All That He Loves (Volume 2 The Billionaires Seduction) (25 page)

I laughed. “No, he was actually a really good guy.”

“Then what happened?”

“Did you see any of the interviews with him?”

“Did I see any of the interviews with him?” she asked rhetorically as she gave me a
Have you lost your mind?
look. “I watched every damn one I could, because he is FINE.”

I almost snorted margarita through my nose. “Yes, that’s true, he
is
fine.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, remember in the interviews when everybody kept asking him if we were going to get married?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, imagine a guy
you
dated for seven days, and people started asking him on the national news if he’s going to marry you.”

“Oh my GOD.” She put hand to her chest. “Oh, you poor thing. He probably ran faster than Usain Bolt, huh.”

 “Well… let’s just say he sort of faded away really quickly.”

She shook her head sadly. “I am so sorry.”

I shrugged. “Thanks.”

“So now you went back to your job?”

“Well, actually, this is my first day.”

“Get out of here!” she laughed. “Well, you’re doing pretty good, then.”

“Really?”

“For your first day? Shoot yeah.”

“Because nobody really wanted to go on record about anything. They were very… um… ‘guarded’ is the word, I guess.”

Actually, most people had been kind of clueless or disinterested, but I wasn’t really talking about most people. I was talking about Keisha.

She immediately looked uncomfortable.

“But if you don’t want to talk about it – ” I said.

“No, no, I don’t mind. It’s just… it’s a good company and all, don’t get me wrong.”

“Of course,” I agreed.

“And girl, I know I’m lucky to even have a job in this economy.”

“I know what you mean. I was a secretary barely making ten dollars an hour before this.”

“Really,” she said, her eyes wide.

“Really.”

“So you know that shit rolls downhill.”

I burst out laughing. “Oh, I
definitely
know that.”

I launched into some of my funniest stories about Herr Klaus, and told her about how I’d ditched out that Friday night to go with Connor, and what I’d said to Klaus on the Monday when he screamed at me and I quit.

It was probably more than I should have told a stranger, but I was two margaritas deep by that point, and Keisha was laughing so hard she was crying when I finished the ‘You’re a shitty boss, but you’re a shittier human being’ line.

“Damn, I wish I could say that to a couple of people around here,” she said afterward as she wiped her eyes. “Let me tell you, they made all these changes about a year ago, and whoever made ‘em didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.”

“Like what?”

“Some genius upstairs thought it would be a good idea to outsource half of our customer service to the Philippines. Which might be okay, except they have these giant call centers over there, right? They actually have malls over in the Philippines, like giant shopping malls, filled with dozens and dozens of different customer service companies. That’s a fact – one of the guys I speak to all the time, Ferdinand, he’s my buddy, he told me the real deal.

“Our company pays them crap to begin with. So, somebody in the Philippines gets an offer to make 25 cents more an hour to go work in some other place across the mall, they’re
gone.
Outta there. So I’m constantly having to deal with new people who just started that day who don’t know what the hell is going on. I swear, management here is so cheap, they’re bendin’ down to pick up nickels, and dollar bills are fallin’ out of their ass.”

I laughed
hard
at that
.
Partially because it was so true of my old job, too.

“Then our sales department puts in orders – and there are
always
errors. Lots of ‘em. Sales got their heads up their asses so far they can see out of their mouths. Not to mention they got ADHD so bad they don’t doublecheck
nothin’
.

“So, anyway, Sales submits the orders to the Philippines. Problem is, the overseas guys don’t go through the whole purchase order and say, ‘Okay, there’s five errors here, you need to fix all of them.’ No, as soon as the Philippines sees one error, they kick it back without checking the rest. So if the Philippines sees the purchase order doesn’t match up on the first line, they kick it back to me. I fix the purchase order number and send it back to the Philippines. But then the Philippines notices that the shipping address is wrong, so they kick it back again. And so on and so on and so on. What used to take ten minutes to straighten out can take a whole day. And I can’t do a damn thing about it, because that’s official company policy now.”

