Hating Him Wanting Him : A Contemporary Romance Collection

by Summer Brooks

  With the hum of the computers in my ears, drowning out the sound of the constant talking in the room, I buckled down, moving my project around in pieces. I created spreadsheets of processes, things that the company did in the product creation line that couldn’t get overlooked. I researched those processes, finding creative but not groundbreaking actions to streamline them. Groundbreaking was great, in the medical field, or in a moment where you had years to test, but this had to be proven and true.

  “Hey, we’re headed to lunch, you coming?” Andy, one of the techs said, leaning on my desk.

  I smiled and glanced from him to the computer and back again. “I’m not really hungry and I’m really digging in this theory. I’ll skip it for today. But thanks.”

  He chuckled as he turned to walk away. “Oh, to have the motivation of a newbie again.”

  While I got the reference, what he didn’t understand was that was how I worked, new, old, veteran, when I had an idea it was like a cyclone, sucking me into it. It was impossible for me to put it down. I was caught in the vortex of it and my mind just had to see it to completion. The hours ticked by without me even realizing it. When I made my last keystroke, and leaned back, I realized that I was the only person left in the room.

  I furled my brow and looked at the time. It was half past four, thirty minutes after quitting time. Leaning up in my chair I could see the light still on in Sharon’s office. Good. I could get my proposal in to her. I printed everything out and slipped it into a presentation notebook. On the front I put my information in standard lettering, standard text and typeset. Flashy had never been my thing which was why I ended up in tech, not car design or building design. In my opinion flow and functionality was far more important than style any day, especially when it came to the inside of a manufacturing plant. I liked to let my ideas speak for themselves.

  When the file was ready, I packed up my things and headed up the steps of the pits to Sharon’s office. I knocked on the doorframe and poked my head in. “I just wanted to drop this off before I left.”

  Sharon looked up from her work and smiled. “Thanks. Your draft?”

  Glancing at the stack of drafts to her right, I shook my head. “No, this is the final spec before mock-up.”

  She paused as I handed it to her, giving me a funny look. As she flipped through it, I stood nervously with my hands clenched together and my eyes roaming around the plain office. She sniffed, drawing my attention back to her face. There was a stunned look on it, one I didn’t know how to read.

  “Is there something wrong?” I asked. “I can rework something if it doesn’t flow but I swear I checked it all.”

  She shook her head, her eyes shifting up to mine. “No. There’s nothing wrong. This is…wow. No one else finished it today. All they got through were their drafts. Some didn’t even get that far. This is fully ready for presentation.”

  I nodded, never really caring for other people’s work timelines but I could see it had made an impression. “I just had the idea in my mind and I had to get it out fully or I would be up all night thinking about it.”

  Sharon continued to read through it, mouthing the words as she read. She even popped out her calculator at one point to check a couple of the calculations. Her eyes didn’t leave the pages as she turned through them. When she got to the end, she set the booklet down in front of her and laughed with a breathless tone. “Mia, I don’t know what to say about this. This is super impressive. You went far beyond the scope of the project, but sometimes that is what it takes. And while they will own the patent, if anything needs to be changed or updated, they will have to come to us for it.”

  I nodded. “Right. It was important they got what they wanted, but it left a residual income for us. If we were handing the whole thing to them, we would still need something to maximize the long-term finances. This gives us a residual trail on it. One that the client might not see, or find that it was worth it.”

  “Wow,” she said, shaking her head again. “Good work on this. This is exactly the kind of thing we hoped for. I will send this up the pipeline but you should get an answer about mockup in a couple of days max. I guess until then just continue on with the project I gave you yesterday. There really isn’t anything else I can tell you.”

  Nodding my head, I left the office, feeling really good about the work I had done. She was impressed, though I really couldn’t believe that when the others were done there wouldn’t be something that completely blew me out of the water. They were seasoned veterans. Nonetheless, impressing my boss was good. Now all I had to do was figure out how to navigate my own life around work and will have completely mastered number fifteen on my life goal list. Everything was going just as it should be.

  8

  Evan

  Yawning, I entered the office, not having gotten much sleep the night before. I didn’t go out or anything like that, I simply couldn’t sleep. It had been a long time since a project had me twisted up like that. I had my own concepts going through my mind. So much so that I’d opened up the drawing room in my condo for the first time in about three years. The cleaning staff kept it dustless, but it was so still in there. I used to live in that space.

  “Good morning, Evan,” my secretary said, looking frustratedly at an electric pencil sharpener on her desk.

  I laughed. “For someone who works for a tech company, you really don’t get along with it.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes, well, that’s why I’m the secretary and not the inventor.”

  Lydia was a middle aged woman, very professional, very old school. She had worked for my father for years, but in the middle of changes to the company she faced a layoff. My father had her as his secretary for years and years. I always went to see her when I was a child, she had candy for me and gave comforting looks when my father was barreling down on one of his rampages. So, when the company started, I took her for myself.

