by Tia Siren
“Research!” I exclaimed.
“What about charities?” someone else said. “Does the company donate? With the millennial culture, if a company throws its assets behind a cause they can stand with, that usually generates more revenue with just what we’re doing now.”
“Look into it; then get back to me,” I said. “It’s actually an idea I’ve been tossing around the past few weeks, but I haven’t had time to pass it on.”
“Anything else?” Alex asked.
After a few beats of silence, I nodded my head. The room disbursed as the excited junior executives chattered away about their new tasks. I shuffled the files in front of me, readying them to be put back into my briefcase, but then a light hand descended on my shoulder.
“Yes, Alex?” I asked.
“I’ve got something to ask you,” Alex said.
“Something that wasn’t appropriate for the meeting, I’m assuming.”
“Correct. It’s more of a…personal favor.”
I threw my gaze over to Alex before I nodded, telling him he could proceed. If there was one thing I enjoyed about Alex Marks, it was the fact that he never asked for anything. He was resourceful, had connections with individuals that spanned three entire rolodexes, and had a decent head on his shoulders. After all, he was the one who had built the company to be the most-used natural gas company in Louisiana.
I just came in and made it the most-used gas company on the East Coast.
“Well, spit it out, Marks,” I said. “What is it?”
“It would really help me out if you would consider it,” he said.
“Alex, in all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never pussyfooted around anything. I value your friendship greatly, not just your businesslike demeanor and knowledge. I’d do just about anything for you. You know this. What the fuck is it, man?”
“Crissy’s home from college,” he said.
“Well, I bet that’s fun for your new wife,” I said, grinning.
“She’s raising hell, Grant. I mean some serious hell. And it’s pissing Mel off. And me off.”
“I’m pretty sure Mel’s still going through puberty, so anything’s likely to piss her off,” I said.
“Not funny.”
“That’s what you get for marrying someone who’s a few years older than your daughter. Crissy’s, what, twenty-three now?”
“Twenty-two,” he said.
“And Mel?”
I stuck my hands in my pockets and waited for Alex to respond. I loved fucking with him about his new wife. She was the stereotypical exotic beauty: tall, thin features, long-ass legs, dark hair, and dark, brooding eyes to match. Even if she was simply staring off into space, it looked as if she was trying to figure out the source of the universe itself.
“Twenty-six,” Alex said, murmuring.
“That never gets old,” I said, chuckling. “What is it you need?”
“Crissy’s a smart girl,” he said. “She really is, but she’s just driving us all insane. Having her around the house is too much for both of us. She needs something to occupy her time that falls in line with her degree.”
“She went to Dartmouth College, right?” I asked. “What’s her degree in?”
“Business,” Alex said.
“Takes after her father, I see.”
“Honestly, I had no idea until about halfway through her college career,” Alex said. “When she did come home, the only shit she talked about was parties, booze, and boys.”
“Sounds like a wild child, but then again, she’s always been that way,” I said, shrugging.
“She’s got no desire to get a decent job, no desire to move out, no desire to start any life of her own. She just sits around the house pestering Mel and me and raising the type of hell she usually does.”
“I’m not going to lie,” I said. “It’s easy to make Mel angry. I’d do it for fun if I could, too. What is it you’re asking, Alex?”
“I was wondering if you had an internship here she could fill.”
The request stunned me for a second. He wanted me to take on his hellion daughter as an intern? We were a natural gas company. Enough hot air spewed from between that young girl’s lips to blow up half of Louisiana’s oil rigs.
“It would get her out of the house,” Alex said. “It would get her some experience in the field she got her degree in, and it would fucking give Mel and me some time to breathe.”
“And fuck, I presume,” I said.
“Grant.”
“Hey, you’re the one who’s asking,” I said.
“I can tell you’re less than thrilled,” he said.
“You’re asking me to take on a person even you describe as a wild child. Yes, I’m a bit hesitant to do it.”
“Just entertain the idea for a second, all right?” Alex asked. “Look at these executives that just poured out of this room. You’ve taken a misfit bunch of idiots and whipped them into prime slabs of beef for the business world. The ideas they threw out there are really good, and it’s because of your tutelage.”
“You don’t have to stroke my dick on this one, Alex,” I said, grinning.
“No, I’m just being serious. Even I can admit when you do something I can’t, and I never would’ve been able to pull that kind of shit off with them. If there’s anyone who can whip Crissy into shape, it’s you. Honestly? I don’t care what the fucking internship is as long as she’s got her hands in something here instead of something at my house.”
“You do realize you’re talking about your own daughter, right?” I asked.
“Look, all I’m saying is that Crissy needs a bit of guidance.”
“Guidance her own father can’t give her?” I asked.
“Look, Grant, things were tough. When Abby died…”
Alex panned his gaze out the window, and the moment his eyes began to glisten, I knew I’d take on the internship. I knew shit was hard when his wife died. It was one of the things that had strengthened our friendship. I understood his pain over losing his wife. I’d lost mine a little over a decade ago, and I’d had no passion to create any sort of substantial relationship with anyone since then, much less with a woman. But I had created one with Alex.
