Chapter 3

“You!”

His grin widened. “Surprised? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that to you.”

“You’re.....”

He crossed the room and stuck out his hand. “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Matt Rockford, and you’re Eva Charles, aren’t you?”

She stared up at him. His hand felt alien and uncomfortable in hers. “You’re Matlock Rockford?”

“Call me Matt. Everybody does.”

She couldn’t blink. “You’re...you’re RipRoarer. You’re the one I’ve been texting all these weeks, sending dirty pictures to, and now you’re my boss? I can’t do this. I have to go.”

He jumped in front of her. “Don’t go yet, Eva. At least sit-down and let’s talk about this. I would hate to see you walk away from this job over some silly misunderstanding.”

Her embarrassment exploded into rage. “You just trapped me outside so you could touch me and take pictures of me, all the time knowing I was on my way here to work for you. You prick! I should report you to the Labor Board. They could shut down your whole operation.”

He put out his hand to her. “I’m sorry, Eva. Please sit down. We can talk about this. If you want to, we can put the whole thing behind us and start over. You can forget RipRoarer ever existed.”

“What makes you think I want to forget RipRoarer ever existed? Maybe I want to forget you ever existed, but I can’t even do that. I was having a good time with RipRoarer, and you had to come along and ruin it for me. I can never go back to the way it was before I found out you were really him in disguise.”

He straightened up. “I’m sorry, Eva. I shouldn’t have done that.”

His apology only made her angrier. “You know, I really cared about you. I told RipRoarer things I never told anybody. I felt things for RipRoarer I never knew I could feel, and now all of that is gone forever.” Her voice cracked.

He watched and listened. He didn’t bother to apologize again. When she finished and turned away, he murmured under his breath. “If you want to leave now, I’ll understand.”

“Yeah, great, and I’ll be back to looking for a job.”

“I still want you to work here, Eva. If there’s anything we can do to put it behind us, let’s talk about it. You’re the best candidate for the position by a mile. I don’t want anyone else as my assistant. I want you.”

She fumed but didn’t answer.

He waved his hand toward the couch. “Come sit down.”

She let him lead her to the corner, and he took his same place. She sat down on the couch opposite him, but she was still too mad to look at him. She couldn’t think of anything but RipRoarer. The man of her dreams, the man of her fantasies, the man she looked forward to sharing her secrets with at the end of the day—he was gone.

She would never again feel the flutter of butterflies in her stomach when she got a text notification. She would never again rush to curl up in the corner of her lounge chair with her fuzzy socks on, with her phone in one hand and a cup of hot cocoa in the other. Those tasty nights were a thing of the past. He wouldn’t make her laugh and he wouldn’t make her ache for him all over again.

He regarded her from across the coffee table. “Would you like something to drink—tea or coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

“You have a very impressive resume.”

“You said that about a dozen times at my interview. I guess that's why you hired me.”

He smiled. "You're right. It is. Would you like to go over the projects I have on the boil so you came get up to speed?”

“I guess so.”

He didn't move. After another pause, he took a deep breath. “I understand you're mad at me, but if you're going to work for me, we should put this behind us and move on.”

“I don't know if I can work for you. I've always worked for people I respect, and I don't think I can respect you after what you've done.”

“If you can't respect me, then you definitely shouldn't work here. If you can't put this behind you and get on board with this company the way you did at your interview, then I'll be happy to let you go. You respected me at your interview, didn't you?”

“You know I did. I respected you and this company.”

“I'm still the person you respected at your interview. I haven't changed.”

“No, but maybe I have.”

“Look, Eva. I had no idea you felt this way about RipRoarer. I thought it was just some fun on the side, but when it comes right down to it, I'm still RipRoarer, too. Everything you thought and felt about RipRoarer is still there.”

“I never planned to work for RipRoarer. I never planned to face RipRoarer every day at the office.”

They glared at each other across the coffee table until he slapped both hands on his thighs. “Okay, Eva. I can see I'm going to have to break this stalemate myself.”

He grabbed a stack of file folders from the side table and scooted around to sit on the couch next to her. Eva cringed at his presence, but she didn’t run away. She sat in stony silence with her arms crossed over her chest and refused to look in his direction.

