by Moriah Jovan
But she was obviously at her tipping point and when asked directly, she couldn’t lie, couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.
It was another hour before Eilis had the nerve to go upstairs. Sebastian and Karen were nowhere to be found. “Louise, where’s Mr. Taight?”
“In the conference room with Karen. I hope he doesn’t fire her. That poor daughter of hers . . . ”
Louise knew. Eilis didn’t.
They were in there all day long, and except for the moment a pizza delivery man showed up with a veritable feast, the doors didn’t open. The restrooms on this floor had an entrance directly from the conference room, so neither came out for potty breaks, either.
“I don’t think he’d order pizza for someone he’s going to fire, do you?”
“Louise,” Eilis said, “I honestly don’t know what to think about that man.”
To her shame, at that moment, the only thing she could really think about was the smell of that pizza wafting throughout the suite. Her stomach gurgled and she went to her office for a rice cake. Well, two.
At 4:15, the doors opened and Karen walked out. She didn’t seem to notice Eilis and Eilis could only see Karen wipe her face.
Eilis went into the conference room to find Sebastian cleaning up the pizza and pop. She looked longingly at the leftovers he’d thrown away, but then snapped herself out of it with some difficulty because her stomach grumbled. He didn’t acknowledge her presence.
She spoke hesitantly. “Did you—?” She couldn’t bring herself to say the F-word.
“No,” he said shortly. “I didn’t fire her.”
“She was crying.”
Sebastian turned on her then, his face stone cold. Her stomach roiled and she thought she might puke. He reached behind him and picked up two of those engineer’s pads he liked. Every page was written on and the writing fluffed up the pads until the two of them together were about three inches thick.
“I picked her brain, Eilis. I picked her brain, which is something her supervisor—” Eilis flinched. “—should’ve done the minute she was hired. She was crying because she was so grateful that someone finally listened to her.
“And I want to tell you something else. Karen faked your test. She beat it. She knew what it would say about her if she did it honestly and she needed this job. I don’t even know why you bothered hiring a marketing executive if you weren’t going to use her or listen to her. I’m leaving,” he muttered as he dropped the pads of paper into his backpack. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
With that, he brushed past her and walked out. Eilis barely made it home before she broke down and cried.
* * * * *
Eilis was tempted to stay home the next day without calling in. She was the CEO. She could do that. Sebastian Taight’s opinion of her couldn’t get any lower.
She hadn’t slept. She’d spent the night at her kitchen table with a pencil and a pad of paper it’d taken her a half hour to find. What she wanted to write there, she didn’t know. The only thing she’d written for the longest time was “Karen Cheng.”
Then she wrote down what she knew about Karen, which was everything she’d learned that day and nothing more.
Then she wrote her assistant’s name, Louise Brummel, and everything she knew about her, which wasn’t much.
Then she wrote her CIO’s name, Michael Pritchard, and what she knew about him, which was that he went to MIT and wouldn’t use the screening tests and was all of twenty-six years old. End of list for Michael.
She went through every executive and every employee whose names she could remember and after Michael’s very short list, none of them had any entries. Eilis knew nothing about her employees.
Each and every one of her employees and everything about them couldn’t be known; she understood that. What she needed to know was that the rank and file were being managed well enough that they were productive and she couldn’t know that without knowing their supervisors.
HR Prerogatives had always had a good name as a caring employer. It paid well, it provided good benefits. All Eilis asked in return was a good day’s work, but how could she get that from people who hated their jobs? Management style flowed directly from the top, so did that mean that she was that bad at managing people?
In three days, Sebastian Taight knew more about her employees and what they needed better than she ever had or ever would have if he hadn’t pointed it out to her.
Eilis ripped her piece of paper off the pad and made a notation to look at her tests again with a new eye. Karen beat it. Who knew how many others had? Sebastian had estimated half her workforce could have beaten it, so if it was that flawed, she didn’t want it out in the marketplace.
At the thought of Sebastian, of Karen, of Michael and his programmers, an idea occurred to her that she scribbled down before she could forget it. Perhaps the test wasn’t flawed at all.
No one was at work when she got there, which she had planned. She couldn’t face Sebastian’s derision or Karen’s bitterness, but she couldn’t stay away; that just wasn’t done. Besides, she had things to do today.
She closeted herself in her windowless inner sanctum and wrote on her single sheet of paper until she’d covered it front and back, and it curled. She had no more lined paper in her office, so she emerged to get another pad or two.
Sebastian stood at the mezzanine window, his hands behind his back. Eilis didn’t think he would want to talk to her, so she went downstairs. When she came back with a bundled package of legal pads, he was no longer at the window. Instead, he lay on the sofa in her office, his head on the arm rest, one expensively loafered foot on the floor and the other hanging over the opposite arm rest. One arm was thrown over his forehead and the other dangled uselessly over the floor.
His eyes were open and the only indications he gave that he was even alive was the occasional blink and the steady rise and fall of his chest. She wondered if that was normal for him, because she couldn’t imagine this man sleeping, much less resting.