Then I watched him bounce from woman to woman before marrying a pretty young idiot only a few years older than his damn daughter.
“I know,” I said. “Alex, believe me. I get it. If there’s anyone in this fucking company who gets it, it’s me. But you gotta understand. I mean, I’m no father, but—”
“That’s right,” he said. “You’re not. All I’m asking is if there’s any internship my daughter could possibly apply for. She needs the experience if she’s ever going do something with her degree.”
Alex always got defensive whenever Abby was brought up. Everyone knew Crissy took a nosedive for the worse when Abby passed away, but it was something Alex didn’t know how to deal with. He’d been coping with his own loss, and Crissy needed her father, but when it came right down to it, she didn’t have him.
At least, that was how I saw it.
“You don’t even have to pay her,” Alex said as he turned his gaze back to me.
“I’ll pay her for the internship, but I’ll have to figure out where she’ll fit in the best,” I said. “It would be a bad idea to just put her as an intern for the junior executives. Those men would fucking eat her alive.”
“So, you’ll do it?” Alex asked.
“Yes, I’ll do it.”
“Thanks so much, Grant. Seriously. Just let me know what she’ll be doing and when she’ll be starting. I’ll tell her tonight that we’re coming up with something.”
“I’ll let you know when I do,” I said.
Alex retreated from the room, and I raked my hand through my hair. I couldn’t believe I’d just agreed to take on the hellion of the South. Crissy caused trouble wherever she went, and she seemed to take pride in it. She was obviously smart. Obtaining a business degree from an Ivy League school was no small feat
, but I had no doubt in my mind that she had partied just as hard when she was at college. It was easy to see why Mel wanted her out of the way.
I couldn’t put her anywhere near the junior executives. Those men wouldn’t just eat her up because she was a woman; they’d eat her up because she was gorgeous. Even I could appreciate the younger female form when it presented itself in the proper fashion, and Crissy was the perfect example of proper womanly form. She had big tits, a small waist, and an ass you could bounce a coin off. Alex had half-assed raised a gorgeous daughter, and the only thing she would do was flirt with the junior executives all fucking day.
If she was going to be an intern at this company, she was at least going to get something from it. But if she couldn’t fraternize with the junior executives, there was really only one place I’d be able to keep my eye on her and mold her in the way Alex wanted me to.
And that was if she was at my side.
The only option I had was to make her my personal assistant. People had been telling me to get a secretary for years, but I didn’t want to spend the money just to have someone sit outside my fucking office and pester me. But a personal assistant would do more than just work. I could send her on lunch and coffee runs. I could get her to help with my dry cleaning. She could take all the little stuff off my plate while simultaneously taking minutes for important meetings, and it would give her a taste of the world she had majored in while giving me a few more minutes in my day to do more important things.
The only issue would be keeping her distracted from the young men who ran around this fucking place long enough to teach her something. If those boys got a whiff of her, if they even took a one-second look at the body that young girl was carrying around, they’d be all over her.
And she would love it.
If there was any man in this company who could control himself around a beautiful female, it was me—not to mention the personal relationship I had with her father. Having her at my side and working with me would not only present a mentoring opportunity, but it would keep her safe. I could fend off the hungry dogs and show her that the workplace wasn’t a place of fraternization. That was something a party girl like Crissy really needed to learn. I trusted myself, as well as my relationship with her father, more than anything on this planet, so I headed down to human resources to notify them of my decision.
I had to let them know they needed to talk with accounting to release the funds necessary to hire Crissy Marks as my personal assistant.
Chapter 2
Crissy
I lay in my bed swiping through pictures on my dating application. Every time I got someone who matched up with me, I was sorely disappointed. None of the little boys warranted any sort of effort. None of them looked like they had any experience underneath their belts. I wanted a man, someone who could use their tongue for more than just overestimating their sexual prowess. I wanted someone successful who had a thirst for success just as much as a thirst for my body. These boys were all young, dumb, and full of come, and I’d gotten enough of that at Dartmouth.
A knock on the door sounded into my childhood room, and my phone hit my face. I groaned, tossing my phone to the floor. Then I heard my door open before my sister’s voice rang out.
“Crissy, it’s time for dinner.”
“Pass,” I said.
“Crissy, come on,” she said. “You can’t just ignore the world forever.”
“I don’t know. I can pretty much do whatever I set my mind to, Sissy.”
She crossed her arms, and a smirk peeled across my face. I loved pissing my sister off. It was my favorite thing to do besides pissing off Dad’s new wife.
“Come on,” she said. “Why won’t you join us for dinner?”
“Because we never did the ‘family’ thing until Mel showed up on the scene. Now it’s all ‘sitting at the table for dinner’ and ‘watching a family movie’ and ‘no going out on Fridays because it’s family night.’ Who fucking does that?”
“Regular families,” Sissy said.
“Well, we haven’t been a regular family since Mom died,” I said.