He opened the first folder and spread the contents on the coffee table. “This is the building permit application for our new factory in Esmond, and these are my notes for the City Council hearing next Tuesday where I have to present our proposed budget and tell them how many jobs and public works the factory will bring to the city. I want you to organize my notes into a coherent speech that makes sense. Here are the plans for the workers’ apartment building that will be located right next to the factory. It has a gym which will be open to the public as well as a day care center for the workers’ children. It’s within a block of a public school, so the older kids can go there. The day care center will offer after-school activities, snack meals and care for the older kids until their parents get off work.”

He paused just long enough to check that she was listening. Then he opened another folder. “This is our budget forecast for next year. As you can see, we have quite a lot of income streaming in from abroad, so we have an accountant who does nothing but organizes our exchange rate calculations and the tax on them. I want you to research the possibility of having all our overseas subsidiaries pay us their profits in US dollars so we can cut those costs.”

Eva turned her head to glance at the paperwork, but when he caught her looking, she turned away again.

“Here is my weekly schedule. You can see I have time blocked out every day for exercise. Three days a week I go to the gym, one day a week I play a pick-up basketball game down the block, and every day I take a long walk along the GreenSpace. For the past ten years, I’ve turned off my phone during this time, but I want you to get up to speed with everything I do so you can field calls and emails redirected to you while I’m unavailable.”

Her head shot up. “You want me to check and answer your emails?”

“Just check them when I get a notification. Only answer them if it’s urgent or directly related to something you’re working on. If it can wait until I get back, don’t do anything. Same thing with phone calls. If you can handle the situation, go ahead and do it. Otherwise, take a message and I’ll deal with it when I get back.”

She stared at him. “That’s a lot of responsibility.”

“Now you understand why I wanted the best executive assistant possible.”

“Maybe it’s not such a good idea. Maybe you should just continue to be unavailable during that time. I wouldn’t want to make a mistake.”

The genial expression vanished from his face, and a firm, hard determination took its place. “I’ll decide what we do and what we don’t do. I’ll do it this way, and if you’re going to be my assistant, this will be one of your most crucial tasks. I need to know someone I trust is answering my calls and responding to my emails. If you can’t handle that, you’re not the EA I thought you were.”

“Oh, I can handle it. I’ve just never had a boss put so much trust in me, and we don’t even know each other. Technically, I haven’t even started.”

“It’s crucial that I know you’ve got my back during this time. I need to hand over responsibility for these things to someone else so I can free my mind and fully relax. This is far more important than understanding building permits and housing complexes.”

“Okay. You can count on me.”

He smiled and turned back to the folders when Eva realized. She had forgotten about being mad at him. He hooked her into being interested in the company’s work and made her forget what he did to trick her.

Her heart railed against him. She wouldn’t forget what he did, and she would never forgive him. She would walk out that door, and he could go back to answering his own stupid emails, but he was already talking about the next project.

“This is a list of all our domestic employees. It lists their names, their dates of birth and their home addresses. I want you to compile a database of notifications so the company can send them a card and a cash bonus every year on their birthday.”

Eva’s eyes popped open. “What do you want to do that for?”

“I just told you—so we can send them a card and a cash bonus every year on their birthday.”

“Yeah, but why? That’s gonna cost a fortune. That will cost a lot more than paying an accountant to figure out your exchange rates and tax.”

“Yes, it will, but this is an investment in our people. This is to show our people how much we appreciate them, that we’re connected to them in a personal way, and we care about them.”

Eva stared down at the sheets and sheets of lists. Her mind churned through all the possibilities. Today was August 10th. Her birthday was August 13th. If she constructed this database, she would probably be the first birthday to come up. Would she, too, get a birthday card from Matlock Rockford, along with a cash bonus?

She wouldn’t get that if she didn’t stay working for him. Not only that, but the rest of the work intrigued her, too. What other company on the planet constructed workers’ apartment buildings and day care centers for their employees? Maybe a few, but this was one of the rare exceptions. Most companies didn’t give a flying leap about their employees’ well-being.

The same excitement filled her heart that she experienced at her interview. She wanted to work for this company. She wanted to participate in the general sense of accomplishing great works, of being one of the good guys and building a better world through business.

This was the kind of company she wanted to work for. These were the kind of people she wanted to work with and for, people who cared about each other and showed it in tangible ways.