I stared at her. “You’re kidding me.”

“No! But does upper management care? NO! ‘Cause they’re only paying these people two dollars an hour! But they expect US to ship on time, and ME to handle all the screaming customers, and don’t even get me started on how the company handles customer service. I’ve had customers say to me, ‘I left your competitor because you people said you could do this, but you LIE. You may be cheaper, but if I wasn’t locked into a contract, I would leave right now because I cannot
ever
count on you to keep your word.’ I don’t know
how
many people have told me that. And anything I can do to help them out, I basically got to break company policy to get it done.”

This was it.

This was what I had been hoping to get in the interviews.

“Look, this is awesome – this is exactly what I was looking for – but is it okay if I tell upper management about this?”

Keisha got quiet for a second. “Are you going to tell them I said it?”

“No, if you’re worried about somebody coming down on you – ”

“Girl, I got a boss makes your Herr Klaus look like
Santa
Claus.”

I grinned. “Then I’ll tell them five or six people all said the same thing.”

She laughed. “If you tell them fifteen people said it – that’s half the department I work in – then you can tell them any damn thing I say. Now listen to this – ”

The rest of the evening was pure gold.

Keisha and I had dinner, then dessert. We switched to water halfway through so we’d be okay to drive, and the whole time she gave me enough material to do a doctoral dissertation on all the things wrong with Telenexin, Inc. Not only were her stories perfect cautionary tales of a corporation disconnected from its front ranks, but they were really funny, too.

“But how would you fix it?” I asked her at one point.

“Honey, get a pen and some paper,” she said. So I did.

I ended up covering twenty sheets with notes.

I picked up the bill, made a new friend, did my job, and had an awesome time doing it.

I even saved the receipt, just like Sebastian had told me to.

Keisha’s insights were the foundation for everything else that followed. Once I knew the right questions to ask, the rest of the interviews went amazingly well.

People were so used to accepting the status quo, they just didn’t think about it until someone brought it up. But if you happened to stumble across one of their pet peeves, that was usually a match to a can of gasoline. In fact, if you
knew
their pet peeve, and indicated that other people hated that thing, too, they would go
off
on all the things that were wrong with the company.

And because of Keisha, I had a whole laundry list of potential pet peeves.

I think some writer gave a speech once that started with a joke about an old fish who meets two young fish and casually asks, “How about the water today?” and then swims on. After he’s gone, one of the young fish turns to his friend and asks, “What the hell is ‘water’?”

When you’re in it all the time, you stop seeing it – whether the ‘it’ is water, or bullshit problems at a corporation.

Sometimes it takes somebody getting you riled up for you to remember what you’re swimming in.

I kept busier than I’d ever been in my life, doing nine hours of interviews a day, then coming home and compiling the information with Anh’s help until midnight. I was exhausted – but exhilarated.

And terrified. The presentation to the CEO was in less than three days.

But I knew I had enough ammunition to blow him and everyone else away. I just wasn’t looking forward to having to speak in front of a group in order to do it.

There was one unanticipated benefit to all the work, excitement, and terror: I didn’t have time to think about Connor.

Well… that’s not true.

I just didn’t have time to think about Connor
as much.

One of my biggest regrets was I’d never taken a picture of us together. I had nothing to look at besides pictures I found on the internet – and there were only a few that didn’t contain some famous starlet or model on his arm.

Or me pressed up against a brick wall with my dress half-off.

So I saved a file of photos I would return to again and again: Connor getting out of the Bentley and walking the red carpet for some charity function. Connor exiting a courthouse with a big grin on his face. Connor in some sort of sailing competition, sunglasses on, shirtless and ripped, looking grim and determined. And roughly a dozen more.

I would open that folder and stare at the pictures, and feel the sorrow and heartache and grief all over again… but also remember the passion, the excitement, the tenderness… and the love.

