Nothing Personal (12 page)

Desiree walked through the office
, the fluorescent lights working overtime to combat the dark gray skies and steady rain that were turning a late January morning into something that looked more like night. Her automatic sweep for trouble spots found empty fast-food wrappers and Dr. Pepper cans littering Simon’s cube. Again. And he was lounging against the reception desk, talking to Veronica. Also again.

“
Excuse me,” she said when she reached the two of them.

“Back to the salt mines,” Simon told Veronica. “But remember what I said.”

“One moment.” Desiree put a hand out to stop him, stepped away from the desk a pace or two, kept her voice low. “When you get back to your desk, please dispose of your trash. We don’t want ants in here.”

She saw the sullen expression, but didn’t let it deter her. Waited for his answer, which was nothing but a nod, but at least it was there.

“Don’t let him waste your time,” she warned Veronica once Simon had headed back to his desk.

“Oh, no,” the young woman said hastily, and Desiree could see the flush growing.
It was heady stuff, she knew, working in an office full of young single men. Veronica seemed to have got over her crush on Alec, his clear lack of encouragement having had its effect, but Desiree had seen her eyes following Brandon more than once in recent weeks, and that was an even worse idea. And Simon . . . She sighed.

“
I know it can be tough to know how to say it,” she coached the younger woman now, “but you can always go with, ‘Well, I’d better get back to work.’ And then you look at your computer and click your mouse.”

Veronica flushed a little more, hearing the re
primand under the advice as Desiree had meant her to, and uttered something inarticulate and apologetic.

And that was enough, Desiree judged. Time to move on. “
How’s it going working with Thomas?” she asked next, and all right, maybe that
was
a bit of a nudge. Thomas Hsieh, the quiet young IT whiz she’d hired to provide the in-house tech support Alec had insisted on, had been working out well, and she’d decided on Veronica as his backup. A good opportunity for the young woman, who, despite her romantic tendencies, was bright, a good, hard worker, and eager to get ahead, the reasons Desiree had hired her in the first place. And if Desiree thought the two of them would make a nice couple, that was merely a bonus.

“
It’s fine. I’m learning a lot,” Veronica assured her, and that didn’t sound like romance was blooming. It was really a shame that women were so often attracted to bad boys, and that bad boys were so often, well, bad. But she wasn’t a dating service, and Veronica’s foolish heart wasn’t actually her responsibility, so she left it there.

Alec rapped once on Rae’s door, stuck his head inside. Not out for lunch, of course. He’d figured as much. Intent on her computer, as always, but she looked up at the sound and gave him a smile. A cautious one, the kind she’d been offering him for a month now, ever since she’d drawn the line.

“Got a sec?” he asked.

“Sure.” She pushed back a bit. She was wearing a long brown sweater today, falling open in gentle folds over a matching brown top, stretchy cream-colored pants, and boots. All very covered-up, very winter-weather-appropriate, very professional. Man, he missed her skirts. The top and pants were fairly tight, but still.

He took a seat opposite her. “We need to add some programmers,” he began.

She nodded, clicked her mouse a couple times, started typing. “How many?”

“Eight.”

“Same ad? Same basic requirements?”

“Yeah.”

More typing. “I’ll be recruiting on some Women in Tech sites. We need to make a genuine effort. You’ve got fifteen guys out there now, which doesn’t look great. I need to know you’ll be giving female candidates equal consideration.”

“Of course.
Not our fault, though, that startups are full of young guys. Not too many grandmas doing cutting-edge programming.”

“
I know the statistics. Equal consideration. That’s all I’m saying.”

“And I’m answering. Yes. Of course.
Moving on, can we fit that many more without going to another floor?”

“Up to seventeen more
,” she assured him. “Lots of room.”

“You sure? It doesn’t look that way to me.”

She swiveled and pulled out the big horizontal file drawer in her credenza. Reached an unerring hand out for the file she wanted, shoved the drawer shut, and swiveled back to Alec again.

She laid the file on the desk, opened it and pulled out a large sheet of paper, folded neatly down the middle. Spread it out on her desk facing him.

“Here and here,” she pointed. “That’s where your two new four-person cube setups go.”

“Oh. OK.” Of course she’d already figured this out.

“We’ll have to take out that communal work space to do it,” she went on. “Move them into the conference room for group work. Probably just as well to keep things a little more contained. A little more professional.”

He nodded agreement. “And on that note, you’ll probably want to get somebody different to do the installation.”

She gave him her first real smile of the day, and there was that dimple again, winking at him from the corner of her pretty mouth. “Well, I could just sic you on my pal with the power tools. You could take him outside and beat him down for me.”

“I could.” He smiled back, saw her own smile grow. “And I would, if it would make you happy.”

She looked down again, made a business of folding up her drawing and putting it back in the folder. “Actually,” she said, “I’ll get them to do the work on a Saturday, keep the disruption to a minimum.”

“Probably pay double,” he pointed out.

“Hey. You poaching on my territory? I’m the one doing the cost-benefit analysis. You’re the big idea man. You just go back there and have ideas, write some brilliant code.” She flapped a hand at the door. “I’ll handle this.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He ducked a chastened head, grinned at her, saw the answering smile escaping her stern expression, and laughed.

“One more thing,” he said. “The Super Bowl is on Sunday.”

“Yes,” she said gravely. “I
’d heard that. But thanks for the reminder.”

He laughed again. “You never make it easy, do you? But, yeah. The Super Bowl, and then, you know, that other thing. The premiere of my show.
America Alive: 1885.”