The whole ethos of Rockford Communications came down from the apex of the pyramid, and that was the man sitting right here in front of her. He was the one who came up with these ideas. He was the one who wanted to cut funds from accounting to give back to his workers.

She scanned the list of names. Hundreds and hundreds of names crowded those sheets. Each and every one of them had a home address and a birthday, and each one of them held his or her own birthday sacred. Who but a great man would recognize that and acknowledge it—not with flowers and boxes of chocolate, but with cold hard cash, the one thing these people really need?

She cast her eyes up at his face. He made a show of rifling through his papers while he let his words sink into her brain. If she came to work here, he would be her boss. His ethos and his values would come down to her, too. He would acknowledge her birthday, too.

Her heart cracked open, and a rush of feeling spilled out of her toward him. She wanted him to acknowledge her birthday. She wanted him to value her for her relentless commitment to his company. She wanted him to trust her and count on her to have his back when he needed to relax.

She didn’t say anything, but the sight of him tricking her lost its sting. She could put it behind her and focus on the job at hand. She picked up the list of employee names.

He raised his head and smiled at her. He understood, but he knew enough not to rub her nose in it. He closed the three folders and opened the last one. “Now, then, Eva, this is the last project we’ll go over for today. Then Katrina will show you to your office, and we’ll get to work. Here we have our weekly company-wide newsletter. Most of the employees get it by email, and you can see at the back we have a community notice board where people can advertise anything they want to sell, side businesses, houses for rent—you name it.”

She pointed to the front cover. “What’s this? It looks like a poem, and who’s Felicity Townley?”

“She’s the dishwasher in the cafeteria.”

Eva’s eyes popped. “What?”

“We started taking submissions for literary works for the newsletter. Any employee can submit. Sometimes people submit poetry or short prose. One of the machinist apprentices even submitted a longer story that we ran in serial. It was wildly popular, and a lot of our employees read the newsletter specifically for that.”

Eva stared from the newsletter to him and back again.

“I want you to compile all the submissions and turn them into a literary magazine. We’ve had this going for over a year, so we’re ready for this year’s magazine now. Then we’ll keep doing it every year. Every employee will get a copy of the final magazine for free, and if they want to, they or any member of their families or the public can buy additional copies, too. That will be another one of your projects.”

“Okay. That will be fun. I always liked writing. I’ve got some poems and stories I might even like to submit.”

“Perfect. Joyce Roth, from accounting, is our submissions editor, but she’s getting ready to retire, so you’ll take over for her. I’m trusting you not to stick your own work in there at the expense of everybody else.”

“Oh, don’t worry. It takes me forever to get a piece ready to submit. I’m my own worst critic. I can see from this poem that your cafeteria dishwasher is a lot better than me.”

“You”ll still have plenty of time to submit your own work. Some weeks, we don’t get any submissions at all. That will be the time to stick your own work in.”

“Okay. I can do that.”

“When you finish compiling the first magazine, I want you to do one more thing. I want you to apply to publishers to get it published.”

Eva stared at him. He just kept coming out with one surprise after another. “Published? What publisher would want to publish an anthology like that? I’m sure some of the work is great, but some of it will be unpublishable.”

“I’m sure some of it will be. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that the employees understand the company is working to publish their work. That will give them an incentive to improve.”

“My God! You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”

“Of course. We have a culture of mutual benefit here at Rockford Communications.”

She shook her head. “Okay. I’m ready to get started.”

“Great.” He stood up.

She collected all four folders, her zippered computer case, and her handbag and followed him to the reception area. “Would you mind showing Eva to her office, Katrina? This is the last time you’ll have to show a new employee to their office. In the future, this will be your job, Eva. When a new employee leaves my office, you’ll show them around and get them oriented.”

“Yes, sir.”

His head shot up, and his eyes widened, but when he saw Eva smiling, he relaxed. “I’ll see you later.”

“When will you see me? Will you just contact me when you want me?”

“Come back here at one o’clock. I’ll forward my notifications to your phone before I leave the office for the gym.”

Eva headed down the hall after Katrina, but before she turned the corner, she glanced back to find him watching her out of sight. A wistful smile played on his lips. Then she turned the corner and he disappeared.