Smart Girl (14 page)

“I—”

My anger feels righteous. I hold up my hand to cut him off.

“Everything else aside, if we seriously are friends, then I will tell you that that mentality is seriously screwed up. You can’t sleep with more than one woman at time. It makes the entire thing cheap!” The idea breaks my heart, breaks it enough to loosen my tongue. I finally say the thing I’ve wanted to say to him for a year. “Actually, it makes you cheap,” I whisper. “You are so special. Don’t you get that? You’ve got to value yourself more than that.”

Neither of us speaks for so long that I look down at my toes. Running headlong through every emotion I have in the last quarter hour on top of night upon night without sleep has made me exhausted. I have no idea how he’s going to receive any of the things I just told him.

It shouldn’t surprise me when he handles it with irreverence like always.

He reaches for my hands, pulling them off my hips and dragging me closer to him in the process.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re hot when you’re angry?” he asks playfully.

My breath comes out in one big gust.

“Liam, I’m being serious.”

He wraps my arms around the back of his neck and kisses my biceps. “So am I. I’m totally turned on.”

He kisses my other biceps and then my shoulder and my neck. I can barely find my voice to reply.

“You’re always turned on.”

“Only around you, beautiful.”

These words are better. So much better than all of the things I just said. I let myself focus on his words instead of my own; I let his words wash away the others. They fill up the space around us until there is no more room for questions. There’s only room for us.

We fall onto the sofa in one feverish heap, the notepad all but forgotten on the floor beside us.

“Crap and crap and crappy crap!” I scramble around my messy desk, trying to find my notes on the presentation I’m supposed to give.

Casidee hurries into my office, carrying the coffee I begged her to get me when I ran into the building twenty minutes ago.

“They’re in your filing cabinet.”

I come to a full stop. “I have a filing cabinet?”

She rolls her eyes and walks across the room to the piece of white furniture in the corner. I’d brought it in because it went perfectly with the aesthetic in my office and balanced out the space against my white glass desk. It never occurred to me that Cas would actually use it for its real purpose. I’ve never even opened the thing up to look inside. She slides open a middle drawer and pulls out a blue-green file.

“They’re color coded by client. The teal files are all Riverton.”

I slam back my coffee and grab the file out of her hands. “Thanks! Do I have time to use the restroom before I go in there?”

She grabs a stack of paperwork off my desk and places it quickly into my hands.

“Landon has been making small talk with them for the last five minutes; you barely have time to walk down to the conference room.”

I nod quickly and rush out of my office in a near sprint. Halfway there I realize I left the presentation packets on the printer and shout out for Casidee to grab them and bring them in once they’re stapled. Then I turn back around and run-walk as fast as I can. The second I get close enough that they can see me through the glass door, I slow to a more casual pace. One of the few things I ever actually learned from my old boss in the event industry was
Never let the clients see you run.
She meant this both literally and figuratively, but in this instance I don’t want Diego and his team to think I’m as frazzled as I actually am. I pull open the oversize glass doors, and the four clients at the table stand up to greet me. When I first met this group it was handshakes and formality, but we’ve done several events together now and they’re all Latin, so we’ve moved up to double
besos
.

As I greet the last member of their team with a kiss on each cheek, Landon throws me a questioning look. I smile and try my best to appear casual, but I feel terrible. I’ve never been late for a meeting before. I’ve never been this unprepared either. Riverton is a huge client of ours, and it was an incredible coup to have landed their business when our firm was still so new. This is not something we can afford to lose. This is not a situation I can afford to screw up, and if I do, it won’t just be my livelihood I’m messing with but Landon’s too.

“We’re very excited to see what you’ve pulled together for us, ladies,” Diego tells us in his thick accent. He has to be at least fifty, but he is a caricature of the suave Latin lover. When I first met him years ago, I thought he was a super creep for trying to flirt with me. Then I realized he uses that same tone and persona with everyone he meets, both men and women. I’ve come to recognize it as a lure. He seems charming and laid back, but underneath all that affability is a sharp businessman with laser focus.

Casidee enters the room and smiles. “I’m so sorry I forgot to drop these off with y’all earlier,” she says, putting a stapled packet of information down in front of each person. Using bubbly southern charm to ingratiate herself with the clients is something she learned from Landon. Throwing herself under the bus to save me face is a characteristic that’s all her own. We really should give this girl a raise.

“We can’t wait to take y’all through this,” Landon tells them with her usual enthusiasm. “We have so many cool ideas.”

I give Cas a grateful smile when she sets down my packet and then turn it up to ten when I look back at Diego. This is a pitch meeting, so enthusiasm is everything. I hurry to play my part.

“The party space is great too. It really lends itself to that Old World charm you’re hoping to impart. Plus, downtown is so trendy right now. Your guests are going to love it.”

Landon’s brow furrows. Diego looks up from the paperwork in front of him.

“Downtown?” he asks me. “I thought the venue is on the Westside.”