After a minute hesitation, she proceeded past him and sat at her desk. She bent back over her task once she’d opened her package. If he didn’t intend to speak, then Eilis would attempt to block his presence from her mind and concentrate on remembering who worked for her. He said nothing for an hour, and Eilis was ashamed to realize she’d marked the time.
“Eilis,” he said, “we need to talk.”
Uh oh. She carefully put down her pen and folded her hands over her paper. He didn’t sound angry. “All right.”
He didn’t move a muscle, except to speak. “Now, you understand that when I go into a business, I don’t mess around with the product, right?”
“Yes, I know that.” The product usually made the company money in spite of itself.
“I find myself in a unique position with HRP because I deal with people and numbers, but in your case, your people are your product. Quite frankly, Eilis, you don’t know shit about people.”
She swallowed. He still didn’t sound angry, but there was a note of—something—in his voice she didn’t understand.
“I looked at your list while you were gone and congratulations, by the way, for graduating to paper and pen.” She thought she saw a trace of a smile. “It’s a nice start. Question: When you came in and saw me lying here quiet and still, what did you think?”
There was no right answer to that. “I don’t know what to think about you, Sebastian,” she said quietly. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”
He grunted. “Sure you have. You just didn’t recognize them. I’ll tell you what I was doing. I was working.”
Eilis’s brow wrinkled. “You were lying there doing nothing.”
“Wrong. I was working. Some things require minimal brain power. Some a lot. Most of the time, if I’m sitting doing nothing, I’m working something through, letting my mind wander where it wants, laying the groundwork for the solutions to my next sixty problems. What you need to understand is that lots of people do tha
t. Your product is people, but you’ve completely disenfranchised that portion of the population that represents the best this country has to offer.”
That made no sense.
“Sure it does,” he replied when she said that. “This country was built on the back of ADD and its comorbid personality disorders. It’s heavy in the general American gene pool because it self-selected. You know, Darwin? Immigrants came here, pioneers. They were of one type, though on a broad spectrum of that type: They were risk takers. They built things. They succeeded. They defied a king and waged war on the most powerful country on earth at that time, and they won. The United States of America is what they built, and my ancestors not only helped win a war and build a country, they made a fortune doing it.
“So back to my unique position. I’m going to mess with your product, contrary to my usual M.O., and I would like to request that you just ditch the screening test altogether.”
“It brings in a lot of revenue,” she said quietly.
“I know, but it’s flawed.”
She hesitated for only a microsecond. “I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t think the test itself is flawed. I think the scoring criteria are.”
He said nothing and then, “Eilis, I can think of only two people in my very, very large tribe who would pass your test without cheating and that’s Knox and Fen, and if he weren’t dead, Oliver, either. That’s not coincidental.”
Eilis struggled to keep her cool.
I’m always willing to look at options if they’re presented to me logically.
She took a deep breath and said, “Let me explain my reasoning, please.”
He continued to lie still and quiet, so she went on. “I think that the test itself did what it was supposed to do, which was to pinpoint your personality type and learning style. The only thing that was off was the label the program assigned to your score. You only failed because the grading scale said you did. My idea is that if the scoring criteria were based on categorizations, no one would fail; it would only suggest in what capacities those people would do well and where they shouldn’t be put at all.”
He said nothing for a long while, still staring at the ceiling. Eilis waited and waited. “I’ll agree to that,” he finally said, surprising her. “But I want you to get it restructured by a psychologist who specializes in personality disorders—and, by the way, I hate that term. It’s just convenient to use—as if we need to apologize for or medicate a big segment of the population just because the looters and moochers don’t like it.”
Looters and moochers? “All right.”
He sat up, then stood, shaking out his pant legs. “I’m going to spend the rest of the day and tomorrow talking to people. It’s about time someone did,” he growled, glaring at her. She truly did flinch that time, but he’d turned by then and started his long stride out of her office, so he didn’t see it. “Monday, I’ll clean your house.”
Eilis breathed a sigh of relief. That wasn’t the worst dressing down he could’ve given her and he hadn’t seemed to hate her and he didn’t seem that angry, either. She figured she got off light and thanked her lucky stars. She set about researching the type of psychologist Sebastian had specified and started making phone calls.
Sebastian came back to her office at the end of the day with yet another of those pads filled with notes. “When I get finished Tuesday, I want you to administer that test again to those who remain. You’ll do that Wednesday before the lunch. You will make it very clear that it won’t be scored in the normal way, that it is imperative that they do it honestly and that their jobs depend upon their doing it honestly.”
“How will you know if they don’t?”
He dropped the pad on her desk. “I’ll know. Believe me, I’ll know.”
She looked into his cold blue eyes and felt herself beginning to think of entirely different things altogether. His scent was odd, one she’d never encountered. One part man, one part expensive cologne, and one part chemical compound of some sort, a solvent maybe. Even with that mixed in, it wasn’t offensive in the least bit. In fact, it was so not offensive that she was getting aroused. Fortunately, the makeup and contacts would hide that from him.