“I’d heard that too.
I’ve seen the promos. I’ve even taken a look at the website. No escape, because my neighbor thinks you look good on TV. He has that picture of you and your brother as his screen saver, and he tells me he’s not the only one. Imagine that, you’ve got fans already, and the show hasn’t even started yet. You could have a whole new career.”

She seemed to catch herself, went on after a moment. “
Besides, I’ve okayed all the bills for the PR blitz, remember? Good work getting on a reality TV show right before you launched a new venture. That’s some good marketing right there.”

“Well,
even if you weren’t planning to watch,” he said, “at least I know your neighbor is, that there’ll be an audience besides my mom and dad. What a relief. I poll pretty well in the gay demographic, that what you’re telling me?”

“That’s the word I’m getting,” she said, the smile peeking out again.

He grinned. He loved it when he could get her to relax like this. It had been way too long. “Good to know. But anyway. Brandon and Joe are coming over to my place for the game, and then the show, and we thought you might like to join us.”

In fact, neither of his partners had been thrilled at the idea.

“What
?” Joe had objected when he’d brought it up the previous Friday night at Ziggurat, where they’d repaired as usual at the end of the workweek. “It’s always been the three of us. Why?”

“Because she’s on the team,” Alec said. “Because look at us. Doing this again.
” He gestured around him. “This is exactly what women complain about. That they’re shut out of the informal stuff where a lot of the discussion happens, where the decisions get made. Besides, she’s got a lot to offer, and we should be taking advantage of that.”

“She’s operations,” Joe argued. “We tell her what we need in support, she makes it happen. She doesn’t need to be in on the decisions before that.”

“Oh, I think it’s a little more than that,” Alec said. “Look at the logo. Look at the trade show stuff. She’s got one hell of a marketing brain, and let’s remember that we’re marketing a consumer product. Women are going to make up half our market. That’s a change for us. We’ve got a resource, and I want to use it.”

“I know you want to use it,” Joe growled, but he subsided at Alec’s warning glare.

“Thanks, man.” That was Brandon. “You saying I can’t market to women? Just because I don’t have . . . ovaries?” he amended at the last moment, after another glare. “That’s some vote of confidence.”

“I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with what you’re doing,” Alec
said as patiently as he could. Even though, yeah, maybe so. Rae’s contributions had been tactful, matter-of-fact, but they’d been on-target, and she was doing as much to move their marketing efforts forward as Brandon was, which was telling Alec something right there, something he wasn’t going to be able to ignore much longer. Which was going to be pretty damn tricky, because Brandon was a partner.

But now wasn’t the time. “I’m saying, she’s
on the team,” he said again. “And that I’m inviting her.”

“And that we have to watch our language, and not offend her delicate sensibilities,” Brandon muttered. “This should be a real fun time.”

“You can’t make dick jokes, if that’s what you mean,” Alec agreed. “Which aren’t that funny anyway. You might think about moving past that.”

He shoved him
self back from the little table, wanting to be out of here, out of the crowd, the warmth, the noise of a hundred chattering voices, about eighty of them looking to get lucky, and most of the other twenty wishing they were free to try. “I’m going home. Who’s in the office tomorrow?”

“Me,” Joe said. “Got a couple things to run by you
, too.”

Alec
nodded, looked at Brandon.

“I’ll be working from home,” the other man said. “Got a hot date
later on tonight. I’m not planning on being too available in the morning, because she can’t get enough.”

“
Yeah, I needed that information,” Alec decided. “Thanks for that. See you tomorrow, then,” he told Joe. “I’m out of here.”

“Anyway,” he said to Rae now. “Would you like to join us?”

“
Well . . .” she began, but stopped as he held up a hand.

“One sec.” The voices had been there, on the edge of his consciousness. Two
of them, coming from the break room next door. They’d been getting louder. And now they’d intruded fully.

“Talk about somebody who needs to get laid.
Maybe if she got worked over hard enough, it’d loosen her up.”

A laugh at that. “Yeah, but who’d
volunteer? When I first started, I thought she was hot, but, damn. I mean, a woman in authority, sure. You know, thinking about getting the upper hand. But you’d have to have balls of steel to take that on.”

“
Stick it in her mouth, she’d probably bite it off.”

“
Avoid the teeth, yeah.” They were both laughing hard now. “That’d be Helpful Hint Number One for the poor bastard.”

“
Pretty fun to think about how you’d do it, though,” the first voice said, and Alec had recognized Simon. Of course. “A couple nights to wear her down, I’d be doing her any way I wanted.”

Alec was at the door now, and
Rae had risen to join him. He glanced down at her, saw her face draining of color as the conversation went on.

“Oh, yeah,”
the other man scoffed, and that was Simon’s pal Michael. Following along, as usual. “You’d be so screwed.”

“
Naw, man, she would be. There’s only one way guaranteed to loosen up a tightass like that. The hard way. That’d be sweet.”

“Dude, you’re sick.” Michael, laughing.
“Braver than me, that’s for damn sure. I get a chill just thinking about it.”

“
The tougher they are, the harder they fall,” Simon assured him.

And then
Alec was around the corner and inside the break room. Michael was facing the door and saw him first, began making frantic gestures to his friend that Simon was apparently laughing too hard to notice.

“Or should I say,” Simon went on over another gurgle of laughter, “the sweeter it is when you get them bent
over the back of the couch, begging you to do it harder.”

Michael finally got Simon’s attention. The young man turned in his chair, black eyes widening with shock behind the stylish glasses.

“Oh, hey, Alec,” he said, tried a casual smile that came out on the sickly side.