And then, because a mountain of work was staring at me (and because Anh kept smacking me with a rolled-up bundle of papers), I would close down the file, come back to the real world, and go on about my life without him.

I was almost so busy that I didn’t have time to think about him.

Almost.

Except when I went to bed, and dreamt of him, and cried myself to sleep.

The big day came. I arrived early, my stomach tied up in knots, and met Scott’s assistant. She took me to a giant boardroom with a steel and glass conference table, and helped me hook up my laptop to an overhead projector. I set out eighteen stapled packets, each ten pages thick, in front of all the chairs… and then I began to pace back and forth and
try
not to flap my hands.

Scott came in first, still dressed in expensive jeans and a white, long-sleeve shirt. It must have been his uniform of choice, the way Steve Jobs wore black turtlenecks.

“Ready for the trial by fire?” he asked with a grin.

Fake it till you make it.

“Yes,” I said, with as much confidence as I could reasonably fake.

“Can I give you a word of advice?” he asked.

Run away, maybe? Far, far away?

“Sure.”

“Most of upper management are your standard go-getters, but we’ve got a couple of alpha males in Sales. Top one is Bryce Smith. He’s the main reason our numbers have stayed constant… but he’s not exactly a warm and fuzzy guy unless you’re planning to buy a million dollars worth of equipment from him. He hates criticism, he’s resistant to change, and he’s very outspoken. Just be prepared.”

I knew
allllll
about Bryce Smith. He had been around Telenexin since the beginning, and ruled his own little shadow empire through threats and intimidation. A third of the sales department loved the guy, but they tended to be the ‘let’s talk about the sales contract over a round of golf and the strip club afterwards’ crowd. A third hated his guts, but blamed all the company’s problems on every other department but their own. And the remaining third were terrified of him and wouldn’t say a damn thing for fear of losing their jobs. The rest of the company pretty much hated him, even though many grudgingly admitted he was the best salesman in the company.

“Thanks for the warning,” I said.

“You’ll do great,” he smiled, and patted me on the arm. “I’m looking forward to seeing what you came up with.”

“Thanks.”

By that time, people were filing in and taking their seats. Scott left and took his place at the head of the table, directly opposite from where I was standing in front of the screen.

Last person in was a big guy, six foot four and muscular, but with a substantial belly under his tailored suit and expensive tie. He looked like a college athlete gone to seed. He was somewhere in his late 40’s or early 50’s, rugged with thinning blond hair, a hawkish nose, and a big, booming voice – which he used the second he walked in.

“This is a waste of time, Scott,” he snapped as he walked in the door. “I’ve got five SOZ’s ready to go, I’ve got another client call lined up for – ”

“Bryce,” Scott interrupted, “we’re going to listen to this presentation, especially since the research came from our own ranks.”

Bryce glanced at me as he sat down, but then looked right back at Scott. “Great, another fucking consultant. Why don’t you just pay me the money instead, and I’ll tell you the same thing I’ve been telling you for months: fire all the lazy bums sitting on their asses, put the fear of Bryce into the rest of them, and then maybe we’d get some goddamn work done around here.”

Three fourths of the table either rolled their eyes or glowered.

“Maybe that will be in the presentation,” Scott said with a thin smile, then turned to the rest of the people present. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Lily Ross of Ross and Associates Consulting. Many of you have already met her over the course of the last week and a half. She’s conducted interviews with our staff during that time, and is here to present some solutions and insights she’s gained from our own ranks.”

“Good luck with
that,
” Bryce snorted, then peered at me closely for the first time. He frowned. “Hey… you look familiar.”

Shit.

Here it comes.

“A lot of people say that,” I said with a smile, then walked over to the laptop. “As Mr. Shaw said – ”

“Aren’t you that chick that banged that billionaire guy in the alleyway?” Bryce asked, obviously relishing the moment.