I glance quickly at Landon, expecting her to come to my rescue and explain to Diego that he’s confused about which area we’re producing this in. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. Landon’s smile is just as big as mine, but her brow-frown has gotten deeper. I keep the smile glued to my face while inside I’m screaming every curse word I know. She appears to be trying to read something in my face and then comes to some kind of conclusion.

“Oh, we know.” She waves his question away breezily. “But everyone’s using the term
downtown
now. Downtown Burbank, Downtown Hollywood—”

“So the Armory is in Downtown Santa Monica?” Diego asks.

“That’s exactly right.” She turns back the cover page of her packet at a precise angle. “Now if you open your proposal to page one, I’ll take you through some of the installations we’re considering, and then Miko will show us her design schematics.”

I should be elated that she just covered for me like that. Instead I’m in full-blown panic mode. The Armory? When did we change the venue to the Armory? My palms are sweaty, and I wipe them down the front of my jeans. Last I heard we were holding the party in an old empty bank in downtown LA. I designed all three parties to fit within those specifications. Oh gods! I am so dead. This is a killing offense for sure! Diego is going to torpedo this project and the three others we’re scheduled to do for him as well. I dart a look at Landon, who’s happily chirping about the options available for break-dance troops to perform at their party. She’s in her element. Totally polished and fully prepared. I cannot screw this up for her!

I quickly think through the parties I’ve designed for this presentation. The specs aren’t exactly right, but I doubt Diego and his team know either space well enough to realize I planned the proposals for a different venue. Maybe if I describe it in detail, they won’t pay as much attention to what’s on the paper. I run through each party design in my head again, looking for ways I can expound on what they’re seeing.

Landon looks at me. “Miko, you want to show them what you’ve been dreaming up?”

Time to put up or shut up. I pull up the first design on my computer and spin it to face them all. I don’t need to look at Landon to know that she’ll immediately recognize the leather-studded bar that’s a signature of the original venue. I just do my best to spin it into the pitch.

“So first of all”—I grin at each client in the room—“how amazing would it be to create a custom bar like this?”

Despite my being wholly unprepared, Diego and his team love the designs and end up choosing the one I sketched out last night on paper. We shake their hands and promise to send over the contract and details before the end of the week. We make it all the way back to my office and close the door before Landon turns her fully incredulous face in my direction.

“What just happened?”

The sound of knuckles popping precedes my answer. “Um, our client just picked out a design for their next event?”

My voice sounds only slightly hysterical.

She wore a pretty baby-blue dress today for our client meeting, but it does nothing to soften the stink eye she gives me. “Girl.”

Landon uses that one word in a thousand different ways. I never knew one word could be a question, an encouragement, or a statement of fact. In this case it’s got the full implications of Tosh’s favorite who-you-trying-to-kid look. She doesn’t wait for me to answer.

“How could you not know the event venue? I sent you at least three emails about this right before I left for the holiday. They’re putting the executive staff up at Shutters, and Diego wanted the venue to be closer by.” She searches my face for some kind of recognition. “Remember the email? I mentioned that they’d added on a huge order for gift bags?”

I vaguely remember an email about Diego and gift bags. I’d gotten it the morning after that first night with Liam, and I’d been too upset to pay attention. I had meant to go back and read through those old notes, but I ended up at Liam’s house again the next day and I’ve basically been distracted ever since.

I walk around the edge of my desk and pretend to sort out the materials on top of it. Really I’m just stacking them in nonsensical piles to have something to occupy my hands and buy me some time. I’ve never done anything like this before. I might be a little messy and disorganized, but I have always taken client relations seriously, even when I’ve worked for other companies and the clients weren’t my own. We’re in a consultation-based business; if we don’t take care of our clients, we won’t have a business anymore. This is really, really bad of me. I give up on the paper tower I’m building and fall into my chair desolately.

“I am so sorry, Landon. I don’t even have a good excuse. I’m just—” Even though I told her I didn’t have one, I search for one just the same. I got nothing. “I’m just sorry.”

She sits down in the chair across from me and stares like she’s trying to figure me out. I doubt she’ll be able to. She has always been so focused on her career. In fact, if anything, Landon is the opposite of me in this situation. She struggles with not putting her career in front of everything else, and her relationships have suffered because of that. Now here I am screwing up both our careers for a relationship that’s not even real. I have to fight myself to keep from crying.

“Hey,” she says softly. “It’s OK. You pitched the heck out of those design concepts. It all worked out.”

Did it all work out? It feels like my life is just as messy as my desk. Everything is getting more jumbled by the day; nothing is becoming clearer. I nod just to appease her.

“Hey, let’s call it, OK? Let’s just acknowledge the elephant in the room. You screwed up. It happens to the best of us. Remember last summer when I forgot to order enough pens for the silent auction bid sheets?”

God love her for her lame attempt to make me feel better. We were down eleven pens, so we borrowed some from the hotel’s front desk—it wasn’t any kind of a crisis. She is one of the most organized people I know, and her troubleshooting list is typically three pages long. She doesn’t screw up, not like this.

“Oh yes.” I sniff miserably. “The pen crisis of 2015.”

“Girl, it’s
fine
. You’ve had a ton on your mind lately. I should have double-checked to make sure you were clear on the details.”