Chapter Five
Declan
“Santa Monica Pier, please,” I said to the Uber driver after loading my bag into the back.
“On the beach or the actual pier?” the driver asked.
“Beach; thanks for asking. I’m going for a quick run.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about the cute blonde in the tiny pink dress. She was a firecracker and looked totally out of place in that club. It surprised me that I hadn’t been able to close the deal with her; she seemed in to me. Any woman who could get that angry at me, that quickly, unquestionably had a thing for me. But yet she still denied me and I couldn’t forget it.
My morning workout on this particular day consisted of running five miles along the beach. I dropped my bag with a friend at his juice stand and then took off down the sand. No shoes, no headphones, just me and nature making the morning more invigorating. It didn’t matter if I woke up to the warmth of Los Angeles or the cold of Colorado: I loved being outside. In fact, I only tolerated my time in the office because it was a means to an end that I liked much better.
As the sun rose in the East, the beach traffic started to pick up and I quickened my pace. When I arrived back at my friend’s juice bar, The Squeeze, he was just finishing his morning vegetable prep and opening to the public. Barely out of breath, I wiped off and stayed to visit for a minute.
“Dude, you’re going to die when you see the waves today. I heard they are going to be massive,” my high school friend, River, said.
“Man, I’ve got to go do the whole work thing today. Some of us have real jobs.”
“The purpose of having a lot of money is so you don’t have to work. Not so you spend even more time working. What’s happened to you, Declan?”
“I’m working on getting a break soon. Thanks for the smoothie. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Try not to work too hard in that corporate jail you’ve made yourself.”
“I’ll try not to.”
I didn’t feel exactly like River did about working, but I did always have my eye on the future and my end game. Sooner or later I hoped to pass on the day-to-day operations of my company to one of my department heads. Then I’d get to stay out of the messy parts of the business and just show up for board meetings, which was much more my pace. But until I felt ready for that major change, I was going to have to keep plugging along with the day-to-day decisions of my company.
As I walked off the elevator and toward my office, the empty desk, where Margery had sat for so many years, gave me anxiety. I really hoped Teddy’s daughter knew what she was doing and could actually help me out while I continued to interview new assistants. There was just too much work for me not to have a right-hand man, or woman, working with me over the next few weeks.
I quickly jumped into my office shower to clean up and change before the day got started. My week was going to be busier than usual as we finalized designs for the new project, and I had a charity fundraising event to go to on Valentine’s Day at the end of the week.
“Hello?” I heard a woman’s voice say after I had just lathered the soap up in my hair.
“Just finishing my shower,” I hollered out, thinking it was one of the department heads and I had forgotten an early morning meeting or something like that.
“It’s fine, I’ll wait in the lobby,” the voice said, and suddenly I realized it was Teddy’s daughter.
“Oh, crap. Sorry. I forgot you were coming this early,” I yelled after her.
“I’m a half hour early,” she replied as she stood right outside the bathroom door. “I wasn’t sure how long it would take to get here. The traffic is wild out here, and I’m such a newbie at it.”
“Yeah, it really is crazy. Thanks for agreeing to help out. I appreciate it. I swear I’d lose my own head if it wasn’t attached to my body.”
“That sounds gross,” she laughed. “I’ll wait for you in the lobby. Take your time.”
“Okay,” I said as I turned the water off and reached for a towel.
But there were no towels. Nothing. Not a single towel in my whole bathroom. Apparently, stocking the bathroom with towels was one of Margery’s jobs that I didn’t know she did. Reluctantly, I yelled out to see if Emmi was still in my office.
“Hey, Emmi, are you still there?”
“Yep,” she yelled, and I heard her footsteps move back toward the bathroom.
“I hate to ask you, but can you grab me a towel out of the closet just outside my office? It has a silver handle and is right behind the desk.”
“A towel?”
“Yeah, I’m really sorry. My old assistant did a lot more around here than I knew. I forgot to grab some towels before I jumped into the shower.”
“Sure, no problem,” she replied briskly.