Sebastian picked up his pad and turned. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Eilis. Have a good evening.”
* * * * *
35: KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR
It had been three days since Giselle left Bryce in the park, and she hadn’t seen him or talked to him. Two unbelievable days, two incredible nights—a completely unexpected turn of events—and then nothing. He would not pursue her any longer. He would wait for her to make a decision and inform him of it, which she couldn’t do until she actually made one.
Giselle missed him desperately. They’d been together for less than forty-eight hours and she felt the loss of his presence beside her as keenly as if she’d spent years picking his brain and wandering through his soul; she felt the loss of his body in bed with her as sharply as if she’d slept with him for years. She needed to see him, to touch him, to hear his voice, to smell him, to taste his skin.
Thursday morning she went back to the gallery, to her bodhisattva, and sat in front of him cross-legged most of the day, meditating, turning over and over every second of the time she’d spent with Bryce, every word of every conversation, every touch, every kiss, every orgasm, from that first glance in Hale’s office to the moment she’d walked away from him.
Turning over and over what Knox had said. Knox had always had wisdom beyond his years and he gave good advice. He chose to ride the ride each and every time he came across the opportunity to love a woman regardless of the inevitable outcome—but he paid a very high price for it.
Turning over and over what Sebastian had said, his insight, his ability to cut through the bullshit to the core principle. Sebastian, who had begun to inject courage into her soul before she’d graduated from diapers, was angry that she would let her fear hold her back from what she really wanted and hurt someone else in the process.
Turning over and over exactly what Bryce had given her that was as precious as what she had given him. I don’t know when I fell in love with you, Giselle, but I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t.
Turning over and over the dreams she’d had before she met Bryce, that he’d fulfilled the most important one, the odds of ever finding that again with someone who wanted children—and how long that would take.
The thought of having to wait another sixteen years made her chest collapse.
*
Andrew knelt before Giselle in the living room of the house he shared with Knox, his wrist bent back to its limit, keeping him there while she lectured him on how to correctly execute the technique.
Her untied canvas gi jacket floated over her tee shirt and around her hips. Her sleeves snapped the air properly when she moved quickly enough. Knox sat at the kitchen table staring through them as he waited for his study group to arrive. She took Andrew’s other hand to emphasize the importance of the ability to do a technique left- or right-handed.
Giselle had put Andrew on his knees again before he knew what hit him and he grimaced in pain.
“See, Andrew, that’s why she has the brown belt and you have the blue one.”
“Oh, ha ha ha. Screw you, Hilliard.”
The front door opened to admit the first of the law students Knox expected. Giselle’s attention was distracted for a second—and her breath caught in her throat.
Six-four. Two hundred-plus pounds of solid muscle poured into tight worn jeans, a black tee shirt, brown leather bomber jacket and black cowboy boots. Black hair cut excruciatingly short. Angular face, olive-tinged skin almost as fair as Sebastian’s. Small black-rimmed eyeglasses.
Remington Steele.
She continued to talk to Andrew, to explain the finer points, had him recreate the technique on her so she could demonstrate where he needed to change his execution. He did well enough to put her on her knees, but, afraid of hurting her, not well enough to keep
her there. Still talking, still teaching . . .
The man had stopped short in the doorway and stared at her with an expression she recognized immediately, for all she’d never seen a man look at her that way before: Lust.
Blatant, unadulterated, hot.
She determined to cut Andrew’s lesson short to make certain she had an opportunity to let that man know she reciprocated that lust fully, but out of habit, she checked his left hand.
Sixty seconds. It’d taken her sixty seconds, a glance, to fall head over for a married man.
Turning her attention back to Andrew fully then, she tried to breathe normally, to put aside that stabbing pain behind her sternum, to ignore the sick feeling in her belly. She smoothly maneuvered Andrew so that her back was to the door and she could no longer see him.
How could it be—and at BYU yet? Married men didn’t look at women other than their wives that way, or at least, if they did, they successfully kept it to themselves.
More to the point, men didn’t look at Giselle that way at all. Not even Knox did that.
She left as soon as the time came for Andrew to join the study group. Refusing Knox’s offer of a ride home with a wave, she ran the mile from his house on Tenth East to her apartment on First East, hoping to kill some of the pain.
She curled up on her bed, still in her gi, still sweaty. She shoved her fingers through her coarse, frizzy curls with a vicious yank as if the pain would distract her, and let the tears drip silently into her pillow as she confronted the truth of the matter.
Her hand drifted to her pudgy belly, then over her wide hips to explore—not for the first time—the broad expanse of butt that her gi couldn’t hide. Strong, athletic, graceful. And fat. She couldn’t diet it away; she was already starving. She’d even tried making herself throw up, but that was nasty and worked even less effectively than starving. Sebastian would have a fit if he knew and it didn’t matter he lived half a world away. She didn’t dare let Knox find out because he’d feed her himself. She couldn’t exercise it away; she got stronger, but no leaner.