Chapter 10
Jack
I t’s 6:15 in the morning, a week after Maisie started working for me. My calendar is now balanced, projects are on the right track toward completion, and I could swear that our efficiency has doubled since I decided to hire Maisie Mitchell. I even find myself smiling more.
Her soft voice is constant in the background, and I leave my door open just to hear her. I’ve just sipped my coffee when Maisie walks into my office. No, she doesn’t walk. She saunters. It seems she’s taken my advice to heart. Gone are the demure skirts and black flats, and in their place, the silk button-up paired with black pencil skirts that cling to every curve, and at least six-inch heels. I swallow my coffee, hoping it will remove my tongue from the roof of my mouth. I’m still staring when she stops in front of my desk and looks up from her clipboard.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry. Let’s go over the calendar.” I set my cup down and straightened my tie.
Maisie gives me a skeptical look but returns her focus to her clipboard. “Okay. Well, you have a 9 a.m. meeting with Eaton, a 10 a.m. with accounting, and a noon lunch at Julianie’s. There’s no agenda posted. We’ve moved the project meetings from yesterday to today at 4 p.m. Here are the projection reports, HR reports, and a note from—to be honest, I’m not sure who. But it’s on… this .” Maisie gingerly passes me a napkin, her pert nose wrinkled in disgust. “I pray that it’s tomato sauce.”
“Ah.” I take the napkin. “That would be from Eaton, my CFO. He’s brilliant but scatterbrained, so he habitually grabs whatever he can find when he has an idea, question, or something he needs to do. He remembers to write it down at least, on whatever’s available unfortunately. It would be remiss of me to say this is my first napkin note, and I doubt it will be the last. To answer your question, yes, that is ketchup.”
Maisie wrinkles her nose again before returning to her desk, and I open my emails to find one from my PI. It seems the preliminary check I ran on Maisie matches everything Gio told me about her before the interview. What I don’t expect is the note attached at the end.
Antony’s family knew about Maisie and paid her mother to stay away. Family friends of her mother stated that Maisie never knew about the money or who her father may have been until the DNA testing had been done. Maisie and her mother had lived a modest life in a little beach town near Sydney, where her grandmother still lives in a retirement community. The woman is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s, which explains why Maisie is intent to return to Australia after her degree.
I sit here staring at the report, repeatedly reviewing it and sorting out the implications. While this has no bearing on Maisie and her job with me, I debate telling her what the PI discovered, unsure if she’ll even want to know.
Would she be upset or angry that I hired a PI? Would she want to see that she could have had a different, more privileged life all these years? I can’t see how the knowledge would benefit her now.
I’m still staring at my screen when a knock on my door has me looking up, and Eaton walks in. “I thought we were meeting at nine?” I grab my notepad from my desk, trying to look busy.
“It’s 9:05. Are you okay?” Eaton slides into a chair and crosses his feet at the ankle.
“Sorry. I got caught up with something and lost track of time.” I make quick notes, flip the page, and pick up the napkin. “You wanted to talk about—” I squint at his scribbling. “The IPA?”
“The IPO. I wanted to talk about the IPO. Right now, though, I want to talk about that sweet little thing you have admining for you. She’s new. Can I have her when you’re done?”
For some reason I don’t want to look too closely at, I fight the sudden urge to knock my oldest business partner’s smug smile straight off his face. I grip my pen and stare at him instead. “No. Hands off my assistant, you lecherous bastard. I won’t have you doing anything that would make her uncomfortable. You know the rules.”
Eaton grins and pushes his blonde hair out of his face while adjusting his glasses. At six-foot-four, he’s built. We frequent the gym together. But where I tend to be darker and more somber, he gives off more of a pretty boy surfer mixed with nerd vibe. This fact plays up in his favor every spring break. I’ve never minded his good looks before now, and we’ve been known to be each other’s wingmen.
“Anyway. The reason I wanted to chat was about the IPO.”
“What about it? You said that it was all wrapped up and ready to go.”
“It was supposed to be. But several projects are overdue, which delays the financial review.”
“Yes. I know. Shit. I have a stack of files I need to sift through. We had to fire the lead analyst.” I grab the folders and spread them out on my desk.
“Ah. Yeah. Lucy, the man-eater, or so I hear. She really made the rounds.”
“What does that mean?”
“You can’t be that obtuse. She, ah, slept around. If the scuttlebutt is true, it’s how she got to lead several important projects. There was one manager… I can’t think of his name at the moment, but they were hot and heavy for a while despite his wife and three kids. I don’t usually listen to idle office gossip, but the rumor’s been around for a while, and I’ve seen some things that make me believe it’s true.”
By the end of his spiel, my jaw has hit my desk. “How could you possibly know all this?”
What has been going on in my business?
“Analysts! They know everything, and they’re a bunch of horrible gossips! You should go down to the canteen sometimes. Well, maybe not you. Everyone would recognize you, and the tea would dry up.” Eaton pushes his glasses up his nose again, a surefire sign he’s excited.
“Get out of my office. I have work to do.”
Eaton grins and straightens up from his chair.
Before he reaches the other side of the room, I call out, “Can we try to limit the napkin notes?” I wave the flimsy material at him, and he chuckles before he opens the door to leave.
“Maisie, my lovely! How are you today? I wanted to ask…” he says but he shuts the door on the rest of his statement.
I stand from my desk, stride over, and wrench it open again. I see Eaton leaning casually against Maisie’s desk while she smiles up at him. “Eaton! Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
He laughs before winking at Maisie and strolling toward the elevator.
“That was rude.” Maisie laughs.
“He wet the bed until he was ten,” I grumble.
“Oh, well. That’s good to know. So, you’ve known each other a long time, then?”
“You could say that. We had very similar upbringings that led to us crossing paths over the years. While I attended Oxford, he went to school here in the States.”
Maisie grimaces at the mention of uni, but I continue speaking anyway.
“When I decided to start my company, I knew there was no one else I would want to go into business with. Eaton graduated at the top of his class and was already making waves in the business world. He’s truly brilliant. A little crazy but brilliant. He convinced me to move the company here, and the rest is history.”
“It must be nice to have a friend like that in your life. Someone you can count on.” Maisie answers the phone, and I hear the shrieking from where I stand. “Ma’am. Ma’am. Please, ma’am, I—” she says.
I reach out, pry the phone from her hand, and hang it up. “You never, ever have to put up with this. Ever.”
Maisie laughs, and I find myself smiling in return. Her joy is infectious. Except during my dressing down for speaking out of turn to Antony, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her anything but happy. It’s refreshing. I look at her closely. Her hair is curled around her shoulders and back. She looks rested, and signs of a sack lunch disappeared after the first day. I find myself inordinately pleased with the fact that she’s thriving here.
Maisie lifts a challenging brow. “Maybe you should be more careful who you date because that was Regina.”
I grimace. “Still?”
“Still,” she repeats.
“Don’t worry. I’ll handle it.” I head back to my office and shut my door. Maisie doesn’t need to hear what is about to happen. So far, she’s only known Jack Foster, a friend of her uncle and a pretty easygoing boss. But I’ve heard the rumors, and they’re true. She doesn’t need to meet Jack Frost, the man about to set a few things straight with a former lover who’s overstepping.