed everything back into her bag and hustled over to wait outside the bathroom door.
She had enough time to straighten her skirt before the door opened with a simi
lar force and she came nose to nose with Tim Gunderson.
“Holy shit!” He clutched his throat as if he were wearing pearls.
“Gah!” Dylan jumped, more in response to his surprise than her own, dropping her satchel in the process. The bag hit the ground with a nauseating crunch that could only have been her laptop before exploding papers, pens, hair ties, and a romance novel everywhere. Dylan watched in semihorror as the frizzy crown of Gunderson’s head bowed toward the floor and began picking up the book.
“Sorry, you scared the hell out of me.”
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have been standing so close to the door,” Dylan said, diving toward the mass of paperwork and a breath-mint container. “I was hoping to catch you before you went in.” The moment she said it, Dylan realized it was the wrong thing to say. Panic spread across his freckles.
“Layla, would you mind calling security?” he stage-whispered to the barista, dropping the novel and inching away from her. “Look, if you’ve been recently let go, Steve handles all that now. I don’t know how you got in here or what you want, but I can assure you that I don’t keep large sums of cash on my person.”
Dylan had to wonder if Gunderson was really as brilliant as everyone said he was. If she were going to rob or otherwise maim him, did he think she would come dressed in heels and a pencil skirt?
She sighed. “No. You haven’t fired me. In fact, you hired me. Look, Mr. Gunderson, I’m desperate for twenty minutes of your time. Time you agreed to give me.” She crossed her arms as he sputtered to a halt, then added, “As I’m sure Steve reminded you this morning.” She watched as recognition slowly spread across his face, his shoulders retracting from his ears a quarter of an inch.
“Are you the consultant?”
“Yes. And given the time limitations imposed by your board of directors and our mutually agreed-upon contract, I believe it’s best we get started right away. I understand you’re busy, but I must insist we meet, at least briefly, today. The rest of our discussion can be put off for another time.” She nodded authoritatively as his shoulders dropped another fraction.
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