Mom died when I was fifteen. Fucking cancer. It crept up on her like a ghost and took her before we even knew what was going on. It was her autopsy that revealed the cancer, not the doctors who had declared they wanted to “save her life.” Sure, I grieved. But I also had to plan the funeral. I also had to shake the hands of those who came by with food for weeks. I also had to force my father to eat while Sissy buried herself in college work because no one else knew what the fuck to do with themselves.
The least they could let me do was eat in my fucking room.
“I get your point, and I understand,” she said. “Really, I do. But you’re living under their roof, and it doesn’t look like you plan to move out anytime soon. If you want to live here, you have to play by their rules.”
“You mean Mel’s rules?” I asked.
“Whoever’s rules,” she said. “And if you don’t want to, then move out. Eat in your room every night. Leave all your dirty-ass piles of clothes and half-eaten plates of food anywhere you want.”
“Pissed that my room’s better than yours?” I asked, grinning.
“Better? It smells like a garbage dump. Do you ever wash your clothes?”
“When I need them, sure,” I said. “But I’m usually lounging around naked anyway, so who needs clean clothes?”
“Ugh. Come down for dinner, Crissy. Quit being a bitch.”
“Why don’t you get an apartment with me?” I asked as she turned to leave. “It would be cheaper for both of us.”
“Fat chance,” she said. “You’re a slob, for one, and I’m just fine slumming it here with Dad and his plaything until I get done with my graduate studies.”
“Oh, yeah. The master’s in Music. What do you plan to do with that again?”
“Become one of the world’s finest female conductors; that’s what,” she said.
“Sounds enthralling.”
“Better than getting a business degree to try to get Dad’s attention,” she said.
“I didn’t get that damn degree for him,” I said. “I got it because I want to run my own company someday. Maybe start my own business. Franchise. Branch out. Take over the West Coast before Dad does or something.”
“Well, for someone who wants to take over the world or whatever, you sure as hell are lazy,” she said.
“Not lazy. I’m just biding my time,” I said. “You’re not gonna go away until I come down for dinner, are you?”
“Nope.”
“Can I come down naked?” I asked.
“Only if you want Mel to somehow view you as competition,” she said.
“That could be fun,” I said, grinning.
“Don’t fucking do that. Come on. Come eat.”
I honestly didn’t want to. I was more than happy getting in my car, driving up the road to get a burger, and then coming back. But in the process of doing that, I’d have to justify to my father why I was doing that and then face Mel’s idiotic “mom stare.” Like she’d somehow raised me and knew how to stop me cold in my tracks.
Such an idiot.
I pulled myself from bed and threw my hair up into a bun. I picked up my phone and shoved it in my back pocket. If I got bored at the table, I would just continue swiping. Even if the guys on my phone didn’t know a damn thing about what a girl like myself needed, at least they’d be pretty to look at.
But when I got to the table, a bomb was dropped on me that made me forget about their faces in a heartbeat.
“I’ve gotten you an internship at the company, Crissy,” Dad said.
“Wait. What?”
“You’ll be Grant Jacob’s personal assistant,” he said, grinning.
“Oh, that’s fabulous!” Mel said. “Honey, how in the world did you swing something like that?”
“Probably sucked his dick or something,” I muttered.
Sissy elbowed me harder than I expected, and I rubb
ed my ribcage. Apparently, Dad didn’t hear me. He was too busy gazing into the deep, dark eyes of his exotic, legal prostitute.
“You’ll be going to work for him tomorrow,” he said.
“That isn’t necessary, Dad,” I said. “I’ve already applied for a few full-time managerial positions around here with various places. I’ll be just fine.”
“It took a lot of convincing for me to get you this position, and with Grant no less,” Dad said. “Anyone would clamor for this job.”
“Then let them clamor for it,” I said. “I’m waiting to hear back on my applications.”
“It’ll be good for you, Crissy,” Mel said.
“Yeah,” I said, glaring at her. “It’ll get me out of the house and out of your hair.”
She didn’t take the bait. Mel just shrugged and took a sip of wine.
“You start bright and early at eight in the morning,” Dad said.
“Eight in the morning?” I asked. “Dad! Why the hell are you taking an interest in me now?”
“Crissy!” Mel exclaimed.
“Oh, can it, gold digger,” I said, not even looking at her. “Why in the world do you suddenly have an interest in me now, Dad?”
“You’re my daughter,” he said. “I’ve always had an interest in you.”
“Is that why you didn’t know what I was majoring in until halfway through my college years?” I asked.
“You came home and talked more about boys than you did anything else,” he said. “How was I supposed to know?”
“By asking me, Dad,” I said.
Mel rolled her eyes, and suddenly, I wanted to throw a green bean at her. She was snotty, she was a brat, and she spent my father’s money almost as fast as he made it.
“Why don’t you use that expensive degree of yours for something other than a basic managerial position?” she asked.
“What, like marrying rich?” I asked.
“That’s enough. Crissy,” Dad said. “We’re done here. I had a long talk with Grant, and he’s taking you on tomorrow. You either show up or you have no place in this home.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked.
Sissy elbowed me again, and I kicked her shin underneath the table. If she really thought I was going to back down from this fight, she was sorely mistaken.