I couldn’t stop shaking my head at my own stupidity. Teddy would hate it if he knew I was sending his daughter to get me a towel while I stood naked in my bathroom. Not exactly the best first impression to make on his sweet little girl.
I opened the door when I heard her come back in the office and stuck my hand out through the smallest crack in the door. It meant a lot to me that Teddy’s daughter would be helping me out and I needed to get my damn clothes on.
“Thank you. I’ll be out in a minute.”
“No problem. Like I said before, I’ll be in the lobby,” she said as I heard her start to close my office door. “Are you sure you don’t need anything else? I’m really going to the lobby.”
“I think I’m good,” I laughed.
So far I really liked Emmi. She seemed like a relaxed girl who at least had a sense of humor. I also liked the fact that I had promised Teddy there would be no funny business between the two of us. Taking sex out of the equation made it a lot easier to work with someone, and that was exactly why Margery and I had worked out so well for all the years she was there.
After quickly drying off and putting my dress slacks on, I pulled on a white T-shirt and button-up shirt, but no tie. I didn’t wear a tie unless there were lawyers involved, and even then I tried to avoid it whenever possible.
“You can come in now, I’m sorry I was…” my words froze as I looked at the blonde standing in my lobby. It was her. It was the sexy, petite blonde bombshell from the club. I couldn’t help but let out a chuckle. “You’re Emmi Shields?”
“Wow, now if this isn’t a coincidence, I don’t know what is.”
“Um, so okay…you’re Teddy’s daughter. This should be fun.”
She raised her eyebrow at me and the spark between us could hardly be contained. The soft smile that grazed her face was in far contrast to how she had acted at the club. I liked this version of her much better. Soft, sexy, and hypnotic as I stared at her glistening green eyes.
She looked good. Damn good. So good that I forgot for a minute that she was there to be my assistant. She had a stylish black blazer on with a striped black and white blouse under it. Her tailored slacks looked like they were practically painted onto her, and I couldn’t wait to see her ass as when she walked away from me. A blitz of visuals from the night I met her in the club rushed through my mind.
Suddenly my promise to Teddy seemed much harder to keep than I had thought it was going to be when I made it. Having this little sexpot around all the time was going to distract me for sure, but at least she wasn’t yelling at me.
“I think we will get along alright, as long as you don’t use any of those horrible pickup lines on me.”
“I promise not to. How about I show you around the office and let you get settled in. I think I have a few meetings this morning, if my phone calendar is right. I’ve had some problems syncing it up to my computer.”
“Let me see,” she said as she held her hand out and waited for me to provide my phone to her. “Android or iPhone?”
“Android.”
I handed her my phone, and she tinkered with it while we walked to the end of the floor and I started to give her the tour. Our building wasn’t the biggest one around, but it was stylish, and I was really proud of the design and layout we had come up with.
“This is our main conference room. Usually my meetings are in here, sometimes other big teams will meet in here, but there are some other rooms downstairs that they use more often. This one is most often used when outsiders come for meetings.”
“What’s your email password?” Emmi asked as she continued with my phone and barely looked up at the office.
“I’ll type it,” I said as I grabbed it back.
“You’re going to have to trust me with these things if I’m going to be your assistant.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you. I honestly can’t remember it unless I’m typing it into the phone keyboard. It’s a star with a circle around it. I should probably change it to an actual word so I can remember it, but most applications have it saved in there now, and it seems like a lot of trouble to change them all.”
“What would you change your password to if you could?”
“Capital s, then u-r-f-c-i-t-y-six-nine,” I said with a smile and a shrug.
She didn’t look up or acknowledge my slightly risqué use of the number 69 in my password. So I continued on with our tour and let her fiddle with the phone while we walked. It was a little immature that I still laughed at the mere mention of 69, but I couldn’t help it. My friends and I had even made snowboarding tricks out of the number to try and get girls’ attention when we were younger.