  “Lifesaver?” she asked, holding up the package of individually wrapped mints.

  I grinned and took one, feeling just like that little boy for a moment. “Anything happen while I was gone?”

  “Besides the death of three good pencils? Two messages from the patent department, and Sharon dropped off one of your proposals for the new project. I put it on your desk.”

  My brow pushed together. “Already? I would have assumed today would have been the earliest.”

  Sharon shrugged. “I don’t know, she was going to bring it by last night but we were all gone for the evening.”

  “Huh,” I replied, glancing in at the binder on my desk. “Sounds good. And for the love of God, please put down the pencils and join the 15th century. Use a pen, you don’t have to sharpen them. And in celebration of our survival as a race into the 21st Century, you don’t even have to refill them. Just click, click, toss it, get another one.”

  She gave a mock laugh as I chuckled my way to my desk. Setting my things down, I opened up the binder and began to flip through the pages. I was shocked right off the bat, even the presentation was perfect, just how my father had always instructed me to do them. No frills. Let the project be the frills, the excitement.

  Sharon brought me a cup of coffee and hurried back out of the room as the phone rang. I shook my head at the project in front of me. It superseded the scope of the project, yet incorporated everything that the client needed.

  “Evan, line one is Sharon from Tech,” Lydia said through the speaker.

  I picked up the line and shook my head, as if she could see it. “I am blown away by this project in front of me.”

  “I know right,” she chuckled. “I told you she would be worth it.”

  Shaking my head, I flipped to the front, realizing it was the new girl. “Mia, interesting. Well, as soon as she gets in this morning, I want you to send her over to mockup. This is a fantastic piece and I want to see the dummy version.”

  “Yes sir, sounds good,” Sharon replied. “You should have more by close of business as well.”

&nb
sp; “Thanks, and keep up the solid work over there,” I replied before hanging up.

  Mia, Mia…why does that name sound so familiar. Maybe because she was that superstar internist that I kept hearing about.

  Either way, I hadn’t seen work like that in a really long time. In fact, her style and thoughtfulness reminded me of the projects I had done in the past. She encompassed the entire idea of a client relationship. She gave them what they needed, what they didn’t know they would need, and the company a place to stand for further financial gain in the coming years. If I had ten people like her, I would have a company three times the size of what it was at that point. I wasn’t even sure if that was possible.

  I pressed the com button. “Sharon, do I have any morning scheduled appointments?”

  She clicked the button and I could hear her typing. “Nope, clear. Nothing until lunch with Connor.”

  “Thanks. I’m going to head over to innovation and check things out. It’s been a while since I poked my head in.”

  “I like that,” she replied. “I’ve always told you how much more productive your father’s company would get when he spent some time at home with his employees.”

  “Well, here I go. Hopefully no one throws rotten fruit at me,” I joked.

  “I might take an umbrella,” she joked back, dryly.

  I shook my head, standing from my desk and pulling my suit jacket closed and buttoned. Meeting the people that worked for me used to be so important to me. It was like I had to connect with the people that made it all possible for me. But after the boom in sales, and my father’s input, I rarely even left my office except to head to the front door. Most of the people that worked for me didn’t even know my name. I didn’t like to have that showmanship. That information on me like a biography when new employees started. It was useless, and wouldn’t help to get them in gear for the future. It would only make me look farther away, if I could get any further away then I already was.

  Taking the elevator down in the middle of the day was interesting. I got strange looks, nervous people, and others who I had never met, and clearly had no idea who I was. Fortunately, the conversation around the water cooler seemed pretty positive, except where people were complaining about the stall in innovation’s work.

  Floor by floor I descended down to innovation, noting that another elevator might be worth looking into. It must have taken me twenty minutes to get down there. When the doors slid open, no one looked up, the innovation team was quieter, much quieter then I remembered in the past. Even Sharon was too engrossed in what she was doing to notice that I’d come down to say hello.

  “Good morning, sir,” one of the innovation team’s longest standing tech’s said as she passed me in awe.

  “Good morning, Tilly,” I replied with a happy tone.

  That was when Sharon looked up. Her expression went from focused and steady, to shock, to panic as she raced across the pit to meet up with me. I put out my hand to greet her. “Morning Sharon.”

  “Morning,” she replied. “I didn’t expect to see you here today.”

  I nodded, putting my hands in my pockets. “I wanted to meet this woman that you sent the information over for this morning.”

  Sharon glanced around. “I sent Mia to mockup. She was early as usual and I figured the faster the better.”

  “Oh,” I replied, wrinkling my nose. “Okay. No, you did the right thing. I guess I’ll head over to the observation booth then and watch her work for a bit. I don’t want to interrupt the process and the cleansing requirements in there take hours.”

  “Do you want me to call down?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “No, that’s alright, I’ll just slip in and take a peek. Don’t want to mess anyone up over there.”

  Sharon clutched a stack of projects to her chest and then glanced down at them. “Oh, these are some more of the finished blueprints.”

  I nodded. “Just have them sent up to my secretary. I’ll glance at them when I get back. I have an early lunch today.”

  “Right,” she replied. “Thanks for coming by. We miss seeing you down here. I know the techs loved working projects with you in the past.”

  I smiled, feeling good about her words, even if they weren’t true. “Well, I’ll have to start carving out time for them again. I’ll check in with you later.”

  Sharon nodded, a stunned look still on her face as I climbed back in the elevator and headed down one more floor to the mockup room. It was a completely sterile environment, allowing for all the technology to be put together for mockups without the possibility of contamination or dust entering the small intricate workings. There was a viewing booth above it, something I had pioneered after watching a surgery a few years before the company took off.

  Stepping inside, there were screens on the right and left, and a large window across the front. I looked down into the room, finding Chris, the supervisor of mockups standing with a woman, long brown hair and curvy hips. She wore the usual scrub type outfit and dainty pink flats. As she turned, my mouth dropped open just slightly. Now I knew where I had heard that name before.

  “Mia,” I whispered.

  She was the girl from the bar. The one I spent all night listening to talk about her college days, in awe of her nerdy but sexual persona. She was the tech that had blown me away with her project. And still, from up there, I couldn’t help but notice how hot she was, in a tech geek nerdy kind of way. The kind of way I would have found irresistible just a few years before. Apparently, that hadn’t changed much at all.

  “Hey fool, I’ve been searching for you everywhere,” Connor’s voice rang out from the doorway.

  Glancing over, I didn’t spend much time on him, not when I could be looking at Mia. “Sorry, wanted to meet our new tech. She sent down an absolutely brilliant blueprint yesterday and I sent her right to mockup.”

  Connor positioned himself next to me and then pointed at Mia, giving me a double take. “Is that…That’s the girl. Lily’s friend from the other night at the bar.”

  I chuckled and nodded. “Yeah. Her name is Mia and apparently she works for me.”

  Feeling Connor’s eyes rolling over me, judging me, I tried to stiffen up, but it was too late. I could hear his condescending chuckle gurgling in his belly. “You look kind of smitten dude.”

  Right then, Mia looked up at the room, our eyes catching. Her face went from determined to shock, obviously recognizing me from the bar. She tripped over the wheel of one of the rolling carts and a metal piece fell from her half constructed model. She hurried over and grabbed it before it could roll under the cart.

  “Wow, she’s a lot more of a nerd then I remember,” Connor laughed. “I feel like she might collect comic books and play some role-playing card game when not at work.”

  Slowly I turned my head toward him. “I don’t think that’s the case. It’s a small world though. A very small world.”

  Connor tapped his foot. “You know what’s even smaller? The fact that I have lunch reservations for us and we have to get across town in twenty minutes.”

  I nodded, my eyes locked on hers as she stood in the middle of the room, staring up at me. Connor grabbed my shoulder. “Come on Casanova. She’ll still be nerding it out when you get back.”

  With a nod, I gave her a small wave and followed Connor out of the viewing booth. There was something about seeing her again that slammed into me like a brick wall. Suddenly, I didn’t want to go another day without capturing a glimpse of her. I was either in a lot of trouble, or things were getting ready to change. Either way, Mia had made her entrance.

  9

  Mia

  When Sharon had told me to load up and report to mockup, I could barely control my excitement. I could only assume that the big heads really liked my idea. They hadn’t even waited to see the others in competition. I took the elevator down one floor and headed to the decontamination chamber. This company had the coolest process for mockup projects, a completely sterile environment to work
in. It was about time someone did it, companies had been losing millions of dollars every year for tiny bits of dust in computational pieces. In fact, that issue had been one of my major focuses in the quality control portion of my thesis.

  I pulled the scrub-like gown on over my business suit and stuck my shoes in the cleaning box. It was way more financially efficient to clean and sterilize them than it was to go through millions of pairs of booties every year. When I was ready, the doors hissed and I entered, finding the supervisor, Chris going over a checklist. When his eyes shifted up to me, he smiled.

  “Mia, it’s good to see you again,” he grinned. “We had a fun time when you guys came down last year for part of your training. I heard you got the job but didn’t know you had started until I got the call from Sharon. Come on, I’ll show you around the lab. There’s a ton of stuff but I have it labeled and catalogued to make it easier to find.”

  “Awesome,” I replied with that excitement still in my voice. “This is probably my favorite part of the job, being able to create a physical representation of my idea. I just didn’t think I would actually be able to create it anytime soon. I figured it would take years for me to get down here.”

  Chris chuckled. “I saw your proposal, it’s pretty amazing. My question is, how are you planning on doing a mockup of that entire system? It spans the whole client’s company.”

  I clicked my tongue, shaking my finger at him. “True, but you guys did a really successful mockup a few years back using tiny versions of everything. If I can create something that represents the company in a clear fluid way, they will be more likely to understand the concept.”

  Chris grinned. “That is perfect, and we should have everything you need.”