“These offices are the marketing team. Edward is the team lead. They are working on some new ad campaigns for our last resort in Big Bear. Feel free to stop in and say hello to them at any time. I’ll get you introduced at the noon meeting today so people will know who you are when they see you.”
“Done,” Emmi said as she handed me back my phone.
“What’s done?”
“I synced your email and changed all your passwords to your desired new password.”
“All of them?” I said as I thumbed through the apps on my phone. “I’ve got a lot of apps on here.”
“There’s a trick to it. I can show you if you’d like.”
“No, don’t bother, I’ll just forget it. But thanks for taking care of that for me.”
“Sure thing. I might be more help around here than you think. I’m not just a pretty face.”
“Your dad said you have an MBA; what sort of work do you hope to find once you’re settled into town?”
“I’m not sure. I used to think I wanted to work at a big company, but my last experience didn’t turn out so well. Maybe I’ll check out some smaller organizations, or even a consulting firm. I have no idea. Do you know how long you’ll be needing me?”
“I have no idea,” I laughed. “Apparently I’m really bad at hiring people, but I’ll have you help me go through some applicants, and it shouldn’t be too long. Did you have a time frame of you wanted to finish up here by?”
“No, I’m good through the spring if you need me. I’d like to take it easy and really think through my next career choice.”
The way we were talking back and forth was already comfortable to me. I wasn’t even afraid of flirting with her because she seemed really good at her job and I needed someone like her around. Maybe I was being naive, but I really thought I would be able to keep our relationship on a platonic level.
“I might end up needing you that long. Do you have a place to stay or are you staying with your father? By the way, these are the offices of my architecture team. They are working closely with your father on our new Breckenridge project.”
“I’m staying with Jessica right downtown here; she’s the one I was with at the club. And I don’t really talk to my father much about his business stuff; you’ll have to fill me in on the project.”
“Do you know what it is we do with your father?”
“Sort of. You were a snowboarding guy and went in with him on a resort, and everyone kept asking about you, so Daddy wanted to work with you again. Then you guys started branding his resorts as only carrying your products for sale, and he rents your equipment there, too. Now you two are inseparable, like two peas in a pod. But do you work with other clients still?”
“See, you know pretty much everything you need to,” I joked. “A large part of my business is still on the retail and pro-snowboarder side of things. I’m enjoying exploring the resort side, though.”
We arrived back at my office and went inside. I propped the wooden door open and motioned for her to sit in the chairs near my desk.
“Why a wooden door?” she asked. “I mean, I really love the glass walls; it’s open and irreverent. But why the wood door?”
“You know, that’s the one thing about these offices that drives me nuts. The design team thought it would be too much glass if we didn’t have some sort of accent doors. I fought them, but in the end, I gave in. I regret it.”
“Do you often give in to other people's desires?”
Her voice tone deepened, and I watched as Emmi crossed her legs slowly and watched me as I tried to respond to her. I swallowed hard at her word; desires. I did like giving in to the desires of sexy women, but I couldn’t exactly say that to her. She was my partner’s daughter and 100 percent off-limits. Giving in to desire was a certainty about my life. But did she mean it like that or was she just making a comment about the design team? Maybe she wasn’t trying to be seductive at all and was simply asking me a question? I didn’t know her well enough to know the answer to this.
“I usually try to analyze the feel of my team and negotiate where I can,” I said, to be on the safe side.
“Yeah, that’s what good bosses do. But if it had been up to me, I would have told them to do the glass doors too,” she said, with that soft grin that I was growing accustomed to looking at.
“Hey, boss, meeting in 10,” Rosa said as she walked passed my office.
“That’s Rosa; she’s the head of the architecture department.”
“Architecture?”
“It’s not really called that, it’s our structural design elements division. But I like architecture better. We are getting more and more involved in the design elements of the properties because your dad is trying to pull out and be more of a money man. The problem I run into is that I don’t know hotels as well as he does. Something that might seem cool to me might be a horrible idea for a hotel. Anyway, that was Rosa, and she and her team are amazing.”
Emmi grabbed a notepad from my desk and started taking some notes. I wasn’t exactly sure what she as writing down, but she looked busy, so I let her write and didn’t keep talking. She was beautiful though, and I couldn’t stop looking at her. She had the slightest grimace on her face while she wrote, and it slipped away when she lifted her head and looked at me. I could only hope that she was going to be happy working with me and that my bad habits didn’t turn into too much for her to handle.
“What would you say were the top five things that your previous assistant did for you?”
“Wow, top five?” I asked as I searched the long list of things I knew Margery did for me. “She did so much I wouldn’t know where to start. And as you’ve already learned, she also did things that I didn’t even know she was doing for me.”
“Did she get you coffee in the morning?”
“Yes, usually.”
“We know she got you towels for the bathroom,” Emmi laughed. “Did she do other errands for you, like picking up your dry cleaning?”
“No, I do my personal things.”
“How about meetings? Did she prep you for them a few hours ahead of time, or right before the meeting?”
“Well, it depends on the meeting. If it was important, we usually talked about it in the morning.”
“Can I come with you to your morning meeting?” Emmi asked as I got up to join the architecture team meeting.
“No need to join this one; it’s going to just be the team and I discussing changes to the project. Take some time to get settled in, and we will talk more in an hour or so.”
“Okay.”
She looked disappointed but quickly pressed a smile across her face. She took the notebook with her to the desk in front of my office and sat down as she continued taking notes.
“Relax and make yourself at home. If anyone calls, just take a message, and I’ll get back to them. You’ve got to push the line button next to where it’s blinking to actually answer the call; they won’t be there if you just pick up the receiver.”
“I know how to answer a phone, but thanks.”
“Okay then, the break room is just over there. Feel free to grab any of the snacks or make yourself a coffee. I’ll see you in an hour.”
“Sounds good.”
She went straight back to looking at her pad of paper as she wrote down some more notes. It seemed odd that she needed to take so many notes when I hadn’t been talking about anything important, but I wasn’t about to ask her what she was writing down.
As the design team and I were going through their ideas, it looked like we had some unique rooms for our lodge. Of course, I needed Teddy to take a look at them, and we still needed to go on site to make the final designs, but what we had was promising. Rosa and her team were amazing at listening to what I had to say and bringing it to life.
“Mr. McMillan,” Emmi said as she knocked and then opened the conference room door. “There’s a woman on the line who insists she talk to you.”
“Emmi, like I said, please just take a message, and I’ll call people back.”
“I know what you said, but she keeps calling and is insisting I put her on hold so she can talk to you.”
“Then let her hold,” I said, trying to hide how annoyed I was. “I need to finish this meeting.”
“Okay, but she’s not going to hang up until she talks to you.”
“I understand that.”
“Don’t you think it would be quicker to just talk to her and tell her you’re not interested in her than it is to have her calling here interrupting your day like this?”
I stood up and walked out of the room and closed the conference room door behind me. How dare this girl talk to me like that in front of all my staff. I didn’t care if she was Teddy’s daughter; it was rude and disrespectful to say something like that. I took in a deep breath before I responded.
“Emmi, I’m a simple man. I don’t have many rules. But I do ask that the rules I give you are followed. Please take a message or let her hold.”
“It just seems cruel to drag her along like—”
“Emmi, this is not appropriate. You don’t know me, and you don’t know who that woman is. I asked you to take a message. Please go do it.”
“Okay but, I just thought—”
“Please don’t add your thoughts to my personal life.”
“I’m sorry,” she said and reluctantly went back to her desk.
Even though I was pissed, I couldn’t help but smile as I turned back to walk into my conference room. That was the girl I had met the other night at the club. It was nice to know I had a woman who could think for herself, even if it was going to drive me crazy. Margery had driven me crazy when we first started to work together, but it was her straight thinking that kept me in line, and I was forever grateful to her for that.
I wasn’t ready to let Emmi know her free thinking would be allowed, though. There had to be some sort of hierarchy of power between us. She needed to know that I was the boss and not her, even if her father and I were friends.